Epiphany

"Keep a diary. It might keep you."

2011-12-21T01:56:00.000-05:00

So we learn here that we should keep a diary. It will keep us. Cryptic advice. It will keep us sane, whole, wits intact, what? But forgetting about the latter, it is indeed good advice. Over the years I've accumulated so many fancy journals, leather bound, artsy covers, cloth bound, you name it, we've owned it. Inaugurating them and filling up the first page was always a very satisfying experience. It was an experience matched in satisfaction only with finding an old diary whose pages were filled by someone else. Oh yes, few things come close to the pleasure of snooping and wondering, while snooping, if the author intended secrecy or was hoping that their journals would be discovered and that through their journals they would in turn be discovered, remembered, understood and immortalized.

I've stopped buying those journals now. These are different times and our lives are ostensibly public (ostensibly because we only share cherry-picked moments and I doubt any of our virtual friends have the desire or the inclination to wonder about that which is not being said online). We share the highlights of our days with others hoping to either stress the ways in which we are different or to find consonance.

So if we must keep a diary, so that it "keeps" us, we can keep it in a blog and drop the coy bit about storing our innermost thoughts in the pages of some journal that would then be stashed away in some drawer somewhere, begging to be found by friends, relatives, future generations, etc. A song comes to mind:

Tu aa ke mujhe pehchaan zara (Come find me)

We digress. But then again, we are so very prone to musical digressions. Every thought snags on a song.

The first advice I ever got about diaries was that at its most basic level it needed to be an accounting of the day. There are large chunks of my day that are repetitive. It's surprising when I fire up MS Excel each morning and type in "=NOW( )" and it spits out a new date and time! I guess the date does change, if nothing else. Sometimes Interstate 80 isn't a parking lot, this wasn't such a day. I wake up, I drive some thirty miles, I immerse myself in various analyses and I drive back the same distance. Those are the large repetitive chunks.

The things that do change however, and are really worth writing about, are the notes that bounce off the ostinato, so to speak. These thoughts are often unrelated and they stay unresolved like scattered fragments that could be collected and molded into something of consequence if they weren't so fleeting, and as tantalizingly out of reach as those earth-like exoplanets we discover each day.

Today this song filled the sound theater of my car on my way to work:

And I wondered about the lyrics that suggest that our voices would stand the test of time while our names are obliterated or lost in its annals and our faces change beyond recognition. I wondered if this was true. I tried to think of all the loved ones I had lost, of all the friends who were friends once but are strangers now. If it wasn't for the aid of a recording device, a constant replaying, would I remember the specific timbres of their voices, the cadences of their speech, their intonation, the sound of their laughter? I have my doubts. I think I would do better with faces and would never forget a name.

Then I heard this song:

In this lyrically and melodiously supreme song there's a thought that the moon would reflect our pasts (yeh chand beete zamanon ka aina hoga) and the floating clouds would form the likeness of a face (bhatakti abra mein chehra koi bana hoga) and this thought transported me to places I have never been and moments I've never felt.

So I moved on to my own lame recollections of the things that stay on after we've lived our short lives, the things the moon or the giant sequoias have lived through. I recollected something a friend wrote about the art of stretching and I thought of the static sequoias in their little corner of California countering my thoughts about their isolated and oblivious, though intact, state through most of recent history as they tell me they weren't "oblivious", that they heard it all through the whispering wind and the percussive branches.

Then my thoughts veered off to the idea of artistry and brushstrokes and the place where grace notes and tiny brushstrokes converge, where a little goes a long way and differences can be felt in infinitesimal degrees.

All this was yet another scattered reverie that helped me discern 12/19/11 from 12/20/11 and is now stored in this very public diary.

I get closer to ending the clattering of these keys with a final thought about the fungibility of our media. Will the history of this era be the most accurate it has ever been, untainted by biased rewriting, because of videographic or endlessly documented virtual evidence or will the lack of backward compatibility in technology leave future generations guessing about the purpose of the iPhone carcasses they find littered at future archeological digs?

How it sounded over the years (1981-1988 continued...)

2011-12-04T01:20:00.001-05:00

These years saw the return of Indira Gandhi. As a child I was proud of the fact that India had such a personable and powerful woman prime minister. She was always impressive to me despite what I heard about her tyranny and her abuse of power. She always appeared energetic and purposeful unlike the Morarji and Charan Singh crowd of the years that saw Coca Cola disappear. Who needed them running the country? A woman who radiated power was so much more desirable. It felt as though we were well-governed again.

1981 was the year of Silsila. The Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha rumors were at their peak. Every magazine that the magazine wallahs delivered at home were grabbed for the latest on this particular rumor. I refused to believe them. I was never willing to entertain any negative thoughts about the people I liked and AB was on that list, despite Shaan. But is was shocking to see a movie based on these rumors, it seemed to lend them some credence. Everyone acting in it, with the exception of Shashi Kapoor and Sanjeev Kumar, was an affected party. It appeared nothing short of audacious. But the songs were memorable, the yellow tulips in Amsterdam amidst which the rumored lovebirds pranced, making them even more so. Each song had to me memorized. Each one became a part of our three-home sing-off. There was Neela aasman so gaya, Dekha ek khwab to yeh silsile hue, Rang barse.

There was a sense of the nation fracturing a bit during these years. Zail Singh was the President of India and I still remember his speech calling for national integration, "Hamein rash-ter ko ek suttar mein bandhna hai". Doordarshan liked to hammer this message home whenever they could, stressing unity in diversity by playing this 1974 Films Division of India film over and over again:

Some names were often on the news, like Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Some tensions were brewing, building, something was absorbing latent heat.

1981 was the year dad visited Philippines and he brought back a gorgeous embroidered, wraparound skirt and top for me. I was in love with this dress and wore it at ever special occasion. The photograph below was one of those special occasions. Mrs Gandhi was going to inaugurate the annual Science Exhibition at Teen Murti Bhavan and I was going to hold the plate with the scissors she would use to cut the ribbon. There was excitement in the air. I couldn't believe I was actually going to see her! And then I saw her, this powerhouse of a woman, so petite, so pink-cheeked and so much in awe of my Filipino dress! Good times :)

That was one unforgettable celebrity contact.

Life went on for the moment with more stellar performances from AB in Namak Halal and Shakti and catchy numbers like:

Aaj rapat jayein to hamein na uthaiyo
Jaane kaise kab kahan ikraar ho gaya

There was also the Farooque Shaikh and Deepti Naval starrer Saath-Saath with stellar musical performances by the late Jagjit Singh and Chitra Singh:

Yeh tera ghar yeh mera ghar
Pyar mujhse jo kiya tumne to kya paogi
Yeh bata de mujhe zindagi

Tumko dekha to yeh khayal aaya
Kyun zindagi ke raah mein

I think Umrao Jaan was made around the same time - an amazing movie with an immortal songs and singing:

Dil cheez kya hai
In aankhon ki masti ke
Justaju jiski thi
Yeh kya jagah hai doston

Then came the movie Coolie. I never saw it and am not sure if it had any songs worth remembering but it was the one where AB got gravely injured on the sets of this movie and a new actor, playing the part of villain - Puneet Issar - caught a lot of heat for it.

Meanwhile things kept heating up on the political front. There were growing concerns about Sikh militancy and a separatist movement. Indira Gandhi kept toughening up her stance. Until we got to Operation Blue Star and the raid on the Golden Temple in Amritsar in early 1984. The news on television, the newspaper headlines, were full of shocking images of the arms and weapons that had been stockpiled at this holy shrine. Through it all there were the national integration messages still coming at us through every mass communication channel around us.

1984 was the college year and on October 31st, 1984 we were in an Economic History class with Mrs Mathur when our class was interrupted and she was called out. She came to make the tearful announcement that Indira Gandhi had been shot. Our class, stunned in disbelief, was dismissed and we were asked to go home.

The television was on all the time as we heard of the multiple rounds that her bodyguards Beant Singh and Satwant Singh had fired into her petite frame. I had seen that petite frame.

The next several days were beyond being the darkest period in the history of Delhi. Sikh homes were burnt, there were riots, killings, carnage everywhere. We just stayed huddled inside, worrying about and praying for the safety of all our Sikh friends and acquaintances.

I wonder, as I recollect these times, if we are a scaled down representation of the Yugas from Hindu lore. We start our lives in Satya Yug, the Dharma Bull on all four legs, all is well in our worlds (some fortunate worlds), we are not the actors or the initiators in our lives at this early, perhaps five year long stretch.

Then we get to the Treta Yuga of our lives - the world takes on a bilious green hue from certain angles, we become sensitive to slights, we fear certain things, certain people, but things are still more or less rosy.

Dwapar Yuga, we are in the 12-20 period of our lives and the world has disappointed us quite a bit more. We've probably experienced every negative emotion by now, we've seen the evil in some people, we've acquired some shells to keep our innermost child safe and secure but we get a good sense of the darkness all around. This is when we learn to take things in stride, if we're strong, because not doing so could destroy us. We develop defense or offense mechanisms. The bull is on two legs by now.

In this Dwapar phase of my life I saw the violence with which Mrs Gandhi was assassinated, I saw the ensuing genocide and in December of the same year, we saw the tragedy of Bhopal, thanks to the negligence and greed of the battery maker Union Carbide.

Two years later, after years of hearing about the Cold War, the "balance of terror", the escalation in nuclear arms we heard of the worst nuclear disaster in the history of human kind at Chernobyl. This was the world we were about to inherit in all its rotting glory.

And then we arrive into the Kal Yug of our lives. This phase doesn't end in five years. We stay here for the rest of our lives, in the thick of it, riding a roller coaster of despair or euphoria on a one-legged bull. It has its moments, its bright sparks but the periods of darkness are powerful and potent when they arrive.

Speaking of Kal Yug, there was a movie of the same name, perhaps 1981, directed by Shyam Benegal. It was very well made, or so I thought at the time. Trying to track the modern story as though it was the Mahabharata was an interesting exercise.

All this time, I thought Kal Yug had one song filmed on Rekha but I was so very wrong; memory conflation at play. The song I was thinking of was actually from the film Vijeta and I remember it well now. The song was Man anand anand chayo.

How it sounded over the years (1981-1988 and beyond)

2011-11-30T23:50:00.001-05:00

I realized I didn't quite finish reliving 1981 and 1982 in the last post. These years were the ones when various sons were ascendant. The first one was Kumar Gaurav. His father launched him opposite Vijayeta Pandit with Love Story.   I thought Amit Kumar did his dad proud as the playback singer of choice here. Dekho maine dekha hai yeh ik sapna was a big favorite as was the one where Aruna Irani was trying to seduce a nervous Gaurav in Kya ghazab karte ho ji. It felt as though every ten years or so a towering superstar of yore launched a son into orbit and asked Aruna Irani to attempt a seduction (I am thinking Bobby and Main shayar to nahin). Must say she didn't age much in those intervening years between Rishi Kapoor and Kumar Gaurav. Another song that hooked us with its melody at that time was Yaad aa rahi hai.

The next son to emerge was the droopy eyed, half asleep, half stiff son of Sunil Dutt and Nargis in a movie called Rocky. This movie had some memorable songs as well. I remember Kya yehi pyar hai. It sounded good at that time, that age. His narcoleptic demeanor, the addiction, the rehab were the things that Devyani Chaubal et al liked to discuss in Stardust or Star & Style etc.

The march of the sons continued with Kunal Kapoor, Shashi Kapoor's older one, in Ahista Ahista. The conversation then was all about how he walked like Shashi Kapoor but looked more like Jennifer. This movie had one of my all time favorite songs Kabhi kisi ko muqammal jahan nahin milta. Sulakshana Pandit did a good job with another song from this movie Mana teri nazar mein tera pyar hum nahin.

But we aren't quite finished with the sons yet. Sunny Deol was yet to arrive with Betaab. Once again, a bunch of songs that sounded quite melodious at the time but they wear thin now, like Jab hum jawaan honge and Parbaton se aaj main takda gaya. I never saw the movie so not sure if Aruna Irani tried seducing him here or not.

Some sons succeeded for a time, some for a longer time and some didn't make it at all. We moved on, becoming a palimpsest like representation of songs from our teen years, songs from when our parents were our age and some even from the time when our grandparents were our age. Songs, especially old songs from Hindi films, define and distill the essence of immortality.

The next record to grace our collection illustrated this concept. It was The Best of Talat Mehmood. By the time I was a teenager, Talat Mehmood, or Tapan, had been silent for many decades and yet I was in love with an album which had songs like:

O teer chalane waale zara aa saamne aa kar teer chala
Seene mein sulagte hain arman
Bechain nazar betaab jigar
Dekh li teri khudayi
Andhe jahan ke andhe raaste

These Talat songs were new to me, I had never heard any of them since they weren't in my dad's repertoire. I was familiar with, and loved, the ones he used to sing or the ones I had heard on the Sunday Doordarshan feature film, like:

Jaane woh kaise log the jinke pyar ko pyar mila
Jalte hain jiske liye
Jayen to jayen kahan
Hum se aaya na gaya
Rahi matwale sun ek baar
Raat ne kya kya khwab dikhaye
Main dil hoon ik armaan bhara
Shukriya ai pyar tera
Tasveer teri dil mera behla na sakegi

They just don't make them like this anymore, nor do they sing them like this. The Talat Mahmood LP in our collection was one of my favorite possessions. There weren't any new songs being made then that came close in melody or lyrics.

1983 and 1984 are a bit of a blur, perhaps I was studying hard for my ISCE exams. The years in the life of an Indian teenager, when they are in the grades 11th and 12th are perhaps the worst ones.   One has to consider the engineering option, the medicine option, the Delhi University North Campus option (if one is a Delhi-ite), the BITS Pilani option or a doomed option if one is anything short of either being a genius or a tenacious, no-nonsense-ever type of bookworm. I was neither. There was much nonsense that kept me preoccupied. But I would have lost any last shred of self-confidence I possessed if the only option available to me became the one where I was studying English, History or Political Science. Yes, I was just that shallow then.

If the fine people who have pursued a genuine interest in the liberal arts and humanities are reading this and want to send some choice expletives my way, they should note that I was very young and very shallow back then. I wasn't studying Physics, Chemistry, Math and Biology because I was so exceptionally good at those subjects, I wasn't bad but I wasn't going to be a star. It felt prestigious to be a student of the sciences. Of course the trade-offs for this false sense of prestige were the levels of difficulty one encountered.

Calculus stopped being just about dy/dx and morphed into d square y/ d x squared. Things just weren't changing anymore, they had to change at a certain rate. Integrals, where we needed to figure out what the shape of a line or curve would be if it was rotated a certain way, differential calculus! Conceptually all very clear but the hours of problem solving, the ensuing tedium was nightmarish in its intensity.

Biology gave me no grief, no anxiety at all, except when it came to dissecting cockroaches or frogs or rats. It wasn't about being nauseated with dissection, it was more about breaking things like cockroaches into unmanageable little pieces instead of making clear ventral cuts and removing the exoskeleton in order to see things like the caeca and the Malphigian tubules. Every dissection of P. Americana was botched beyond recognition at my hands.

Physics and Mechanics - the lesser said the better. All I remember from Physics is Mr Kennedy saying "capacitor" and "adiabatic".

I couldn't balance a single equation in Chemistry, the art of chemical equation balancing felt like a mysterious, shamanic ritual or legerdemain when I saw the smart ones do it on the blackboard in a jiffy. Yes, Avogadro's number is 6.022 x 10 to the power of 23 but I wasn't sure how I could use this priceless information to solve millions of problems. Titration in the Chemistry lab was a whole other story with me sucking to deep on the KCl and then coughing it up.

If my Nelson & Abbott Physics textbook wasn't always surreptitiously sheltering something like Atlas Shrugged or Jeffrey Archer's Kane and Abel or Prodigal Daughter I might have had more than a snowball's chance in hell of becoming a doctor or something but the lazy devil on one of my shoulders always convinced me to go south.

And yet, there was this need for music, to be involved in it somehow. When the school decided they would enact the Gilbert & Sullivan musical - Trial by Jury - I was thrilled. I wanted to be in it and I signed up. We practiced for days, so much so that the song, Hark the hour of ten is sounding/Hearts with anxious fears are bounding/For today in this arena/Summoned by a stern subpoena/Edwin sued by Angelina/Shortly will appear is still a part of my soundtrack. Alas, the upcoming exams were breathing hope and fear down my neck and I had to withdraw from the play.

The nightmare was over, although not quite over right away, not until we lived the "cut-off point" hell for awhile. The year was 1984. I have bitter recollections of the gruelling trudge through various colleges, various campuses, disappointments at not making the "cut-off" points, shame, regrets etc. and then a compromise: if it had to be the dreaded "humanities" then it needed to be a quasi-scientific subject and thus the first tentative steps into the world of economics and finance.

No wonder those years are blurry, I'd rather forget them.

At some point I even thought it would be cool to study at the Indian Institute of Mass Communications. I made it through the written entrance exam and was asked to appear for an interview. A very stern interviewer asked me a question that made me use the word "consumerism" in my response. I used it casually, as people often use this word, but he pinned me down for a definition. He wanted to know precisely what I meant by the word "consumerism". I probably told him it referred to a culture of mass production and mass consumption. But I don't think he liked that.

That word has troubled me ever since. We didn't have the benefit of Wikipedia back then but it tells me now that consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. In retrospect, I think I was close enough and I was only 17, he should have given me a break. Well, no such luck.

College was a lot of fun. For once in my life I had many friends. There were usually seven of us in a gang that did everything together but I was especially close to D. I saw D at the DTC bus stop in Malviya Nagar on the first day of college. I had no idea she was headed for the same college until we saw each other again in class. We hit it off from the very beginning and for the next three years she was the catalyst for every transformation in the soundtrack of my life.

D liked to live on the edge a bit although one couldn't tell from looking at her. I had seen her smoke. She said she had been smoking since school days but then she used to like dropping conversational bombshells like a propensity to experiment with things like Mandrax.

I was rather unsettled by these admissions. That unsettled feeling wasn't some manifestation of correctness or of sitting in judgment while depicting a straight-laced - ness, as it was a familiarity with that word Mandrax.

I had an uncle, a much loved, favorite uncle, who was a talented musician, sculptor and artist and throughout my childhood I had witnessed him wasting away, bit by little bit, because of his addiction to this thing. That word had always been around our family for as long as I could remember.

I was in thrall of his exceptional talent. I remember his rendition of these songs:

Nathali se toota moti re
Saranga teri yaad mein (this is my rendition, not Mukesh's - just to make the point that I remember him when I sing it)

My mama (uncle) passed away in 1986. But in 1984 he was still alive and in trouble with an addiction to Mandrax, to bhang (cannabis) and even to alcohol.   The family was distraught. So when I met D and she mentioned the M word, I was very nervous, very anxious. I worried about my strength to resist even as I always knew I would be immune to inebriation. There was always the "what-if". Could one resist things like this in moments of weakness or peer pressure? I continued to be her friend through all this because I really liked her. I often wondered if the other stuff was just pretense at rebellion since she never appeared off-kilter.

Until I met D the only version of Ticket to Ride I had ever heard was the Karen Carpenter one. I had no idea it was a Beatles original. Top of the World (KC looks pre-anorexic in this video) was another Carpenters favorite that was probably not an original Carpenters song, but I didn't know any better then.

When D told me about the Beatles it was like a big bang of sorts in my musical education. I just couldn't get enough of them. Abbey Road was the very first followed by Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the White Album.

D used to go to Calcutta (Cal) every summer and she used to return with stories of a Cal friend of hers who she called Heroc. Our chat sessions were always full of Heroc stories. He was probably the one who got her to experiment with certain things. One summer she came home full of the merits of Simon & Garfunkel - I had never heard of them. D's Cal summer had yielded a fascination with I Am a Rock. Apparently "He-Roc" used to think of himself as "a rock". I was absorbing these bands and these songs via a weird osmosis - Heroc - D- Me. The Simon & Garfunkel LP was naturally the next addition to the ever growing record collection, every track a gem:

Mrs Robinson
El Condor Pasa
Bridge over troubled water
Sounds of silence
Scarborough Fair
Homeward bound
Kodachrome

The Heroc phase of D's life diminished after a while only to be replaced by BITS-Pilani and the music preferred by the department of Instrumentation Engineering and a student therein. D was dating someone who couldn't stop raving about Pink Floyd. The sound was sublime, the music superior to anything anyone had ever heard, according to the Pilani boy who I had only indirectly met. Pink Floyd now entered my consciousness with Comfortably Numb.

Jethro Tull came next, also courtesy the Pilani boy who knew "sound", and we got Aqualung and Bungle in the Jungle with Ian Anderson, the god of flute.

That took me through college along with some exceptional soundtracks in the Hindi films: Saagar, Aitbaar, Utsav and Ijazat.

We're drawing close to the end of the India phase of my life.

College led to The Delhi School of Economics. Making it through the entrance exam brought with it a sense of validation, a sense of accomplishment and the fatal flaw of hubris. Everyone around me was a brain and a half and those who didn't spend every waking hour and every glorious dream in visions of qualifying for the Indian Civil Services exams had stars and stripes in their eyes and worried about taking their GRE exams,

Once again, I was woefully short on goals and ambition and long on distractions and fun. Somehow the folks here had figured out my interest in singing and I was often asked to sing. The song that I favored those days was Dil ki awaaz bhi sun.

That was until D introduced me to American Pie (stupid video but best sound quality I could find), by way of Pilani. Don McLean's Starry Starry Night became a big favorite soon after.

And now we are at the very end of this phase. The bits about poring over Jung's words on dreams and wondering about the meaning of the lyrics of American Pie at D'School's Ratan Tata Library, with someone who went on to a rather illustrious career in the Indian Police Services, would have to wait for another day and another post, or perhaps the lesser said, the better.

In the margins

2011-11-26T11:19:00.000-05:00

I asked my mother if she remembered the years I was writing about in the same way I did. Her answer indicated life happening with no time to really sit down and think about what was happening.

That was something to think about. In the years I've been writing about, my parents were the actors. I was an observer, a very engaged member of an interactive audience. I was watching, listening, learning, the mirror neurons in my frontal lobe were firing up with activity as they absorbed cues on how to be. For my parents, life was happening to them even as they planned their next steps or worried about the present and the future.

I remember wondering why money would be short when there was a salary at the beginning of each month. Or puzzlement at the very adult assertion that childhood was a carefree time when there were rotten teachers, nasty friends, unit tests and final exams to worry about. These words, these thoughts bounce back at me when my daughter expresses them now.

This song, which the singer said scares him to death, says it all. The father was busy with life, the son was busy watching him and learning how to be and then he turned out just like his father. When one hears this song, as a parent, one wants to take away a lesson about spending time with one's children, about appreciating every moment spent with them, about making these moments count because life is too short for anything else. But the other thing to note is that parents are people too (for want of better words). When we are kids our parents are usually in the prime of their living, thinking, planning, providing years. They are the driving force. We watch them and we learn how to be even when they aren't administering a direct life lesson.

I wonder now, after spending some time thinking about my mother's comment, if I'll remember these years of chasing dreams, watching them dissolve only to be replaced by newer ones, of making plans, watching them fail, rebuilding them and running after the dots that may or may not connect in the future, with as much clarity and as much accuracy as I did the years of my childhood.

My life is speeding by in a blur similar to the one described by mom. The years bleed into each other and time as a concept is increasingly meaningless. When I am not worrying about quotidian concerns I am worrying about how not to let quotidian concerns drag me down and before I know it the sun has set and the calendar has advanced.

And through it all a little person is watching me, she's learning, observing, absorbing, emulating. In conversations she brings up things she's overheard from the times when I wasn't even aware she was listening. I tell her in jest, "You are always listening, aren't you?" and she says, "I have ears, Mommy!"

How it sounded over the years (1978-1982)

2011-11-25T00:44:00.002-05:00

Something is happening, exciting, bewildering – it was on dad’s tape recorder, a 1968 song that he probably taped while it was being telecast in the US. I used to love listening to it. I recollect the chagrin and the pure frustration of my friends and classmates looking at me as though I had three heads if I ever mentioned this song or sang it. They had never heard of it. One of many ways in which I felt different and alien.

This memory goes together with the incident where I told a friend how funny Laurel & Hardy comics were and she said, “Ha ha ‘funny’, that’s not even a word, did you just invent that word?” Alien world! These were very strange days for me. I feel like I became two different people around this time with my personality at home a completely different one from the one at school. It was perhaps the first indication that the world wasn't a sympathetic place, rather, it was a place that more often than not took on dissonant and ugly shadings and my shell was firmly in place when I left for school every morning.

Home was where I was a mimic, where I was someone who couldn't last a minute without bursting into song or cracking a joke or saying things no one expected me to say; where I could be a normal child who begged for things and sulked when the things she wanted didn't happen or grew ecstatic when they did. People at home cared about my actions and reactions. At school I was increasingly invisible. My classmates were a couple of years older and stranger, the first teacher in Delhi terrified the living daylights out of me. I didn't quite know how to be the same everywhere.

I used to see classmates exchanging LPs. The Pussycats album was the one that was going around back then. I held the record in my hands, in class, and gazed at it with fondness. Perhaps a part of me was in extreme distress about not being like the people in my school. After all we just had a spool tape recorder at home which played Downtown or Something is happening but never anything that was known to other people. They hadn't even heard of the Hindi songs I knew and loved like, zabaan-e-yaar man turki, o man turki nameeda nam, nameeda nam, nameeda num, nameeda num oye.. (chahe tu ik nazar mein kulkayanat le le - more wonderful sounding words that made no sense at the time)

And then it happened in the year 1978, suddenly TV and our own record player shortly thereafter. Happy days! No more Sunday evenings on other people’s carpets watching their rotti-shotti rituals and listening to stories of the grand old days in Peshawar, Multan or Lahore before all the "syappa" (trouble) and personal losses on grand and unimaginable scales; stories of how these folks had experienced trauma, lost everything and built it all back from scratch, literally from the ground up. I overheard awed conversations at home, between my parents and with other extended family, where they marveled at the extreme industriousness and resourcefulness of the Punjabis and how as Biharis we just weren't in possession of these genetic traits.

We heard it all in those Punjabi living rooms and the mysteries of being referred to as Hindustanis started unraveling. These people had all been on the train from Pakistan. What I absorbed in those living rooms all those years ago didn't register with a full and meaningful impact until so much later. Back then it was just mataji talking. In 1978 her memories from thirty-one years ago were still as fresh as her yesterdays.

The Sunday feature film and the Wednesday Chitrahaar were already unmissable for us but now we even saw the regional films that were telecast on Saturdays - either Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, Punjabi or Bengali, occasionally a Bhojpuri movie like an old one called Loha Singh. These were enjoyably, and often hilariously, different, especially when they appeared with subtitles. There were those endless talent shows where we saw a very young Alka Yagnik and so many others before they were so famous and so commercially viable and soulless. We even sat through Krishi Darshan, watching someone wax eloquent about rabi and kharif crops, in stubborn avoidance of homework.

The trips to Rhythm Corner (RC) in Delhi’s South Extension were an exciting addition to our lives now. I was finally exposed to more English songs than just the couple that played on the tape recorder. The new rituals of holding the LP at the edges and laying it down ever so gently on the turntable and then resting the needle in the groove were so exciting and it was such an honor to be permitted to handle the records and the record player. I still remember being awed when I was told that the tip of the needle was a small bit of diamond.

The beginning of what grew to be a rather impressive record collection was a "Best of" record recommended by a bespectacled attendant at the store. He spent many years of his record selling career at Rhythm Corner (which is such a sad little nothing store in South Ext now - no idea what it even sells). This record featured Rod Stewart’s Hot Legs. I remember spending a lot of time trying to perfect “I Love Ya Honeeeeeeeeeey” like he did. There was Foreigner’s Feels like the first time and Roberta Flack singing Killing me softly along with a bunch of other 70s standards on that album. An enduring love for the back beat was probably born with this record, especially the first two songs.

Sadly, I was still an alien in school with these songs. The gentleman at Rhythm Corner had advanced my listening pleasures to a point where they were still not quite in sync with those of other sixth or seventh graders. The classmates were into Harry Nilsson's Pussycats album, especially the song Save the last dance for me or Staying Alive and we didn’t have those albums.

Then came ABBA, Boney M and Osibisa. Voulez-vous – aha and suddenly we were all in sync. ABBA were everywhere (I'd invert that 2nd B if I knew how), Boney M with Rasputin, the intrepid lover of the Russian queen, Brown girl in the ring and By the Rivers of Babylon, close on ABBA's heels and then, for awhile, Osibisa with their Sunshine Day. I still remember their Doordarshan commercials of Osibisa-unleashed-leashed-leashed...

The movie Qurbani came with a big bang next and went on to dominate the soundtrack of those times. What was not to love about Gabbar Singh turned comedian and the wonderful sounds of Aap jaisa koi (this song was probably on the radio 24/7 and we still couldn't get enough and had to spin the record whenever the radio took a break) and Laila o laila where Amjad Khan draws even more attention than Zeenat Aman!

At school, the kids who exhibited a singular (not dual), extroverted (not worse than introverted) personality, started performing songs that intrigued me and interested me but I could never find the albums at RC:

Though it hurts to go away, it’s impossible to stay
Down the way, where the lights are gay
Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River – lot of time was spent perfecting the high notes in “to the place, I BELONG”
500 miles away from home

I used to memorize these songs and either sing them at home or during the times I stole away from the Sports/PT period to go visit with the music teacher in the junior wing of our school – Mrs Hopcroft. She used to play them for me on the piano while I sang to my heart's content.

Doordarshan showcased many classical music and dance performances during this time. At the age of ten or eleven these shows had the same impact on me as Aavishkar and Bleak Moments had had when I was seven. I remember a dance performance where the bols sounded like, “Yadhubansh sudha se ladding cha” (Yadhubansh is fighting with Sudha). An uncle, close to us in age, used to join in in the interpretation of the sounds. He thought the words said, “Yadhubansh Sudha bhuti chhading cha”. Only this much was clear – the dance was about Yadhubansh doing something incomprehensible to Sudha. And when they showed Carnatic Sangeet it was yet another occasion of frustration, topped in anguish only by the ever present 7:00 PM Krishi Darshan.

Delhi – Mummy’s House files
It was remarkable how we kept finding landladies who wanted to be inter-generational moms. The last one was mataji and this one wanted to be known as mummy.

Interesting times here. The neighbor next door, Dimpu, and the one downstairs, Ritu, were also into singing at the top of their voices. Some famous movies came out during this period – Ek Duje Ke Liye, Kudrat, Shaan, Bemisal, Umrao Jaan, Basera, a Shashi Kapoor and Moushumi movie which had the very pleasant song – Mujhe choo rahin hain teri garm sansein. All had songs that begged to be sung at the top of one’s vocal register. The neighbors would soon chime in and we would have our own little sing off from three different houses, no one acknowledging that that was indeed what we were really doing.

Mummy's house could well have been the inspiration for the present day chat window. There was a certain time during the afternoon hours when my mom would go out to our balcony with a cup of chai, Dimpu's mom would appear in her aangan (courtyard), Ritu's mom (Mrs Nayyar) would appear in the aangan of the floor below us and a rather hirsute woman - Balaji - who lived in the barsati of mummy's house would pop open her window upstairs to get an hour long chat conference going with all the chat windows popping open. I used to love eavesdropping on them as they gossiped about friends, family and other neighbors.

By now I had also become fascinated with classical music maybe after watching the film Anuradha on a Doordarshan Sunday. All three sing-off contestants were entranced with Kaise din beete re, kaise beeti ratiyan, Haye re woh din kyun na aaye ("Ritu" especially loved this one) and Jaane kaise sapnon mein, from that film, every song so clearly showing Ravi Shankar’s involvement.

We also saw the movies Amrapali and Chitralekha during this time with these beauties:

Neel gagan ki chhaon mein
Tadap yeh din raat ki
Tumhein yaad karte karte
Sansar se bhaage phirte ho (an early declaration of my motto for life)
Man re tu kahe na dheer dhare
Kahe tarsaye
Ae ri jaane na doongi

How could one stay away from an interest in classical music after hearing these songs? It was impossible.

I started my Hindustani classical vocal training that year. My teacher was the Odissi dancer Uma Sharma’s dad and I am so sad that I don’t remember his name anymore…Pt Sharma. I learnt Yaman, Khamaj and Malkauns with him. He loved teaching me and was very upset when I stopped learning after about six months of training because I had to concentrate on my ISCE exams.

There was a musically memorable Pakistani invasion during this period with Ghulam Ali, Salma Agha (with Nikah) and Nazia Hassan making their presence felt. Salma Agha's voice was a lot of fun for me to imitate. For awhile there all the "Minki gana sunao" (Minki, sing us a song) requests led to my imitation and duplication of Salma Agha singing Dil ke armaan aansuon mein beh gaye and Fiza bhi hai jawaan jawaan. Ghulam Ali's Chupke chupke raat din was also something I couldn't stop myself from singing whenever I could.

That was the only Ghulam Ali song I knew for a long time and then one day one of my uncles paid us a visit. He was very fond of Ghulam Ali and he left behind a tape which had all of his other songs; songs which hadn't been sung in any Hindi films like - Mastana piye ja, Hungama hai kyun barpa, thodi si jo peeli hai and Dil mein ik lehar si uthi hai abhi. Hungama...is especially memorable because our neighbor Dimpu had an older sister Jo. Jo had a rather jaundiced complexion and every time my brother and I heard or sang the song we used to stress the line thodi si Jo peeli hai (Jo is a little yellow).

Around this time we were influenced by a culture to the west of Pakistan. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was in the news a lot and we suddenly found ourselves living next to Afghan neighbors. In the years 1981 and 1982 there was a large influx of Afghans in Delhi. It was really exciting for us to have them as neighbors; a whole new culture to observe at close quarters. The family living next to us consisted of Ahsan jaan, Rohilla, Nahid, Faujia and Fakhria. Ahsan jaan was married to Rohilla (I think). They were all so beautiful, so pink cheeked and wore such exquisite clothes. They were some of the most attractive people we had ever seen.

My mom is especially skilled in communicating with people whose language she doesn't know. She has a gift. These people didn't speak any English, perhaps Nahid knew a few words. They spoke Farsi and just using the few words that are common to Urdu and to Farsi mom was able to determine that they were en route to seeking refuge in the US and that Delhi was a temporary stop. They were desperate to learn English and mom agreed to teach them. Pretty soon they were able to express themselves in rather amusing ways.

One of the funniest things I remember is Ahsan jaan looking up during his lessons to observe the flurry of activity at our home during the morning hours. Our door bell rang every few minutes as a lady came to collect the garbage, a guy (dhobi) came to pick up the clothes for ironing, someone else came to clean the house. He couldn't resist commenting on it one day and said, "Nalini jaan - one man come get clothes, one lady come cook, one lady sweep floor, one lady get garbage, what you do Nalini jaan, what you do??" His puzzled inquiry was hilarious in tone and in delivery.

That's about all that feels like the years 1978 - 1982. We'll move on to 1983 - 1988 next. After 1988 India becomes a strange and exotic place for me.

How it sounded over the years (1975-1977)

2011-11-19T02:50:00.000-05:00

The Kapoor Singh Guliani Files

The days leading up to our arrival at Delhi were full of language trepidations. We were told everyone spoke Shuddh Hindi in Delhi. There were practice sessions where we tried so hard to replace the sound of our pronouns "ee" (this) or "oo" (that) with "yeh" and "woh", respectively.

We had to train ourselves to stop saying hum (me) and tum (you) and to start saying main and tu. Thank god kids learn fast. But some things still tripped us up, especially since they weren't quite as expected. Where one expected aap aaiyega one heard aap aaoge or aap jaoge. It didn't compute sometimes. Just as the presence of newspapers written in Urdu being perused by the older gentlemen around us didn't compute. We were sometimes called Hindustanis by our neighbors and that was especially disconcerting as we wondered what they were.

Malviya Nagar, in those days, was also a place where one saw women, often heftier than one was accustomed to seeing, walking around trussed in salwar-kameez and chunnis. In my childish recollection of the Bihar phase, women were only seen in sarees worn either seedha palla or ulta palla. I always associated one of those (I forget if it is seedha or ulta) with a more rustic aspect and was glad my mom never opted for the version I considered rustic.

The first house we found in Delhi was what's known as a barsati, on the third floor of Sardarji Kapoor Singh Guliani's house: 90/76 was its address. It had two rooms, a kitchen, a large expanse of roof and a balcony overlooking most of Malviya Nagar.

I remember Sardarji and Sardarni-ji as kind souls, Sardarji gentler than his wife. That was the first time my ears heard, "Aaoji rotti-shotti khao ji". I wondered why we were always being invited to chomp down dry rotis. Biharis are rice enthusiasts and rotis were never too tempting.

Sardarni-ji was very fond of my brother. We used to tease him and say he was going to marry her. He answered with much anxiety, "Nahin, unse shaadi karne se buddhe bacche honge" (if I marry her I'll have old kids).

They also had something called a television!

In the bucolic settings of Sabour there was no television. I was told I had seen television and that Mr Dressup was my favorite television character when I was a two year old slurping baby food in Canada. But I had no recollection of television until we arrived at Malviya Nagar, New Delhi 110017, in 1974.

Every Sunday, at 6:00 pm sharp, my brother and I descended from our barsati and made a beeline for the Guliani's living room. We sat through each Doordarshan feature film, cross-legged on their carpet, glued to the black and white television set. We declined offers of roti eating and watched them consume their own rotis with lip-smacking gusto and then dust off their hands and sit back. No post-eating handwashing was ever witnessed. We thought perhaps that's why they liked eating rotis, they weren't messy like bhaat, daal and sabzi.

The movies I remember watching here were - Nausherwan-e-adil. Raj Kumar, who might have been in his fifties by the time I saw him playing a young prince in this movie, was probably my first screen crush. He exhibited such a princely demeanor in that movie. Whenever I heard my grandma tell us stories about princes and kings I pictured them looking like Raj Kumar in Nausherwan-e-adil. The songs were beautiful - Taaron ki zubaan par hai mohabbat ki kahani, ae chand mubarak ho tujhe raat suhani and Yeh hasrat thi ki is duniya mein bas do kaam kar jaate. These songs are wonderful enough to have traveled thirty seven years with me.

The other Doordarshan movies we saw then were Lal Patthar and one in which Abhi Bhattacharya dies and comes back as a ghost haunting a scared looking actress known as Vijaya Mishra. I can't remember the name of the Abhi Bhattacharya movie and Google hasn't helped much either. Perhaps I am conflating a couple of memories here but I am certain there was a movie in which Abhi Bhattacharya was doing a lot of haunting. I remember this because the movie terrified me! As did Lal Patthar. I forever imagined invisible fingers reaching for me in the dark and felt certain there was a ghostly presence seated on a couch in our living room. I am not sure what was creepy about Lal Patthar except that it was filmed around Fatehpur Sikri, I was told. Some bits of it reminded me of the light and sound show at Lal Qila in Delhi...it was somewhat creepy to imagine life in these old places. But the cheerful song that was filmed on Vinod Mehra in that film - Geet gaata hoon main, gungunata hoon main, maine hasne ka vaada kiya tha kabhi, is liye to sada muskurata hoon main - stayed with me for days to come - and of course Raj Kumar, once again. I remember being so disappointed when I was told he wore a wig.

A couple of other Doordarshan Sunday screenings from this time were memorable. One was called Akhri Khat, memorable because of the two year old kid who simply walks away from home. I thought it was an amazing film. The song, filmed on Indrani Mukherjee - Baharon mera jeevan bhi sanwaro - wasn't too shabby either, it was hummed for days on end. The other one was a weird movie, boring to me then except for the bit about a young couple living in a drainpipe.

The house numbered 90/76 also distinguished itself because of the movies we saw at either Uphaar in Green Park ( I hear it was gutted several years ago), Odeon or Regal (at Connaught Place - accessible via DTC Bus #520) and Archana (GK I) cinema halls.

The movie that I haven't seen as an adult, even though I have a feeling I might like it now, I remember as the most boring movie in the history of movies: Aavishkar. Was there any reason for the camera to stay on the "Ghar Amar aur Mansi Ka" sign for so long! I sulked throughout the movie. Nothing happened in it! It was just Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore being very gloomy and serious. They didn't even pretend to sing. All the songs were in the background! I heard my parents say they liked it and I couldn't understand why. I do remember the song Babul mora naihar chhooto hi jai, Vividhbharti Radio played it often. I am very fond of it now. But if I traveled back in time to meet my seven year old self and expressed this opinion about the movie and this song she would probably look at me in disbelief and disgust.

Just when we thought things couldn't get any worse with the movies that resembled stills, my parents chose to see the movie Bleak Moments! First Aavishkar, then Bleak Moments! Who made these movies? I couldn't decide which one was worse. They reside in the same corner of my memory banks.

Then came the movies Pratigya, Roti Kapada Aur Makan, Mili, Zanjeer, Ek Nazar, Zameer, Do Jasoos, Mili, Dharam Karam, Aandhi, Kabhi Kabhi and Sholay. I remember the songs:

Main jatt yamla pagla deewana
Hai hai yeh majboori
Mehngai mar gayi
Aaye tum yaad mujhe
Patta patta boota boota
Do jasoos karein mehsoos ki duniya badi kharab hai
Ik din bik jayega maati ke mol
Is mod se jaate hain

Many of these songs talked about mehngai (inflation) and milawat (isn't milawat really hard to explain in English? Is it a uniquely Indian phenomenon? Let's say - things like the dilution of milk with water, the mixing of sand with cement or mixing small pebbles or stones with grains and lentils). This was the time when Rajesh Khanna slowly faded away after overlapping for a bit with the angry young man - Amitabh Bachchan - going after all these people who did things like milawat, the original protagonist for the perpetual ninety-nine percenters. As I look back I see eternal recurrence in action.

The other noise around me at the time were protests and writings on the wall that said, tanashahi nahin chalegi, garibi hatao, hum do hamare do and the word nasbandi always associated with Sanjay Gandhi.

Of course, when one traveled from Delhi to Patna and beyond, along the Ganges route, during summer vacations and such, one never failed to notice the ubiquitous sign: rishte hi rishte.

Kabhi Kabhi and Sholay deserve special mention here because the song Kabhi kabhi mere dil mein khayal aata hai and Main pal do pal ka shayar hoon became a permanent part of the weave of my quilt. They were probably the first songs I memorized from start to finish and the first ones that emerged from my voice box when someone said, "Minki gana sunao."

Sholay always warrants special recollection, simply because of its Sholay-ness. Not only did Gabbar Singh terrify gaon ka baccha baccha in the film he was pretty monstrous for little kids outside of the screen! The song that stood out for me then was Mehbooba Mehbooba - loved trying to do the ooh ooh ooh part.

That was the end of the Kapoor Singh Guliani Files.

Mataji Files

In 1976 we left the barsati when we noticed that a house we could see from our rooftop was about to be vacated by Drs Bhola - the Khokha market physicians who offered up a greenish concoction for every ailment. Mom told me and my brother to walk up to the landlady of house #90/81 and ask her if the duplex house was vacant. We walked over to her and asked her, "Auntyji, yeh ghar khali hai?" (Is the house vacant?) and after giving us a bit of a hard time said that it was. She also asked that we call her mataji and her husband pitaji.

We moved into their house soon after. One half of the house, split down the middle, was rented to us and the other half belonged to mataji's nuclear family of five. There were her daughter Baby, son Parvesh, adopted son Amar (Baby auntie, Parvesh uncle and Amar uncle to us), mataji and pitaji. Her extended family included another adopted son Darshan Gulati. Darshan Gulati owned and operated a shamiana (tent) rental place. He had two kids - Dimpy and Kaka - who were our age. They became our playmates.

Dimpy, Kaka, Samir (my brother) and I watched a lot of the Doordarshan stuff together. The movies and the Wednesday night Chitrahaar were big favorites. We were still watching their TV, however.

We got up to no good with some of the songs, like nagari nagari dware dware, we managed to sing it with every letter of the Hindi alphabet, taking special pleasure in the "th" substitution. It became "thathari thathari thware thware" for quite sometime.

The most unforgettable song during this period will always be the one from the movie Do Aankhen Barah Haath starring V Shantaram as a prison reformer and Sandhya - playing a one stringed instrument and balancing things on her head while doing so, for the most part. We were watching the movie with mataji, pitaji and the rest of her family when the song Ae malik tere bande hum came along. Pitaji had been kidding around and conversing with us until he suddenly wasn't anymore. It happened around the same time as the line in the song that says, "taki hanste hue nikle dum" (as I draw my last smiling breath).

This was probably the first time I witnessed death. It was hard to grasp. He was laughing, joking, conversing and then suddenly he wasn't. The mourning rituals the breaking of the bangles, several days of grieving and of not knowing how and where to be as kids make up some sharp recollections.

That wasn't the first time we saw death in that house. My uncle (my dad's older brother) passed away while we were in that house. Another stream of mourners and this pervasive feeling of incomprehension and the creeping up of an errant smile in the midst of it all is what I remember. I didn't understand why my face kept wanting to smile despite my feeling so anxious and so sad.

I used to call my late uncle babuji. I remember how fond he was of me. He called me Bulbul. Sometimes he wrote to me and addressed the letter to "Chi. Bulbul" (in Hindi). I wondered why he preceded Bulbul with "chi" and if it was supposed to represent the sound the Bulbul bird made. Mom later told me that "chi" was short for "chiranjeevi" (live long).

He had always wanted me to sing for him and in 1977 the songs from the movie Doosra Aadmi were all the rage. I had memorized the words to Aao manayen jashn-e-mohabbat. I used to sing that for him.

I also remember Doosra Aadmi well because it was 1977. The "tanashah" (rumored to have been the subject of the movie Aandhi) had been ousted from power, for the time being, and Morarji Desai with his unique beverage preferences and Charan Singh, Atal Bihari Bajpayee et al had come to power. I think Charan Singh had something to do with bottles of Coca Cola disappearing overnight.

No more Coke.

And yet there was a scene in Doosra Aadmi where Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh were sitting at an outside restaurant, under an umbrella, sipping Coke. I had asked mom why they got to have Coke while we had to get used to things like Campa Cola and Thumbs Up (Happy days are here again, everybody is feeling good with Thumbs Up, refreshing cola, Thumbs Up refreshing cola, Thumbs Up refreshing colaaaa - that has to be a part of the soundtrack as well!)

Then came the phase where all I ever sang was Chain se humko kabhi. It was during a trip to Allahabad,

at Mr Dhaulakhandi's house when one afternoon, on a hot summer day, when we had nothing better to do, dad decided to take on the role of music director as he meticulously coached me through the intricacies of the melodic twists in this beautiful Asha rendered song, especially the sudden key change in kaash na aati apni judaai. This signaled the launch of my career as a performer of film songs for friends and family. I have lost count of the number of times I've performed this song for people.

We are coming close to the next phase of owing a television and a record player. Those events signaled a significant change of sound. But before that phase we must talk about Hum Kisise Kum Nahin and what I ended up doing to the song Kya hua tera vaada. When the constant singing of that song became too boring for me I inverted the whole thing. And even now I can't help singing it in this form: "yak ahu rate daava, woh masak woh darai, galebhu ladi, saji nadi hemtu, woh nadi gidnazi ka rikhiya nadi ga ho".

How it sounded over the years (1970 - 1974)

2011-11-18T15:30:00.000-05:00

The music in my head is very carefully organized in various files. I was reading something about music therapy and the Proustian effect of melodies; how they can transport you to places where you've been. Even Gabrielle Giffords is responding to music therapy as it helps her recover her speech. If I ever need the restorative effects of such therapy I believe my mental files will come in very handy in resurrecting, reconstructing and restoring things for me. The earliest discernible and autonomous recollections are from Patna.

Patna files (very early seventies):

The name Mujib-ur-Rehman was often heard. There was a war going on.

I remember a trip to Nainital and Mussoorie. Dad was a botany professor at Patna's Science College back then. He had organized a "collection" trip to Nanital and Musoorie for all his students. They used to collect and preserve various types of plants and leaves from the hills and dad used their finds as teaching opportunities. Mom, my 2 year old brother and I had tagged along for a holiday.

Somewhere along the trip we met several soldiers. I remember mom saying - they were "jawaans", a new addition to my growing Hindi vocabulary. She encouraged me to talk to them. I liked chatting them up. That was my first sense of the heroism of "jawaans". My brother picked up the song "Aamar shonar Bangladesh". Why we sang about Bangladesh in India became clear much later.

Then came the construction of the Punaichak, Patna home. I loved those days. There was a big pool in the front of the house, I suppose it was used as a reservoir for construction purposes. The majdoors (construction laborers) used to get water from there and use it to mix up the cement used for plastering the walls. It was fascinating watching the bricks being placed, the plaster spread over them with a spatula and another brick placed on top as dad's first home slowly took shape.

The miniature reservoir was my favorite. I know we saw the movie "Aadmi Aur Insaan" around that time. Saira Banu was in a song where she was rowing a boat and singing, "Zindagi ke rang kai re, saathi re". I remember saying I imagined myself in a boat in that tiny reservoir singing,"Zindagi ke rang karenge". For the longest time I thought that's what the lyrics said - zindagi ke rang karenge.

The day the construction was complete I remember the shiny and sparkly mosaic floors, freshly waxed. We slid around it, the happiest we'd ever been. The house was designed with so much love and so much attention to detail. There were closet alcoves, a large kitchen, box windows my brother and I used to clamber into and make it like a tiny home within a home.

I know dad often sang this lullaby for me, "Nanhi kali sone chali, hawa dheere aana" but my memories of hearing him sing this lullaby to me are associated with the Punaichak home.

Anand was the movie that came out around this time. Its songs - ageless and timeless.

Rajesh Khanna was everywhere with his Haathi Mere Saathi, Kati Patang, Saccha Jhootha. I think my little brother had a "Rajesh Khanna shirt" too. The songs on our lips were, "Chal chal chal mere haathi, oh mere saathi", "Maine...tere liye hi saat rang ke sapne chune" and "Kahin door jab din dhal jaaye".

Mumtaz and Asha Parekh were equally ubiquitous. I forget which movie but there was one where Mumtaz popularized something called a "lungi dress". At five, for some inexplicable reason, I was in love with the "lungi dress". My grandpa was the one who caved and finally bought me one. I tried it on as soon as I got it and then came out to model it. Grandpa took one look at me and said, "You look like Dalai Lama". That was it for the "lungi dress". Much later, when I finally saw pictures of the Dalai Lama, I understood what he meant.

I had a real early start with weird fascinations. I remember the raisin incident from around the same time. I decided I loved raisins one day and consumed one or two bags of it within the span of a couple of hours. Unstoppable puking continued for the next few hours and that was it for raisins and me. I haven't touched them since.

It's sad for me, in retrospect, to think that we didn't live in the house dad built in Patna for more than a year or two. It was truly a labor of love. It was around for many years until it got sold around the time that my brother went to BITS Pilani but we never lived there again. Many of our relatives did.

We moved to a place that not many people have heard of, a place called Sabour. It is near the Bihari city of Bhagalpur and its claim to fame is an agricultural college. This is where my dad's next job took him.

Sabour files (early to mid-seventies)

I suppose it would be hard for a young US returned couple with two young kids to love a place like Sabour. I don't believe my parents were happy there. I got the sense that there were many frustrations, financial woes and worries about ensuring a quality education for the two of us in the back of the beyond that Sabour was. I accompanied my dad to his office one day and saw him tracing a cauliflower leaf on graph paper. He didn't seem too thrilled about it. It must have been a far cry from his Caulerpa research days and electron microscopy in Hawaii.

Sabour's only saving grace was the fact that my grandparents and all my mamas and mausis lived in Bhagalpur. My mom's two sisters (mausis) and five of her six brothers (mamas) lived there with my grandpa and nani (grandma). They were always around, either visiting Sabour in grandpa's official jeep or having us visit them in Bhagalpur, a few miles away. I have fond memories of the time, I was happy in Sabour.

We had an officially assigned living quarter. There were many kids my age in the neighborhood and our quarters were surrounded with mango trees. The Sony spool tape recorder was very active during this time. Songs were recorded from the radio and on weekends it was open mike session where we'd record our own songs on to it.

I remember the song "Haal chaal theek thak hai, sab kuch theek thaak hai", especially the line, "gol mol roti ka pahiya chala, peeche-peeche chandi ka rupaiya chala". I found those lyrics fascinating as a six year old with no sense of its being a reflection of those times, of the educated and unemployed living in corrupt times of dearth (has anything changed one wonders?).

Then came Pakeezah. The radio never stopped playing Pakeezah songs. We had "Thaare rahiyo", "Inhi logon ne" and "Mausam hai aashikana" which to me was the train whistle song. We could hear the train whistling by where we lived in Sabour and we could hear it from the roof top of my grandparents' place in Bhagalpur and every time I heard the train whistle I thought of the song. Got some interesting words added to my vocabulary - like "shamiana". The dots connected later when we became the tenants of a family who were in the business of renting "shamianas" in Delhi.

Then there was "Inhi logon ne le lina dupatta mera" with its own strange vocabulary of "bajajwa" and "rangrejwa". I had no idea what these words meant for the longest time. But they were fun to say. There was also something in there about "asharfi gaz (we said gaj in Bihar) deena". I used to hear my dad talk about someone called Asharfi Ram in a not-so-complimentary fashion and always thought of "asharfigajdeena" and Asharfi Ram in the same spot in my brain.

My early memories of Hindi songs are littered with lyrical mondegreens. Another one that came about was "Anamika tu bhi tarse". In conversations, when I heard my uncles, aunts, parents talk they would say things like, "Oo BHITAR se badmaash hai" (meaning someone was rotten to the core, not just superficially mischievous). So when I saw the movie Anamika and Sanjeev Kumar appeared angry at Jaya Bhaduri while singing this song, for the longest time I thought he was accusing her of being rotten to the core by singing "Anamika tu BHITAR se". I guess I wasn't too far off, he was accusing her of something.

The blockbuster Bobby came around next. And just like the "lungi dress" from before all the little girls wanted Bobby dresses. I think I had my fair share of Bobby dresses. The songs that were heard everywhere then were "Hum tum ik kamare mein band hon" and "Jhooth bole kauwa kate". The first one was funny because we liked to sing "sher se main kahungi mujhe chhod de, tumhein kha jaye".

We took a trip to Kathmandu when we were in Sabour. I was six then and that trip was so fabulous that I can recollect it with tremendous clarity. We were with my uncles and aunts and cousins close to me and my brother in age. We sang these songs on the trains, on the scarily winding roads on the buses, in hotel rooms. That trip was certainly one big sensory overload for me.

We either passed through this one place en route to Kathmandu or I heard the adults talk about it, a place called Bhainsalotan. I still conjure up images of buffaloes lolling around in swamps when I hear that name - Bhainsalotan - wonder if it got that name because that's what happens there - buffaloes loll around!

There was another funny sounding song that was immensely popular during this time - "muthukudi kabadi hada". I still don't know what that really means. But since the first two syllables mean something totally different in the part of the country where I was - the words were a source of much hilarity for us kids.

The mango eating, potato farming, cauliflower leaf tracing days of Sabour came to end when my parents heaved a big sigh of relief and proceeded to spend a large chunk of our lives in Delhi.

In Delhi we'll talk about what I've mentioned to some of my readers: The Kapoor Singh Guliani Files.

First Principles

2011-10-30T20:40:00.002-04:00

When I started this blog I was looking for a tag line; an overarching sentiment that expressed what it was going to be about. The line from U2's - One - said it all. I do come here to find insight, to search, to look through the tracks being laid down in my brain. Others could see this as more navel gazing but I felt as though I need to live my life as well as be the resident pathologist or forensic expert that resides within. I have to be the one who goes in to play Jesus to the lepers in my brain. There are many.

So...cleansing, detoxifying, purifying...these words are tempting. The notion of deconstruction, a return to first principles and a building of something new, something beautiful, is tempting.

There isn't an iota of order in the way I live my life. I don't live well. I don't air things out often. There are years of sediment, years of accretion of things. Sure my slate is cleaner than most, perhaps I haven't even lived enough through it all. But I probably need to break this slate and start afresh. Either way, a deconstruction and a getting back to first principles is called for. Or so I feel.

I headed on over to a retreat where we were going to be on a system cleansing raw food diet while we explored cleansing and purification possibilities in other areas of our lives. I wanted to emerge from this experience scrubbed fresh, blinders removed, ready to go at the world in a reasonable and precise manner. I wanted to reject this overwhelming notion of absurdity that shades everything, clouds every judgment in a fog through which I am finding it hard to emerge.

More on the retreat later. Before I go there I need to take an archaeologist's look at what lies within.
***

There are many themes worth exploring in this bird's nest of a mind. Even as I try to keep my thoughts linear and coherent they come unhinged, wanting to digress and bleed tendrils everywhere. I'll be better off pinning them down as they appear.

There was a clearly marked point where things started unraveling for me at a rather fast clip. I remember my amateurish attempt at poetry several years ago. The sentiment I had tried to express then was of an eerie calm, eerie because it carried within it a hint of dread...a sense of hurtling toward a dreaded destination. I have reached that destination now.

In 2010 I turned averse to everything my life was all about, starting with the job. I found what I did at work absurd beyond description. Perhaps my aversion became apparent in my work and I was the recipient of some harsh words from a boss. I went on a vacation to India after this exchange.

I went with my parents. I spent many hours telling them about my discontent. I met my cousin's friend. I saw the spark of fulfillment in her eyes. I sensed a freedom in her soul. I craved that. But all cravings aside, I didn't know how to get to the same place where she was effortlessly present. I still don't know.

I spent some time with my relatives in Indore. My uncle and aunt. as welcoming and as cheerful as ever, their pain and their anxiety about their child's future never evident in their interactions with us. I then felt ashamed at myself for my petty, almost nonsensical anxieties.

I visited a few temples while I was there.   I felt absolutely nothing in the presence of idols and thousands of other devotees. I was ashamed at this lack of "shraddha". I felt out of place, strangely attired, larger than others, more well-fed, uncomfortable, in pain and discomfort at being barefoot on the burning marble, brushing flies away, ignoring beggars. I felt like Frankenstein.

I was out of place. I am always out of place. No matter where I am I feel as though I don't belong in this skin or on the firmament on which I find myself.

I returned from the trip determined to try and get more comfortable with myself. I was determined to examine the roadblocks to this feeling of "fit" even as none of my clothes fit anymore after the sweets and other treats at every host's place in India. Landing at EWR in a state of bloat didn't make fitting in any easier.

I returned to work where every absurdity was reinforced. I was always angry, always frustrated. I was angry when cost-cutting eliminated the half-and-half I could use in my coffee, I was rabid when they took my local printer away. I foamed at the mouth when the workload smacked of redundancy and illogic.

Several times during those months of ferment I came to the conclusion that I had to let go of expectations. I couldn't expect any happiness from work, any happiness from my disordered home, any improvement in my financial condition, any deep connection with friends real or virtual. There was a targeted, conscious effort at cultivating detachment.   A detachment that only made me feel less connected and less of a fit. There were weeks of expectation-free success followed by several weeks of wallowing in dashed expectations that always managed to creep up again. I was on a yo-yo diet of letting go of expectations.

The one expectation that always stood its stubborn ground, however, was the expectation I had from myself. Somewhere along the line, through all these years of growing up, I'd convinced myself that I was capable of much more than I had achieved. This notion is perhaps all in my head. Maybe I am really only capable of what I have achieved so far. It plagued me nonetheless.

Perhaps it started with my mom taking a picture of me by the statue of John Harvard, thinking I might end up at Harvard some day. Perhaps all my friends and relatives who encouraged me when I sang or wrote were just being nice to me. Perhaps I am not capable of excelling at all. These doubts never leave me. They are like the little demons I must now fight.

But before these little demons emerged I did believe I could excel in the arts. This belief was never supported by my inherently lazy temperament and so I drifted in and out of misery at wanting to be someone and then thinking it could never happen.

Through it all, I couldn't stand the tone of defeat in any of my friends. If they ever felt they were slipping away into failure I would offer them words of encouragement and tell them that they needed to just get up and do it. Sadly, I was never able to take my own advice. I didn't think and I still don't think that advice would work for me.

I think fate tried to intervene toward the end of 2010. I was on the phone with my husband one Sunday while he worked (or played?) in sunny California. I asked him to say the word, to tell me I could quit. I wanted him to tell me that I had the green signal (keeping in mind our precarious household finances) to walk into my boss's office and say, "I quit". He laughed it away. The next day, at work, I was summoned to the Human Resources offices and told that my job was being eliminated from NYC and shipped out to Florida. I wasn't offered a stint in Florida. I was in shock. It was almost as if the universe had acted on my behalf when I wasn't prepared to act.

I wasn't sad, I wasn't upset, I didn't even feel worried about our future even though I had every reason to worry. The severance pay was going to last for a month. The average job search these days is an 8-12 month long affair. I should have been catatonic with rage and anxiety but I wasn't. All I could think of, in that instant, was how I was talking about wanting to quit the day before and how the next day I had my answer.

Over the next three months I spent a lot of time with my daughter. I tried to introduce into my life the things that I thought had gone missing. We played together, read together, experimented with cooking, spent time at the bookstores, at the library, for the first time in my life I was a real mom...in the hours when she was home.

The hours when she was at school were strange. They were spent refreshing contacts, sending résumés, learning that many of the contacts who could have helped me find a job were themselves jobless.   I exercised like a maniac, for hours, then I slumped down on the floor in a "shavasana" state for an equal length of time. I read a few more chapters of my book after emerging from that state. I then showered and got back to the task of searching for a job or exploring our bank statements for areas of cost cutting. I laid off my own laundry and cleaning lady. I ridiculed my search for a job because I was once again seeking the absurdity I so despised.

Two blank canvases, oil paints, brushes stared me in the face for all those months. Never once did I pick them up. My mind was such a blank I didn't know of a single thing I could express in paint. I have always been excellent at copying things but did I really want to turn out more unoriginal art? I suppose the answer was no. I practiced all my ragas, scales and études in violin, I tried writing. But I don't think I have lived through a more uninspired phase. I felt like an empty shell or a deactivated robot who only experienced motion or animation upon the return of her daughter from school.

Around that time I decided to start volunteering my time. I answered several requests for volunteers and ended up with three organizations who wanted assistance sans remuneration. They all did good work. One was an institution for adults and children with developmental disabilities, the other was doing some work on diseases of the brain and the third was doing some wonderful work helping less fortunate people.

I ended up on my hands and knees putting together dreary employee manuals and filing invoices for the institution that helped kids with disabilities. I had to photo copy hundreds of pages and then learn how to use a machine that bound pages in a spiral book. A new skill learnt, a cause for celebration! I laughed at the lines in the pages that asked paid employees to be nice and considerate to the volunteers. Once again - absurdity underscored. Even my volunteering yielded absurd results.

I tried to assist the other two organizations enhance their social media presence. That was somewhat satisfying until I learnt of their fears and trepidations about having a vast social media presence; they weren't willing to post videos or photographs, they didn't know what to blog about, what they said on their sites had to be censored on many levels, they couldn't understand Twitter or Facebook or the essential why of it.

Before I could get them to understand it all a job came along. Since the prospect of a year long stint at unemployment was starting to scare me and since I am only able to drag my heavy shackles around when I have some money coming in, I decided to stick an arm and a leg out of the poverty sack and go for a much downgraded job. These people needed me to do all the things I had ever done at all my previous jobs, they just weren't going to pay me as much. I decided that would be acceptable.

So I experienced unemployment, poverty, self-pity, joys of motherhood and amplified feelings of inadequacy all under the umbrella of absurdity in the space of three months.

Could I have started a writing project during the time I wasn't working? Could I have envisioned a better life in those moments of leisure and taken a first step towards it? Perhaps. But something always keeps me glazed over, numb and inactive. What hinted at being latent in the days of my youth has started feeling stale.

I've noticed a marked shift in my attitudes over the last several weeks. A few things happened in the weeks leading up to my cleansing, purifying, detoxifying retreat.

I had visited my sister-in-law's home in NY. While I was there I had pulled down the Carl Jung's "Memories, Dreams and Reflections" from my brother-in-law's bookshelf. I was absorbed and fascinated by the book. I couldn't finish reading it nor did I borrow it. I probably just left it sitting there on his nightstand or some unusual place.

Back home I got deeply absorbed in another book.   I am still only halfway through it because reading time is in short supply these days. This is Alex Ross's second book called "Listen To This". It is about the history of music. The theme of it is that all music we call classical now didn't use to be so. It was perhaps considered licentious, was perhaps banned. He talks about other things as well.

The chapter about "laments" was fascinating when he explained the concept of a ground bass line; when he talked about the studies that show that when people mourn, when they grieve, if they express this in sound it's always something close to the same four descending notes -A, G, F, E. Many pieces of music incorporate this ground bass line also known as the "basso ostinato". Beautiful music often gets woven around this ground bass - the constant.

When an idea hits home in this fashion, I often put the book face down as I think about all the other associations that get triggered. I ponder, I contemplate, I dog-ear the page of the book at the bottom. The reverse dog-ear tells me that there's something on a page I must revisit.

I was in this state of pondering when my brother-in-law emailed me to say that he had noticed I had been reading Carl Jung's book when I visited. He told me he found what was within horrifying and reassuring. He said C.G. Jung re-envisioned western religion and philosophy for him. He also sent me a link to site that had listed Jung's Seven Sermons To The Dead from his Red Book.

In Sermon I Jung says:

"Not your thinking, but your being, is distinctiveness. Therefore not after difference, as ye think it, must ye strive; but after your own being."

This and many other things he says in his sermons which can be found here reminded me of the Bhagavad Gita.

I am a non-religious person with a very limited understanding of the scriptures and wisdom of the religion into which I was born. What I've gleaned through the tales my parents, my grandparents and those wonderful illustrated gems called "Amar Chitra Katha" are the bits that give me some succor in moments of confusion.

I've absorbed some fractional essence of what is being said in the Gita. Arjuna was struggling with absurdity, with the notion of war with his near and dear loved ones and Krishna set him straight in conveying to him that he was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing in this life. He was fulfilling his karma. Krishna revealed his all-encompassing monotheistic form, he talked about the inverted aswattha tree with its roots in the divine and the branches spreading in our world. Carl Jung's vision of Abraxas jogged my memories and drew me straight back to whatever limited impressions I have of the Gita.

The absurdities in which my perceptions see me drowning are all just a part of this flow. They are a part of this journey that will end somewhere. I feel as though I lose my way a little bit every time I question it or react to it in ways that breed doubt and confusion.

By this time my thoughts have all converged into three points of a bookishly acquired harmony - Basso Ostinato, Abraxas, the notion of striving after YOUR OWN BEING and another thought - Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.

I have talked about the last one before in another post. It is a very compelling picture for me, of the lotus flower, holding its own, flourishing in muddy waters, just like a ground bass that holds it's own as other music happens around it, my own being - a constant, my trials, vicissitudes all a constant as I see my journey in a new light, a journey of being in the world, of the world and finding a way to flourish.

If I was to pick up that canvas now I could probably create something of beauty that reflects these thoughts. Perhaps the right medium would help the thoughts coalesce into a philosophy. It hasn't happened yet, as you can see, but I feel as though I am on to something.
***

So we now return to the retreat. I went to a "Goddess Rejuvenation Retreat" in the Berkshire Mountains. I didn't know what to expect. I knew some of the people who were going to be there. I liked them. The first time I had met them I came away with the impression that they had a firm handle on living this thing called life to the fullest. I was hoping that a cleansing, purifying, detoxifying retreat such as this would help my thoughts coalesce further.

I was looking forward to the solitary ride up to the Berkshire Mountains, absorbing the brilliant fall foliage while immersing myself in my music. I wanted a break from thinking and wanted to relish a smooth ride up to the mountains without grasping at searches and thoughts or reliving past mistakes, failures or successes.

It was all going very well for me until this song called "Arziyan" came on. About halfway into the song tears came, unbidden. They were streaming down my face uncontrollably. I didn't want to control them. I relished being washed in them, they signaled a breakthrough of some sort. I wasn't sure what it was but the lyrics that triggered the lachrymal response were about complete surrender. In the last part of the song, throughout the song, but especially in the last part, there is the expression of a sentiment that in a prior life the poet strove for success and glory, had dreams and ambitions and went about it with a certain chin-up audacity that yielded scant results. He didn't find fulfillment of any sort until he came forth in total surrender:

Sar utha ke maine to kitni khwahishein ki thin
Kitne khwab dekhe the kitni koshishein ki thin
Jab tu rubaru aaya nazrein na mila paya
Sar jhuka ke ik pal mein maine kya nahin paya

It was this message of humility that got to me and stayed with me as the song built to a climax.

By the time I pulled into the driveway of the retreat I felt washed clean. I felt as if there was a lesson for me. A lesson that hadn't sunk in in its entirety but was there for the taking; reaching for it was up to me.

There were many beautiful souls at the retreat. That is a statement that isn't very likely to come from someone like me. I feel as though the part of my life that I haven't lived in a self-absorbed manner, I've lived observing others. I am a human camera. I observe, I absorb, I collect impressions. I go about it with the detachment of a collector. I don't say things like "beautiful souls". I am fascinated by my collection but I have seldom felt any emotional attachment. That wasn't the case this time.

I studied the faces of the people I was meeting again and I saw some new ones. I was stunned by the beauty in some, the radiance in the others. I hugged people with genuine warmth. I wanted to convey that I really liked them and that I was thankful to be in their presence. There was a dog there, Daisy. She felt like a bundle of love walking around the room, spreading warmth with every lick, every shake of her tail. I haven't felt these emotions so deeply before and I don't understand why I haven't. Where was I lost? I felt every emotion coming up to the surface.

My daughter wasn't there with me. I thought of her, I conjured up her face and I smiled. Someone asked me why I was smiling and it was because I had suddenly felt as though I love her so much that my heart could burst. She brings me so much happiness. How could I ever feel angry or frustrated or in a state of ferment when she is around and being who she is?

As the weekend unfolded all the women got to know each other well. We learnt of each other's hopes, dreams and deepest fears. We learnt about our pasts our hopes for the future and we all probably spent a lot of our Sunday crying.

I remember feeling shaken to the core by some of the stories I heard. Once again I was filled with shame at my seeking, striving, grasping, reaching, permanent anxiety when my life is relatively charmed.

In the last part of the retreat, our brilliantly intuitive host, L, gave each one of us an assignment. We all had to do some role-playing and enact a scenario. Each scenario was designed for maximum impact, maximum honesty and catharsis. Mine required me to take on the role of a drunk woman who had lost all meaning in life. I was required to select a few participants and recreate a bar scene where I walk in drunk and proceed to tell the bartender about my feelings on anger, desire, lust and confusion. I was also required to flirt outrageously and act promiscuous with the guys (girls pretending to be guys) at the bar.

I was stunned when I received my assignment. The part L wanted me to play was indeed me. Or perhaps it was me from before my tear-washed journey to the retreat. I generally find it all absurd in the extreme, I have been angry, I have been confused and about desire and lust the lesser said the better (or perhaps that's where the most needs to be said, don't know). As for acting drunk, I haven't experienced a single drunk moment in my life. I have never sought inebriation. I have been asked why and have felt annoyed when people assume it may be for religious reasons. That is not the case. I haven't felt a desire to lose control. I have always wanted to be in control of myself. Perhaps L sensed that as well. Perhaps total surrender and control don't go well together and pretending drunkenness may have been a way to send this message home.

I gave my assignment a lot of thought. I read it several times and during my reading as I hit upon each note therein - anger (hit a key on the piano), confusion, lust, desire (play a triplet) - I felt as though I was on the verge of tears just leading up to my part. I told the others, "I really don't need to act drunk to talk about these things. I could write a book." But when it was my turn I got into the role, I came into the bar singing a drunk song, I staggered, I hiccuped, I slumped forward, flirted with the "guys", danced and kept repeating how my life was all about putting little numbers in little boxes and how it was all so absurd.

I got through my assignment, I was told I made a wonderful fake drunk who danced really well. E invited me to a dance party and I said, "Sure, just make sure you have my fake booze flowing".

But at the end of it I felt as though I had shut down inside. That I hadn't really used the opportunity to share the things that tend to eat me up inside. I felt like I had escaped and wasn't happy that I had.

In the very last bit, before we said our goodbyes, L, for fun, brought out these "goddess" cards. The eighteen of us, shuffled the cards and picked one up. Each one got a message that appealed to them. Mine was loaded with irony. It was the goddess Coventina and she said to me, "Your soul needs cleansing, detoxifying and purification." I said to L, "What?? Wasn't this what the last three days were about? There's more?"

L said, "More? There's a lot more!"

I know there may be more, I am just surprised she knows this too.

Endless Mountain Zone

2011-06-26T21:48:00.001-04:00

I know I won't remember the year 2011 at all when I am an old lady in a rocking chair, mentally traversing the same roads I travelled in my past. It has been just such a year, uninspiring, uneventful with expectations lowered to the point of flatlining; no spikes up or down. Which doesn't really make for a bad year or for unhappy times. It just feels a bit like the stretch on Route 81, en route to all points north and slightly west, where the sign says, "Endless Mountain Zone", somewhere near Steamtown, Scranton, PA. The area in question is endless enough even if it isn't quite mountainous. The satellite radio loses its signal, the cell phone enters a dead zone. All one can do is drive and hope that road hypnosis doesn't set in.

Yes, that's what 2011 feels like. It's an year of feeling resigned. It could have qualified as placid contentment if one was more mature, less restless and more enlightened. A year of no plans, no expectations, no excitement. A year of being resigned to a lowered salary and rising expenses, no vacations, not even
"staycations" because one has grown traffic averse in the extreme and somewhat conscious of gas expenses.

The things I used to enjoy in 2010 have receded into distant memory. Reading, loading up all my electronic gadgets with music or books, lunch hour explorations of midtown, east side, finding something new and exciting every day, watching people in all their quirkiness of attire or mannerisms, their classic unconcern with what anyone thought or felt and every now and then an amazing glimspe of sartorial elegance. Those who know me well, through what I wrote then, would also remember that I used to whine a lot. I was always complaining about the bus, the train, the hours lost commuting and about the dull nature of a very routine job. I did go on and on about that to anyone who would care to listen. There is some truth to the grass being greener on the other side, it seems.

The truth is that I don't miss the old job and I don't miss losing four hours of my day each day... but I do miss New York City with all my heart. For the last 15 years New York was an exciting second home. I loved having a connection to a wonderful city that's really like no other. A city that's more like a living, breathing organism pulsating with contagious and life-giving energy. When I spent time there I was inspired and alive. I had more days where I felt as though anything was possible, as though expectations never needed to be lowered to the point where they were a flat line. The city embraced me, I returned the embrace and sensed a oneness.

Now the commute is an hour shorter, even if the hour is spent crawling at speeds that often make me wonder if I could get to work sooner if I walked! I sit there examining my aging face in the rearview mirror in the long spells when the car just doesn't move, each additional minute spent in traffic adding another line around my eyes or my lips, asking myself if this is how it's going to be from now on? There are no discernible crow's feet yet unless I squint a certain way but the grey hairs are certainly threatening to explode into the likeness of a powdered wig. As the car lurches forward again the maudlin thoughts give way to a realization that these thoughts are bringing one down and that one needs to crank up the radio. But then the radio plays something horrendous like, "She was a fast machine/she kept her motor clean..." seemingly for the fifth time in five listenings, reminding one that one's own "fast machine" is going nowhere in a hurry, it's just sitting there rusting.

That's when the iPhone comes out with it's voice recording feature. Singing all the songs I know, I lurch forward some more. And so the ride goes, all the way until we exit at a nondescript exit and into the parking lot of a nondescript building with no surrounding points of exploration, no lunch hour excursions. No lunch buddies since everyone is either on a diet or working straight through lunch. We saddle up for a day of intense, focused work, telling ourselves that this is what the Bhagwad Gita preaches. Work, work, work, no expectations, no distractions, just an intense focus on one's work. This time the cubicle at work has no personal affectations, no pictures, no collection of jackets, sweaters draped over the chair or shoes under the desk. It's work in all its purity except when I take some time off to tell my virtual friends that Gladiators, cactii and creeds are the things on my mind. They probably think I've lost it when they read something like that from me. But my reference points are not entirely random. I conjure up the image of Russell Crowe playing a gladiator in the movie "Gladiators". His character has a family back home, he is enslaved and he just does what he is required to do as a gladiator, unemotionally and with immense detachment. I think of the proud saguaros lining the Arizona landscape, self-sufficient in an arid climate, their inner resources intact and then I summon up the question of creed after having read, in an article about Clarence Darrow, that life is intolerable without a creed. We all have a creed, we need one to get by. What's mine, I wonder.

The evening drive is similar to the morning's drive. Fiddling with the radio, listening to the phone recordings of one's own voice, making phone calls (handsfree, of course) wondering about dinner and whether the rest of the evening could be effectively parsed into the things that I need to do to tell myself that I am intelligent and alive and have interests that just won't quit, quitting them would be like quitting on myself, driving the flatline of life even lower if such a thing was possible. So we practice our scales and études on the violin, we fire up the electronic tanpura and sing the longer notes, we do what needs to be done for dinner and then watch the family members disperse to their own separate spaces of the house.

Then it's just us - me and the bright screen in front of me...demanding...something.

The World As You Don't Know It

2011-04-08T10:36:00.001-04:00

After my daily dose of news snippets I was thinking about how potentially massive change in how we live and how we see things, is evident in little bits of news. In the last few days we heard about Katie Couric, Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer all making the decision to leave network television. Is it network fatigue or is it a realization that they could do so much more with a crack at personal branding?

The Katie Couric Show, The Matt Lauer Show, these are all real possibilities and for these people, if they choose to go for these personal branding opportunities, success is more likely than not. In a world where the distinction between varying degrees of celebrity is fast blurring, people like news anchors suffer the possibility of extinction and redundancy if they don't take some steps to underscore their ability to command an audience.

Along similar lines, not much of a digression at all, we hear about CNN ratings slipping because "Breaking News" doesn't bring in viewers anymore. It has been several years since I tuned into a channel that brings breaking news because by the time they break the news it has already been broken by citizen journalists and microbloggers. No sooner has an event happened that politico.com tells me all about it...within seconds of it happening.

Then there are newspapers, the news about newspapers these days is about them finding ways to adapt. There's the New York Times pay wall, they won't be giving it away anymore and there is no reason for them to do so. They have enough equity in their name, enough followers of their brand of long form journalism, there are enough of us out there who would rather pay what NYT wants to charge than be deprived of reading what they have to say. Most of the top newspapers - The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The LA Times - are all in the same boat and they need to ride this wave with a certain degree of panache and equanimity about the fast moving, shifting and often alarming quicksand nature of events in our times.

USA Today, another major newspaper in the news today is debating whether they want to pay bonuses on the basis of "page views". That's another example of a dawning realization that "what" is being written is about to take a backseat to "how many" read it and "who" wrote it. Perhaps this was always true to some extent. Success in media cannot be expected if the "what" ever got sacrificed in its entirety. However, chances are, that something immensely readable could vanish without a trace if enough people haven't "liked" it, "shared" it, "recommended" it or ""Digg'd" it.

Sometimes one has to re-state the obvious, if only as a form of exclamation: the world is changing. Say "Duh" if you want to, but it is. We can nod as though we understand it is changing. We can make it a topic of conversation at the cocktail hour and offer up our own examples of the ways in which it is changing: little children adept at treating smartphones as an extension of their developing brains or their fifth appendages, governments being toppled over because people feel more empowered than they ever have before, a YouTube video made by the mayor of a small town in north eastern Japan getting him an unprecedented wave of concern and real if not physical support, making him feel like he isn't alone in this tragic world, free and abundant open source applications digitizing people to their heart's content, people buying from each other instead of from big corporations and more...profit motive? What's that? It's en route to being passé when there are an unbelievable number of people who care more about the impact they are making; the magnitude of their impact, their crater-creation ability rather than dollars and cents, Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame would be such an example.

Julian Assange is a good segue into one final thought about our legal institutions. A professor of law, who is memorable to me for his insistence on being called a doctor of jurisprudence, drummed into us the principle of stare decisis. The principle whereby judges are expected to respect the precedents established by prior decisions. He told us that our entire legal system is based on precedents. Just think of lawyers quoting prior cases in every argument they make.

What happens when precedents don't exist? If most of our lives will be led entangled in the world wide web of pleasure, pain and intrigue then won't all our crimes be committed in this same world? Where would they find those precedents? They would set new precedents, wouldn't they? Hard to imagine those ancient Supreme Court justices all up to speed on this, but I suppose they soon will be!

In a few years this world will be unrecognizably better for those of us who call ourselves optimists and who believe all change is good, who are not alarmed by it; the new-utopians some call us. But it could be a very scary for the rest of us.

To plan or not to plan?

2011-03-17T02:23:00.001-04:00

"Your destination has arrived," announced the GPS lady, talking to me through the speakers of my car. She sounded confident and cheery as if she had steered me right, a self-congratulatory note of pride in her voice at a job well done. Except that the said destination was not in my sights. I was at the edge of a traffic circle, getting blinded by the angry headlights seen through the rearview mirror of my car, wondering what to do next. Traffic circles aren't new things. They are anachronisms. So even if my GPS hasn't been updated since 2006 chances are the circle predates the GPS, new traffic circles just aren't being built and as such I shouldn't have been told that my destination was a traffic circle when I was really looking for an Arts Center in the New Jersey town of Watchung, a town I had never heard of before.

The planners would tell me life isn't as simple as just getting in your car and driving off without having mapped your route and convinced yourself that you couldn't possibly get lost. They wouldn't be wrong. Life really isn't as simple as just driving off in your car, armed with nothing but an outdated GPS, a bag of Doritos and oodles of senseless overconfidence. But in this world of ours there are the ant types and the grasshopper types. Ants with their super organized, super structured life, all work and no play, marching along, single file, carrying bits of food. Grasshoppers...well...no idea what happens to them during their life cycle. Do they have more fun doing all that hopping on the grass or are they miserable drones (no pun intended) drowning in the cluelessness of their next move? Who knows. But they aren't known for planning and organization. Somehow my life refuses to run a course similar to that of an ant's.

I know the merits of scheduling and mapping, of carrying around an agenda with all 365 days neatly marked, but that's where it stops - at this wide-eyed admiration. These excellent qualities are frozen within a beautiful diorama inside the glass walls of a museum. I have stared at them in awe. I have admired but have never been tempted to emulate.

Regrets? Yes. Of late nothing but regrets and yet the leaf is stubborn and refuses to turn over despite the sticky fingers of fate trying their level best. Someone up there is licking those fat fingers with a vengeance, forcing the turning over. I look around and I see how streamlined some lives are, how self-assured, how confident and I wonder if it was their incessant planning that got them there. I want something like that for myself because, in retrospect, things appear to be falling apart with a degree of certainty.

So after being lost around a traffic circle, disoriented and disgusted with my inability to find a place, today I sat down and mapped my destination using MapQuest. I looked for the Panera Bread in the town of Sparta and was told that it was at 25 Country Lane. I printed out detailed turn by silly turn directions...get out of your front door...turn left to your car...go straight for a few yards...leave your driveway...etc. Then I got in my car and fired up the GPS. This time I was not taking any chances. If the GPS got me lost I would have the paper. Off we went admiring the picturesque settings of Sussex county, the quaint bungalows and the large mansions, the farms, the hills and dales, pointing at this or that while our dear friend, the GPS lady, told us to bear right or bear left or go straight for eight miles. So far the paper and the disembodied voice were in sync.

A few more twists and turns and there I was outside the largest mansion I had ever seen in New Jersey, set back inside a cul-de-sac, as the voice announced, "Your destination has arrived". Panera Bread anyone? Nope. Chances were that the folks who lived here would say, "Panera Who?" if we rang their doorbell. My destination, dear GPS lady, would never be a castle like home in this neighborhood, but I am flattered you thought I had arrived!

What did I do wrong this time? See, planning just doesn't sit well with the people who just aren't used to planning. The paper from the Google Search and the GPS lady both wanted me to go ask some millionaires if their home was pulling double duty as a Panera Bread.

So I came home. Told the people I was supposed to meet that I was sorry I couldn't make it but I was perpetually lost these days, that I probably couldn't find my way out from inside a paper bag I was inhabiting with a GPS woman telling me my destination had arrived.

So despite an awakening desire to plan, despite making my plans to plan, I am in a state of paralysis. I sit there with my notebook, making lists, filling out my calendar, I pause to think, I lift my eyes up at the TV screen and I see some very calm and serene Japanese people pushing empty carts through empty supermarket aisles while the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen tells us of consecutive nuclear reactor meltdowns. Some announcer talks about lunchtime in Sendai...people would have been thinking about a return to their work desks, about picking up their kids at school, about dinner plans and their own mini-universes within the larger one and at tea time their worlds as they knew it had ceased to exist. Plans washed away, slid under a mobile tectonic plate, crushed beyond recognition.

Can those who live in doll houses with matchstick walls, drive toy cars, sail toy ships and work in pretend jobs at pretend offices afford the luxury of a plan?

Fiction hasn't done it well, yet!

2011-03-05T22:10:00.001-05:00

I read this blog in The Guardian today and agreed with the author in that I couldn't think of any fiction with a description of childbirth that sounded real to me. The descriptions almost always were from the point of view of expectant fathers or midwives or someone in the story who was the only one around when a childbirth was imminent and had to direct the whole "warm water and lots of towels" operation. No one ever writes about how it is for the woman giving birth. And like Emily Cleaver says, women often tell her how wonderful it was and how one forgets the pain.

Well, not all of us forget the pain. I can never forget that pain, nor will I forget the sense of accomplishment, the sense of having walked through fire and emerged stronger, gilt-edged and transformed forever. I remember the first dull pain. It felt as though someone was scooping out a small part of my insides with a spoon. And then the pain subsided completely. I walked around the hospital corridor waiting for the next one because they told me the pain would come again and would keep coming back with greater intensity.

And then it started. The next one had me doubled over until it passed, as did the next one and the next one. It went somewhat like this:

Pain...............Calm (play Solitaire)................Pain................Calm (more Solitaire)..............Pain.........Calm (a few moves of Solitaire).......Pain.....Calm....Pain...Calm...Pain...Calm (don't worry, the anesthesiologist is coming)..Pain..Pain..Pain..Help..someone help me..where are they..where are the anesthesiologists..they're late..Hubby says, "Where are those idiots!!" I say, "Stop it, shut up, HELP, HELP ME, SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME!!" Nope...too far gone, no epidural possible...Pain.Pain.Pain.Pain.Pain.Pain.UNBELIEVABLE PAIN. A sense of breaking apart and splitting in two.

And then somehow it was all over. The baby was out. I got a glimpse and then she was taken away to be cleaned and swaddled. All the family members trooped out behind the nurse carrying her. There was no one around me.

I was no longer the picture and was not yet the frame. The spotlight had moved away with unquestionable finality. Things would never be the same. The lights, perhaps, would only hit me as slanting rays and with partial incandescence from now on. I was just someone who appeared to be no one's concern at the moment. No wonder not much fiction about childbirth gets written from the perspective of the woman giving birth, she (an important part of the thing that was "she") ceases to exist, a new one takes her place.

Hubby was gone, the doctors were gone, the nurses were gone, the baby was gone, the TV was on and still showing the smoking rubble of the Twin Towers and I was all alone in a hospital room, listless on a gurney, staring at the ceiling to avoid staring at the television and wondering why I was so very cold. I felt the bed shake with my shivers and my teeth chattered like they never had in the worst of winters. This frightening state of solitude probably appeared more pronounced to me in that state. Perhaps it lasted just a few short minutes. But it felt like an eternity. Eventually a nurse came in to do some things to me, sew things up, take out stuff that no longer belonged inside me and then asked me to rest and take a nap. I asked to see my baby first. They brought her in, I held her for awhile and then slept for several hours.

In the days that followed I felt as though I had moved. As if my mind had sold its old familiar home under some kind of duress and now inhabited a place that would take some getting used to. Things didn't look as I remembered, things didn't work the same. The mirror reflected a different person.

The times with the bundle of joy were immensely rewarding most of the times but often one just felt like food. The bonding was instant on some levels and not so much on others. There appeared to be a short-lived tug of war inside. One that the baby finally won and continues to win day in and day out.

Employed at Will

2011-03-02T02:26:00.001-05:00

Today I was putting together some employee handbooks for an organization where I am volunteering. I read through all the standard employee handbook language as I copied each page and placed them in binders and gave in to nostalgia while conducting each mechanical action. There was a time when I was a frequent recipient of these things (well, okay, not so long ago).

I read about the PTO (paid time off) policies, the sick leave policies, the code of conduct and the ominous phrase that reads, "employment at will". I wondered if that language suggested that it wasn't slavery one was going for but employment at will, or whether it meant that an employer was employing you at will and could dispose of you at will as though you were the human equivalent of a plastic stirrer. There was also a note about appreciating the altruism and nobility of volunteers and to ensure that they were treated with the utmost courtesy by all employees. Can't say I had ever had an opportunity to read a passage like that. My former places of employment didn't do things sans profit motive, so there were no altruistic volunteers for them.

There were notes about 401K plans, about the percentage of employer match...oh how the familiar terms played havoc with my bruised heart! Perhaps those who request assistance from volunteers should be sensitive and not hand tasks such as the putting together of employee handbooks to people who are no longer employed, perhaps they should make like they are walking on eggshells around this rather sensitive group of people, don't you think? Sigh. Of course I am being facetious, in case you were starting to take me seriously.

The people for whom I am doing this grunt work are quite incredulous at my desire to help them do this kind of stuff for them and they struggle to find ways to appreciate the help. Today, as I stood there punching holes, making copies, stacking pages, binding and creating each book, I kept playing imaginary dialogues in my head. I imagined them saying to me, "Thank you so much, you don't know how much this means to us. Wish there was something we could do for you. Can we wash your car, buy you lunch?" To which I'd say, "No, perhaps you can just find a reason to hand me one of these babies", while waving one of the freshly minted handbooks at their chagrined and slightly guilty faces.

I am volunteering at a few other places where I am doing more cerebral rather than mechanical things. The cerebral tasks don't send me into as bad a wallow as the mechanical ones do. While doing the mechanical tasks I keep telling myself it's alright, I volunteered. So what if I am just using my hands in carpally repetitive motions and not my mind, the cause is right, it can't hurt. But there are days when all my pep talk to myself falls flat.

I finished my work early today and was ready to make my escape when they asked if I could also help with alphabetizing and filing some applications. I hemmed and hawed this time. I could have walked away and said that I had better things to do but I didn't do that. I told them I would help but not for the next two days. I said I would return after a couple of days and get it done. They were pleased. I don't know what it is that's motivating my actions. Is it really a desire to be a proud owner of an employee handbook again or is it something else? Whatever it is, it makes me feel rather strange because I am doing a great job, a perfect job for these people and there is no incentive to be so perfect, so conscientious, so dedicated. The strangeness I feel manifests itself in a either a sense of detachment and a need to just live through each moment, doing what each moment dictates or in a bout of nostalgia that can even be triggered by a pair of jeans I've owned forever. I look at this pair of fly button jeans and think of how it has seen me through lean and weighty times - in the literal sense. I remember wearing it during a trip to Vancouver or to Paris or Amsterdam and then I wonder if I'll ever feel affluent enough to give these jeans another whirl around the globe.

After my hard labor this morning I headed out to the grocery store. I had been ordered to buy Ore-Ida Crinkle Cut Fries because that's what the little one wanted for an after school snack. I shopped for a few other things while I was there. Later as I plucked all the bags out of the cart before starting my walk to the car, I flashed back to my first few months in this country when I lived in Riverdale, MD, before I owned a car, when I used to have to walk to the grocery store three quarters of a mile away and then walk back with the heavy bags, their twisted up handles cutting into the skin of my fingers. But just before I tell myself those times were not pleasant another thought crosses my mind and tells me that I had a paycheck coming in even then, a miserable $234.35 every week, but there was a paycheck. I have never been unemployed in my adult life until now.

I did wish for it. I wanted to see how it would feel. There are days when I rejoice, when I love how the day stretches ahead of me, full of possibilities. I cherish the hours I now spend with my daughter, doing things with her, cooking things for her, I love it all. I willed this. I have always got what I wanted when I've wanted it badly enough and I wanted this. I wanted it with a growing sense of desperation over the last year. So I have it now. But the joy I feel at an entire day stretching out in front of me, a day where I don't have to visit Microsoft Excel for even a minute, vanishes as the sun sets and I realize I haven't done much to own it. It has just been another day.

Pinky Promises, Cats in the Cradle etc.

2011-02-27T17:12:00.000-05:00

I had picked up the 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear while idling in the fiction aisles of my local Border's bookstore. I read the back of it and thought it would be an interesting read for both me and my daughter. I brought it home and handing it to her said we could read it together or take turns. I told her I might read some pages while she was at school. And that was our deal. She started it last week and finished in about a week, reading some parts of it aloud to me. I couldn't keep my part of the bargain. I couldn't make the time, even in this current state of extreme leisure, to start reading the book.

Yesterday she sulked for hours because I hadn't started reading the book.

"Start reading it now!"

"No baby, I have other things to do, I can't right now."

"What do you have to do?"

"Stuff. Stuff on the computer."

"What kind of stuff? Lexulous?"

"Well...that too, but I need to try and write something."

"I don't think you're going to write anything tonight. Just read the book."

"No, not today, I'll start tomorrow."

I thought I had had the last word on the subject until I noticed that she was not talking to me anymore. She was answering my random questions with monosyllables or shrugs. I can't say I am ever immune to the feelings Harry Chapin generated in Cats in the Cradle and so I finally had to hug her and offer up the solemnity of a pinky promise. A promise that can never be broken, come what may. I promised that I would wake up on Sunday and start my day with two chapters in the 13 1/2 lives of Captain Bluebear.

So that's how I started my day today, with the first two chapters of Walter Moers - 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear. I read it while imagining the parts of it that made her chuckle as she was reading. The book wasn't found in the kids' section of the store. It's meant for an older audience and has some phrasing and some words that I am sure are not familiar to my nine year old. But she raced right through it. She loved it so much that she wants to see it made into a movie.

Captain Bluebear is a poor, lost, orphaned bear who grows from the size of a walnut to a gigantic bear and by his second life has acquired the invaluable skill of crying on demand. He has elevated the act of crying to a performance in fine arts . I could have gone on reading to see what other skills he acquires as his life progresses but I was dragged down by an insane fluttering of butterflies in my stomach. I was paralyzed with anxiety, not into a state of immobility but into a state of meaningless mobility, I was pacing, worrying, picking things up, putting things aside, removing lint, straightening things that didn't need straightening, all in an effort to calm myself down.

I felt like a lost soul. I haven't known what to do with myself for the last several weeks but I've tried doing some things. I have made plans, I have cultivated detachment, sown the seeds of zero expectations and tried to welcome the blackness and bleakness of the cipher in which I find myself at present. It has been a lot of work. I have had to push my worries aside and deal with each problem as it presented itself. But it was as if I suddenly didn't want to be so brave anymore. I wanted to howl like Captain Bluebear who always found a strange sense of calm and detachment after every emotional enactment.

Well, I quieted the butterflies in time. I showed her my bookmark at the beginning of Chapter 3. I had kept my promise. Now it was time for the other standing promise that every Sunday I take her to brunch at the International House of Pancakes, where she never orders pancakes - always chicken fingers and fries.

Now we're back home. She's doing her thing and I am doing my nothing.

Dendrochronology and Minor Immortality

2011-01-11T13:28:00.000-05:00

Dendrochronology is the fascinating science of dating past events by studying tree rings. Everything that went on in the life of the tree can be studied in the concentric circles visible in cross-section. Oh what stories those tall sequoias and redwoods could tell.

When I think of Facebook (it could apply to Twitter as well but I don't think of Twitter much) I see each year of our presence on this social network as another annual ring. Every status update recorded, every picture and video uploaded, every link to a song, to an article is stored on Facebook forever.

Our pictures will show us growing older, the thoughts we express at 20 or 30 years of age will be there for us to review when we are 50 or 60, giving us a chance to wonder if we really looked like that or if we really said what we said. Each year brings a new layer. We capture each moment on a digital camera and even as we're taking the picture we think about how it will appear to the people who will see it in their news feeds after we upload it. So much of everything we do is now Facebook driven in some way. We are out there creating and embellishing our virtual facsimiles, some of us more than others.

A few years ago I read Milan Kundera's - Immortality. The concepts that stayed with me after reading this book were the ones he explored at length, of minor and major immortality. A few of us achieve major immortality - Gandhi, Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, Lennon, Michael Jackson, Einstein, Elvis and so many others. Whether Elvis has left the building or not, he is immortal in a major way. These people are unshakable from our collective consciousness. Some of them are in fact so immortal that they have earned the tag "Delebs". There is an agent in Hollywood, who was talked about on CBS's Sunday evening show - 60 Minutes, who represents these "delebs" or dead celebrity. Michael Jackson's estate has earned more than a billion dollars since he died. His extreme indebtedness in the years leading up to his death, forgotten. Einstein is the top billed deleb of this agency, showing up in several commercials the world over. James Dean, who would have been 77 now, had he lived, and Steve McQueen are the others who get top billing at these agencies. These folks have certainly achieved major immortality.

Then there's the concept of minor immortality. The kind of immortality the rest of us desire. We want to be remembered by our loved ones, at the very least. We want to leave some sort of a legacy. We want to find that one tiny raft that would somehow keep us from sinking into the sea of oblivion. A couple of years ago I remember going through every family album I could lay my hands on. I took on the role of family archivist. I was thrilled to learn that there's a family tree that documents my roots on my father's side to the 12th century, going back about 26 generations. I had names from back then but no pictures.

As the tree spread down the generations some early 20th century black and white photographs started making an appearance. I studied each feature, each expression on these faces, wondering what they were really like, what thoughts were predominant in their consciousness, what were their aspirations, what brought them joy. All these interesting names from earlier centuries, what did they look like?

They were all in eastern India, in the state of Bihar, did they care about the various invasions that the land, which wasn't yet India as it is now, witnessed? Did they see anyone that didn't speak like them or look like them until the late 19th century when the British decided to exploit their lands for indigo farming?

In the black and white pictures I searched the faces of the women. How was it like for them? They never appeared too happy with their existence (and not much has changed now). The ones who got photographed were lucky. There were so many women whose names future generations didn't care to remember. The people who have kept the male names, going back 26 generations, documented and duly recorded didn't think women were important or relevant enough to remember. Such were the times. So many unremembered souls who were truly mortal in every sense.

In the late sixties, or seventies perhaps, some folks got interested in cryonics. They asked that upon their death their bodies be frozen and kept intact for however many years it took for technology to catch up in ways that their thawing, revival and restoration to life became possible. This was yet another stab at immortality by some. Some such bodies are still in cold storage in various places in the world.

It's important for us all, it seems, to greater and lesser degrees, to achieve some sort of immortality. This is where Facebook comes in. It captures our very essence, it captures our banalities, our trivialities, our intelligence, our style of banter, our weaknesses, our strengths in steadily accumulating cyber layers. Cryonics, for those who believed in it, is suddenly redundant. Who needs a physical presence when our cyber-essence is expected to prevail in perpetuity? Forget minor immortality we are all as immortal now as we care to be.

I also read about a business idea (NYT Sunday magazine) that is now taking hold. There are companies and companies with iPhone Apps who want you to think about what will happen if you suddenly don't wake up one morning...they want to manage your digital afterlife. They urge you to "will" your "digital estate" to your bewildered and aggrieved survivors because those of us who are active on the Internet will always have the unique distinction of rattling around in cyber space long after we're gone; literally the ghosts in the machine.

The brave new world is already here, courtesy Facebook and Twitter, and we are all well on our way to being A, B, C or D listed "delebrities".

More thoughts on the Tucson Tragedy

2011-01-10T14:45:00.000-05:00

Rest in peace -Christina Green, Dorwan Stoddard, John Roll, Gabe Zimmerman, Dorothy Murray, Phyllis Scheck - they were all gathered at the Safeway in Tucson, just to listen to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and they lost their lives at the hands of a 22 year old madman - Jared Lee Loughner.

Today I learnt from Gail Collins piece in the NYT, A Right to Bear Glocks, that even at a gathering being addressed by Gabrielle Giffords in 2009, a concealed weapon had fallen out of the armpit of another maniacal gun-toting person. Anyone can walk around anywhere in that state, carrying a concealed weapon. A friend just tells me that they are allowed to carry a gun to school in Arizona and that anyone over 18 can carry a gun and a permit isn't required by someone over 21.

How is it that none of the powers that be, in these gun loving states, see anything wrong with this picture? The gun folks love telling people that guns don't kill people, people kill people. Do these people believe that mental illness has been eradicated and uprooted from this country? Do they really believe guns are necessary for school? Would they see nothing wrong with school bullies taking potshots at other kids or at teachers? Would the NRA defend the sale of guns to these "PEOPLE" who can and will KILL PEOPLE using a GUN?

Many people have expressed an opinion about the vitriol in public discourse these days. I feel it's likely and equally unlikely that Jared Loughner was impressed by the ugly words coming out of his television or computer screen. Maybe he was entranced by such rhetoric or maybe he was marching to his own drummer. Either way he is insane. If he is so easily influenced by the purveyors of vitriol he is insane, if his inner voices and fractured selves are telling him to assassinate a congresswoman and several other innocents, he is insane.

Insane people should not be allowed near guns! The states that are so fond of their gun laws cannot possibly defend a position that lets guns get into the hands of such people!

Or can they?

Will they continue to throw millions of NRA dollars at ensuring that every child, every psychotic, every sociopath in this country was given glocks?

The rhetoric needs to be toned down, no doubt. It should have been toned down before any of this happened, before any idiotic politicians placed congressional districts under the image of the cross-hairs of a gun. But why aren't enough people talking about lethal guns being in the hands of lethal people?

When I was 21...

2011-01-09T11:37:00.000-05:00

When I was 21 I was still fascinated with Ayn Rand; objectivism, rational self-interest were all seductive ideas. I agreed with every theory she espoused and wanted to fashion the rest of my life as a Dagny Taggart wannabe.

I came to the US at this age. The people who worked with me then called me a sponge. They were impressed at my rate of absorption of all things American. I remember a colleague from those times – Rick Lennett. He was an older gentleman, probably in his late sixties, and his water cooler conversation often centered around his weekend hunting sprees; bear hunts, deer hunts, venison preparation, etc. I used to listen to his stories. I was an engaged member of his audience. He walked in one day with a petition that he was having people sign. It was a petition that was opposed to any form of gun control. My colleagues were adding their names to this piece of paper and as a consequence I didn’t think twice about signing it. I was one of them, eager to emulate, be like them.

How did I feel about the 2nd Amendment then? Did I have any opinions about the NRA? I had no opinions, no thoughts on the subject. Did I want to appear as though I was one of them? I most certainly did. The incidents at Columbine and Virginia Tech hadn’t shaken us up back then. If Rick Lennett, my new American colleague, was selling the notion that we had the right to bear arms, then I was buying it without reservations. That was my 21 year old mind.

My boss at the time, my very first boss, was just an year older than me. He used to go around talking and dressing like someone whose ancestors hailed from Sicily because the people who he reported to were from Sicily or from other parts of Italy. He told me he was from Puerto Rico but if anyone asked me I was to say he was Italian. He thought it would make a better impression on his bosses and result in a swifter ascent up the company ladder.

Yes, 21 and 22 year old people, most of them, are just that shallow. I acknowledge and respect the ones who are wise beyond their years and amaze the rest of us by their unfathomable depth. But such stellar young people are more an exception than a norm. That’s what my experience has shown me. I haven’t been pro-gun, anti-choice, pro-capital punishment or anti-immigration for most of my adult life. I went from being sans opinion to having these opinions. My personal evolution led me to this point. But at 21, I was shallow as they come. People just don’t know who they are, who they have the potential to be at these first bewildered steps into adulthood.

Some are worse than the others. Jared Lee Loughner, 21, falls in that category. He has come of age in these vitriolic times. He has been baptized in the toxicity that permeates public rhetoric these days. Perhaps he visited Sarah Palin’s website and saw various congressional districts around the country represented under the cross-hairs of a gun, as targets, on a map on her website -a map that has been removed after the tragic shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Gabrielle Giffords’ district was on that map. She was shot in the head at point blank range. A federal judge and a nine year old girl born on 9/11 were killed during this shooting and several others critically injured.

One only needs to read the placards carried at Tea Party gatherings, or catch whiffs of elevator or water cooler conversation to realize how toxic we have become as a society, to see how a crowdsourced herd of delusional people are amplifying every manic notion and idea, to hear of people who are sold on the idea of taking up arms against the government.

There are so many shows on television these days encouraging people to free their bathrooms, kitchens and pantries of toxic, carcinogenic elements – encouraging the usage of BPA free plastic containers, organic foods, vinegar-based household cleaning – discouraging the use of anything that could be potentially toxic or carcinogenic. We want our homes to be as full of goodness and health as we can make it. The movement is strong and gaining strength. Who wouldn’t want to be aboard?

Why then are our personal interactions, our politics, our public discourse so awash in harshness, in verbal toxins?

I have often heard that driving, being able to use the roads and highways, is a privilege, not a right. Why then must bearing arms be a right? Why isn’t it treated like a privilege? Why are we averse to ensuring that guns don’t end up in the hands of dangerously half-baked individuals like Jared Lee Loughner? Why was someone like him in possession of a legally acquired weapon?

When have we ever heard of guns making the news in a good way?

Day 4

2010-12-25T20:48:00.000-05:00

Christmas Day. It's a quiet day, a lazy day. The one day of the year where there's no agenda and one can just be, surrounded by family, food, hot cocoa, scattered and shredded gift wrapping paper and opened boxes. It's a day when it's futile to worry about the silent phone. No prospective employer would call on this day, so the phone can be comfortably silent; not feeling my eyes boring into its plastic shell, willing it to ring. Tomorrow is Sunday, another day to just be.

If things hadn't changed I would have been worrying about the snow we're supposed to get tomorrow and on Monday. I would have worried about my commute. I would have worried about how I would look to my bosses if I told them I'm scared of getting out on the road when it snows and that I'd like to work from home. Things like that used to gnaw at my insides. So I am thankful. Snowy days and Mondays won't have the power to get me down for awhile. I might even get to build a snowman with my daughter.

I need to work on my resume...

Day 3

2010-12-25T20:47:00.000-05:00

It's Christmas Eve and I do feel the love. I am surrounded by well-wishers. Some say I shouldn't be sad, some tell me to think of this as a much needed break that should be spent resting, relaxing and hugging my child. It's all good advice. I need to hear what they are saying to me. I am listening, absorbing and also waiting for the words that no one has uttered yet. No one has told me not to worry, at least not with confidence. The way I tell my daughter that a shot is nothing to worry about, that it will be no more than a pinprick and that's it. There's no one around to tell me that.

I've taken a good look at how I feel about all this and I know I am not sad. The misery is over, the misery of feeling like nothing but an expensive piece of furniture at work. I haven't felt more invisible anywhere than I did at this place. I was quiet about my work, I knew no one except my next door neighbor. I was able to amaze and amuse a few people with my caustic turn of phrase sometimes but otherwise I was suffocating in a pervasive state if invisibility. I was spending four hours commuting each day just to go to a place so lacking in warmth, intelligence, a sense of community, goals, long term vision, effective leaders. So sadness isn't something I feel. I had considered quitting and walking out like some others had before me; one had gone off on a "walkabout", another had simply walked out one day, never to return. I guess I play safe.

So no, I am far from sad but there's a worm within and it's eating at me from the inside. There's nothing I can do about it. People can console you through your sadness and there are so many things in the world to be sad about, job loss isn't one of them. But what to do about worries? How does one chase them away?

Perhaps it has something to do with age. When I left home and traveled 10,000 miles to start a new life for myself as a stranger in a strange land I don't remember being worried. I had faith in myself, my self-confidence might even have been enviable to others. It seems to have vanished now. I don't know if I can pull it off again.

Day 2

2010-12-23T20:01:00.000-05:00

It didn't matter that the Jimi Hendrix song released on May 12, 1967 was about an entirely different sort of experience. It was an anthem of a generation that wasn't preoccupied, not then, with the mundane realities of bosses, jobs, promotions and this very establishment concept of 'experience'. It still kept popping up in my aural and visual fields when I first got serious about a post-MBA corporate career in the year 1998. As though hearing the song everywhere wasn't enough William Sutcliffe even wrote a book called "Are You Experienced?" in 1998. I started seeing subway and bus faces hidden behind the covers of this book.

I imagined baby-boomer bosses and hiring managers, now all grown up, sitting in plush chairs behind large desks and asking me in that classic Hendrix way, "Are you experienced?"

My resume could fit on one page in 1998 and because I wasn't experienced enough the experts suggested I display my MBA education at the very top. All I heard back then was "experience, experience, you need experience, you don't have enough experience." When I discussed the futility of a day's efforts with loved ones I used to complain about the dilemma of finding a way to get experienced without being experienced in the first place.

Like all desperate phases that phase passed and I was able to jump from one experience to the next over the next 12 years. The resume went from a page to three pages, each experience leading to a job that was similar to the one where the previous experience was earned.

I am older, wiser and more experienced now. They can't deny I am experienced. Except as I stand here, one step poised at the threshold of a very crowded job marketplace, I am learning that "experience" is a perishable commodity with a set shelf life. By the time you earn enough experience it's already too late.

Almost like bananas. You buy them at the supermarket when they still look green. You leave them in your fruit bowl and watch them as they turn a lighter shade of green and a little yellow the next day and then you better eat them right away if you have an aversion to the overripe, very yellow and soft-on-the-inside kind, the kind that's only good enough to be mashed up for banana bread. Yes indeed, an experienced person is exactly like an overripe banana that no one wants...unless they love banana bread.

My friends in the recruitment industry are telling me that I am too old to sell myself based on education alone and selling myself on 22 years of steadily growing experience ages me and makes me look too old and too overqualified. I am now asked to make some changes to the resume where I look as though I only have a few strong years of relevant experience.

Well, no problem. I'll get working on that right away. I am still too young to become banana bread. As I start trimming, restructuring, finding a young and smart looking font and selecting powerful keywords, keeping in mind that the keyword emphasis has shifted from action verbs to hard-hitting nouns during my years of gainful employment, I can't help but wonder about the absurdity of it all.

There was an article in The New York Times today about a town in Alabama where true to financial predictions the pension fund for town employees ran dry by 2009. Retirees here stopped getting pension checks. Some went back to work in their late sixties and others became dependent on the charity of others. They ran a race all their lives only to hit a dead end, a concrete wall at the end of their race with absolutely no way out.

This is life in all its absurd glory and I am willing to embrace it with all the joie de vivre I possess at this moment.

Day 2 brought this realization home. The draft of the new resume is open in another window on this computer. That window is minimized for the moment, the task is a dreary one and there are too many distractions at home. I might have to go to the sunny periodicals room of MOPL again to get this done.

Day 1

2010-12-22T17:52:00.000-05:00

I dropped Anoushka off at the bus stop and got myself a sausage, egg and cheese biscuit at McDonald's. It was combination #4. Love McD's breakfast menu.

The next stop was Mt Olive Public Library (MOPL) where I knew the coffee was not free but didn't know where I could pay for it. I was embarrassed when the receptionist thought I had asked "if" I had to pay when I had asked "how".

It's a nice, serene place. The periodicals section is awash in sunlight. I had forgotten how quiet a library could be. So much nicer than the cacophony of New York workers at the ex-office whining about their shabby, shoddy treatment at the hands of arrogant Floridans.

At 9 am, library opening hour, there were two of us exhaling frosty, wintry breath as we waited for the doors to open. I greeted him and wondered if perhaps he shared the same circumstance as me. Was he new to this life or is this the only routine he has had for the last several months?

I picked up The Star Ledger. I don't even remember the last time I had glanced at it. I have been reading my papers online now, from a desk bathed in fluorescent light, surrounded by gray cubicle walls.

The last time I got newsprint on my hands, papers still had an extensive classified section for job hunters. I didn't find such a section. Instead I saw several pages of a section called "Legal Advertising". Each ad was the sheriff's office inviting bids starting as low as $400 on various real estate properties. I didn't want to dig deeper in order to get all my facts right because my fear was that these were all a result of foreclosures. That thought is a scary one for an unemployed person responsible for a mortgage in a bankrupt state in a country on the verge of bankruptcy.

The Star Ledger had other news about our governor capping salaries, fighting the federal government about repaying $271 million on a half finished tunnel that will no longer be built and doing nothing about property taxes that don't go away even if you lose your job, like income taxes do. There is probably a frightening connection between these opinions expressed in the editorial section of paper and the aforementioned "Legal Advertising" section. A connection that I am rather unwilling to explore on Day 1 of my state.

The USA Today looked cheerier. It was colorful. The growth rate of US population has slowed down. The 2010 census shows that we are now a nation of 308 million people, a 9.7% growth rate, the slowest since The Great Depression. Probably not a bad thing, all said and done, although it is sad to note that the population of Michigan actually declined; no jobs, no prospects in the glorious erstwhile automobile state.

The other story on the second page of the USA Today was of a hardworking couple who had lost their home where they spent many Christmases and were now living in a garage like space of their parents' home. This year their kids' gifts were donations from charitable organizations. They were happy, they had faith that this wouldn't go on much longer. They were good Christians and God wouldn't let them down.

They have their faith, I have the words of my daughter that echo in my ears day and night, "These things don't happen to us." She has grown up seeing that such things don't happen to us. We have navigated her life so far in a way that she didn't sense any choppy waters. I must preserve her innocence somehow, preserve the belief that these things don't happen to us. She is too young for the lesson that anything could happen to anyone, anytime and that the pillars she leans against can crumble too. All lessons should arrive in due course, not prematurely. For now, our magnetic north pole is more or less aligned with our geographical north pole and there can be no cataclysmic shifts. Not for her, not now.

A phone call interrupts this reverie. It's the hubby asking where I am. When I tell him I am at the MOPL he says, "Oh no! You are one of those people now!"

I answer, "Yes indeed, I am...and loving every moment of it!"

I look around me now, the retirees are trickling in. I wonder if I am in one of their special MOPL, sun-kissed spot. I should probably head on out, go home, clean the closet, organize the kitchen, the books, de-clutter, settle down with some dreamy creamy hot chocolate and find a beautiful "Jobs R Us" site to explore...especially since the man sitting next to me has just started talking to himself. I should grant him his privacy.

Signed the papers

2010-12-21T00:48:00.000-05:00

I signed the papers
I said I had no questions
When they wanted a reaction

Perhaps a reaction
Is more of a band-aid
for them, even if it comes
gift-wrapped as a kind and gentle
opportunity for me to let loose.

But no, I am not Florence
and I offer no comforts.

Something animates my steps
these days. I stand tall.
I am starched stiff.
I am a body in motion
Yet to register
the external force.

So I walk tall
Not meeting an averted gaze
and claiming with pride
the space that's already

sterile.

Conversations

2010-11-23T12:43:00.000-05:00

This morning I announced in my Facebook status update that I love garrulous salespeople.

On another note, yesterday in Andy Martin's piece, Beyond Understanding, in NYT's series - The Stone - I got interested in his quoting Simon Baron-Cohen:

"In his book “Mindblindness,” Simon Baron-Cohen argues that the whole raison d’être of consciousness is to be able to read other people’s minds; autism, in this context, can be defined as an inability to “get” other people, hence “mindblind.”"

When I announced that I loved garrulous salespeople two of my dear friends responded. R said that she did too and that silence was overrated. I responded to her comment saying that I just loved watching how they were all lit up from inside, putting their best foot forward, when they were trying to make a sale. I implied that it was interesting to watch the process.

There is a heater in my cubicle that emits a series of dings as it automatically switches on as the thermostat dictates: Ding...Ding...Ding...Ding...and then the welcome heat. The dings may not be obvious in the sales people but they are very much there. They are trying to get me to buy something or to make me a repeat customer. Do they know that I am aware that they are trying to sell to me and that I am watching them with hidden amusement as I decide whether to be "sold" or not? Or do they think I feel as though they are my newest best friends and that I am all warmed up for a sale because of this newly minted friendship?

At my response, which is only partially the reason I like garrulous sales people, R came back with a response that she missed the "sales" bit in the comment and she felt that her response was probably off base. Stay tuned R!

Another friend, J, responded that she didn't like garrulous salespeople who went on and on about their product.

She has a point. The sleazy used car salesmen, and so many other types fall in this distinctly unlikable category. But I responded to J with a couple of anecdotes. The ones that had prompted my comment in the first place.

I was strolling home last night and I decided to stop at Cafe Galet, a tiny French patisserie. I wanted to try one of the macaroons on display. There were orange ones, green ones, brown ones...So I had to ask him what flavors they were. He explained them all. Then he told me that the mocha one must be had with an espresso and that the chocolate one went well with a cappuccino. He also said that one small one was enough, that it packed so many calories. He was incredulous that a customer before me had purchased sixteen of them and was washing them down with le Coke! He went on to wring his hands at how Americans didn't care what they drank with what they ate. It was beyond him. I flashed back to a memory of my time in Cannes when some co-workers had ordered Coke with chocolate mousse making our waiter and the waiters on neighboring tables frown. I also quizzed him on his delicious looking madeleines. They were smaller in size than the mass-marketed Entenmann's. Some were the familiar golden yellow and the others were greenish. He said the greenish ones were pistachio flavored. He stated that madeleines only tasted good in these two flavors, that chocolate ones were horrible. Of course one can't talk about madeleines without discussing Marcel Proust, especially with a Frenchman.

I ordered my chocolate macaroon and a cappuccino as he suggested but when I pulled out my credit card he said he only took cash. This led to another conversation on how banks were crooks and why he only accepted cash.

I enjoyed our conversation. I returned to him this morning for a buttered croissant and a cappuccino and talked some more about the "delicieuse" soups he was planning to serve for lunch.

The other anecdote was about a woman who had a gemstone jewelry stall at the Bryant park holiday shops. She had some amazing pieces, a lot of them fashioned with different varieties of Jasper, Opals and Kyanite. I am fascinated with gemstones so I was full of questions. However, Helen (at Helen's Corner) was reticent. She wasn't offering up any information. At first she was only answering me when I asked a question. This time my questions were the catalyst for the "Dings". But then she warmed up and started telling me about everything at her store....the Red Creek Jaspers, the Black Lace Agates, the African Opals and the Kyanite. I asked her about her creative process and her sources. I came away with so much information and so much fascination at how some people were making such a go of their Plan B's.

So I love conversations. I love to see people warming up to converse. I was telling another friend today that the thing I yearned for the most, the thing that would make me the happiest, was having someone with whom I could have long, meaningful conversations. I told this friend that I remembered his conversation with the owner of an antiquarian bookshop here in NYC, when he was visiting. He spent an entire afternoon at this shop talking to the owner about Indian geopolitics, listening to him about his 1979 visit to India, learning that the son of the owner of this shop was a famous sportscaster in the NY tri-state area. Even a second-hand retelling of the conversation was interesting to me.

Conversations where there is give and take, where one listens and learns and where I one is heard in turn, where one can willingly share a bit of oneself, no currency, no riches are more valuable than that. For me such conversations have been especially rare this year.

Which brings me to the three points I wanted to make here. One that I probably seek out conversations with "garrulous salespeople" because I am starved for conversation. Sounds pathetic perhaps but not necessarily - it's probably a sign of resourcefulness in making up for dearth, I'd say! And they do their best to listen...it's a part of the warming up "ding".

The second point is that R wasn't off base at all in her first comment. She was in fact right on target. Silence is overrated. Conversation isn't rated high enough.

The third goes back to "mindblindness" - the raison d'etre of consciousness is to be able to read people's minds - to see where someone is really going with a thought. This is what makes something like a status message interesting, seeing where people think you are going with any given thought. :)

Perspectives

2010-11-18T15:53:00.000-05:00

My social interactions and associations are often with like-minded people. My friends and acquaintances tend to espouse liberal views and shun conservatism, libertarianism, tea party-isms and other conservative fringe elements. That's just the way it is. If my television remote ever stumbles upon a station where Glenn Beck is holding forth or where Sarah Palin and her clan are "refudiating" this or that and talking about a future White House residency then I would probably have to cleanse and purify my erring remote, rinse it clean, make it a "born-again" remote.

Many of my co-workers and friends live in New Jersey and commute to New York City. We wouldn't be exaggerating if we were to characterize our commutes as horrendous or as a major drag on the quality of our lives. The distance between my home and my place of work is approximately 54 miles but it has taken up to 3 hours on certain days, certain conditions to traverse this distance. The plan for a trans-Hudson Commuter Rail Tunnel was welcome news for those of us who share in this misery. There was a promise for shorter, more efficient commuting. Some studies even indicated higher property values. Those of us who rest our heads on pillows in New Jersey care about higher NJ property values and property taxes that are held down as a result of higher property values. But NJ Governor Christie shot down the idea for the moment. Nearly half of all the NJ voters supported his decision. It was a matter of not being able to afford the $9 billion price tag plus potential overruns on the costs for the construction of this tunnel. The latest news is that other financing options are being explored and that NJ voters want New York City to contribute to the costs.

I am pleased to learn that other financing options are being considered for this project, that it isn't necessarily dead in the water yet. But I doubt Governor Christie's willingness to explore and exhaust every option. Politicians like Governor Christie don't strike me as visionaries who would rather find better ways of doing things than slashing health care, education and policing budgets to make ends meet. They really don't come to office with long term goals or a plan of action. They just stand at a podium and tell people they are against taxation and often in states like New Jersey that's enough to get them elected to a gubernatorial office. Slashing requires no vision and no further action.

But that just shows my bias and my perspective. The disappointment and anger at the block on the trans-Hudson tunnel also reflects my bias, my perspective.

A few days ago I was in conversation with the parents of Anoushka's classmate. They have jobs in New Jersey, not too far from where they live. They appeared sympathetic to my commuting plight and this led to my mistaken feeling of comfort in sharing my chagrin at the Christie decision. My comments generated instant heat and anger and a valiant defense of the governor. In earlier conversations it had seemed as though they missed their former state of residence, a state where it is so easy to get around if one lives in the Bay area or in San Francisco. The BART is unmatched in convenience. New Jersey, by contrast, is all cars and clogged highways with poor signage no matter where in the state you are. So I had assumed they would be in favor of mass transit options. But, as I said, I was mistaken. A non-confrontational person like me had finally gone and broached a controversial subject with people who weren't like-minded.

They loved Christie's decision and supported it because a tunnel to NYC was meaningless for them. Why pay for something that was meaningless to them at the moment? Perhaps they had already decided that they would never seek employment in New York City. Perhaps there are no long term costs attached to the gas 302,500 New Jersey residents burn in commuting to New York City. Perhaps these NY commuters are not the ones who contribute to the New Jersey boast about of annual income of $70,000 being the second highest median income in the country. And I say this without sarcasm - perhaps these things are significantly less important than an increase in our New Jersey taxes and a more efficient means of getting to and from the city.

It is all a matter of perspective.

Two other things did come up during the discussion. One was whether New Jersey's economy was in the worst shape of all other states. I was sure it wasn't-was sure we were ahead of California, Michigan and Nevada. But they thought New Jersey was the worst. I had to research that assertion and it turns out NJ might be in the bottom five based on the budget deficit and unemployment numbers (around 9.4%) but it certainly isn't the worst. The states I thought were worse off really are - CA unemployment 12.4%.

The other was an implied assertion that the number of NJ residents working in NYC wasn't a significant number. From my skewed perspective this number was more than significant. Why else would I face a 3 hour commute every morning and night with Lincoln Tunnel being the narrowest bottleneck? So I had to dig into the numbers.

I collected some information from these sites:

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/34000.html
http://www.us-places.com/New-Jersey/population-by-County.htm
http://www.newgeography.com/content/001721-new-york-commuting-profile-from-monocentrism-edgeless-city

Did some rather liberal extrapolation, such as assuming that only 56.6% of the 6.4 million people, who lived in the counties from which commutes to NYC originated, worked. Since 43.4% of them were either under 18 or over 65. Further assumed that the 9.4% state unemployment percent applied to all these counties evenly (probably faulty) and then determined that about 302,500 people commute daily to NYC from NJ.

Hmm...so in a state as densely populated as New Jersey, 8.7 million people living in 7,417 square miles, is this number significant? Is it enough to justify an expensive tunnel? What do three hundred thousand of us contribute to our state's budget even if we labor across the Hudson? Do we deserve a tunnel to bring a modicum of comfort to our lives?

Don't really have any of the answers. Just know that I want my tunnel and don't mind eating a little humble pie when it comes to respecting another perspective.

Mental Spelunking

2010-11-11T15:07:00.000-05:00

A few months ago I reported starting a vision board. In concept, a wonderful idea. Of this I am convinced. When you take the pains to state your intentions, if you spend time thinking about it, cutting out pictures, finding the right words, cutting and pasting things on construction paper; ritualizing the thing in any way, it's all a means to imprint what you want on your neural networks. I've never doubted visualization even through all the layers of cynicism and hopelessness that have accumulated over the years.

When I was younger I wanted things with greater desperation, with intense hunger. I wanted to ace my driving test after finishing 4 weeks of driving lessons (didn't visualize parallel parking well enough - so it took 2 attempts), I wanted to come to the US, I wanted an admission to the Delhi School of Economics and later to the Stern School of Business at NYU for my MBA. I wanted a job that would support my education. Hunger was a driving force behind everything I wanted or needed. I couldn't imagine a life where I would fail to get any of the aforementioned things. So visualization was easy. The goal was shimmering in the horizon, crystal clear and intense. I imagined myself hitting every note that I needed to and then went on to hit them. Sometimes with such ease that I felt I was getting more than my fair share of blessings. I was always afraid that the troughs that were sure to follow would be as intense as the crests ridden.

My vision board from a few months ago is still incomplete. It's languishing in one corner of the dining room, the red construction paper fading to pink. There's even a coffee stain on it somewhere. Someone in the home, perhaps me(?) who didn't think much of this piece of work probably rested a cup of coffee on it. A vision board is an exercise in futility when the vision has either ceased to exist or has exiled itself deep in a dark cave somewhere. Perhaps finding it requires some mental spelunking of the highest order.

I really don't know what I want next, this feeling of being lost in a perpetual fog is so real. And if fogs really scared me perhaps I'd flail harder and make a more meaningful effort at getting out of it. But the thing about fogs is that once you're in them they aren't quite as threatening as they appeared from the outside. They could even turn fascinating. In a fog things in one's immediate vicinity look clear enough. I can see my fingers and my toes. I can see well enough to step around the rocks and pebbles in my path, I know I won't step into puddles or ditches. But as far as the panoramic vision goes, I am blindfolded. I haven't a clue.

I don't know if I want to accept the futility of any resistance and roll with this viscous flow, that threatens to pull me under sometimes, or if I want to emerge, fight, dig deep, determine what would be the right next move, one that wouldn't leave me wishing for a return of what I had before. One where I won't discover brown, desiccated grass again.

This stuff I am writing today is all about me. I am whining, trying to come to terms with the parameters of my existence. But as I do it I know that I enjoy writing. I like it because it probably releases some endorphins within. It makes me feel good for some fleeting moments. But do I like it enough to make a living out of it? I have no ambitions of being published. Or, if I do harbor such thoughts, they are tainted with consternation. I could invent a story that may or may not sell but I don't have what it takes to push my finished work, to submit manuscripts to people, to deal with rejection. I balk at the idea of any self-promotion. Then I tell myself I won't be able to support myself or my family during the phase where I can't sell my work or when I am busy facing rejection. Nothing ventured, nothing gained they say but can things be ventured with a real danger of tampering with the well being of my family?

So what of acceptance? Contentment with what I have? Those ideas don't lack merit. Perhaps there's nothing wrong with total surrender. The choices I made have led me here, to this point where I can't find any pleasurable moments during the day. If I accepted this as my fate, if I told myself how much I like having a house, a car, a family that loves me, my freedom to explore a frequent, binge like indulgence in gemstones, or clothes, or books, or...egg cups on eBay... would it really be so bad?

I smile at strangers, I make small talk in elevators, I kid around with friends and family. I pretend for fourteen hours, because pretense has a way of morphing into reality. I am waiting for this morphing to reach completion. Then I go home and have a couple of hours of untainted and genuine fun and frolic with a daughter who is growing up too fast.

This should be enough. It feels right for this to be enough. It might be too late to build something out of this yearning to live a life that's drenched in the succulence of art, music and literature. A beautiful life where money is meaningless and the commute takes one from one's bedroom to one's sun drenched kitchen for breakfast with the family. It might be too late for that and the yearning only causes dissonance.

There is a world of meaning in this message from a friend who embraced Buddhism - Nam Myoho Renge Kyo - which essentially refers to the flow of life and to take a cue from the lotus flower that flourishes even in a swamp. I cannot find any fault with this message even if I abhor any membership in any organized religion. But this message is indeed flawless.

Perhaps the next words I need to cut out of a magazine and place on my incomplete vision board are - Accept. Surrender. Think of the Lotus (not lotus eating).

That should go up on the vision board along with a detailed picture of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that I want in my living room. I am desperate enough to visualize and achieve the construction of these bookshelves, along with a library like ladder that helps one reach for the books on the highest shelf.

What is she saying?

2010-11-10T15:26:00.000-05:00

There's a new addition to the cast of characters who permanently inhabit the corridor between the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the Times Square train stop. She paces the area, making her speech in a sonorous mezzo/alto voice. I have been walking past her for the last week. I am in a rush like all the other commuters who are paying no mind to anything these people say. I act as if these tunnel inhabitants are invisible to me. The other commuters appear to be acting as if they are invisible to them as well.

Except...I am not certain whether they are acting or they really don't notice the speech makers, the subway evangelists, the Indian accented, bespectacled evangelist, the really short and highly skilled accordion player, the Chinese man playing his bamboo flutes in a pentatonic scale, the little boy on the keyboard, the superb violinist who I now know is Susan Keser - Violinist for Hire, the family of five, undaunted in their acapella rendition of something or the other, the old Chinese woman seated outside the newsstand - asking for nothing but pleading all the same. I blend in with my fellow commuters...except...I know I am acting while being hyper aware of these subway tunnel citizens who appear to have dropped out of the raw deal that the rest of us have made in our lives.

The pre-caffeine faces are all blank in the morning, sans animation, all programmed to reach their bathed-in-fluorescence destinations with no emotional stops in between.

This new woman wears a plaid jacket and boots. She has a warm woolen scarf tied around her neck and she never smiles or stops to take a breath, as though doing so would derail her train of thought, wreak havoc on her momentum. The Doppler Effect of her voice remains with me for a very long time. Even after I've reached the end of the straight tunnel I feel as though I am still hearing a phantom echo of her voice even though her actual voice is out of hearing range.

However, I am yet to understand what she says. I know a language or two well and I have a sense of how some of the ones I don't know sound. I can assign a broad, general region to most of the sounds I hear. She doesn't sound like she is from anywhere. She punctuates her delivery, she uses recognizable inflections but she doesn't make any sense at all, the words are unearthly.

I am left wondering why. I wonder what place she calls home. She isn't unkempt or noisome. I wonder why she chose this venue or where she was before. What's her last thought as she turns in at night? Does she set the alarm clock for a certain time each morning, not wanting to be late for this unpaid gig at the tunnel? What drives her to do this everyday? Is she as familiar with the 9:15 am faces that treat her as invisible every morning as some of the ones who only pretend she's invisible are with her face and her voice?

Rainy 14th Day of Diwali

2010-11-04T16:44:00.004-04:00

It's raining. I hate carrying huge umbrellas and tiny umbrellas do nothing for Manhattan rains. I guess I'll leave the umbrella behind, pull up the hood of the cozy jacket that makes everyone wonder if I went to Princeton, and duck into the nearest subway station. The hood doesn't quite stretch all the way to the front so we'll have to deal with some residual frizziness of the hair.

Tonight we'll go home and light the diya that is supposed to keep dark spirits at bay. If it wasn't too rainy I'd have ventured out to Edison in search of some succulent gulab jamuns and sparklers but the weather is too disgusting. I just want to catch up on some sleep since I was up till 2:00 am, working.

Diwali is going to be a remote access work day, since it isn't a festive holiday in these parts - still not anywhere near Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwaanza in the diversity and inclusion scales. So we have to celebrate it in our quiet little neck of the woods, without any friends or family. The right shoulder goes into phantom spasms at the thought of lugging the damn thing again. The straps of the tote back will be cutting into flesh and bone, probably inflicting a lifetime of damage. I am still sore from carrying it home last night and back today this morning. Why is the damn thing so heavy?

But hey, as long as I can skip three hours of wretched commuting in the rain tomorrow morning I can shoot for good spirits. Diwali in the day long company of the Nukster should cheer me up quite a bit.

It isn't possible to end this mundane account of the day without saying a few words about our resident Dolores Umbridge at work. The facilities manager who believes she wears a blinding aura of supremacy around here. When the office temperature is unbearably frigid and people turn on space heaters she comes storming down to ask, "Do you know what it's like to be burnt alive?"

When she spots an isolated offender dribbling some office milk in their cereal she takes away the half & half privileges from the entire office. I am waiting for the day when she will decide to take away the coffee! Against our Umbridge there are no higher courts of appeal.

She has been around with a measuring tape, measuring the length of every office cubicle. Now she's budgeting space. She wants to condense each cubicle by about two feet so that another closet sized cubicle could be created for some unfortunate newbie.

I had steered clear of her atrocities and unpleasantness thus far. Today she took away my printer. And this now is war.

Going to take this in my stride for now, count to10 etc, go home, unwind and hope for a pleasant Diwali.

Happy Diwali to all who care to wander on over here.

Silent Contemplation of the Seedless Grape

2010-11-03T17:15:00.000-04:00

The skin was stretched tight, the color bearing the translucence of peridot, shimmering on the sun dappled breakfast table. Was there anything more perfect than a seedless grape? Who needs a pit taking up space within?

Pit - an angry sounding word. Did the word sound angry because of all its other connotations: a concealed hole in the ground, a trap, a sunken area, scars, depression? Because a seed - the very bearer of the genetic material that would result in future grapes - couldn't by itself create this feeling of anger toward seeded grapes; this feeling of something lying there, waiting, of something building up and congealing inside. Something ready to unleash a new wave, a new generation of confusion, of anger and of all forms of ferment upon one's insular and smooth world.

She broke one off and rolled it around her tongue, feeling the velvety texture with her tongue, reluctant to break the skin, even if it promised a flood of unbearable sweetness coursing over her teeth and gum and finally down her throat. The seeded ones sat there too, untouched, unwanted.

Her shopping list had said "seedless grapes" but he picked up whatever the heck he wanted - not paying any attention to her needs, her desires or to any of the words that left her lips these days. She had bit into one with extreme annoyance and then, without uttering another word, had grabbed her car keys and walked out the door to buy the green, large seedless grapes she wanted.

She cleared the table, shaking off her grape-filled reverie. There were other things to do, other evils to taste or spit out. With the most important meal of the day out of her way she could now some other fruits - blackberries, for instance.

She would soon be confronted by the fluid facial muscles of the guy she was forced to call boss. His eyebrows, eyelids, saggy cheeks, pupils, would all swim up for a second or two and then swim swiftly back to the contemplation of his Blackberry. He would expect her to prattle on about the things on her “plate” while he dove headfirst into his “fruit” of choice. The urge to swat the thing out of his hand would be barely contained as she sat there, unheard, for the second time within a few short hours, on the same day.   She blessed him instead, “Be one with your Fruit, go forth and merge”.

The day had been half spent in the silent contemplation of grapes and blackberries. There were other concerns, other forms of all consuming mindlessness to worry about but the pit within was growing and demanding all her attention. She could feel it taking over, taking control inside. There were several layers to it. There was a hint of personal inadequacy, a tinge of guilt, a brushstroke or two of helplessness blended rather seamlessly with anger and impatience, the whole lot had then been die cast in the leaden weight of passing time.

Time with it’s illusory, rubbery feel.   She remembered when it stretched into eternity. When the days seemed long and when a year seemed endless. The world was full of possibilities because time appeared generous, giving and forgiving. Depictions of the Roman Empire at it’s peak came to mind with fat emperors lounging around on plush thrones, biting off the succulent grapes proffered by the slave girls sashaying all around them.

Just a few short decades ago time felt just as benevolent as the languorous stupor of a Roman king’s palace in the heyday of the empire. Then came the realization that suddenly a year didn’t feel as long, that years were just folding in on themselves, piling up into a pile of debris in a corner of her consciousness, summed up in two words: the past.   At this stage even this realization wasn’t worth the effort. One might as well date one’s letters, one’s bills, one’s work with the next year’s date because it was right here - just a blink away. This dark, multifaceted pit showed every sign of expanding and taking over, bursting through the skin. What ate Gilbert Grape was perhaps the grape itself, all the way from the inside.

She thought of her friends. All like-minded souls with their own varieties of grapes to contemplate. Each one desiring the seedless kind and in sharing adding to the growing pits within each other.

But in some ways her pits bore more of a resemblance to pitfalls...

Santa Lucia - A Neapolitan Boat Song

2010-10-27T15:36:00.000-04:00

So I am learning how to play second violin on Santa Lucia - A Neapolitan Boat Song. I am at the point where I am playing each note well and where practicing with an annoying metronome is finally yielding some rhythmically sound results. The next task at hand is to make it sound not just technically sound but beautiful. To add a lilt to it, to sway with it. The teacher's suggestion was that I should put myself in a boat in Naples, this song playing in the background. How would I feel? How would it make me sway? She asked me to channel those imagined feelings for the right effect.

I see what she is saying. I know how doing so would help. I remember reading Arnold Steinhardt's book - Violin Dreams - where he makes the point that a well played Ciaccona should make one dance. Imagining a room full of people dancing the Ciaconna should help the violinist lend just the right degree of lyricism to his playing.

Playing Bach's Partita for solo violin is too distant a dream for me and might even be several lifetimes away. Though the point of feeling swept along in a Neapolitan boat is well taken. What's needed for this mental fugue however is a mind where the gritty and all too real images of being swept down Route 80 in fits and starts, flowing in a very different way than a boat in Naples, with the windshield wipers beating a quarter note at 110, don't rudely intrude.

[I could have played with so much grace and so much fluidity if I was of a place where a musical gondolier ferried me hither and thither, if I wasn't in a state called New Jersey, working my way east to a city called New York every morning.]

Even as I typed the parenthetical thought above I cringed at the notes of discontent with the grace notes of whining misery. I do not approve of these sad and sorry notes creeping into my life. I want to drive them away with as much determination as I want to eliminate the squeaks, the creaks the harshness and choppiness that creeps into my violin playing when I've had a rough day, when I've felt stressed and harried, when the hand holding the bow trembles and shakes and presses down too hard on the string.

Even if Naples or Venice or Hawaii and it's swaying Hula hasn't been in one's past and isn't in one's future, one shouldn't feel handicapped when it comes to letting the mind roam free, imagining the pleasures, the beauty that could take one's breath away. True misery comes from the jaded inability to conjure up even a mental image of a place where one can sway and float with eyes closed, carefree.

Stop playing in loops!

2010-10-26T15:55:00.000-04:00

1. Ignoring or addressing the "Left Front Turn Signal Malfunction" notification that my car insists on announcing with an earth shattering "DINGGGG" every time I want to signal a turn or a lane change to my left. I did park in front of a reflective surface at night just to see if the left front turn signal flashed when I wanted it to. It did. So is this "DINGGGG" a feature built-in by the manufacturers to make the repair shops at dealerships richer?

The car has also told me that my tires were flat or the dynamic traction control was off or that the steering fluid was depleted when it really wasn't. I need to stop thinking about the car that cries wolf.

2. Thinking of traffic when I am stuck in traffic. It just puts me in a horrible mood. I should learn to just "roll" with it, or not, whatever the capricious traffic gods and goddesses want. What is it that drives me crazy about this? Is it that this phase of life refuses to pass? I am not the only one in the world who needs to travel 2-3 hours before arriving at the work desk. I am not the only one who is creating this massive carbon footprint by burning millions of hours of gas, idling in traffic. If my problem isn't unique then the solution can't be too unique either. It is lurking out there, staring me in the face somewhere. I just can't see it. Maybe if I wasn't thinking about traffic when stuck in traffic - I'd see it?

3. A certain someone. I wish her well, always and will say HAMH any number of times, but I really don't want to think about her anatomy and physiology. I don't want to worry about calling her, I don't want to worry about what she'll say when she calls me. I don't want to feel the muscles in my jaw, my neck, my shoulders tensing up when she's talking to me, when all I can say is "Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" while thinking I am not a doctor, I am not a psychiatrist, I am not a physiotherapist, I am not a chiropractor, I am not a gastroenterologist, I am not an osteopath, I am not a neurosurgeon - I really can't help...really I am quite helpless...I wish I could help but I can't. I am sorry for your back, your legs, your thighs, your bones, your spine, your calves, your glutes, your skin, your scalp, your lipid levels but any possible cures are beyond the scope of both the halves of my brain.

4. Obsessing about the time not spent with my daughter. I can either take a chance in life and take whatever steps are necessary to find a way to spend more hours with her until her college going years or I can tell myself to believe she is strong, resilient, a millennial kid, a compassionate kid who will not remember me as an indifferent parent, who will think of her childhood with fondness. But the thing I need to stop doing is obsessing about this. There should be no room for niggling, circular thoughts that keep one awake all night in life. There should only be decisive action. Inaction kills like nothing else. Pointless pontification is meaningless.

5. Loans. They will get paid off when they get paid off. Thinking about them isn't getting them paid off any sooner.

6. Wondering what this life will amount too. Another senseless line of thought when the only things that are real are birth and death. There are only dust bunnies, lint and a handful of dirt between those two bookends. So no matter how many sleepless nights we go through it is all headed for glorious dust-dom. So why the agony, is there a purpose to this constant agonizing other than leaving one feeling off-kilter all the time? To what extent is this life about choices and consequences, about checks and balances? The so called "right" choices don't always have the "right" consequences and accidentals are probably more important in the shaping of any life than a set linear course.

7. Thinking about whether I should be thinking about this temporary separation at all. Wondering if the stoicism I feel about this is normal or if I should be falling apart and by so doing hastening a reversion. After all I haven't been given a load I can't bear. Every circumstance gets taken in one's stride as always. Even if these all encompassing strides still involve significant mental churn and constant ferment. What would constant togetherness achieve? Why are the phone conversations so mundane, so dissatisfying, so much about bills and money? Where is the richness of experience? Why is it not possible to not think about this and just live?

8. Worries that I'll never master music or the arts or literature. How ridiculous that sounds to the rational part of the brain. There are no masters! The knowledge here is infinite. Eighty or so sentient years are not enough to plumb the depths or scale the heights of art, music or literature. So why do I always feel like I am in competition with myself and the whole world? Why is it so impossible to just sit, listen, absorb and then do it some more?

Unstoppable Impulses

2010-10-19T00:14:00.000-04:00

What goes through your mind when you see a misted up glass window in a car or in a bus? How about a misted up glass door in a shower? Well I know what goes through my mind - there's an unstoppable urge to place the edge of a fist, the side where the little finger is, on the glass, so that it looks like an infant's foot sans toes, and then to add little dots around this "foot" so it looks like a baby placed a tiny foot there.

Of course I always make two such feet. Most people I know just make one and it's too weird to imagine a baby hopping on one foot and too depressing to imagine just one leg.

The days are getting shorter, darker and colder here in the western hemisphere and misty surfaces are abundant wherever hot and bothered, stressed breaths emerge from frowning faces of stressed commuters and workers and collide with cold surfaces.

It was one such night tonight as our bus crept along Route 80, barely moving for several minutes. Some people had given up on getting anywhere anytime soon and were snoring their blues away. Others were getting a head start on tomorrow’s assignments as they plugged little numbers into little spreadsheet cells. I was staring at my own reflection in the bus window, wondering when the glumness set in, if there was a clear demarcation, a point after which it all started going south. When did the eyes take on this dull, glazed sheen, when did the lips acquire a seemingly permanent downward turn, when was the last time I was happy or moved or touched. It is not as if such moments have ceased to exist, it’s just that they are hard to recollect when the blues set in and one’s reflection defines an unpleasant reality.

The glumness was threatening an accelerated downward spiral when I caught sight of the man sitting across from me. I see him everyday and I’ve never seen him smile. He is always serious, always working on the bus until it’s time for him to get off. One gets the impression that he has a super important job in some Fortune 500 company. However when my eyes drifted in his direction tonight he wasn’t gazing down at his computer. He was staring at the misted up bus window. And then he raised his hand and I noticed the fist. The next few moments went by in slow motion as I wondered, “No! Is HE really going to do what I think he’s going to do? It can’t be!” And then he did it. His fist went up against the glass and created a little baby foot. Then his index finger came out and dotted five little toes around the foot! I was stunned. I couldn’t believe this man had felt the unstoppable impulse to create the impression of a baby’s foot in the misted up glass of the bus window. How uncharacteristic of him...or was it really? I smiled. The blues from just a few seconds ago all but forgotten.

I absently reached inside my purse, took out a large orange flavored Tootsie Roll lollipop, and popped it in my mouth. My lips couldn’t possibly stay turned down as I was sucking on a lollipop. The serious man caught my eye and smiled. He knew I had seen him do the baby’s foot before. I wondered if he was wondering if someone who looked as glum and blue as me while on the bus would be an orange Tootsie Roll type.

Wonder if our unstoppable impulses really say more about us than anything else.

Places - 4

2010-09-24T13:44:00.000-04:00

This is from a time seventeen years ago when I was rather green, or certainly a darker shade of green than I am now. My opinions were unformed; like formless clay. Perhaps they are now taking some sort of a discernible shape at the metaphysical potter's wheel but back then they were like clay being softened for some future ceramic project (a project that is way past any scheduled completion).

I had started a new job then, one that promised an annual week long visit to some place that wasn't in United States and was often in Europe. The location of choice the year I started this job was Marrakesh.

I remember being beyond a normal state of excitement. Oh I was not going around saying how much I had always wanted to go to Morocco or how awesome it was, how exotic...none of that. It was just a destination that filled me with curiosity and a sense of awe that names like Casablanca and Marrakesh have the power to inspire. But I was rather surprised at how underwhelmed my coworkers were at the prospect of this trip. There were constant moans and groans and whining along the lines of, "Why couldn't it have been Venice, Monaco, Rome or Cannes?"

I used to ask them, "Marrakesh is exciting! Why are you guys so bummed about it?"

I don't know if I ever got an answer that made sense to me at that time. The answers indicated the following notions and/or perceptions:

a) Poverty
b) Squalor
c) Poor facilities and amenities
d) Bad food
e) Bad water
f) Poor transportation
g) Getting sick
h) Getting robbed

None of these concerns diminished my enthusiasm about the trip. I hailed from a country where these things were commonplace. After all it couldn't possibly be as bad as sidestepping all kinds of feces on the roadside en route a bus stop or seeing people urinating against a wall or spitting and expectorating in stairwells and alleys and walls etc. Gold chains were often snatched in buses and trains, women were scared of traveling alone or traveling in crowded Delhi Transportation Corporation buses for fear of being molested. So how bad could Marrakesh really be?

But the moans and groans continued until we left on Royal Air Maroc. The airline made them even whinier, they seemed to forget that all airlines experience turbulence and that this wasn't a RAM specialty.

It was as if my co-workers and co-travelers were closed to any possibilities. They didn't even want to give this destination a chance. I decided to ignore their negativity and see things for myself.

I had a wonderful trip. How could one not in a place as culturally rich as Morocco? Our hotel was palatial, the services, the rooms were all extraordinary. The locales chosen for the evening events, the dinner functions were all amazing in their splendor. Everything was rich, exotic and wearing a sheen of textured brilliance. I was very pleased to be there.

When people from other countries indicate that they are big fans of Hindi film actors and Hindi film music I am always pleased, it always makes me smile and in Morocco this happened with some frequency. They all wanted to know if I knew and could sing the song, "I am a disco dancer", for them. There were also the carpet salesmen who were eager to show me a flying carpet. They had me sit on one then they lifted up the edges and swung me around on it. It was all so much fun.

But that's a digression from what I had really been thinking of writing about.

Feelings of shock, shame and general disgust have passed through me in waves over the last few days as I've seen India stumbling and fumbling with the preparations for the Commonwealth Games. There are.graphic pictures of squalor at the accommodations for the athletes, there are reports of rampant corruption and substandard construction, it appears as though every ugliness hidden under the "India shining" rhetoric of the past is suddenly out there for the world to see.

These reports don't seem inaccurate and they are building perceptions, adding to stereotypes, further fastening the third world tag that India has been eager to shake off and burn in the recent years in a bid to be recognized as a powerful player on the global stage. Perceptions are quite a force.

Ages ago when the dream of coming back to the US was just a glimmer in my eye, Indian news magazines were reporting the "dot-busters" incidents in New Jersey. It was frightening to read about this and it led to us jumping to the conclusion that America had turned into a place where Indians were routinely shot and killed. That's how powerful perceptions are. The perceived intensity of a real event is always amplified and magnified.

At Marrakesh, my American colleagues got into various debates with the European visitors when we got together at the end of the day for cocktails or dinner. The Americans continued to whine and express their dismay at the signs of poverty all around. When we visited the souks they failed to take any pleasure from the local color, the hustle and bustle, the various arts, crafts, textiles, tapestry, rugs, pottery etc. on display. They were always too busy wrinkling up their noses and complaining about the smell, the dirt, the squalor. They said it depressed them to see how people lived here, so on top of each other in such congestion. They thought it was all very sad and the conference should not have been organized at this venue.

The European viewpoint, which was always offered to contradict the American one, was about how irrelevant the poverty and the squalor were and how shallow it was for Americans to not see how happy people were, how at ease with their situation, how accepting of life as it was for them. The Americans were bashed for their desire to change everything, to drive things to a place where the rest of the world was better off not going. The Europeans relished Moroccan cuisine, the Americans kept asking the waiters to make spaghetti with meat sauce for them if it didn't exist on the menu. I just kept glancing from one group to another thinking about the deeper undercurrents that flashed through the behavior of both sides.

I wasn't able to form an opinion about whether things in the world needed to be spic and span and up to snuff by American standards. I couldn't find fault with the American spirit of driving change, of changing your circumstances, these are the things this world is built on - a desire to make things better. But isn't "better" relative? The Europeans' attitude was extreme as well. It seemed strangely snobbish, as if the scenes they were witnessing were in a museum or a zoo, as if they were walking around saying, "how utterly quaint!"

In my mind there is some tenuous association between the reluctance that athletes from countries like Scotland, New Zealand and Canada are showing in wanting to attend the Commonwealth Games in Delhi and how my colleagues felt about going to Marrakesh.

Yes things may be bad in India, bad enough to make the Indian diaspora cringe because the reality of how things are is clashing once again with the pride Indians can so easily be roused to feel because they threw the British out, because things get outsourced to India, because it is the largest democracy in the world, because publications like The Economist sometimes call India an Asian super power. A pride that is so easily bruised when a satirical article in Time magazine jokingly refers to the city where Thomas Edison was born taking on a third world tinge because of an overwhelming presence of Indians. Why take offense to the truth? I have seen enough betel juice stains on Edison streets to be more saddened and despairing than offended by that article. There has been immense pride and what we are now witnessing is the fall that was inevitable.

The real India still has a large percentage of people living below the poverty line, the real India needs a Right to Food campaign because obviously many people are denied this basic right. The problems go much deeper than anyone can fathom. The media gloss about a rosy, shining India should be taken with as much of a pinch of salt as is the current media condemnation. A flat perception is not how one can see and understand a country like India.

As for the whiny athletes from first world nations, why not go with an open mind, play the best game you can, win all the medals you can and return to your plush lives? You might even emerge as enlightened citizens of the world contemplating future courses of action toward shaping a better world.

I have to write so I don't do other useless things

2010-09-21T16:04:00.000-04:00

I can either rest the laptop on my lap and find a million distractions on the computer as I try to unwind from worthless yet tiring days, or I can just open up this box on blogger and start typing whatever comes to mind. Typing up stuff like this doesn't cost money, or at least doesn't involve a direct an immediate outlay (the costs are hidden in my carbon footprint and in my energy bill) and is ultimately more fulfilling than anything else I end up doing when I am tired of thinking about all the things that are ostensibly important things to think about.

The thing that I am most tired of thinking about is not being able to write. So here I am, writing. I know I am just rambling and not saying anything that could interest anyone or anything that could take me to that haloed place where writers dwell. Let's just say I am being selfish.

The last 164 words have soaked up the last ten minutes with such seamless ease, ten minutes that would have been spent on Facebook scrolling through my news feed and gaining nothing from the experience. These precious minutes could also have been spent on the website of New York Times or The Guardian. Ordinarily this is time well spent but then one notices the "share" links at the bottom of all the articles one reads and one wants to share them with one's virtual friends.

Such sharing, be it links to news or one's own thoughts, always leads to expectations of reaction. The reaction, when it comes is like a drug. It feels good to be heard, to find people who share one's views but then one craves more of the same. The "reaction drug" is as viciously potent as any other easily abused drug.

The voicing of an opinion, the public declaration of our likes and dislikes, the sharing of music or of any article, from any news source one frequents, also has tinges of competition; more self-branding, more shouting about one's uniqueness. It's nothing more than ensuring some form of minor immortality. It amounts to virtual screaming, often shrill in pitch. And since birds of a feather do always flock together all "friends" often end up sharing the same links, the same songs. They "like" the same things. So if I hadn't been spending the last twenty minutes talking about this virtual screaming for attention I probably would have been screaming for some attention and what would that get me except more self-loathing?

[This post will end up appearing on Facebook because I checked a box somewhere, some time ago, that makes everything I write here available to everyone on Facebook. So even as I talk about this virtual screaming I am still doing it and have no intentions of not doing it or undoing it. But hey, shame is another casualty of these times we live in.]

So, yes, this piece of writing is pointless. It's directionless, it's going nowhere and doing nothing for anyone. But these days I am a real nowhere woman, sitting in this nowhere land, making all my nowhere plans for nobody. But when I allow even one word to follow another word; when words go marching one by one - hurrah, hurrah - I feel better. The change in mood is almost instantaneous. The air clears a bit. I can think again, even breathe again. If before I was in a state of numbness about my condition, about standing at the corner of "This Dull Life Street" and "Exciting New Life Avenue", paralyzed, now I feel as though I am ready to take a step in the right direction. Writing anything, even nonsense such as this, has that immediate effect.

I feel like nattering on some more... about changing the settings at home, about placing a desk near a window, about surrounding myself with floor to ceiling bookshelves, about not taking for granted the importance of the right physical setting for doing the thing one is most passionate, most serious about. Resting my head on the headboard of the bed with the laptop crouching in the space between my knees and my belly while I do pointless things on the Internet is not going to help me with my need to write. Writing this gibberish has allowed me to see this with some clarity. The ghostly light of this realization should last at least until the next ramble en route to some meaningful writing.

This ramble is now coming to a close. It has succeeded in clearing away some of the funk. Some happy hormones appear to have been released and I feel somewhat prepared to think about or take on the next set of ostensibly important tasks.

Places - 3

2010-08-20T12:34:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week I was coming back through the lobby of my office building with the lunch I had just purchased in one hand, the other hand reaching in to find the electronic card that would let me in through the security turnstiles, when my boss, heading out to buy his own lunch appeared in my peripheral vision, his hand raised in a gesture demanding a high five. I returned the gesture, trying to make it look as natural as possible given my discomfort with all high five and fist bump types of actions. A few seconds ticked away during the process leaving nothing but a sense of absurdity in their wake.

A gesture of camaraderie such as the one noted above would have made so much more sense with anyone else. In this case I just proceeded to the elevator with an expression of derisive mirth as I thought about all the stresses from just a few months ago, nights of lost sleep, expressions of lament to anyone who would care to listen, getting nauseous at the "this too shall pass" panacea that listeners offered. All a distant memory now. Not because these moments passed but because they became irrelevant. How I felt a few months ago about the events that transpired was absurd, the events themselves were absurd and the way things stand now underscore absurdity encore because they don't appear to have followed from anything that preceded them. Context appears to be as fungible and perishable as bananas on a supermarket shelf.

Our memories define us and one would assume how we behave today has some relationship to how we felt the day before, or what we did the day before, or what was done to us the day before, but that is so rarely the case. We look for themes, we yearn to impose an ex-post narrative upon the scatter diagram within the Cartesian coordinates of our lives. But if there is a pattern it is stretched on a canvas so grand in scale that we can't possibly discern it during our short lifetimes.

Take the cauliflower leaf for instance, the outline of which was being traced by my dad on graph paper, on a day when I had accompanied him to his office. This was when he was working at Sabour Agricultural College in a place called Sabour, the back of the beyond of backward Bihar; not even remotely comparable to the whiteness of Canada or the bluish green Pacific charm of Hawaii. I can't recall if Sabour was a village or a town or just something in between. We lived there for a couple of years. I was six years old and my brother was three. I was somewhat fond of the place. I never forgot the seven or eight mango trees around the house, the other families with kids my age all living in close proximity, the parks, the gardens. It was a carefree time for a six year old.

What could be better than eating mangoes by the bucket and romping around wild? But in retrospect I sense it was a dark phase for my parents who had returned to India after six years of being in the United States. Sketching the outlines of a cauliflower leaf on graph paper isn't something that a research scientist, used to working with state of the art electron microscope technology of those times, did. It was random, it was absurd and I can't understand how it helped along the general narrative of our lives. Ranipur and Kumaitha to Honolulu and Ottawa and then a place like Sabour makes it all look so random and so lacking in any grand design, just like the high fiving moment with my boss during a senseless filler moment of the day. But these interstitial phases of our lives, when we are waiting and wondering if something better will ever come along, often cause our biggest miseries.

We shared our living quarters with another family at Sabour. It was a type of duplex with a large shared courtyard. The lady on the other side was well settled in the life of Sabour and directed some taunts toward my mom who insisted that her two babies would never do any growing up in that godforsaken place. She insisted that we would be out of there soon and that my brother and I would not forget our English and adopt the slow-as-molasses Bihari Hindi drawl of that region. She was quite alarmed at the prospect of that happening!

In retrospect these were just two years of our lives but the two years must have felt like an eternity of miseries and worries to them at that time, a time when as a young couple with two young children, they were at the peak of their worries about what the future held and how they could either mold it and shape it or let it rest, contented or resigned to "fate".

Then out of the blue an opportunity materialized out of the ether, a new clearing in the woods, a new direction, setting us all on a path that could not have been logically deduced. For my parents this was the move to Delhi. The place where we were to be for the next ten to fifteen years.

So I sit here waiting for my clearing in the woods, for the path that's out there, obscured in fog or just unseen by me even if it sits in plain sight. I know this much is true: whatever that next step is it's not something that will follow, de rigeur, from whatever it is I am doing at this moment. I can't plan for it at least not in any conscious way. But I do wish I was blessed with some fog lamps!

Places - 2

2010-08-18T14:27:00.000-04:00

So many of us, especially the believers in a western, non-fatalist, deterministic line of thought are certain we can plan our lives. Much effort and much thought goes into having a vision and then directing and acting in a self-written play, taking center stage, lifting the curtains on the enactment of our own scripts. We want it rendered alive, drawn out of the recesses of our brains and made real. Willpower plays a key role and certain cinematic cliches like "if you build it they will come" or people saying "dream big".

I am attracted to this line of thought as well. I make lists, I set goals, I resolve to do certain things, not do certain things. I gain immense satisfaction from checking things off my lists. My notebooks and journals are full of plans and lists. I have spreadsheets that track our expenses, I have repayment schedules chalked out for my debts, I have fitness goals, writing goals, I want to train hard enough to become a seasoned musician, I want to live in a home that isn't mortgaged and drive a car that's paid off, I want to share breakfast with my family every morning; I, like everyone else, believe that these things could make me happy because if I live here, in this country, at this point in time then I have to believe in the pursuit of happiness. All my steps and all my missteps are taken in an elusive pursuit of happiness while the definitions of happiness keep morphing as I become a different person from one day to the next.

But this is what it always remains, despite the stacks of notebooks chock full of plans and lists and grand visions, we never move from pursuit to destination. There's nothing wrong with an eternal pursuit, this is what life is all about, but as I grow older I realize that the most gratifying moments in my life have been the unplanned ones, the serendipitous ones. Something unexpected happens, as it did for my Dad when he took off for Hawaii, and everything changes. "Plans" almost always get relegated to the dark attic-like space in the surrounding ether that stores all the roads that weren't taken because we took detours from the most obvious plans, from the ones that appeared to be the most logical segues at any instant.

The most logical segue for me in 1988 certainly wasn't a final move to the United States. I was in the middle of a master's degree in Economics. I was uninspired and listless and not at all at home with the mind-boggling squiggles of Econometrics. The prospect of another year of mastering something that was so challenging and so uninteresting was unpalatable in the extreme but I was resigned to it. I was sticking to the plan and willing to put myself through every stage of the torture, despite distractions, despite immense boredom. The plan was to finish that degree. But something unexpected happened again when my dad got a Fulbright scholarship that was to take him on a tour of universities within several states in the US.

I remember those days, I remember standing at the terrace of our New Delhi flat at Mandakini Enclave, gazing at the horizons, wondering what life had in store for me. Boredom was the most overwhelming state back then, with distraction close on its heels. I also had a very distressing asthma condition and my parents had been assured by a doctor at the Patel Chest Institute that my problem might go away with a change of venue; a change that would take me 7,000 miles away, perhaps.

So the biggest and most pleasant surprise of my life was when mom and dad asked me if I wanted to accompany dad to the US. As if they needed to ask! Of course, of course! I had never wanted anything more than I wanted that.

I was often asked what I would do in the US. Unlike others my age who came here having secured an admission to an Ivy League institution, or some others who got married early and followed a spouse here, I didn't have a plan. I used to say I would "earn and learn", that this is what Americans did. A vision of learning while earning was all I had, no other plans, no other details fleshed out. And even this broad vision was only trotted out for the curious, the nosy. All I wanted was to break free, to start afresh. I wanted to see my own footprints in the sand as my fingers slipped from my dad's guiding grasp, amidst a pool of tears - both his and mine - as I walked on with steps that were shaky and determined at the same time.

Places - 1

2010-08-17T13:58:00.001-04:00

I like listening to Ranipur and Kumaitha stories whenever I am sitting in a living room of the 17th floor of my parent's apartment building in Ottawa, watching the sun set at the Rideau River, the skies the color of mystic topaz. In my mind, I occupy some sort of a moving point within the imaginary lines of the scalene triangle marked out by these three points on the globe: Ranipur, Kumaitha and Ottawa. Or perhaps the boundaries of my existence don't map out a triangle at all; There would be too many points left out in a shape as restrictive as a triangle. What of Honolulu, Patna, Sabour, Delhi, Columbia, Washington DC, Baltimore, Hackettstown and New York? Perhaps it's more of an amorphous and amoebic shape that our footprints have traced.

People are always curious about my antecedents. They want to know where I am from. I still haven't figured out a short answer to this question. What could the short answer be? My parents still don't have any trouble saying they are from India and my daughter could just say New Jersey and be done with it.

I don't have the luxury of a short answer in a country where attention spans are short and most questions are rhetorical; demanding a non-answer or no answer at all, and the question is asked in the first place because the person doing the asking is stocking some shelves in his or her brain and wants to be able to find a special shelf for me. The answer I give could put me on a shelf for which I don't particularly care.

When I have the luxury of a leisurely answer I tell them I was born in Hawaii (at the US-Canada border the officers sometimes want to know how that came to be), grew up in New Delhi, did some more growing up in Maryland and DC and then ended up in New Jersey. An answer that could be a head-scratcher for those shelf-stockers. In the end I probably get stashed on a shelf reserved for miscellany or exotics. Of course there are always those who walk up to me and want to know, "habla Espanol?" and still others who ask if I am from Ethiopia or Somalia - maybe something about the longish nose, the eyes the curly hair, the dark complexion, who knows?

I can't name any one place as a starting point for me. Even though, as a child I used to view the slides and photographs from Hawaii as often as I could, I was entranced by the colors on the island, the blues, the greens, the exquisite colors of the saris my mom wore, saris that were still fresh from her trousseau. She never gave the impression of being in an alien environment there, she always looked gorgeous and at home, even with her two long plaits of thick hair; a hairstyle not seen in 1960s Hawaii. They were so young and in such a perfect place. I recall with vivid clarity a picture of my mom standing next to a hibiscus plant, the colors were so rich, so tempting, I used to feel I could sink deep into the picture if I stared long enough and hard enough.

As the show went on a little baby made an appearance in the frames projected on the walls and that baby born in the month of June, the month of the pearl, on an island that is often referred to as the pearl of the Pacific, was enveloped in all the love and care her two very young parents showered on her.

Every time I saw these slides I felt special. When school was dreadful, when friends were hard to come by, when teachers frightened me and any spectacular academic achievement seemed impossible in an intensely competitive world, I could lose myself in pictures of Hawaii and convince myself that my life would be exciting and different, because the starting point of my narrative was unusual...in my mind. The shimmering Pacific of my dreams always soothed and comforted me and kept me from lapsing into the dread of ordinariness.

So they reminisce now, towering high above the streets of Ottawa. They launch Google Earth on their computers once a day and trace the rural roads that lead right up to their ancestral homes in Ranipur and Kumaitha.

Dad peers at the aerial view of Ranipur, a small village near the city of Bettiah, in the middle of the erstwhile Bettiah Raj, where he took his very first steps. His dad, a freedom fighter, a Gandhian, born at the tail end of the 19th century, couldn't see beyond the vision of an India free of the British. That was the only thing on his mind. He was beaten by the British, jailed by them for passive resistance and satyagraha and each instance made his resolve stronger. But there were some moments of reflection when he gazed upon his son playing in the courtyard and dad remembers my Baba asking him,"What will you do when you grow up? Will you be a rickshaw puller?" Maybe he knew India would be free and independent soon enough but he couldn't envision a bright future for his son within independent India.

Mom traces the roads that led up to the village where she grew up, a village called Kumaitha. I always thought Kumaitha was a funny sounding name, but she mentioned it came about when Kumbhkarana, on his quest to vanquish Rama and company, sat there for some rest and relaxation, "Kumbh baitha" (Kumbh sat here) became Kumaitha. I recall the maternal side of the my family being constantly ribbed and ridiculed by my dad about their propensity for long siestas, a la Kumbhkarana.

My mom's grandfather and my own grandfather were contemporaries and friends. Both of them fighting the British in the Gandhian way, both passionate about the cause, they rode the crest of this passion all the way, until they breathed their last. Their dedication, their work, their sacrifices bore fruit.

I hear these stories and make attempts to juxtapose the trajectory of my own life against the stories of these ancestors and it makes me question the heft of "nature" in the "nature vs nurture" debate. Do I possess these genes of passion, of conviction? Or did nurture overwhelm nature completely, vanquishing it, making me a privileged and complacent person, lackadaisical about so many things and taking so much for granted?

I live in a world where I don't have to imagine my daughter pulling a rickshaw. But she is also a child of privilege, how many things would she take for granted?

Dad and mom talk about a large chunk of their pre-Independence childhood spent playing in the dirt. Dad was in the Gandhian system of basic schooling. He tells me about Basic School and how all they did was weave thread from cotton, dig the earth using a shovel, plant things. There wasn't much emphasis on anything academic. The focus appeared to be the development of efficient agrarian skills. He never wore anything but khadi growing up. My grandfather passed away when he was twelve and I hear stories about the rest of his childhood where all the basic needs of food, shelter, clothing were essentially being covered by the wave of goodwill that was my grandfather's legacy. I hear about him trudging several miles, the first of every month, to collect the money for his school expenses from someone who wanted to see him get a good education. He didn't enter the world of academics until a much later age and had no English until 8th grade.

It is always amazing and fascinating to me that he ended up in Hawaii on a grant from the East West Center of the University of Hawaii for a doctoral program in plant physiology, given his entirely rural background; by some benevolent quirk of fate the rickshaw pulling prophecy was dodged and dismissed.

This fascination of mine will endure for me as it does for my parents. There must have been so many days of despondence, of not knowing what life had in store for them, of wondering, of frustration until things literally turned on a dime (or 25 paisa coin) for my dad and someone encouraged him to fill up an application that would have him winging his way more than half way across the world. The 25 paisa application that he reluctantly filled out at the urging of a professor at his college.

Nothing: Part 30

2010-08-04T15:23:00.000-04:00

[Note: Possibly of no interest to anyone else]

I am an unabashed eavesdropper. I love listening in while pretending I couldn't care less about what's being said around me. There is something so thrilling about overheard conversations even if the most mundane things are being discussed.

If each stage or each day of our existence is like a single bead or gem, several of which have been strung together on a thread of memories, in an elegant necklace defining our existence, then overheard conversations certainly reside within the interstices.

I usually sit on the very first seat of my bus on the way back home because the other front seaters are usually the ones who love chatting with each other and with the driver.

A few weeks ago the front seat occupants were two women who were returning to New Jersey after a day spent in New York City. I soon learned, from listening to their chatter, that they were school bus drivers by profession. They were so excited at being passengers in a bus that wasn't painted bright yellow and where they weren't doing the driving. Throughout the ride they kept comparing notes on the equipment, asking the driver what the various buttons and controls on his dashboard were, marveling at his cushioned seat which he was smug enough to inform them was made by the same company that supplied airlines with the seat used by the pilots. They adored the smoothness of the turning angles; something their bright yellow tin could never achieve and the quiet passengers who never needed to be disciplined. Of course that theory was soon blown to bits when the driver had to grab his microphone in order to silence the obnoxious cell phone chatterer in the back. They said they were tempted to drive our bus just to see how different it felt. I was stunned at the level of palpable excitement they were emanating. The bus driver did have to concede a point to them: the school bus ladies had the POWER! The power to stop all other traffic short simply by extending the long arm of the bus that ends in the sign that reads "STOP".

I never knew that a bus could have such an effect on people! But then again, I have never been a school bus driver, so how would I know, how would I even begin to grasp the sheer thrill?

Yesterday I sat with a woman who appeared to be a good friend of the driver who was taking us home. Their conversation was a treat. They were talking about another driver they knew who was thinking of retiring. The woman wanted to know why he would consider the retirement option since he was young enough. She asked the driver, "What would he do? Sit on the porch, read a book?"

Here I was thinking to myself, "Hmm, I wouldn't mind either one of those options given how my days have been blurring into each other, retaining no distinction, no shape, leaving not a trace of having been lived."

The driver replied, "Well he could do anything, he has enough saved up. He could live. He could get a girlfriend, move to Florida, anything he wants."

The woman replied, "I don't know what I would do if I retired. For me the best place to retire would be New York City. That is my dream. Why would anyone want to retire anywhere else? No other place makes sense. You never have to drive you can go wherever you want, walk anywhere, do anything you want, restaurants, parks, theater, movies - all within easy reach. I would be so happy here."

The driver concurred and said this was his dream too.

I thought of all the places I had considered for my own post-retirement days - Quebec City, San Francisco, Vancouver - specifically Victoria or Paris. I was much younger when those choices were made. I was seduced by the breathtaking, seductive beauty of those cities. But now that I heard the driver and the woman discuss New York City I felt my inner voice saying, "Of course, New York is such an obvious choice, it seems like a no-brainer! Who wouldn't want to retire here, I love it so much I even like coming back on the weekends when I don't have to be here for work."

The conversation then moved on to their favorite Broadway plays. Les Miserables, Beauty and the Beast, Phantom of the Opera topped their lists. The woman said that a close friend of hers had played both the Beast and Gaston in the B'way production, over a period of several months. This certainly is the type of information that makes one exclaim, "oh wow, really" even if one doesn't know the person who said this nor her friend. We are always eager to lap up all instances of discovery when it comes to "six degrees of separation".

The topic of theater segued into what was for me the most interesting tidbit of the evening. The driver shared some history of the bus line that serves as a mobile shelter for me for at least a third of my day. I won't mention the name because every time someone wants to search for L Buses they will be directed to my blog. (These people would be searching for bus schedules or something, in a hurry, and Google would unceremoniously dump them on my blog).

So, it seems this bus line was started by someone who had a Mexican wife who was a showgirl on Broadway. He used to drive her to Manhattan and back everyday. Soon enough there were several women from Mexico in Dover, NJ who were showgirls who needed to commute to and from Manhattan on a daily basis and at all odd hours. This was the spark that led to the idea of L Buses which number in the hundreds now and originate at the Dover, NJ terminal. That's where they are returned every night where they are cleaned inside and out and put back on the road every morning. The operation is gigantic and is now run with supreme efficiency by the daughter of the considerate, bright and resourceful founder and his beloved showgirl wife. She runs the bus line with her husband and her own daughter stops by to help with the paperwork although her true passion lies in becoming a veterinarian.

Interesting! At least to me. Learnt something I never knew, never would have known if I hadn't been so fond of eavesdropping. Is it useful information? Maybe not, although it would make for interesting small talk with other passengers some day when we're waiting for a bus and are chatting about nothing in particular.

It is an enchanting interstitial event.

Nothing: Part 29

2010-07-13T01:28:00.001-04:00

I used to invest in fancy looking journals. Every now and then partially used Moleskines and other little notebooks with ornate covers emerge when I am eliminating clutter from various hidden corners of the home. Each new journal I picked up from the paper stores stated a desire to write down how I felt.

Perhaps this desire stemmed from an inherent shyness when it came to conversing. I was never able to find the right moment to jump into a conversation. My very first co-workers used to say, "You know...it won't hurt to add in your own two cents every now and then." I remember responding with a smile and saying I was listening and learning...absorbing things. There's no doubt I was doing exactly that, but it was also true that I felt that the moments when I could have made my point were fleeting and never quite within my grasp; they hovered around me, tantalized and soon fled. The witticisms that occurred to me, when they did, usually appeared on the second day after the original conversation.

So journals were where I often resolved to speak my mind. I filled the pages with some regularity for five or ten days and then tired of the exercise, leaving them sitting around on nightstands, gathering dust.

When I first discovered blogging in the year 2001 I was thrilled. The idea of penning my thoughts down in the relative anonymity of cyberspace was tempting. I had never been particular about secrecy or privacy. I didn't care if people read what I wrote. I never wanted it to be an exercise in self-branding. I just liked tapping away on the computer as the screen filled up with words. It wasn't narcissism. It was just an outlet, it was a pretend conversation, one I would have had if I ever encountered someone as mute and unresponsive as the blank screen of the computer.

The more I wrote the more I wanted to write. Even if the writing was directionless, even if there was no stated goal. The writing was nothing but a way to de-clutter the brain itself. Maybe a little like the "defragmentation" exercise that we often conduct on our computers, where all the empty unused spaces get compressed and reconfigured, showing you that your hard drive really has more unused space than you thought it did. Writing was like defragmenting; a way to fetter those floating fragments of clutter.

Of course one's entire family and complement of friends weren't online back then. Now everyone is. And, oddly enough, a few people appear interested in the flotsam and jetsam of my consciousness. Things even get quoted back to me a couple of times a year. The simple desire to just write has given way to conscious thought about what I'm writing, how it'd be perceived, who'd read it, what would they think?

"What would they think", appears to be the worst of them all. Deep inside, I feel one shouldn't worry about what anyone would think, that one should have as many degrees of freedom as our individual social consciousness and concerns permit. There is no room for censors in expression.

That is the underlying theme of course. But there are always variations.

One would never find me opposing the freedom of expression. However, the older I get, the more I realize that I never feel exactly the same as I did in the last moment. I read what I wrote two days ago and wonder why I wrote it, why I felt the way I did. Some thoughts that get penned down are passing ones, even if they are dark and despairing. Things pass, a new day brings new challenges, new perspectives, shifting dynamics. Life flows.

When I started writing this I was thinking about a dark message left by a dear cousin of mine on a public, online forum. My cousin and the entire extended family are still trying to find ways to deal with a recent tragedy and the debilitating grief that followed in its wake.

We're all scattered far and wide and the virtual connection to each other is often the only one. So her message of despair sent ripples throughout the entire family. We were afraid, afraid for her, afraid for us, for her parents. We wanted some assurance that she was well, that she was coping with the tragedy as best as she could, that she was trying her best to take baby steps forward, out of the darkness, and that she really didn't feel the way she said she did in an online status message.

But perhaps what she wrote was just a turn her thoughts had taken in one fleeting moment. Perhaps she felt better, more clear-headed, after she spoke her mind in such a public way.

Perhaps all is well. The rest of us were concerned (still are) and seek assurances that all is well with her...but our concerns could be elevated and hyped by the fact that our lives are so much more public now. Every thought has an instantaneous ripple effect.

There is no "relative anonymity". We are inextricably intertwined in a messy mass consciousness. So where does that leave the freedom of expression? It's so much easier to raise red flags with our words, to wound with our words and perhaps set up cascading waves of despair with them, these days.

I recall coming to a realization here, in this space, that once you become aware of what you are doing, you fall off a groove, you fall off the bicycle you're trying to learn how to ride, you hit the wrong notes in music, you get the rhythm and the timing of things all messed up. I wouldn't want anything I write here to appear filtered, censored and strained through a colander. It is my space. But readers, if any, please realize that what's said here today may not be my reality tomorrow.

Nothing: Part 28

2010-06-21T01:07:00.000-04:00

Sunday nights are all about mental preparations and strategic outlines for tackling Mondays. I know I'll be reluctant to hop out of bed and that I won't feel up to any challenges until the mint and the fluoride hit the gums and the enamel, and the burning hot water hits the skin. It will all have to be timed and choreographed. The guilt will make its appearance right on schedule when A is dragged out of bed early and when she is at Y's doorstep, waiting to be let in. She will probably nap on Y's couch until the bus arrives.

Then I'd have to steel myself to deal with the creeping traffic. Judging by the Channel 2 weather guy's report the most common cause for creeping traffic would be sun glare tomorrow. I'll have to keep an eye on the Rt 80 overpass that can be seen from Rt 46 to spot back to back, creeping cars and trucks in order to decide whether I take the ramp to 80 or continue on 46, braving the scary traffic circle (hate traffic circles!).

My driving stress will end at the park and ride and there will be some reprieve while I snooze. Then something will wake me up, probably the Lakeland Bus driver's radio, as he talks to other drivers, wondering why Lincoln Tunnel is simply not moving.

The next decision would be whether to walk to the office or to switch two trains to get to work. That would depend on whether the bus made it to Port Authority by 8:40 AM or 8:55 AM. The latter would rule out walking. I'd get on the subway and get to work by 9:20 AM. I'd stare at the large clock as I make it through the revolving doors wondering if walking would have been as effective and better for my health. I'd also wonder if there's enough time to get real coffee from Pret or Europa Cafe or whether I'd have to make do with the office coffee, made with awful creamer, because a Dolores Umbridge like office manager has cut off milk or half and half supplies for us after spotting someone pouring some into cereal. Yes, yes it isn't the office's job to keep us in milk and cereal...sigh!

Before I open up the first MS Excel file of the day my mind would already have gone through a complex flowchart littered with if and then choices and consequences.

Then we'll have the midday deadline to meet. A deadline that would have been obliterated had the VPN connection not given me this sweet message on Sunday: Error 429. Unable to resolve server address. Why after three years of VPN access is it suddenly not able to resolve server address? I don't know. I'll never know.

Two and a half hours to create several spreadsheets and pie charts. It would be more than enough time if the servers, the RAM etc were all cooperating and if there was no danger of losing my work because "Save" generated a message "Not Responding". It would be so pleasant if it didn't take twenty minutes to open each file, twenty minutes to save it, twenty minutes to close it because the computer appears unable to handle several open windows.

All this would stress me out because there would be no recourse, no sympathy, the deadlines are mine to meet and anything else amounts to shirking or whining or both.

Through it all I'll stay worried or guilty about A. I'd keep thinking I am forgetting something. I'll wonder if I'd be able to surmount all difficulties and meet the deadline in time for making my 6:10 PM bus. I would need to make sure I leave by 5:40 PM in order to get that bus. I would ideally like to leave at 5:10 PM and get on the 5:45 PM bus but that bus has a midget creep who travels on it, the one who ignores all empty seats and asks to sit next to me. It's just exhausting to keep telling him he can have the seat because I am moving to another one. One would think he'd get the hint by now! So 5:45 must always be skipped.

Whichever bus I take it will always get stuck near the Meadowlands after exiting the Lincoln Tunnel, sometimes for hours on end. That's just the way things are. Through it all I'll be praying for some kind of serenity while the brain wants to keep returning to agony. Must accept what we can't change.

Home! Finally I'll be at Y's doorstep, ready to collect A at 8:00 PM, when most kids are already in bed or an hour away from bedtime. Bedtime just won't happen for her until 10:30 PM. Is that a parenting crime? Will the Super-parent police force come after me with their "tsk, tsks" or more? Some folks would say to me how their goal is to get their kids in bed before 9:00 PM and the words would hit like a million jackhammers on my head.

Through all this choreography, this tightrope walking, this constant planning and strategizing for each twenty four hour period I'll see myself getting smaller and smaller, diminished beyond recognition, expecting nothing, planning for nothing, setting no goals other than the next grocery list, as time goes on.

I've always tried to gaze into the eyes of other women in the family: grandmas, grandaunts, aunts, in sepia toned photographs of yore. Photographs from when they were little girls, from when they became mothers and in their present wrinkled or toothless stage. I don't know what I am looking for...perhaps some signs of a desire to leave an imprint of their having existed, of their having meant something to the line of descendants who owe their existence to them. But I never catch this glimpse. When I inquire about some of the women in our family tree (added in there as "? Mishra" or "? Devi" or "? Jha") people don't even remember the names of the women who were.

Not only is it distressing, it may also be prophetic, as a future person with some fraction of my blood gazes at an old album or an old digital record (even more ephemeral and inconsequential than an old scrapbook or album) and notices nothing but exhaustion and resignation, if anything.

Nothing: Part 27

2010-06-10T11:26:00.000-04:00

A thought about loneliness crossed my mind in the last instant: loneliness is not debilitating. One need not weave any lacy ornamentation around the state of being lonely. It can't be painted red, blue or black and it looks just the same to the people who happen to glance at you, it doesn't change your shape or size or smell. It is what it is, just something to feel in a given twenty-four hour period and then get past it to feel something else.

Why write about it then? Well, because this idea is sort of an epiphany. In earlier years, the years when he used to leave on Sunday mornings after deliberately hitting "Play" on the track that bore the Lynrd Skynrd song "Freebird", it might have led to cascading misery; to a downward spiral of thoughts that resembled constant internal whining and external manifestations of gloom along the lines of "why me". But now the "why not me" thought easily cancels out the "why me" thought and we are back to balanced nothingness.

It is a floating nothingness with no moorings, one that allows an astral viewing of time folding in on itself, of things happening, often monotonous and repetitive but with the occasional burst of tantalizing color that fades almost as swiftly as it appeared.

The red tail lights, the gray office walls flushed with fluorescent lighting, the endless arithmetic manipulation of numbers in 17,179,869,184 cells in a spreadsheet are just the parched landscape in my bird's eye view; a desert where a sudden burst of color works its own unique magic. Sometimes this color comes in the form of a tiny, neon green bird that pecks at my kitchen window while my daughter and I run around trying to find the instant when we could "cage" it on film. Or when the cabbage we planted shows us it has nine lives...or more...every time it resurrects itself after being vanquished by birds. It comes while we gaze at the green tomatoes and wonder how long they'll stay hidden from the scampering bunnies and hedgehogs. It will soon come in the color of red when the first strawberries we ever planted ripen. Unless of course the entire patch gets dominated by a killer habanero orange because of the seeds that Mr Freebird scattered everywhere, never in his wildest dreams imagining the profuse fecundity of this killer pepper seed.

The latest brushstroke on the stark canvas came after the purchase of an ancient toy, the Slinky. I never imagined that a slinky would capture an eight year old's imagination to the extent that it did. The Nintendo DSi and all the apps on mommy's iPhone are now forgotten as she works on creating a shoebox, theatrical depiction of Alice in Wonderland where the slinky will play the part of the hole through which Alice takes the plunge into Wonderland. Tweedledee, Tweedledum, Alice and the Cheshire Cat puppets have already been fashioned out of cardboard and the remaining cast of characters will be ready for the grand opening on the day Daddy comes back home for the weekend.

And so, life goes on. She gets her ideas riding in the back seat of my car, I get my passing thoughts on loneliness or love, on being needed or feeling needy, on aging, on contentment or discontent, on expectations or lack thereof, while ferrying us here or there. The thoughts swirl around and evaporate as soon as the ride ends and we step through a door.

Nothing: Part 26

2010-06-09T14:24:00.000-04:00

Aaron Sorkin's creation, The West Wing, ended its seven year run on May 14th, 2006. I was an avid watcher of this brilliant show but as time goes by and memory fades, I am left to grapple with this one line of dialogue that was spoken by the character of Leo McGarry to the fictional White House staffer - Ali: "That's the price you pay."

It has been over four years since the show last aired but I haven't forgotten those words or the fictional context in which they spoken. I remember feeling uncomfortable as I watched that scene. I balked at the possibility that something like this could happen in the real world even as I applauded Sorkin's brilliance in including such a line in the script.

In this episode, the character of Ali was suspected of being involved in terrorist activities. I refreshed my memory of the scene with the aid of Google's search engine. The dialogue progressed as follows:

ALI: It's not uncommon for Arab Americans to be the first suspected when that sort of thing happens.
LEO: I can't imagine why.
ALI: Look...
LEO: No, I'm trying to figure out why anytime there's terrorist activity people always assume it's Arabs. I'm racking my brain.
ALI: I don't know the answer to that, Mr. McGarry, but I can tell you it's horrible.
LEO: Well, that's the price you pay.

Watching then, I was stunned to hear the character of Leo utter those words, was quite shaken and angry despite being aware it was a television drama.

Ali had responded to that remark with confusion and anger, saying, "Excuse me? The price for what?"

I remember that in the final scene of this episode Leo went back to Ali to make amends. He said that he was just about to say that it was the price to pay for "having the same physical features as criminals".

The explanation didn't do anything to appease me. The director didn't show Ali's character appear comforted by the explanation either. The scene faded to black with Buffalo Springfield's song - For What It's Worth - playing in the background: There's something happening here/What it is ain't exactly clear/There's a man with a gun over there/Telling me I got to beware/I think it's time we stop, children,what's that sound/Everybody look what's going down/There's battle lines being drawn/Nobody's right when everybody's wrong...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g9PiEgYYUU&feature=related

The point was made. Pondering this, over the years, there always appears to be a price to pay. It's as though we've all made a collective bargain and are splitting the bill, "going dutch" at this grand buffet of life, even if we refrained from partaking.

The Buffalo Springfield song was a good choice to close out the scene. History repeats itself as Arizona passes a law that allows officials to stop anyone who doesn't look Arizonan enough...I suppose, and to demand that they show their papers or as I read a frequently traveling, brown skinned friend's status message on a social networking site that says he was "randomly" searched five out of the last six times that he traveled.

It is somewhat ironical that the generation that kept beat with this Buffalo Springfield song in 1967 is the same one that is responsible for approving laws like the one that was just passed in Arizona and demanding more of the same. Young people still speak their minds often enough and up to the age where they are not considered "young people" anymore. Life goes on.

There's further irony in that we are all quite willing to "pay this price" submit to searches, deal with being under suspicion for one thing or another because there's a profile that we partially or fractionally share with someone else. We will moan and groan but we will pay as many times as we are required to pay it - for the greater good. No harm, no foul: we generalize, we assume, we profile, we extrapolate. This is how things are, how we are. It has all happened before and will happen again and again...as they concluded in another brilliant show - Battlestar Galactica. :)

Nothing:Part 25

2010-05-31T01:15:00.001-04:00

It's very kind of people to read something I've written and then ask me why I am so blue or why what they read here had a thread of sadness running through it (wonder why I thought of the movie "A River Runs Through It" when I wrote about the thread of sadness). The truth is, there is no sadness and in fact there is nothing to be sad about. What comes across as sadness perhaps, is this sense of resignation...and resignation isn't the right word either. Let's just say it's placidity, at least on the surface of things. Underneath, deep underneath the surface, what churns is a battle between acceptance, contentment, playing the hand one was dealt with panache, with wry, self-directed humor or rejecting it all in favor of something better, the clichéd search for more verdant abundance.

The problem with being so connected on a virtual, social platform is the Rashomon like multiple interpretations of one's state of mind by one's peers and by one's loved ones. Out come the perenially positive advice givers telling me how tomorrow will be another day, how whatever I am feeling will pass, how to change my attitude to something more positive, more "happy" in their eyes. Some quote the scriptures or the saints at me while I watch amused, thinking, that's not it. Some relate personal experiences where they were beset with worries and emerged unscathed. I have already been to those places and have passed beyond.

I have learnt valuable lessons from each experience and know now at this halfway point in life, that this is indeed life. There are good days and bad and in the end there's the mean that takes the high points and the low points into account.

Writing it all down is what helps me understand. I never learnt anything from all my institutions of learning unless I wrote down my own version of the things I had read. So in this blog I write how I feel, I come here to "play Jesus to the lepers in my head" as I say at the very top of the blog. It's a recalibration of sorts. It's believing in myself and knowing that all of this, some version of it, has happened before and will happen again. No smile ever stays frozen on one's face and no sadness remains unmitigated.

So if it all appears tinged with blue, perhaps I've been holding my breath a bit too long. I am reminding myself to breathe and to just go on putting one step in front of another, addressing the concerns of the moment, nothing more, nothing less.

Nothing: Part 24

2010-05-24T16:52:00.000-04:00

I was feeling ashamed of having spent my Sunday doing absolutely nothing until I read something about not feeling guilty about things like doing nothing. So I stopped feeling guilty and continued doing nothing at all.

The list of nothings included several back to back episodes of LMN (Lifetime Movie Network) movies - with names like "Vows of Deception" and "Deadly Honeymoon". It's amazing how capable these movies are of sinking their hooks deep inside. There was one where a neighbor woman kept walking into her friend and neighbor's home, at all odd hours, and replacing her insulin vials with vodka. The poor woman kept getting DUIs after being sober for over ten years. The wicked neighbor wanted to steal her husband and her life. And there are so many stories of women sans conscience or remorse all meeting a deadly "Fatal Attraction" like ending in the end.

I was watching a commercial where a woman stand up comic was poking fun at the concept of television for women saying, "Sure it's television for women, women are constantly getting kicked around, raped, murdered, abused..." It drew laughs but most of the time the writers of these short movies show women being portrayed as victimizers rather than victims! Is this underscoring a much debated and oft-repeated conclusion that women are their own worst enemies? I should pay attention to the gender of the writers of these scripts.

The hubby, who was also spending his Sunday doing nothing, got snagged by some of these "deadly" shows on LMN too!

I think I'll spend the next Sunday watching Spike TV to see what they think men like to watch.

When these movies got too repetitive I started watching back to back episodes of "House" on Bravo. This show is becoming a real addiction. Hugh Laurie is excellent in his role as the cantankerous and obnoxious Dr Gregory House. I am also amazed at how convincing an American he makes.

Loved a line where he called himself a "rational" man and his best friend a "rationalizing" man. How interesting a distinction.

I did eventually get tired of the idiocy of non-stop TV watching and walked around doing this or that around the house, practicing the medley "The Memories of Stephen Foster" (specifically Old Folks at Home, Oh! Susanna and Old Black Joe) for my upcoming violin concert, followed by a vocal practice session where I tried to improve my rendition of Raag Desh.

As I practice my music I wonder about how I can make the session less mechanical. I do "homework" at the moment, doing whatever my teachers have told me to do before getting ready for the next class but I am feeling like quite an idiot doing just that. I need to have some conversations with people, I need my own insights, I need to bounce ideas off someone, but I've always been lonely in my chosen pursuits.

I need to feel unstuck and would give anything for that soaring, euphoric feeling that hasn't paid me a visit in a very long time, not since the day I started this blog and called it - Epiphany. Well, I need the next epiphany. I need sustained gusto, sustained enthusiasm, without resorting to something that prevents serotonin re-uptake.

This thing called "small pleasures" is much discussed these days. Everyone is talking about looking for small pleasures, about slowing down, stopping, smelling whatever (roses aren't always around)...so I am trying. The only problem is about sustaining such pleasures once they are found.

Walking around several blocks of NYC at the lunch hour on Friday was different and hence fun, but won't doing it everyday become mundane and routine? Should I start taking the subway to Central Park or walk to different parks around the neighborhood next? The only problems is - I hate riding the subways and I only have an hour for lunch. I can't possibly lose myself in a book in a park when the time spent is weighing on me.

Cooking? But then there are messy kitchen counters and dirty dishes, also ingredient shopping and perennial barbs from the hubby if all purchased ingredients don't get utilized. Small pleasures appear to be as perishable as the luscious green vegetables and fruits I found at the very pleasurable Whole Foods Market during my Friday rambling.

Well, I just added Dominique Browning's blog "Slow Love Life" to my list of blogs I follow. She appears to be on a quest for small pleasures and I could use some inspiration along these lines.

Floccinaucinihilipilification: Part 23

2010-05-18T14:25:00.001-04:00

We spent most of the weekend at the student concert where I performed a short composition in Jhap Taal, followed by a longer teen taal composition in Raag Bihag. If you are interested in knowing how I did then you can see the videos here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGKT7XXNSeo

here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyoKhnSdq9Q

and here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=574cUY6Dwj0

I get a bit winded toward the end. So this tells me I need to practice those longer notes, riding on a single breath, with even more diligence. But I am happy to report there were no pins and needles while sitting cross-legged.

It does feel rather surreal to see myself sitting there wrapped up in a chanderi sari, singing a composition or two in Raag Bihag, to the accompaniment of tabla and harmonium.

It's an image of enhanced incongruency when viewed with this:

alongside this:

Same person? No wonder it was such a struggle for me to come up with a vision board.

That was the other thing the three of us did together on Sunday; constructed a vision board for ourselves.

Anoushka was excited about the project although there were some thoughtful frowns followed by a statement that she didn't really desire anything more, that she already had everything she wanted. I was stunned and proud to have raised such a "self-actualized" child, already at the peak of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I have seen that in action as well. She always has a very hard time figuring out if she wants anything at a store, even when she's given a generous budget. The most she can think of is jelly beans!

But the prospect of using poster boards, glue sticks, magic markers and glittery stickers was too tempting and she got into it with gusto. She even got done in record time with a vision board that would put most adults to shame. She found the exact images she needed and got to work with her scissors on the stack of magazines we had laid out for the purpose. The scope of her vision is broad: earth conscious, environment conscious and her desires - all reflective of a broader, optimistic and altruistic nature. Like I said it put me to shame because I am not now, nor was I ever (not even at her age) AS concerned about the world and the life on it as I was about myself. Let's hope this will last in her.

Mine was a struggle and a stretch. It's hard to put down on poster board, a kaleidoscopic, eclectic vision, a fragmented vision that has always lacked laserlike accuracy and focus. I like too many things to be tied down to one vision. I do know that I want to write and that I want to be passionately involved with music and the arts. I dabble, I aspire to continue dabbling but dabbling is never good enough for revenue generation and someone with loans, a family, a desire for a secure future and a comfortable present always needs to act with revenue generation in mind. That's the sadness that runs through it all. But I did my best with it. Let's see how close I get to what I envisioned.

The whole idea of the creation of a vision board might seem hokey to most of us. And in cynical, boredom filled moments, so it seems to me. But I occasionally rouse myself from the stupor by saying, "Visualization works, you know it works, it has always worked for you, so get back to it!" More than anything else, the activity brought us all together for a pleasant Sunday afternoon.

The last thing I did over the weekend was finish reading Julian Barnes's masterful musings in "Nothing To Be Frightened Of". The thing that we're talking about here is death. How much I've liked a book is usually evident from the number of pages I've dog-eared from the bottom. I've mentioned somewhere else on this blog that I like dog-earing pages to which I want to return from the bottom (this is less offensive to me than marking up the book by underlining). The number of brilliant insights in this book are too many to enumerate.

I mentioned one to Anoushka, as we stood around in the kitchen toasting slices of bread for breakfast. I told her I read something that she probably wouldn't understand yet, but it was interesting. She wanted to know what it was I read. So I told her that the author in the book I was reading said that when he was a child he used to think that when he grew up he'd be the one in control, he'd be the one 'wielding the whip'.

Anoushka interrupted me then to say, "But I don't think grown ups have any control, any freedom. They always have to do things they don't want to do and listen to bosses or others."

I stared at her, speechless, because she had preempted the next bit of what I was going to tell her about what Julian Barnes said! He had said that when he grew up he learnt that he wasn't wielding a whip, that in fact he was nothing more than the tip of the whip!

I don't know what it is about A, maybe the fact that she's reading at a level three grades above her own or that she is just more thoughtful than I ever remember being. But she certainly surprises me a lot.

I think I'll be compelled to write some more about the rest of what Julian Barnes mused in this book but two minor things serve as some validation:

He said here, quoting from his own journal from twenty years ago:

People say of death, "There's nothing to be frightened of." They say it quickly, casually. Now let's say it again, slowly, with reemphasis. "There's NOTHING to be frightened of." Jules Renard: "The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word 'nothing.'"

Haven't I implied the same (the bolded part) with each one of my "Nothing" posts? Ok, just kidding, just being facetious. But even the earlier part of this quote from his own journal gives one so much to think about. Precisely, the NOTHING, to be frightened of.

And finally an utterly useless word that entered my vocabulary through this book, but does say it all in 29 letters: Floccinaucinihilipilification, meaning to estimate as worthless. You'll still have 111 letters leftover if you wanted to discuss this on Twitter.

So here we are, once again awaiting NOTHING.

Nothing: Part 22

2010-05-11T16:22:00.000-04:00

"Are you comfortable?"

An innocuous question like that left me feeling surprised and somewhat stunned when a friend asked me that at a meeting over coffee.

My emphatic answer and accompanying smile was an attempt to convince her that I was indeed comfortable and our conversation continued. We talked about all our experiences during the intervening years, just like two friends meeting after a very long time would. And yet there was the echo of her remark, ricocheting around my brain..."are you comfortable, are you comfortable?"

Perhaps it hit me because I don't think I ever feel "comfortable". Not around people, not when I am by myself, in a word - never. The balance is almost always tilted toward some strain or some stress. I am always filled with a weird sense of hyper-awareness about my physical boundaries, of the space I take as I move through the world.

I feel a sense of awe at people who sit back on a couch or even on a park bench and look as though they are not feeling any tension in the legs that are extended forward with such ease, the arm that casually rests on the back of the seat, shoulders that find a natural slope of relaxation and are not squared against a hostile world. I am envious of that ability to merge with one's surroundings, to feel at home anywhere.

When I was younger I was always worried about creasing my ironed clothes. As I grew older I never felt certain about stepping in with a segue that would carry a group conversation forward. I was either quiet or tense about making a point in a voice that would be heard before someone steered the conversation away to a place where the point I was nurturing in my brain, for several minutes while someone more voluble was making theirs, would appear like nothing but a non sequitur or a meaningless digression.  Some folks would notice and ask me to speak up more often, to put in my two cents, while I smiled and said I was "listening" and "absorbing".

I was also never sure about my hands, I never knew what to do with them when standing around at a party or in a circle of friends. I would worry about whether they should be in my pockets, on my hips, folded across my chest, hanging limply by the sides, clutching something, twirling something? I just didn't know what to do with them. The pockets grew to be quite a comfort zone. So much so that for the longest time I was known to bring tea or water or plates of food to guests at home with one hand, while the other was stuffed in a pocket. I remember feeling very annoyed with relatives and wondering what the big deal was about using two hands where the usage of one sufficed!

I suppose some people are just born square in a world that only accepts round pegs. I sometimes feel like I've spent whole life whittling away the squares, wanting to force a fit, or having accomplished said "fit" finding myself asphyxiated and boxed in, wanting nothing more than the freedom to be my square self, come what may. How is a natural ease with oneself possible when the fight is always so acute?

It makes for quite the duality of existence.  The public side where I often succeed in appearing like the person I am forcing myself to be; pretending until it feels natural, pretending until the pretense feels like anything but pretense, and the intensely private side that manifests in the discomfort that some rare, perceptive souls can sense, in something as unnoticeable as the way I am sitting across from someone at a cafe table!

Speaking of "perceptive souls", aren't we all in search of the one that would see and understand that part of us that our layers of pretense have not been successful in masking?  I think we spend our whole lives searching for one such. They say love makes the world go round and things like "love is all you need". Not really, unless it's a facetious way of saying what makes the world go round is finding the love who gets to the heart of "your" matter.

I have continued my tradition of listening and absorbing, now through virtual conversations and chats. I notice that as soon as one starts a conversation the responses that come back in reaction to what you said or did, or what went on in your life in the last minute, hour or day, are often detailed ones about how that person would have reacted, what they would have thought or done, had they been in your position. The sounds of wanting to be known, to be heard, to be understood and defined are clamorous. We are all selling clues, offering them up cheap on the social media market, and yet there are no takers, no buyers, only sellers.

All of it just ending in a dissonance that stays unresolved while people try to fit in and stand out all at once.

It was interesting to watch this John Cleese documentary: The Human Face, the other day. It was about facial expressions and how crucial they are to social interactions and communication. The story of a little girl who was born with the Mobius syndrome, a facial paralysis that left her unable to smile, was a cause of serious concern for her parents. They feared the worst for her when she started school. They worried about how other kids would see her, treat her. She underwent surgery that gave her a smile and her world was set right. That is how important smiles are.

The other interesting case in the documentary was of a Cambridge student who had a form of Asperger's syndrome. His problem was an inability to understand and interpret facial cues. He didn't know what a downturned mouth meant, what frowns meant, what it meant when someone was wide eyed. He felt like a misfit because he couldn't tell what people were communicating with their expressions! So he made a study out of it. He prepared a mental inventory of what each expression possibly meant. He taught himself. He "pretended" to know until he really got to know. Now he fit. Now he wasn't isolated.

And so we try, we are social animals, we depend on each other, we seek connections and sometimes the manner in which those connections will be made have to be learnt. They aren't always inborn except in a lucky few.  Others have to learn how to compensate for deficits, or add corners or slats in order to fit. Perhaps the person I envy, who looks oh-so-comfortable at a party, or on a park bench or at a cafe, is also just pretending. Or maybe comfort in social situations is not a problem for them but mathematics or spelling is. Together we all add up and fit, I suppose.

Perhaps that's why we've grown up reading so many fairy tales about the princess asleep in some palace tower, asleep and oblivious, or silent while elsewhere in the tale there's a prince or a knight who has to set forth on a quest and find various clues along the way until he finds the key to her heart.

Digression (as if one can digress from nothing): Funny how the Princess is always the passive, sleepy or silent one, awaiting the Knight or Prince who knows what makes her tick.

Nothing: Part 21

2010-04-25T21:39:00.000-04:00

My thoughts are so desultory that it would be a crime to title this post anything but "nothing". There's nothing here that could be knitted into a coherent piece of writing.

Last night, as I was attempting to get on with the thing we call sleeping I was trying to pinpoint the time that defined my overriding lack of ambition. The thoughts raced back down memory lane only to stop at the waddling walk out of the train station, on the clear and crisp morning of September 11th, 2001. I was heavy with child, she was due to enter the world sometime in mid-October. She was patient in there except for the occasional kick just to remind me that there was another person inside me.

I did need that kicked reminder because all I could think about during the weeks leading up to that day were the dismal renewal rates and plummeting circulation revenues at Teen People magazine. I spent several hours at my desk simulating data that would reflect the best case scenarios for this now defunct teen magazine. The marketers fed me ambitious projections based on the results that price changes would bring, the lifts they expected in circulation from offering premiums of various kinds, the revenue gains they expected to see as a result of commission and remittance negotiations with third party agents.

There was a sense of hope that if a Maybelline nail polish or lipstick was offered up as an incentive then parents of teenage children would respond toute suite to the renewal notices that they received from the publisher. But no matter how many times I crunched the numbers, in my very focused number crunching role, I couldn't come up with a scenario that made all my bosses happy. My preoccupation with this problem was complete. Even if I knew that the data modeling and simulation results were only as good as the data that was being modeled I felt as though I was letting everyone down by not giving them the results they were hankering to see.

We were still a few years away from realizing that the part of the brain that makes teens open up renewal notices and respond to such notices 7 or 8 issues before their subscription was to expire, hadn't yet developed. Publishers were still struggling to telepathically convince adult consumers to renew their subscriptions "at birth"!

Just as the caffeine was kicking in to make me ponder this problem anew, there was news of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. There were people wondering if it was a bizarre accident while I casually uttered that it was probably Osama.

Suddenly renewal rates, payment rates, cancellation rates, subscription orders received per week, seemed as meaningless as lint or dust bunnies in unswept corners of a home. Nothing mattered. Or rather, it took something of this magnitude to make us see what really mattered.

All I could think of was my baby and my condition. New York City was cut off from everywhere else. I wanted to get home. My gentle, solicitous boss wanted to see me to safety even as her mind was trying to deal with her husband's, NYC firefighter's, first responder status. She was escorting me to the train station and asking every firefighter she saw along the way what they knew, specifically about Engine 23. He never made it out. There were ash covered people everywhere and cell phones weren't working for a very long time.

I got home after several hours of stressful waiting and worrying as my feet swelled beyond recognition.

My hypertension ensured an early entry into the world and exit from the womb for my Anoushka.

That's the walk I take down memory lane. That's where it takes me when I want to know what changed, why I see nothing but endless ennui ahead of me. Why the road taken is devoid of all joy, all meaning, and is a one way street to a mindless, meaningless, unimportant and unmemorable destination.

In my industry it is possible to get so wrapped up in things like response rates, payment rates, renewal rates, cover lines that would draw consumers to the newsstand. So much hair-splitting that can lead to so much hair pulling. As a consumer, when I am near a newsstand I make a beeline for the magazines I like to read. What they said on their covers doesn't matter to me at all. And it doesn't matter what the covers of the magazines I don't read say if I am not interested in their content. Still these are fields where subliminal messages works, there are deeper psychologies at play and responses are always measured and tracked. There are several levels of skills and skillsets involved in all circulation activities. Sometimes people even work through the night and sleep in their offices. And yet, when we meet people out of our work circles it is hard to explain what we do. Their eyes light up at first with the green light of envy at being in the presence of someone who works at a glamorous magazine. And then they can't wait to get away from you when they find out you are not an editor or a publisher that you are just a very tiny piece of the puzzle. A piece of the puzzle that is innocuous enough until the numbers that circulators guarantee to their advertisers isn't met. Then circulators suddenly become the cynosure of all eyes.

People so callously lumped in the category of "planners" in an industry that may soon be extinct don't really earn minor or major immortality. And if "immortality" is a goal that the seers and saints of our generation would find childish and pointless, then so be it. I need a shining horizon to which I can walk unencumbered, with as many degrees of freedom as possible.

I was very interested in a steady upward motion for my career until September 11. I wanted to crash out of glass ceilings, I wanted to be seen as someone that had to be watched and feted. I was convinced that the door of opportunities was wide open and a red carpet was laid out for me. I kept fighting for opportunities. Some recruiter was even told about my "belligerence" in a work environment. I fought for promotions, I railed against perceived injustice, I always made sure I got my due.

There's none of that now. Now I feel like a machine. I am a very efficient, well-oiled, rather an "Extraordinary Machine" as in Fiona Apple's lovely song, especially the words "be kind to me/or treat me mean/I'll make the most of it I'm an extraordinary machine". But I am a cog in a wheel that's dragging a dinosaur on a respirator to an inevitable extinction. I'll keep doing it well because that's how my gears now mesh and I'll keep meeting all expectations. That's what my Mom would say, if I ever called her for comfort or for a pep talk, "Karmanye vadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachana..." etc, so keep plugging away because this is it, at this point in time, this is it.

This time I've constructed my prison walls in lead. There are student loans to be paid off over an entire lifetime, there's a mortgage, there are health benefits tied to steady jobs, there's a shaky economy to deal with and last but not least there is that element of hoisting oneself on one's own petard, or hacking away at the very branch one is sitting on every time the next big must-haves roll around in the marketplace.

That sounds rather sad, but I don't know if sad is the word for it. It is just a view from this vantage point from this bedroom, in this house, on this quiet street, on a quiet and rainy Sunday on April 24th, 2010.

People love to say this too shall pass, for want of better words to say to someone whose despondence appears contagious. And most things do pass, if a course of study, like an MBA or a PhD, seems endlessly frustrating it passes and then there's a career to look forward to, illnesses pass, relationships improve, we learn and grow and evolve and things that bothered us before just don't bother us anymore. Even if we felt we loved someone with all our heart and would never recover if we lost their love, we find ourselves not caring anymore after the passage of some time.

We leave so many boxes behind. We break through so many of the prisons we create for ourselves during a lifetime. We keep finding newer, better, shinier prisons with thicker walls until we build one we can't break.

So this is it, I sit here wondering what else can be done in the next twenty five years? Is there enough time to change course? And what direction? What happened to the person inside who thought that we arrived here with just a sketchy outline of the things to come, that we filled in all our own details, added color, texture and dimension? Why do I now feel so resigned, so paralyzed and so imprisoned, so accepting of a rigidly defined kismet?

For anyone who reads this, have you ever seen a bigger piece of nothing? This is all as meaningless as renewal rates of magazine subscriptions in the grander scheme of things where things like Darfur, cancer, AIDS, Haiti and Eyjafjallajokull exist.

Nothing: Part 20

2010-04-21T16:06:00.000-04:00

It is easy enough to live in the moment during the day. You put one foot in front of another and get through your day. The trick is to fill each hour with the things that you need to do in that moment and to not worry about what the next thing could be. It is best to avoid the mental construction of flow charts and what-if scenarios because life could pass you by while you are engaged in those mental gymnastics.

So it has been easy enough to get up and leave home at a set hour in the morning. It has also been easy to train the mind to not punch the steering wheel, to not rail at the red light when the bus is about to leave without me on it, to take all slights, all misfortune in my stride and to accept it as one would a muddy puddle in one's path. There is always a next bus and missing one doesn't set up a catastrophe and there are good and bad times during the course of one's career, one's life.

I am learning to let go, to accept that I really don't control a whole heckuva lot. In fact the only thing I can control is my temper or my own reactions. I can give myself an ulcer free existence, I probably owe myself an ulcer-free existence.

But what can we do at night? Is the diurnal placidity and acceptance just a postponement that leads to nocturnal ferment? Why is it that during the day I can convince myself that my job, my finances, my life are all secure, safe, hidebound and wrinkle-free but at night a niggling brainworm overwhelms me as it grows in size, grows wings, leaves my head and circles around the bedroom, with its menacing eyes and malicious and malevolent intent?

It asks me, "what if...?" It doesn't help with any of the answers it just keeps asking what if. I toss and turn and sit up, wondering why such monsters come rushing into the vacuum of darkness.

I would love to come to a phase in life where I am not answering what-ifs all night.

In school it used to be about figuring out the marks that would make my math and science averages high enough for me to follow a science stream. I used to stay up all night trying to figure out what marks I needed to get and then be so drained during the day that I didn't have anything left to give to the pursuit of the math excellence demon...or to making friends, despite the desperation of wanting more friends and more confidantes.

Now I worry about the choices I've made, the consequences I'll reap, about my ability to cope with it all, about the interests I should sacrifice in order to be more efficient at the activities that are keeping me firmly entrenched at the base of Maslow's pyramid of needs - where the pursuit of food and shelter leaves no time for the pursuit of much else...and still seeking those friends, confidantes and, at my age, a real (not virtual) social circle.

But these are all night demons. I am a fearless conqueror during the day.

Perhaps I should move to Alaska, or wherever else the night is so much shorter than the day. Of course, that would mean moving back to some other place when the seasons change, when it gets to being dark all the time in a place like Alaska. But that would mean owning two homes and earning enough wealth to make THAT happen...oh well...let's kill the absurdity right here!

Nothing: Part 19

2010-03-26T15:09:00.001-04:00

“Imagining Disenchantment” – that was the title of a poem I had written when I was trying my hand at poetry. This was several years ago. Poetry didn’t flow out of me, I wasn’t meant to be a poet. I wrote it before I realized that I could say everything I wanted to say in my own plodding and prosaic way. Needless to say, that poem invited some ridicule from a poet whose works I admire, you can guess who the poet might be. He wanted to know why someone would want to “imagine” disenchantment.

I thought he had a point and was convinced about the meaninglessness of my poem.

Here’s how the interaction went, starting with my juvenile attempt at poetry:
Have I ever really cared
or am I simply pretending?
Is this heartfelt sincerity
or am I expertly dissembling?

Is my extreme apathy
cloaked in sympathy?
Or have you struck chords-
could this be empathy?

Drowning in shallow depths,
Spouting meaningless sophistry,
Disguising my disinterest,
In cultivated airs of mystery,

Showing outrage and anger
at every disagreeing view:
utterances that barely linger,
outside of a moment or two.

No lasting impressions to leave,
none were ever left on me.
Just breathing, taking up space-
waiting, certain
it will all cease to be.

His response was:

This is entirely unnecessary
(and what I say is not profound):
why revel in imagined misery
when there's so much of the real thing around?

:))

Ever keen on having the last word, I added:

Imagined misery, an inherited gene,
Living in the moment, a distant dream.
A safety valve, more or less,
in anticipation of an unholy mess!

And after five years, to the day, this interaction is still memorable to me, revived after some recent events.

There were some tears that left a purple blotch where I was penning my prose. The purple blotch was reflective of rage, of humiliation, of a sense of failure. Even as the blotch grew angrier there was a saner voice inside that insisted on justifiably minimizing the strength of my emotions. It tried to comfort me with a firm hand, by underscoring how blessed I ought to feel relative to so many others. The voice was hard to ignore. Sometimes it resembled the voice of my mother and at others that of a warm and sensitive and increasingly dear friend. It insisted that I was simply imagining the disenchantment again; blaming it on some inherited gene, preparing myself for the dreadful event that I always do have the will to overcome.

I stopped writing in ink and shut the angry, purple blotch inside the covers of the notebook, put it away for good, traded it for the clinical and sterile whiteness of the computer screen. The words had to be said, the realization needed to be set in stone, in letters that didn’t bleed or drip with salt-stained inkiness.

Nothing:Part 18

2010-03-03T18:27:00.000-05:00

Bad days are inevitable. In every life some bad days must fall, we just have to train ourselves to take them in our stride, stay unruffled, unworried, especially when we are sure of ourselves.

Had to close my ears to hubby's screams of frustation bright and early in the morning. He didn't think the snowfall was bad enough for me to ask him to drive me to my park and ride, especially when he had things to do and places to be. He made me appear selfish and inconsiderate and let out his frustrations by pounding on the steering wheel and screaming at the other drivers on the road. Funny how he kept asking if I wanted to be driven even further in order to catch up with the bus that I thought I might miss. Even funnier how people take such pleasure in mind games like this. The only reason he asked me if I wanted to be driven even further, was to test me, to see if I would say yes, so he could further underscore my selfishness and inconsideration. The question was repeated despite my being content with waiting in the falling snow for 30 minutes while I waited for the next bus.

So could I have driven myself to the bus stop today? Was the snowfall manageable? The answers are yes to both questions. I wanted to borrow his keys and drive myself in his All Wheel Drive car, my car tends not to do so well in icy conditions.

In my defense, I didn't start my morning with behavior that might be construed as burdensome to him. But when I asked for his keys he said that he needed to drop me off if it was snowing because he would need his car for his own drive. As it turned out the snow was light enough, the temperature was above freezing and we ended up taking my car instead of his, since his car was blocked by mine. So now it looked like:

the car we were driving was my inadequate one
the weather was fine
there was no reason for him to have chauffeuring duties

But when we were already half the way there and he started screaming and having a fit about his situation, what could I possibly have done? Should I have asked him to turn back so that he could get off at home and I could resume driving myself, wouldn't that have cost him more time? Should I have genuflected and apologized for my crass behavior? What? So I just closed my ears, chose stoicism and silence.

The day got worse when the dodge ball that five bosses seem to be playing with one - employee - me - took on surreal proportions with the "direct line" boss saying that the other "dotted line" bosses had some concerns, the "dotted line" bosses denying everything and telling me that they've never once had an iota of concern! And me appearing like a defensive and reactive moron simply because I was trying to share my perspective on things.

I can't function well enough in a senseless world where my perspective doesn't count and my reasons for doing things a certain way, based on precedence, or prior arrangements don't count. I need direct dealing, and an environment that lacks political ramifications. I have never been adept at dodging the ball in dodgeball.

The family tragedy forms a baseline drone to everything, the headache grows to gargantuan proportions on the eve of vacation that I was looking forward to before but the thought of which fills me with nothing but the shrill noise of trepidation in my head.

But in the grand scheme of things I am not a Chilean or a Haitian. My heart goes out to them, my one bad day is so meaningless in light of all their tragedies. I know my tomorrow will be different. I also know that there are many friends and well wishers out there who will read this bit of whining. They'll be alarmed, they'll be concerned about my well-being, my life, my reactions, my headache, my trepidations. Some will tell me this too shall pass, some will offer hugs, some might even say, "Oh get over yourself!"

Thank you all in advance for those reactions. I love you all for caring. But just know that I know my tomorrow will be different. So many other days in my life will be different. There will be happier moments, better circumstances, better days - filled with euphoria and a bounce in my step.

This day was just not one of them.

On the bright side, the hubby did send me a text saying he got to his meeting on time and that he is sorry for his "tude" this morning. I'll go home and tell him he was right he didn't need to drive me and that I need to stop being so afraid of the snow and more self sufficient on snowy days.

Or...better yet...make a decision to change my life; warmer climes, easier commutes, be less like a workhorse, be more devoted to my interests and passions than to circumstances that ceased bringing me any joy a long time ago.

Nothing...

2010-03-02T14:34:00.000-05:00

I call these posts nothing. Sometimes they emerge coherent and appear to be about something. But they really are one vast stretch of nothingness in the grand scheme of things. I am reminded of the idea of "nothing" encore while reading bassist Victor Wooten's book called The Music Lesson where an interesting cast of characters make successive incursions into Mr Wooten's life and talk to him about rhythm, intonation, tone, dynamics and other aspects of music.

One of his lessons is about nothingness. The teacher who teaches him about the importance of nothing, of nothing being the base (or bass - an instrument that forms a base). She highlights for him how the addition of zero or nothing to any number multiplies it by ten.

When nothingness is all pervasive we start to sense the things that matter, the things that count.

Death brings us face to face with nothingness. It settles in like several zeroes stacking up behind the living, mutiplying their grief tenfold several times over, as hopes and dreams crash, as wave upon wave of memories crash over us, splintering into several pieces that can never be glued together again. And words...words can never express how we feel.

My dear cousin, only 19 years of age, is no more. He lost his life on the first day of March, 2010 leaving us all in tears, unable to make sense of it all. I did not know him well. I had only seen him on a couple of occasions, once when he was very young, four or five years old. I remember him moving around the house, never without his notebook and pencil, looking like the little scholar he grew up to be. I met him again a few years ago. This time he was a lovable teenager doing justice to his name - Anurag (love). He spent several fun filled hours with my daughter who was four at the time.

Now he's gone. I never had a chance to get to know him well. His mom is my mausi (my mom's youngest sister). The age difference between her and my mom is immense and my parents have loved her as though she's another daughter. I have always been close to her and since hearing the news all I can think of are my memories of her, of how much I enjoyed her company while growing up. She was always smiling, always cheerful, very giving and fiercely protective of every family member. She made every summer vacation spent in her company memorable for my brother and I. I could never imagine a grief of such immense proportions ever crossing her angelic countenance.

I am stunned and speechless at the unfairness and senselessness of it all. Every word sounds trite, every feeling inadequate and yet one reaches, one tries to order the events, attribute a cause, find someone or something to blame, wondering why if there's a God would he allow such a thing to happen to someone who should never have experienced such grief, seen such tragedy.

And when all wondering hits a grim brick wall one sinks to the ground in utter hopelessness, the meaninglessness of it all.

The sea of nothingness appears like the only reality with no lessons to offer, no takeaways, no morals to the story. That's when the things that count emerge in sharp focus; the people around us, the need to never take anyone we love for granted, to live every moment like it's our last, to dance on the beaches that surround the inky waters of nothingness.

Some validation

2010-02-24T13:06:00.000-05:00

Roger Cohen's column here is a validation of sorts for whatever I was thinking when I wrote "Nothing: Part 17"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/opinion/23iht-edcohen.html?em

Nothing: Part 17

2010-02-22T15:16:00.000-05:00

Have been thinking about polarized opinions. It doesn't take too long for two camps to form within seconds of the looming of a new issue on the horizon. The opinions are sclerotic at birth with no room for consideration, deference or deliberation. As if the infant thought looked into the eyes of Medusa at birth.

I came across this Schopenhauer quote in the "Train of Thought" series that appear in NY subway trains:

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."

Funny how stray thoughts tend to get validated in this fashion.

Wonder why it's so difficult for us to acknowledge the existence of other points of view. Why is it so hard to agree to disagree instead of forcing our opinions down other throats and always trying to find converts and followers? This same sense of wonder extends to our conscious efforts to declare ourselves a brand. We all have virtual soapboxes to climb these days and we want to shout out our "brands".

The word "wondering" often hints at a setting apart of oneself. Even though I am using inclusive pronouns to declare that I am as guilty of it all as everyone else. The use of the word "guilty" in the previous sentence further betrays my prejudice and lack of non-judgemental impartiality. I wonder about my own motivations. Stating my own opinion about the entrenched opinions of others is making me feel uncomfortably opinionated.

All this makes me reexamine the old ideal of having the strength of one's convictions. Maybe the entrenchment of opinions is a consequence of being rigidly ideal-bound, of fighting a perception of spinelessness and amorality, of being seen as someone who dwells in grey areas rather than the pristine world of black and white. But flexibility in thought need not be an ugly grey. Why not see it as an entire spectrum of possibilities between opposing poles of thought?

This will get classified under idle deliberation but I do hope to personally "tend to" (channeling Calculus) a place where there is room for more cooperation, consideration and tolerance rather than rabid competition and an unyielding entrenchment of opinions.

Nothing: Part 16

2010-02-12T17:39:00.001-05:00

I never learnt how to ride a bike. I remember trying to learn. I remember my Dad giving me riding lessons. There was a brief moment when I thought I had it. I felt free, as though I was flying, as though I had finally got the hang of it. Right at that moment I asked my Dad to let go so I could give it a shot on my own. When there was no response from him I realized he wasn't around. He had let go several minutes ago and was watching from a distance. I had been riding on my own. This realization and my fall were simultaneous. I never attempted to ride again.

When I am practicing my violin, on some days I don't think about the minutiae of playing. On these days I trust (trust being the key word - could have used faith as well) I'll read fluently, absorb the rhythm, tempo, the dynamics, and just play, occasionally with my eyes closed. But then, after a lull, and as if on cue, I'm suddenly aware that it's all going rather well. As soon as that happens, I switch gears and try to control some aspects of my playing, pay special attention to the accents on certain notes, or the crescendo signs in the music, or I suddenly start wondering whether my sound is mezzo forte when the music requires it to be piano. As soon as I start worrying about these tiny details I introduce a scratchiness to the tone, I start hitting wrong notes and I just find myself baffled at how everything fell apart as soon as I decided to exercise some level of conscious control. It's almost as if my mind got in the way.

I've talked about driving before. When I drive I never think about the driving itself. I have the larger goal of transporting myself safely from one point to another. My safety would be hampered if I never took my eyes off the dashboard indicators or if I kept worrying about my hands being at the perfect 10-2 position on the wheel rather than having a sense of the bigger picture and the larger goal. After all these years I've learnt to trust (there's that word again) that something else controls the minutiae, that my conscious attention to these matters is not required, that the brain is dealing with this at a deeper more subtle level.

My husband has faith in a red thread around his wrist. The red thread might give the impression of extreme religiosity or superstition. But that's not what I think it is. My mom is a big believer in prayer and in having faith. She prays for our well being and success and the red thread she then sends us renders those wishes and prayers tangible. My husband keeps the thread on forever...until my mom sends him a new one. I don't think he sees the thread as a magical thing that would bring him luck, or maybe he does believe that, who knows! I believe having it around his wrist enables him to relinquish some of the conscious control I talked about before. It enables a shedding of worries about where the next paycheck would come from, what our future holds, the what-ifs about the next contract being more than a year away...such thoughts could stump him and paralyze him. But once the thread is on his wrist he gets more focussed on the task of making phone calls, sending out resumes, doing all the things that will take him to the next level.

I always start my day saying a couple of Sanskrit shlokas that I don't even truly understand. I chant them out aloud. It's my own way of setting aside some baggage, telling myself to not micro-manage my life to such an extent that I am petrified, immobilized. I relinquish some degree of conscious control when I say the words and it I am not even sure I want to understand what the words really mean, that would defeat the purpose. Has this helped me? Perhaps. Worrying about whether this has helped or not would also be defeating the purpose.

What I've come to realize is that the words: prayers, faith, beliefs in a higher power - these words are secular in their intent. They don't represent a belief in God, they don't make one religious. They are probably a very scientific and healthy means of surrender. As an agnostic, I am inclined to see them as surrender to some part of our very complex brains; a relegation of these niggling thoughts to the part of the left brain where they belong - so that our 'mind' isn't always tripping us up.

I am not eloquent enough to say all that I want to say on the subject but I like the message behind the Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

--Reinhold Niebuhr

I would be inclined to replace all the God references with "Left Brain Neurons and Synapses" (LBNS) but I would still be surrendering and relinquishing control.

I am reminded of this very funny scene in a Ben Kingsley movie, I am forgetting the name (it'll come back to me at midnight when I've relinquished control and stopped thinking about it), where he plays an assassin who has a drinking problem. He doesn't believe in God so his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor tells him to surrender to a higher power, anything, anyone. His character then catches sight of the Golden Gate bridge and decides to surrender to it.

Nothing: Part 15

2010-02-09T17:51:00.000-05:00

Multi-tasking. The word sounds cliched and ugly to me these days. I considered myself an expert at it before, took so much pride in my parallel processing abilities. I can still do it with ease but it brings me no joy. It doesn't come with the feather in the cap of having packed each 24 hour period with so much. But it makes me feel as though things are just a short step away from spiralling out of control even if it's about having a conversation while the television is on. I want to go back to giving my full attention to one thing at a time...within reason...I still don't think I can drive without listening to music; so maybe two things at a time.

Is it age or exhaustion? I am averse to attributing anything to age; the same pair of eyes are staring at the greyness of my office cubicle as did at the colorful kiddy drawings that used to be tacked up on school bulletin boards. Afterall, some neurons stay with us for life. It's just a deep desire to turn away from all the noise, from nerves jangled by the informational juggernaut that bears down on me, unrelenting in its approach.

We had to work for our information before, travel to it, swim upstream or downstream for it and now we stand still, rooted and catatonic but awash in news that's old even before it can be fully processed by our brain. Perhaps there's such a thing as information erosion, stripping away my epithelials, a layer at a time while I stand still, buffetted and battered by the toxic waves. And of course there is an inability to move away from it all, to acknowledge the corrosive effects.

I never thought I would resort to yearning for things as they were before, but it used to be so much more satisfying to pull The New York Times out of its translucent blue sleeve and read it, a section at a time, instead of picking up on tinyurl tweeted by someone. Everyone finds the same things interesting, everyone forwards the same things to all of their followers, constantly trying to be the first ones who picked up on something, anything. Why the race?

The only concept I somewhat retained from my awful MBA corporate finance course is that information is old almost as soon as it qualifies as information. By the time one decides to make investment decisions on information that they now have it would already be too late. But now we have corporations stocking up on "social media" employees to monitor every social networking site to watch for trends, to monitor things like "buzz" and "hits" and "trending topics". Isn't this counter-intuitive? If you didn't create the trend then you are a pathetic follower! By the time your corporation decides to act on what's hot it will long be cold and dead! So what is the point of it all? To my mind it's an image of a car that's attempting to cross a drawbridge that suddenly opens up and rises steeply in front of the driver before he or she has a chance to go across, leaving the pull of gravity as the only outcome for car and driver.

I want to turn away from it all, I don't want to get snagged in things that have just gone "viral". I don't want Google to track my location and figure out where my clacking keyboard is, I don't want iTunes and amazon.com to "recommend" more of the same things to me, emailing me what my previous preferences show I am interested in and I don't want Facebook telling me I should befriend someone because he or she is a friend of a friend of a friend.

The only option is to walk away, to stop being hynotized and so mesmerized by it all. I am growing to resent being told to like more of what I've liked in the past and to like something because others are liking it.

I want them to think chaos theory when they see my profile...refer to Jurassic Park again where Jeff Goldblum so lucidly illustrates how it's impossible to tell the direction in which a drop of water will branch out as it trickles. Just because I looked for books written by surfers shouldn't make these prying eyes comfortable with the idea of marketing surfing equipment to me. I read an article in the last issue of The New Yorker, in the personal history section, about fishing for chain pickerel. I liked what I read. I learnt so much about pickerel, how they eat their own kind, how you see crayfish and frogs hop out of pickerel if you slice it open and how you often find a pickerel inside a pickerel because they devour their young. I might be curious enough to do some searches on pickerel, pike or walleye, now that my mind is open to it. Would they then peg me as an intrepid pickerel fisherwoman?

Something needs to give. Marketers need to rewrite their algorithms to account for eclectic tastes. Information won't stop coming at us, so we need to install personal dams, dykes, whatever it takes to slow down, divert the flow...irrigate our minds efficiently and not chaotically.

In the meantime, I find myself revisiting the song Amazing Grace, and seeing the beauty in the Serenity Prayer and making a conscious effort to just slow down, even if the effort is still imperceptible, the intention will drive it.

More on why an agnostic like me is thinking of these prayers and the issue of surrender in the next post...

Nothing: Part 14

2010-01-25T14:59:00.007-05:00

A woman sat across from me in the subway car. I couldn't stop staring. Her face was a study in symmetry. Every feature flawless, the skin unblemished, the complexion luminous, incandescent. The hair was dark and thick with a lock falling over her left eye when she bent down. Her lashes were long, each downward swoop concealing a twinkling intelligence. It embarrassed me to be caught staring. It's true what they say - you can always tell when someone's staring.

As I stole glances at her I tried picturing her as a central character in a novel. I wanted to come up with words to describe her to a reader. Would it be possible to describe her in a sentence that wasn't burdened with adjectives? Could I divine anything about her simply by looking at her as so many novelists believe can be done? It seemed impossible.

I started studying others in the car, wondering if other more seasoned faces offered insights into the souls within. Some reflected stress through their furrowed brows, some painted a picture of resignation, some showed anger and discouraged eye contact. But the only difference between her face and others seated around her was the absence of any surface clues in hers. What traits would I attribute to her if I forced her into a novel of mine?

My stop was next and she soon became a passing thought. But it did make me ponder physical descriptions in the novels I've read. The authors spend time getting it right, making the person real to the reader. For instance the woman defined by her concavity: concave torso, concave cheeks; her concavity being the only outstanding physical attribute in Will Self's short story - Ward 9. I look at the folks around me and wonder if I would have ever been able to describe a rather pinched looking person with all that the word "concave" implies...caving in on oneself, imploding...

Novelists always highlight a central character by assigning attributes which would result in instant admiration, revulsion, sympathy or pity for their creation. A character in a novel spots another for the first time and accurately guesses most things about the person, things like...the confidence masking an underlying vulnerability, the clothes telling a story, the nails, the hair, the body fat, all leading the audience toward a definitive conclusion about the person being regarded. Is such accurate assessment possible in real life?

Perhaps it is, because one sees it even in memoirs: Sting seeing Trudie for the first time at his neighbor's place, noting the long scar on her face, her lips, the lips that reminded him of a former girlfriend who had just passed away...and feeling an instant attraction. Others writing about their lives and saying how they knew someone was THE ONE when they met him or her. Does it seem so in hindsight, perhaps? A false memory, a conflation that makes one believe what they felt was instantaneous rather than gradual or incremental?

I think I need to pay more attention to faces if I ever want to realize any latent dreams about being a writer of fiction. I would have to hone the skills of surreptitious viewing and analysis of facial expressions and other physical attributes and body languages. Some blinders would have to go, some inhibitions discarded. I would have to be immune to the embarrassment of embarrassing someone with my intense regard.

Ah, on second thoughts, who wants to appear so creepy!! Forget novel writing!

I caught sight of my own reflection in a shop window and had to make some instant adjustments - my lower lip appeared to be pushing upwards at my upper lip, chin tilted upwards, giving my mouth a sad and defiant look all at once. How confused would that make another wannabe writer who was trying to come to some conclusions about what a sad and defiant face signalled about me? That's assuming I'd be a protagonist in this imaginary sly watcher's future literary effort, and not some mediocre sideliner.

Nothing: Part 13

2010-01-21T13:49:00.007-05:00

Sometimes I think of the guy who taught me how to drive when I first came to the US twenty one years ago. He was a fine teacher and was very patient with me when I made the car lurch or when I stood frozen at the "Yield" sign unable to pick the right moment to make my left turns or when I appeared too eager to hit the brakes or misjudged the degree of the steering wheel turn needed to flawlessly execute a turn.

It didn't take more than 2 weeks to learn how to drive (except for parallel parking -I doubt I've learnt that even now and avoid it as best as I can). I remember him well because after I passed my driving test, he presented me with a delightful mix tape of his reggae music, to which he'd seen me tap my feet while waiting for the light to change, and because he said something very simple to me, he said that driving was just like walking.

He asked me to imagine walking on the streets of a city. It would be natural to give people enough space, to not stop short, to go around obstacles or people who were slower and to not bump into people who were in front of me. It would also be natural to signal my intent and to maintain a broader, panoramic vision than just staring at the hydrant that was 2 steps away. Driving came so much easier after that.

These days it isn't something that requires too much thought. Sometimes I don't have any recollection of the seventeen elapsed minutes of thought during the drive that gets me back home from my bus stop. And yet, the fact that I find myself safe, turning the key to my front door night after night, proves that I did everything right, sans anxiety. Processed every sensory input on the road: the other cars, the slow drivers, the swervers, the cell phone talkers, changing lights, everything at unimaginable mental processing speeds, without really "thinking" about it.

I am waiting to reach that point when it comes to playing the violin. I am obsessed with reaching that realm of unthinking effortlessness, where everything happens at a deeper mental level, rendering the act of playing seamless.

I am at the stage where I am aware of the right playing posture, the angle that the instrument, resting between my shoulder and my chin, needs to make to the vertical plane dividing my body in equal halves, I know how to hold the bow correctly and how to place my fingers on the fingerboard. All this knowledge coalesces into a meaningful whole on many days and nights. I have felt the joy of a well-intoned practice session. But on many nights knowing all the right things just doesn't seem enough. Sometimes my bowing arm shakes, sometimes there is a scratchiness during switching strings that seems unshakeable and sometimes the rhythm is persistently off despite my best intentions and despite knowing what it would take to fix these problems. Some sessions are pure mortification for me and torture for my poor teacher.

She has stared at me in wide-eyed amazement because there are days when I fail miserably at playing a passage where I might have done her proud the week before. I fail to understand what goes wrong and why.

Going back to walking, something I've been doing for the last 41 years, it usually comes easily enough except for the times when I could be at my highest level of confidence, walking briskly on the sidewalks of NYC, marvelling at the shimmery bits of mica that make them sparkle at night, observing the lights on Broadway, generally feeling good and I suddenly land on my ankle bone.

"Ouch!!"

However, did that happen? What caused it? I look around and can find no answers, no bumps, no cracks, but a smarting ankle bone all the same.

What goes wrong?

My sensory neurons should work so much better with the motor neurons, synapses firing prestissimo or allegro appassionato at the very least. More neurological collaboration, please! What is with the lackadaisical attitude up there?

I doubt I'll ever understand.

This post was going to appear on this blog yesterday. It was wordier, meatier and made a better point than I've been able to make in today's attempt. In fact today I have failed to make a point. But I was on a roll yesterday. And then I lost it all! I lost some 500 words in an inexplicable instant. My hands were nowhere near the delete keys.

I was angry and frustrated. It's so hard to revive a train of thought. Especially when there's a paucity of thoughtful thoughts!

So again I ask - what goes wrong?

Something breaks, somewhere.

Nothing: Part 12

2010-01-14T11:00:00.002-05:00

This is a sequel to Part 11 and refers to the whole business of nastiness...eventually...after several detours.

A dulled duration of a long commute yields to some strange digressions in thought. I was sitting in my window seat, soporific or alert and lucid in turns. My legs had been crossed for a long time and the knee that bore the brunt of the other leg was now screaming in protest.

It made me think of the stairs and escalators that were still part of my immediate future and how much I was starting to detest them because they bothered my knees. I am not in chronic knee pain. But I feel the sudden painful twinge when I am going up or down stairs. Maybe it started when I decided to climb all the way down the Eiffel Tower and perhaps it got worse when I was expecting but it certainly feels like something that's here to stay. It's where my fabric is starting to tear or unravel.

It'll slowly worsen, become chronic, transform me from a brisk and fast walker to a hobbler. Unless I can find a way to stem this damage...knee braces, stretching, joint supplements, exercise...whatever it takes.

Hobbling is absolutely the worst possible future image for myself. I think of old images of Indira Gandhi running up and down the stairs even at an advanced age. Well...that's where I'd rather see myself; running not hobbling.

I thought about the part of me that's remained unchanged while everything around me changed, aged, transformed, matured. There is something core and something essential within that has remained the same. I know it and I feel it.

I have grown up and landed in a time and a place where being resigned to one's circumstances and giving up is passé. I owe this core, essential, unchanged and pristine part of me a 'vehicle' that is in perfect working condition. I'd rather cruise to the finish line in a Bentley than in a rusty Chevrolet station wagon; the one my first employer had me cruise around in for the longest time.

It isn't a selfish, narcissistic or vanity laced desire to keep oneself in good shape for as long as is realistic. It is a decision for which our future generations, who end up bearing our burdens in more ways than one, will thank us.

Which brings me to how this connects with the last post which talked about the draining nature of negativity and nastiness.

This rage I sense all around me, road rage, Starbucks' line rage, subway rage, bus rage, cars raging at pedestrians, pedestrians raging at cars, bloggers writing nasty posts, blog commenters being vicious...all this and more in many ways appears to be like a twinging pain in the knee, the major load-bearing joint in our bodies.

It cannot possibly be healthy, it signals an unraveling of society. It indicates some sort of coming apart at the seams. It makes me feel as though we'll all be hobbled if we don't attend to this, if we don't eliminate this toxicity from within.

And there are others who feel the same way. Like Nick Bilton on a blog in the Technology section of the New York Times today, where he talks about the nastiness in online interactions and people often forgetting that the person at the receiving end of the nastiness is a living and breathing human.

Maybe the real world nastiness I sense, absorb and sometimes reflect, is an extension of our ever-present online personalities?

Nothing: Part 11

2010-01-12T14:29:00.002-05:00

I find the expression of displeasure draining even as I realize I am expressing displeasure as I say this. I feel intense fatigue at the people all around me always finding something to complain about. The act is so contagious. Not only does misery love company, it actively seeks to corrupt said company.

I am being a hypocrite because I often lead the charge when it comes to complaining. This morning, at 7:13 am, I was waiting for the red light to turn green so I could enter the parking lot where I leave my car in order to take my bus. I heard the bus revving up its engine. It leaves at 7:15 sharp. I found myself screaming at the intersection, willing the light to change. I felt ashamed of my behavior even as I continued slapping the steering wheel and screaming at the top of my lungs, saying how much I hated that particular stop light, how someone needed to do something about it. I wouldn't have been behaving this way if I wasn't alone in the car, this ugly side isn't for public display. But the part of me that hates such ugliness was appalled at myself. We aren't even programmed to be consistent with ourselves. We're such sorry creations.

In the bus I kept praying no one else would sit next to me because they would bring with them the smells of the foods and drinks they had consumed the night before. Their heads would slump onto my shoulder as they snoozed or their lax arms and legs would fall on me or lean on me as I deliberated nudging them upright with force.

I feigned a sneeze and coughed a few times, hoping that would be a deterrent. Such scheming, such selfish nastiness. Of course my prayers weren't answered, the bus rarely leaves unless all the seats are occupied. Thankfully, the person who sat next to me was minimal in her usage of space and didn't slump or snore during the ride. But my cantankerous morning antics don't please me one bit.

The casual conversations are also full of whininess. People complaining about the weather, their healths, their headaches, their aches and pains, their chores, about drivers who delay the evening commute because they like getting overtime dollars (this was news to me, I always assumed it was just the heavy traffic). I should resist joining the chorus but I seldom do.

There should be some degree of acceptance, some resolve to just go with the flow, to just put up with some things as par for the course, instead of raging against anything and everything, pumping our fists up and down, striking at imaginary slights. It's everywhere!

We need to ratchet down the negativity...rather...I need to ratchet it down.

Nothing: Part 10

2010-01-05T16:38:00.004-05:00

It's sad when even the posts about nothing seem impossible for several days. How much of a vacuum have I created around me?

I think a part of me felt as if it was being dragged into the new decade. I felt like a recalcitrant child, like my brother at the age of three or four when he expressed his displeasure at having to walk for a long distance by simply sitting down on the road and saying he wasn't going to budge unless he was carried. I felt like screaming, "I am not done, I haven't finished living this decade, I haven't been able to do much of anything, I am not coming to 2010!" And here I am. Sulking as the new year gets older, as it vanishes before my eyes, making the passage of time even scarier than it was last year.

I am already imagining all the greetings that will sound exactly the same as they did this year, as they do every year. Some folks my age don't even bother to spell it all out these days - HNY and SG is as far as they can bring themselves to go. Then there are some others who shame us all by actually finding a way to anchor the year in our memories with creatively personalized greeting cards that appear right on time and don't feel generic.

There are the greetings that appear from one's boss's boss's boss, with pictures of their wives and kids skiing in Aspen or surfing in Hawaii, with no message, just a signature faked by an assistant. I glance at them and wonder if they would even say a word to me or know I worked in the same company if I ran across them outside of the office building. But in the spirit of the season I assume they have my best interests at heart as I pin it up or tape it on the wall that displays the card. I even remember the one that arrived from the CEO of the company where I worked two or three employers ago. The greetings arrived after my job had been eliminated. It was nice to know she wished me well.

So here's the new year then. 5 days old. I have 360 days to figure out what to do with myself this year. I didn't make any resolutions; past years have shown that to be an exercise in futility. I do have fuzzy goals. There must be some knob I could turn to make them appear sharper, more focussed, more clearly resolved.

I'd better list some of them, or else they wouldn't stand a chance at being realized:

1. Find a way to spend more time with Anoushka. Less whining about lack of time, more concrete action - whatever form that action takes.

2. Find out for sure if I can derive any pleasure from cooking and gardening. No luck so far.

3. Write something that doesn't deserve the title - "Nothing". This is fuzzy in the extreme. Hasn't been backed by any concrete action so far.

4. Master the vibrato technique. How do they make their fingers vibrate on the violin?

5. Make my music practice sessions more productive; more right-brained, less left brained, rather, less hare-brained!

6. Go further along the path of lowering expectations from others, for instance:

- Not feeling even a twinge of envy when someone in the office receives a floral delivery for their special occasions. That twinge makes no sense because I am not a flowers person, neither is my hubby. Flowers die. I can't even say, "You don't send me flowers anymore", because he never has! I'd rather he didn't and I'd rather I didn't feel like it would be nice to get them! Quite the exercise in lowering expectations this! I need to isolate it and define it in order to lower it!

- Watch movies or plays alone, dine alone or with friends who indicate they wouldn't mind joining me, if the spouse is unwilling. This way we won't have to come to blows about his fascination with Poker or football and mine with arts, entertainment and recreation. This might prevent high decibel conversations about our divergent interests that so defy 19 years of togetherness.

7. Celebrate, memorialize and anchor the small A n P n "Little A" area - if one pictures a Venn diagram with 3 sets. I need to do it more often, really "feel" that I am doing it. Maybe then I wouldn't quite mind the "quicksilvery racehorse" passage of time.

Nothing: Part 9

2009-12-27T20:54:00.004-05:00

The cold persists in its stuffy, congested form. Making it difficult for me to practice Raag Deshkar without getting out of breath. But there's still a couple of months to go before the concert. Perhaps my rendition will be acceptable and presentable by then.

The holidays have passed. Monday is knocking. I'll probably be the only one at work with everyone else on an extended vacation. There will be peace and quiet everywhere. So much peace, so much quiet spilling over from the peace and quiet at home. Why don't peace and quiet go to those who crave it? I have never wanted it and have always had too much of it. My vocal chords rust and my ear drums don't vibrate much. Or at least not with the kinds of sounds I want to absorb, the sounds of pleasant, meaningful, enlightening conversations and uplifting music.

I've spent the last four days in one room or another of the house and have gone out to see movies when I couldn't take the incessant TV watching and being indoors, hearing the wind rustle and rattle my home and the rain streak my windows as the sun failed to rise.

I wish I could have used the time to write something meaningful but I am still languishing in nothingness.

Some ideas, concerns or notions do take firm hold when one doesn't have too much else to think about, or when the things one needs to think about are rather depressing like l'argent and how all drudgery stems from the need to not just think about it but do something about it.

So the thought that grabbed a firm hold this time originated with a comment proffered so casually by a TV personality on a VH1 program which was counting down the top 100 songs of the 1990s. Somewhere, sitting comfortably, in the middle of the list was Cher's song: Do You Believe In Life After Love.

Clinton Kelly, from the show What Not To Wear was being interviewed about the song. He liked the song and he prefaced his opinion on it with the following comment referring to Cher's age at the time she recorded this song:

"How does a 52 year old woman make herself relevant?"

This comment was uttered so casually, in such a matter of fact manner, as if it were a given, in the perception of most people, that a fifty-two year old woman slides into irrelevance. She is not on anyone's radar screen, isn't expected to be in the limelight. She is unremembered, unnecessary, unseen and unheard.

There was a similar theme to this day almost from the moment I woke up. When I wake up in the morning I usually log in to my computer. The gossip that greeted me this morning was about actress Susan Sarandon who had just broken up with her partner of 23 years, Tim Robbins. The gossip columnists were speculating if Sarandon, probably in her fifties, was dating a 31 year old. I read this piece of gossip aloud to my husband and his comment was, "Wow! Isn't that unnatural? What does a woman her age stand to gain from a relationship like this?"

My husband loves to get a rise out of me in matters such as this. So I decided not to let myself be aggravated by him. But I wondered again about the light in which women of a certain age are perceived by the world, not just by other men but other women as well.

Later in the day I was chatting with a friend who teaches. She was telling me about her disappointment at not being invited to a function where a young and dynamic Indian leader was going to address students and teachers but had requested that the only teachers who were to be present were to be less than the age of thirty five; perceived irrelevance strikes again!

The thought is depressing. I want to rail against this perception but what good would the railing do? It is unfortunate that it exists and that those of us who feel the need to rail and rage against it need to fight it with all we've got, until the time that such an utterance becomes unheard of.

Meanwhile, two of the brilliantly enacted and directed movies I saw were Up in the Air, starring George Clooney and the musical Nine, starring Daniel Day Lewis and nine gorgeous women.

The two movies seemed to address, in some ways, the male irrelevance. Men examining the point in life in which they find themselves. In Nine Nicole Kidman's character - Claudia - who plays Maestro Guido Contini's (Daniel Day Lewis portraying a film director) muse. When Guido is talking to her about the women who shape the man through every stage in his life, fueling his ambition, helping him reach the highest of heights, she reacts by saying she would rather be the man.

I thought that was brilliant! Of course, let a man be our muse for a change!

Nothing: Part 8

2009-12-23T11:42:00.003-05:00

My cold has gone on for a very long time. Nyquil gives me a good night's rest and fools me into thinking that the rhino virus has been vanquished. But the symptoms return with a vengeance the next day and I can't possibly take Nyquil during the day.

I was exploring the over-the-counter cold medicine aisle at the pharmacy and noticed something interesting. Every cold medicine brand comes in night and day time strengths. The thing that bothers me the most about a cold is the runny nose and the sneezing. And yet none of the day time pills are designed to relieve runny nose or sneezing!

Day time - Multi-symptom relief:
Aches
Fever
Cough
Nasal Congestion

Night time - Multi-symptom relief:
Aches
Fever
Cough
**Sneezing**
**Runny Nose**

Sneezing and runny nose are the worst part of the cold and apparently there is nothing you can take in the day time (unless you plan to snooze at your desk) that keeps you from sneezing or sniffling.

So the sneezes and the sniffles keep coming. At least people give me a wide berth in buses and trains and I get the whole seat to myself. The new thing about sneezing in the crook of your elbow (instead of your palms, when you suddenly find yourself without tissues), to prevent a spewing of germs for all to inhale, has left me with several jackets and sweaters with sneezed in sleeves that need drycleaning or, better yet, burning...not sure drycleaning will help.

I suppose if self medication fails to deliver me from this cold, that has already lasted over seven days, I might have to drag myself to the doctor. But let's see. I'll give it another couple of days.

Misery, miserable misery!