vidya’s posterous

What does home mean to you? Let me rephrase that: what would you put -- or not -- in an empty space to bind it closer to you? What is the unique signature you'd bring to a home?

Would you leave it bare and let the space breathe?
Would you paint the walls in vibrant colours or would you favour an austere, all-white look?
Would you grow plants?
Would you have a pet?
How much space is too much space?
Are you easily smitten by the illusion of space?
How little space is too little space?
Wooden warmth or steely polish?
Do you consider your home a canvas for your creativity or is it a safe refuge? Or is it a pit stop in the relentless race of life?
Is home a fixed address or is it a fluid feeling?

Over the past few weeks, I've had mixed feelings about the mint-fresh apartment V and I recently moved into. It is spacious, airy, well-equipped and pleasing to the eye. But I miss the intimacy of our earlier apartment: the out-of-shape bean bag slumped in front of the TV with just enough space for the two of us, the smell of prawns wafting from the kitchen and the sliver of sea visible from the bedroom window on a clear day. You see, I am a bundle of contradictions. I was ecstatic about the moving experience until we moved. After a lifetime of picking up-and-moving on, I find it hard to strike roots. But ultimately, I do and often without acknowledging it.

So I've been thinking about what flavours and textures to infuse our new apartment with to make it our own. In the process, I've discovered things about myself:

I am scared of hoarding and it takes me little thought to throw away what I don't need.
I might love people but I enjoy nothing more than spending a sunny morning with myself.
I love the idea of having plants. Sometimes, you need other living things in a home beside yourself.
For the first time in a long time, I miss music.
And finally, I've taken to cooking with gusto. When everything else is unfamiliar, familiar food can save the day.

Loading mentions Retweet

I wrote what I thought was a very angsty piece on the mockery that television channels made of the November 26 attacks, exactly one year ago. I never completed it. Surprisingly, much of this still rings true.

Long before a real education in journalism and the wisdom of the years had caught up with me, I watched with unwavering fascination as a female journalist reported from the battle lines of the Kargil War in Kashmir. The histrionics of war didn’t seem – at least to my naïve eyes – as interesting as this brave woman, who didn’t flinch even as sniper fire nearly grazed her ears.

The Kargil War in 1999 was different from every other war India had fought, not only because the specter of nuclear annihilation hovered precariously over both countries, but also because the battle barged right into our living rooms. Thanks to live television, every average Joe could follow a blow-by-blow account of the battle, right as it unfolded. Watching the tanks roll and hearing the sickening staccato of artillery fire only further stoked the fierce, almost unthinking patriotism that hung in the air. India had witnessed wars before but I’m fairly certain that my parents had only visualised combat scenes in their heads, or read about them in history books. This was different: it was immediate and in your face.

I, for one, was hooked to the raw power of live television. I had wanted to be a journalist for years, but it was easier to make up my mind now. I wanted to be a part of the young, microphone-wielding brigade that was changing the way television news was presented in India.

I questioned that decision several times over the next few years, none the least when I found myself working for a business news channel based in Mumbai. In the vast, all-glass newsroom that was my workplace, there were few places wherein to hide. And it seemed like we, trainee producers, were constantly in the line of fire.

When news broke, our backs did too. In the spiraling frenzy that followed, we typed faster than our fingers permitted to put “tickers” out. Even before we made sense of what had happened, a reporter would have reached the spot and we would have “cut” live. OB van numbers would swim before our eyes. A thousand voices would bark orders simultaneously, and there was no time to be intimidated or confused.

A year on, I realised that the adrenaline rush of 24/7 television had only drained me out. I had no passion for the information I put out – I was only a “keyboard monkey”, as a former colleague put it, capable of cutting-and-pasting with alarming speed.

Convinced that its immediacy was also its undoing, I ran a mile from television and into the warm embrace of the written word. I lived without TV for three years, and never missed its cackle. Until, of course, ten armed men walked in to my city and put a gun to its head.

In the early hours of the siege, when every new text message brought more bad news – I hoped they were rumours but they weren’t – I was holed up in a bar in Bandra. I could only watch the horror unfold on a small television set at the bar.

Even by the standards of a city that has jostled with so much tragedy in recent years as to be considered jaded and soulless, the tragic events of November 26 and the days to follow cut deep. It was hard to comprehend how this city could be outraged so easily, and so completely. Every disbelieving eye in the fast emptying bar was preened to the television set, which was spewing out violent visuals that wouldn’t have been out of place in a war zone. On the night of November 26, as indeed for the 60 hours to follow, the television set was our only way to reach out to the rest of our suffering city.

In retrospect, I wonder how I willed myself to watch television during that terrible time. It is now common knowledge that faced with an unprecedented, developing crisis, Indian media channels engaged in something like a free-for-all. Everyone had an opinion, and everyone expressed it. Anchors dropped their already flimsy pretence of even-headedness and let it rip. One gentleman didn’t leave the studio to eat, shave or collect his thoughts for two days running. How coherent his running commentary was at the end of two days is anyone’s guess.

There is now proof that far from reporting events on the ground with restraint and accuracy, the cavalier media circus in fact may have endangered lives. Has anything really changed one year on? Television news is just as personality-driven, and television personalities are just as shrill and opinionated.
As for me, I have never regretted my decision. I may be in awe of the unparalleled power of television, but I’m happier wielding the pen for now.

Loading mentions Retweet

This weekend, I revisited a language I love via a band I've come to love. I listened to the Raghu Dixit Project at the Bandra Fort Amphitheatre, as part of the ongoing Celebrate Bandra festival, and fell in love with Kannada all over again. Years ago, while living in Bangalore, I was forced to learn to read and write Kannada as part of my school curriculum. Strangely, I took to the round, jalebi-like script of the language and the way it rolled off the tongue immediately. Strange, because I belong across the border - in Tamil Nadu - but have never learnt to read or write Tamil.

On Sunday evening, Raghu Dixit brought the already evocative Bandra Fort amphitheatre to life with his deep, powerful voice and inspired singing. I was especially delighted when he launched into Kannada folk rock -- it felt like revisiting an old friend. One song in particular lingered in my mind: it's called Gudugudiya and you can listen to it here (not the most intelligent video, but whatever).

The song was written by a 19th Century Sufi saint called Shishunala Sharif, who Wikipedia informs me is "recognised as the first ever Muslim poet of Kannada literature." I'm in no position to contest that, but I can tell you that I like his brand of philosophy. The lyrics of that song, roughly translated, propose that life is a hookah. I'm sure many agree and see it that way too, but I digress. So, consider that life is a hookah. Open the bag called your mind, take out the hash called greed and crush it, put it in a chillum called faith, set it alight with your intelligence and inhale the illumination. Don't you like it already?

My first tryst with Sufi poetry was when I read the unabashedly sensual, even erotic, poetry of Rumi, the 13th Century Persian poet and mystic. As a teenager, I remember being taken with the raw passion of Rumi's poems. As an adult, I marvel at how deeply and viscerally he felt his faith. Here is an excerpt from one of my favourites, In the Arc of your Mallet, which you can read here:

"I want to feel myself in you when you taste food,
in the arc of your mallet when you work,
when you visit friends, when you go
up on the roof by yourself at night.

There's nothing worse than to walk out along the street
without you. I don't know where I'm going.
You're the road, and the knower of roads,
more than maps, more than love."

Now if only all the purveyors of faith could phrase it in quite such a tantalising way, I would have never felt lost all this while!

Loading mentions Retweet

There's been plenty of time for random musings the past few days. As ever, a trip back home leaves me feeling content but conflicted. There's so much about home that is enticing and hard to leave behind: the warmth of my blankee, the free-flowing filter coffee, the parental units that I can leave all the worrying to for a few days. But I'm at odds with the city that my parents have chosen to retire in. In Chennai, a gentler-paced city that is charming precisely because it isn't racing with itself, I feel like a fringe element looking in on a party that I can never be a part of. In Mumbai, a giant-hearted tidal wave of a city, I sometimes come within a razor's edge of my sanity. In short, my heart is in so many places at the same time that home is destined to be somewhere in between.

Is home the place that you can stake a claim to? If it is, then how can we explain this? This National Geographic piece by Cathy Newman is an unabashedly sentimental ode to Venice, which she says, has one foot in a watery grave. The canals of Venice that have fed a million fantasies are also its undoing, says Newman. With every acqua alta or high tide, Venice's foundation sinks just a tad lower. With every new wave of tourists besieging the city, a few more of its indigenous residents are left adrift.

Consider for a moment this startling statistic: The number of Venetian residents in 2007: 60,000. Number of visitors in 2007: 21 million. Whose Venice is it anyway?

In these fluid times, cities can no longer afford to be ethnically exclusive. Try as they might, Raj Thackeray and the MNS will never be able to stem the mighty tide of migrants that pours into Mumbai every day. But Venice is not a pulsating hive of commerce; its very beauty puts limits on how much it can stretch its resources. Somewhere along the way, Venice seems to have sold out to the dollars that flood its canals, and Venetians have paid the price for it.

Venice has always been on my wishlist of places to visit, never mind the dizzying prices. But now, $40 seems too high a price to pay for a Carnival mask, for more reasons than one.

It's true what Newman says, "Kisses end. Dreams vanish, and sometimes cities too. We long for the perfect ending, but the curtain falls along with our hearts. Beauty is so difficult." 

I don't have any photos of Venice you haven't already seen, so I'll leave you with a photo of a stunning sky taken from my parents' balcony. Am I tempted to stay back in dear ol' Chennai? Sometimes.

Loading mentions Retweet

This morning, I watched a YouTube video of my effortlessly graceful 8-year-old niece performing the Bharatanatyam at a Diwali gathering in Calgary, Canada. She totally rocked the dance floor, giving the grown-ups a run for their money with her precise, limber steps. I was bursting with pride, of course. I could never look that self-assured in a sari at eight. In fact, Bharatanatyam and I never got off on the right foot.

Being a Tamil Brahmin, the spectre of learning -- and hopefully mastering -- classical music and dance always hovered in the horizon in my childhood. My mother bribed me with Mango Bites and dragged me kicking and screaming to Carnatic vocal lessons. On our annual summer vacation to meet my grandparents, my vast, musically-inclined family would converge each night to test my musical mettle. My brother would get top marks for his golden voice and genial behaviour, while I had to grudgingly accept the consolation prize.

I take it that getting me to understand classical music proved to be such an effort for my mother that she abandoned the idea of honing my dancing skills. We are a family of mostly left feet -- well-meaning but awkward. So Bharatanatyam and I didn't cross tracks until I had to encounter it in school. I took a few furtive lessons, but even as a child, I was acutely aware that it would entail way more discipline than I was willing to part with. So I left well enough alone and never felt drawn to classical dance until years later, when my friend G. whirled my world with her Kathak.

Much as I hated to admit it in teenage, music filled our lives with rhythm and melodicity. It strengthened my bond with my grandparents because despite the generations separating us, we could speak the common language of music. It rooted me in the culture of Dikshitar and Avvaiyar, and reminded me forcefully of my Dravidian identity. As time passed, my family moved cities and that connect with my South Indian-ness grew fainter and fainter. I arrived in Mumbai, that ultimate mongrel of a city, and became something of a mongrel myself.

In the last ten years, I've mastered the art of becoming a face in a throng. I speak rough-hewn Mumbaiya like the best of the rest and have perfected a mean Bollywood jhatka. For me, Tamil has become an escape hatch I use only in emergencies, like when I need to haggle with autodrivers in Chennai or when my grandparents demand my eloquence in my native tongue.

This is a disconnect I'm not proud of. It makes me sheepish to know that my niece takes Tamil lessons all the way in Canada -- and likely speaks it better than me too. It's probably too late to develop a taste for Bharatanatyam now, but I've been seriously considering taking vocal lessons again. 

Loading mentions Retweet

It's pouring in winter in Mumbai, while the monsoon was as arid as the summer. While this may be a sure sign that the world is coming to an end, I am loving being indoors in this weather, watching the leaves outside my window being as startled as I am. This poem from Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery comes to mind. It made a deep impression when I first read it in the original French. It's true, innit? Water is not just necessary for life, it is life itself!

L'eau,

Eau, tu n’as ni goût, ni couleur, ni arôme
On ne peut pas te définir
On te goûte, sans te connaître.
Tu n’es pas nécessaire à la vie tu es la vie.

(Water, you have no shape, colour or aroma;
One cannot define you.
We taste you, without really knowing you;
You are not just necessary for life, you are life itself)

Pardon the hasty translation.

Loading mentions Retweet

Recently, in a car filled with friends having fun on a Saturday night, I set the proverbial cat among the pigeons. I spoke of this story: http://tinyurl.com/yen9pqz: that I'd come across earlier in the day. It was the story of Penelope Trunk, a 42-year-old American mother of two, who created something of a small tsunami online by tweeting about her miscarriage. It wasn't so much the subject matter of the tweet, but how she expressed it, that provoked widespread outrage among her followers.

The tweet said, "I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin." Something about the way Trunk said what she did, struck me as callous, if not just wrong. Although she went on to describe in her Guardian story why she was relieved that she didn't have to abort -- one of her children is autistic and there was a high possibility that her unborn child could be too -- the tweet still appeared to me to be forcefully light-hearted and somewhat lacking in grace. It struck me that despite my best intentions, I was being judgmental about this stranger whose circumstances I knew nothing about. So I spoke about the story to my friends.

What happened next was fascinating. Everyone in the car had an opinion about Penelope Trunk and the pervasiveness of Twitter. Most people felt that although everyone is free to say what they will on Twitter, there are still invisible guidelines that should govern our interactions online. Talk about your miscarriage, but choose your words carefully, was another opinion. There was only one person who felt she owed nothing to anyone: if you don't what like she says, simply stop following her. For me, it was clear that this was the kind of story that everyone felt compelled to have an opinion about. Much as Trunk would've liked it, we simply couldn't let her be.

It is certainly true that women carry a heavier cultural burden to talk about the 'right' issues and in a socially acceptable way. But I think that blogs have eased up a lot of that pressure. There are tons of confessional blogs around -- I take huge voyeuristic pleasure in reading them, although I'd hesitate to spill it all out in public -- and they seem to be doing well.

I suppose there is a thin line between being confessional and just letting it all hang out. There is no problem in doing the latter, but you shouldn't be surprised at the reactions that follow. Right?

Loading mentions Retweet

My dear, dear friend A already sullied my initial excitement about this blog by wondering if dogs will be the running theme. Like, duh. I feel honour bound to defend my ability to write about diverse subjects. So this post is on one of my other favourite themes: the blunder of nature that is my nose. You see, I've always loved to hate my nose. It lacks a backbone, if you know what I mean. It is splayed out over the surface area of my face like a hot air balloon gone bust. It is not sharp, aquiline, symmetrical or any of those adjectives people use to describe Deepika Padukone or Courtney Cox's nose. Instead, it is short, squat and utterly all over the face. Ok, rant over.

Recently, on a trip to Malaysia, I met a man who has an eye for noses. His stall at the Artists' Village in Kuala Lumpur stopped me in my tracks because of the giant wooden nose parked outside. I ventured inside to find tens, no hundreds, of little and large wooden noses strewn all over the place. Turns out, Zorollah Bin Silin specialises in carving noses. He has been doing it for several years, he told me. I asked him why, and he said it's because the clue to everyone's character lies in their nose. While that is a unique argument, it makes me uncomfortable about what secrets my rather visible nose might be revealing about me.

As ever, Zoro had the answer. He claimed that a rounded tip such as mine displayed self-confidence and the ability to spend money easily. Aha! I thought. This man has the password to my savings account! He also added that people with long noses and curved tips -- like the boyfriend -- are not stable and need significant others to back them up. By now I was utterly intrigued. I wanted to know if I could spot my architecturally imperfect nose in his vast collection. I saw many that came close to it, but Zoro added that he never makes noses on demand. More often than not, people walk into his store and find the perfect likeness of their nose there.

I tucked Zoro's memory away carefully in the recesses of my mind. After all, not everyone gets a whiff of their future on foreign soil.

Click on the pics to see the tip of the iceberg

   

Click here to download:

The_nose_of_Zoro.zip (3024 KB)

Loading mentions Retweet

It may sound wrong, but I am drawn to Labradors. When I see a fat golden Lab waddle down the street, I feel an irresistible urge to make friends with it. If I have the good fortune of meeting a Lab puppy, it becomes difficult for bystanders to tell if the cooing sounds are emanating from the puppy or the Strange Girl. I like dogs in general but Labs are special for me. They're (often) fat, lazy and vacuous but they're also beautiful, eager and intelligent. So, one sleepless night recently, I began thinking about why I feel such kinship with Labs and I came up with what my good friend J has affirmed is a work of genius.

It wouldn't be fair to not share, so here goes.

Why Vidya is really a Labrador in disguise:

1) We are actually quite similar, despite belonging to different species. We are smart but love to act ditsy from time to time. Who wants to be brooding and intense when being giggly, girly and air-headed is so much more fun? Look closely at a Lab to see the resemblance. Why walk halfway down the hall to get a ball when just making puppy faces at the master will suffice?

2) We are loyal friends and will wag our tails even when people are mean to us. Ok, so maybe this one is a bit of a stretch. I have been known to bite occasionally, but for the most part, I give loved ones a wide berth even when they're moody or nasty with me. Take that cat person in my life, my mum. She's a delight at most times: generous, witty and rib-tickling funny. But she can unleash her claws when you least expect it. But I'm always Lab-like around her: warm, demonstrative, eager for her approval and in absolute awe of her charisma. I wouldn't have it any other way.

3) We have an insatiable need to be cuddled and kissed by loved ones. The only difference between a Lab and me is that I don't lick anyone's face to show my love. Ok, that just sounds wrong. What I mean is that I'm a full-on huggie-kissie kinda girl. I dispense kisses generously and I demand them back -- with interest.

4) Finally, we are very lazy and tend to become fat easily. This point is self-explanatory. What a glorious way to end this valuable discourse.

Are there any insights you'd add to this treatise?

Loading mentions Retweet