PurpleMoon

New Year Revolution

2012-01-02T22:54:00.000+05:30

Happy New Year to everyone!

My new year "revolution" was to deactivate my Facebook account. Well, this ain't a hormonal reaction to the slight panic every new year brings into your life. I had been thinking about both my active and passive involvement in Facebook for a long time. Finishing up PhD and getting a job just made it clearer. Apart from the fact that I spent a lot of time just deciding what goes on Facebook and what doesn't, it also took some real productive work time out of my schedule, merely due to my passive involvement (checking others' profiles, reading comics posted by others, looking at pictures posted by others). I started realizing that I don't get as much time to write as I used to when I was a student (which by the way, was another revelation about my productivity as a PhD student).

So what did I learn from my almost four year long existence on Facebook?

1. People have Facebook personalities

Some like to live through Facebook, some like to vent through Facebook, some like to reveal as less about themselves as possible but reading everything about others. There are Facebook drama queens ("I am so lonely. It is unbearable"), Facebook philosophers, Facebook clowns, Facebook reporters, Facebook stock market and political analysts (they also kind of pushed me to take this final step), Facebook revolutionaries ("Anna [Hazare] Rocks!) and very proud but slightly annoying Facebook mommies.

2. My Facebook profile is like a 1 mL (mostly happy) extract out of 1000 mL of life experiences

I say this only through my own experience. My profile, the way it looks on Facebook is the least likely representation of my real life. Yeah, I have an exciting social life. But most of the times, I am battling various annoying problems. Honestly, sometimes I am just barely able to squeeze in all that I want to do in a day. My everyday life is so boring that it has earned me the nick name "granny" in my close friend circle. The things that give me true happiness are not cool enough to be on Facebook. More importantly, I never feel like sharing the experiences that truly make me happy and enrich my life, on Facebook. They are reserved for a little corner in my heart, in a sanctuary of their own.

3. Not having an instant medium of expression actually matures my thoughts

I had done this with my blog in the past. I would like to think more and express less. So that the quality of my expression does not embarrass me a few years down the line. I would hate to see the record of all my online comments pooled over a period of few years. I know I have been firmly convinced about things in the past. Only to grow out of my convictions by realizing that I was mostly ignorant.

4. Obscurity is the new "Cool"

About a year ago, I was flatmates with a French girl. Her boyfriend flew over to see her in Australia. He was probably the first person of my generation, who not only did not have a Facebook account but also did not own a cellphone (even in his own country). I was secretly angry to find him (the kind of anger you feel after you realize that your "basic needs" are frivolity to someone else) but I was really amazed to see how happy he was without all of these things. I asked him what happens if someone needs to urgently reach him? He told me he has an answering machine on his land line and that he goes home every single night. :)
After meeting him, I have met others who prescribe to his view to varying degrees and I found that all these people were really interesting. Mostly because I pictured them as these giant Sequoia trees standing their ground against the Social Media winds. :)

To be honest, no one cares about your Facebook profile. There are people who genuinely care about YOU. But you don't need Facebook to realize that. Or maybe you do.

In this new year, I plan to write more on my blog. Write about my travels in the Unites States, my impressions of the midwest and also about being a postdoc in a big research group.

Happy New Year again and good luck with your revolutions!

Different Realities

2011-10-25T08:15:00.000+05:30

These days I am working on a little music experiment. I pick a Raga first thing in the morning and search it on Grooveshark. I listen to all the tracks that are listed in that search. Initially, I was doing it only to improve my understanding of Indian music by listening to as much of it as possible. But now I realize the hidden beauty of my experiment. A collection of five or six notes, repeated over and over again to create a tune did not really bring the word "variety" to my mind. But then I listen to Ahir Bhairav on sarod by Amjad Ali Khan, on flute by Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia, vocal by Kishori Amonkar, on the sitar by Pt. Ravishankar and I can "hear" for myself how different the same collection of five notes can sound. Although it always creates the same image of a fresh morning in my mind, the little details of how a morning could come into one's life are vastly different. Often for me, it comes as a sip of freshly brewed coffee, but sometimes, with early morning honking in an ironically practical Mumbai suburb. Sometimes just as a reminder, with the smell of my shampoo lingering inside my beanie at dusk and sometimes, the annoyingly cliched yet refreshingly beautiful image of Rekha singing man anand anand chhayo (in Ashaa's voice!).

How music is delivered is obviously different. You can see that when you listen to Pt. Jasraj open almost every single rendition with the Shantimantra. But then you get to hear Mero Allah Meherbaan in Bhairav. Or a Bhavani Praise in Bhairavi by Begum Parveen Sultana. Sometimes, they sing for the audience and sometimes they sing for themselves. There are also those ethereal moments when the rendition gets its own identity and who performs it and who receives it suddenly becomes trivial. I love those moments. They have happened to me at live concerts. How music is received has so many faces too. I don't know what kind of emotions an early morning Bhoop inspires in others but for me, it always inspires a fresh start. Even if I listen to it at midnight. I learned classical music when I was seven. So I could not understand why Kafi would make me feel a bit sad, which it did, without my googling it up to find out that it is supposed to inspire longing. :)

There are many things in life that can be precise and mathematical. Music is one of them. How it is built, how it sustains itself and repeats, how we come back to the same point after each avartan -- is all very mathematical. And so is life itself. But then again, there is a common territory, a common ground where life, mathematics and music meet. Perhaps, where logic and art meet. Those territories come alive when you get lost in the alaap until the tabla reminds you that it is over. I always struggle with this question of what is more important, the habit of following order and pattern or the tendency of giving in to the larger chaos. Even though I always come out as a strong "J" on the Myers Briggs test, I have come to resent the negative connotation we attach to the word "chaos" in recent times. If anything describes my take on this question aptly, it is the structure of Indian classical music. It follows a routine, a pattern, a regime, a discipline. But then, on that rigid framework, it drapes the colors of melancholy and euphoria. The twists and turns that sporadic outbursts of passion create, the spaces between too much joy or too much sorrow that are filled with soulful notes of introspection.

For whom do I sing?
Sometimes I sing to be noticed.
Sometimes, to not notice.
Sometimes I sing for myself.
Sometimes I sing for others.
Sometimes, I sing for my song.
And then, when I can no longer see the purpose..
I would have truly lived my song.

PurpleMoon Turns Five Today!

2011-10-03T23:57:00.000+05:30

..and I forgot all about it until Prachee (with whom my blog shares a 'birthday') reminded me. So here's wishing PurpleMoon a very happy birthday and hopefully more posts too. :)

In my kitchen..

2011-08-08T03:26:00.002+05:30

In my kitchen, no two coffee mugs
Would look alike..
Earthy ceramics, shiny metal and pretty polka dots
Would grace the shelves hand in hand, side by side.
Just like the people in my life.

No two plates would carry the burden of staying together
Until an exhausted late night crash makes them part
They would all come in a group that is together
Because each one of them is unique and beautiful..
Not because they have to maintain the harmony
Of subtly dictated artistic uniformity.

Between cups of chai, green tea
And awful American coffee,
And bites of tikka masala, apple pie,
Pumpkin soup and spaghetti
My kitchen would quietly celebrate
My life and its diversity.

The doorbell will ring; the oven will sing
The yellow lights shall stay on till late,
And despite the fragility of too much diversity,
In my kitchen, no one will fret over a broken plate.

Misgivings of a virtual citizen

2011-07-16T21:06:00.001+05:30

I am glad I have a voice.
I Tweet, I Facebook, I Blog.
I think my political opinion, at last is being taken seriously. I am, after all, an opinionated, middle class, virtual citizen of India. By that, I don't just mean someone who is away from his/her own country but also someone who is being a part of the political discussion online. I am a virtual citizen even when I am in India because most of my experiences are virtual. My fights are virtual and so is my anger. It is all online. I read online, I see my friends online, I fall in love online and I get my heart broken online. I also go into spells of online bitterness and online fury.

I am grateful for my upbringing. My parents taught me to see right from wrong at a very early age. They built protective walls around me. Life according to them, was a long assembly line. It was a chronology of important milestones (complete with a no-more-than tolerance). All I had to do was to conform and pass those milestones at the right time. Everything was designed to minimize damage. I am grateful for that. But sometimes, I feel a sense of isolation. Although in my virtual life, I seem to have many identities, in my real life, I feel oddly directionless. I am smarter than most. That is one thing I am sure of. If I ever feel insecure about my knowledge, it is only one click away. I love debates and discussions. Sometimes my discussions turn into tirades and monotonous ego-battles. My opponents and I throw links at each other to prove a point. Sometimes, every member of this forum resides in a different country and often, that country is not the country of their citizenship. But I wonder if I am wise enough and perhaps, this virtual citizenship is keeping me away from real wisdom.

I am never happy with my country's government. Mostly because it is not the government that I would have chosen or maybe people like me -- mature, well-educated, middle-class citizens would choose. I am unhappy about a lot of things going on in my country. I wonder why I cannot see people who think like I do, come to power. And I don't know where the people who actually want this government come from. I guess that is another thing that I am confused about. I simply cannot understand people who come from outside of the conveyor belt on my assembly line. Sometimes, they stay far behind. Grappling with issues that were never even included in my growing-up-syllabus. Sometimes, they whiz past in their super fast cars. The next I see them is in newspapers or on television. I feel confused when I see Westerners in their mid twenties take a break from school for three years just to 'see the world'. My parents would call me crazy if I decided to jump off the belt and 'see the world'. It would mean that someone else would occupy the empty spot and get ahead of me. Sometimes, I worry though if there is such a thing as an empty place that you leave behind. I wonder if leaving behind an empty place would fill a bit of emptiness I feel inside. And whether the space that I would otherwise occupy is significant enough to justify this feeling of constant restraint.

Then there is the "Religion dilemma". Growing up, religion was peace, a legacy of love and devotion. Religion was poetry. Religion was philosophy. Religion was work. Religion was faith in humanity. Religion was being devoted to the devoted. Religion was art and music. It was always a road that took us within. It was a personal experience. It still is. Or maybe it isn't. But sometimes, I am reminded of my religion because of someone else, belonging to another. It seems as though Religion has lost its many faces and personalities. Now it is a label that I stick, or sometimes is stuck to my forehead to classify me, my anger and my discontent. Sometimes I feel that meeting as many people as I could, shaking as many hands of real flesh and blood as I could and looking into as many eyes as I could, would be a bigger religion to follow. Then again the walls around me would not let that happen.

I don't know why I feel so angry. I am not sure whether my helplessness comes from outside or it comes from within. I have started gathering a suspicion that the secure walls that were built to protect me from going off this belt, were actually conceived from the same fear and helplessness that I find myself trapped in now. Perhaps this anger is not at the situation around me. Maybe this situation is merely a mirror. Stepping out of this virtual world takes great effort too. It is now like another mind in another space. It is another wall of a secure and rigid identity that I need to cross. Although my voice is being heard and sometimes answered, I think, that all of this -- inside and out, these thoughts and their virtual shadows is not my voice.

It is just an abysmal incoherent noise.

Dilli Ho! Part 1

2011-07-05T10:46:00.003+05:30

Time for a travelogue people! :)

I spent the past six days in and around Delhi. It was my first time in Delhi and I wonder why it took me so long. Before I left Pune, I was in two minds about my travel reading and by a fortunate coincidence; I picked up Mark Tully’s No Full Stops in India. It is one of the most appropriate books you could read on a trip to Delhi. Tully’s love for Delhi makes you want to walk out on the roads he so fondly describes in his book. And when you drive past the formidable and unnaturally clean neighbourhoods of Racecourse and Janpath towards the old Delhi, you can’t help but chuckle at Tully’s apt description of the two faces of the city.
But that is not what my post it about. I have discovered a lot of things that I would want to do over and over, every time I return to Delhi. The first and perhaps the most important is a visit to the Bengali Sweet Centre (BSC) in SouthEx 1. If I were a teenager right now, I would have described my experience at BSC as, “Oh My God (OMG), OMG,OMG!! It’s like totally awesome.” When a salesgirl at Meena Bazar (Ansal Plaza) told me that if I want to taste Delhi food, I should go to the Bengali Sweet Centre, I was not really impressed by the name. But I went to see what it was about anyway. Even when I saw the rather humble looking board outside and a huge dish of neatly stacked barfis through the glass, I wanted to change my mind. But when I entered and started ‘checking out’ other patrons’ food (Yeah. I check out other peoples’ food. You can label and box me now), I realized that I am going to have to come back again, preferably every day, for the rest of my stay to sample all of what I really felt like eating.

It really depends on what you feel like. The first day, I was desperate for a paratha and lassi. Next time around I tried the ‘mixed chat’ and golgappe. I agree that assembling your own golgappe in a hygienic manner goes against the spirit of eating them.
But I changed my mind again when I had the ones at BSC. And let me not even get into the shondesh, malai chop, hot jalebis, dhokla, kachodi and rasgullas. Sadly, I did not get a chance to eat all of those but I looked at them through the glass long enough to get a funny look from the bhaiyya across the counter. You don’t just get a variety of food there; you also see a variety of people. You can find people from every age group and socio-economic background (Geek!) at BSC. I found out later that Amitabh Bacchan and Rajeev Gandhi were regulars at this little joint.
If anything Delhi has taught me, it is how to eat and more importantly, how not to think when you are eating out. We went for a wander around Chandni Chowk. Initially, I was a little reluctant to get into a bicycle rikshaw. I found the idea of a human being pulling us along a bit embarrassing. But it has nothing to do with the previous paragraph. So when we got into Salim’s bicycle near Red Fort, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of sad compassion for him. Fortunately it evaporated in about three and a half minutes. I think the cycle rikshawallahs around Chandni Chowk could prove to be tough competition for the auto rikshawallahs in Pune. He was fearless, rude and ruthless, to a point where I started apologizing after him. If he got a penny for every angry person he left behind his rikshaw, he would not need the rickshaw anymore. He promised to stay with us through the ‘tour’ but asked my mom to hurry up and move on to the next shop. She asked him to leave but he stayed on. Then when we went to look for him where we had left him, he had happily disappeared. So we went for a walk to the Paratha Galee (Paratha Lane).

Every shop was full and it looked as if the Paratha people had a lot of mouths to feed. I had been chirping about this lane pretty much since I came to Delhi. But the transparent and honest process of making a Paratha on the street got me. Paratha chacha was happily shoving a handful of stuffing into the dough. The rolled Paratha however ended up in a wok of pure desi ghee and was literally deep fried. The ‘menu card’ of the shop was proudly displayed outside. It included some unusual combinations such as rabdi (condensed cream) paratha, karela (bitter gourd) paratha, bhindi (okra beans) paratha, kela (banana) paratha, and papad paratha! I could not muster up the courage to eat a deep fried paratha. So after expressing my sincere respects for the occupants of the shop, I moved on to the lassi shop and had a huge glass of lassi in a kullad (clay pot). The shopkeeper told me that the kullad was mine after I finished the lassi. As I was walking about in mild bewilderment as to where would be the proper bin to dispose off a clay pot, I saw Salim approach me with his big beetle nut stained smile. When enquired where he was when we came back to fetch him he gave us the typical “I was there madam, you did not see me.”
So off we went again in his lightning bolt, avoiding accidents by a quarter of an inch and getting dirty looks from all the vanquished he left behind. He left us at the “Old Famous Jalebi” shop. Our driver had told us that leaving Delhi without having one of the Old Famous Jalebis was a crime and we are god-and-government fearing Maharashtrians. So we went to see what this old famous jalebi business was all about. Well, I wish I had been blind folded. Only that could have helped me not commit this crime. Hot jalebis, about half a foot in diameter, soaked in desi ghee for thirty rupees a piece! I have never been in two minds about something this toxic. But my wimpy mind won again and I chickened out. The Jalebi wallah did not even try to convince me. He had a long line of eager customers that he was busy managing. As we walked towards the Gauri Shankar Mandir, we saw little shops selling neatly stacked piles of kachodis and samosas; every shop had its own happy clientele. I overheard someone get angry in Hindi. In an even voice he said, “aap apni ijjat ka khayal kijiye. Agar hamari buddhi kharab ho gayi to sochiye aapka kya hoga”. Quite a contrast to the street fights back home in Pune! It is really remarkable how much respect a language can spell for the listener. Listening to the Chandni Chowk shopkeepers talk to each other was a treat to the ears.
It was a Monday and the temple was very busy. The Gauri-Shankar Mandir has an idol of Shiva and Parvati. But many other Hindu gods also have an office each inside the temple, complete with a personal priest. We paid respects to all the gods and just as we were about to leave we heard someone sing. It was a bhajan with a twist. The artist was singing a Shiv bhajan that sounded suspiciously similar to a famous Bollywood song. Ironically, the wordings of the original tune were, “Maar diya jai, ya chod diya jai, bol tere saath kya suluk kiya jai”. A very crude English translation would be, “Should I kill you or should I let you go?”

Dilli Ho! Part 2

2011-07-05T10:45:00.001+05:30

Next destination was the Taj Mahal. How can you go to Delhi and not see the Taj? Well you can but I wanted to see it because I had heard a lot of people talk about it. So we went to Agra. We picked the wrong day. It was raining incessantly since morning and we kept going on only in the hope that it would stop soon; but it showed no signs of slowing down. So I struck up a hard bargain (so I want to believe!) with a street seller and bought an umbrella for a hundred rupees. Later I found out that you could get it for fifty. But if there is anything you must learn to be able to survive in India, it is having absolutely no regrets about a bad bargain. You will always find a better bargain somewhere else. :)
The umbrella was of no use in the harsh rain. So by the time we moved inside through the queue, I was half drenched anyway. The Taj Mahal has a wonderful shock element in its architecture. You see nothing but red sandstone all around for a long time during your walk towards the Taj. In the modern times, you are also distracted by the million procedures that you must submit to before you are finally let in through the gate. You walk through almost a kilometre of red sandstone that is so characteristic of other structures around Delhi and you enter a dark, narrow gate. Suddenly, you see the Taj. Marble white, a complete contrast to everything you have been used to looking at. It does not grab your attention ever again as it does in that moment. Its magnificence, its grandeur and its pristine beauty makes you blank for a moment and even though you always think of Shahjahan when you say Taj Mahal, in that moment of shock and awe your heart goes out only to the artists who created it. That, I think is the true joy of looking at the monument. It has been built so beautifully that it forces you to think of the unknown hands that came together to create it, and not the emperor who commissioned them using his wealth and power.
The next stop was Fatehpur Sikri. But before that, I went into a government owned “handicraft emporium” and bought a whole new set of clothes. The rain at the Taj had completely drenched me. As I walked out of the changing room, I thought I heard a faint applause from the shopkeepers. :D
The fort at Fatehpur Sikri was built by Akbar in the honor of the sufi saint Salim Chisti, who prophesied the birth of Akbar’s son Jehangir. Right in the middle of the courtyard of the fort is a beautiful dargah. It is a common belief that if you wish for something and tie a thread to a filigree wall inside the dargah, your wish is granted. The guides were constantly pestering us to get our wishes granted at a small fee. But we flatly refused. Each wall that surrounds the dargah is made of marble and has a different pattern. These walls are carved so intricately that sometimes it is hard to believe that it is marble and not lace! As I was walking out, I heard the most magical voice outside the dargah. A sufi singer was singing outside. His band consisted of a simple harmonium and another person playing the tabla. The rhythm was accentuated by bystanders clapping in the typical qawalli style. I waited there for about twenty minutes listening to him. Listening to a beautiful sufi song outside a magnificent dargah! What more could you really wish for? Maybe it is true. Maybe you get what you want, even without tying a thread!
On our last day in Delhi, we mustered up courage and went back to Galee Parathewali. I asked the shopkeepers if they could just pan fry my paratha instead of deep frying it in ghee and they gladly obliged. I had a mulee (radish) paratha and bits of karela (bitter gourd) and bhindi (okra beans) parathas. I survived on that for the rest of the day without even thinking of food. :)
We spent that day wandering around inside the Lal Quila (Red Fort). It is another magnificent structure with many innovative architectural elements. But the most enticing part of Lal Quila was the gardens with huge Bakul trees. It is a shame that you can’t sing, write, touch or photograph fragrance. The experience of sitting under a Bakul tree on a hot summer day cannot be expressed, no matter how hard one tries. The shade embraces you gently and the breeze brings the sweet fragrance of flowers and cools you down. After your nap, you find little stars of bakul blossoms all over your hair and face. It also took me back to my days with my grandmother when we used to spend early mornings picking up bakul and parijat flowers.
I walked back one last time through the markets of old Delhi. Every city has a personality of its own but what can I say about Delhi? I think I am in love. :)

Have you been TALed and Mantised recently?

2011-07-04T22:04:00.002+05:30

For the past month or so, I was caught in what can be called an (unnecessarily) anxious wait for my US visa. I was offered a post-doc at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) in the United States about nine months ago. From then to this day, I have gone through many agonizing waiting periods. Of course, the biggest of them all was finishing my PhD.

I have to accept, I need to put a lot of effort into increasing my ability to handle unforeseen, unexpected and uncertain situations. This was not my first time under the (now) famous 221(g) administrative processing delay. I spent some furious six weeks in 2009, when I missed a conference due to the same process. What makes it even more annoying is that it is applied to only certain individuals under certain circumstances, making it almost impossible to avoid a suspicious or funny look from a regular US tourist. I decided to take this opportunity to blog about it so that people become aware that in certain cases, a United States visa can be delayed indefinitely.

Post 9/11, US has made the visa process stricter. Some US visas are delayed due to the Security Advisory Opinion (SAO). The Department of State has categorized applicants according to their circumstances. The Visas Mantis SAO is applicable when there is a probability of use of a sensitive, illegal or dual use technology. The Department of State has also created a Technology Alert List (TAL). Exchange scholar, H1B and sometimes student (F1) visas are also subject to a TAL check. The TAL check typically involves providing the Department of State with a detailed Statement of Purpose (SOP), resume, applicant's travel history and purpose of US visit. Applicants from countries that possess nuclear technology (India, China, Israel, Pakistan and Russia) working in a wide range of scientific fields such as Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Aeronautical Engineering, Biotechnology, Biomedical Engineering or employed by research institutes that use sensitive technologies can be adversely affected. For security reasons, this list is not published anywhere on the internet. However, almost all the branches of Physics, Chemistry and Biology are included in this list.

I have accepted now (after wasting a lot of time and peace of mind) that I am going to be a regular at these security checks for a few years to come. There is only so much euphemism at your disposal when you are trying to tell a visa officer that you are going to work on making fuels. There is nothing on my resume that would not prompt a Mantis or a TAL check. (un)Fortunately, I am not alone. There is a page dedicated to people stuck in the US administrative processing which I found very helpful during this wait. There is no fixed deadline as to when your visa will be approved. So many people find it very difficult to accept that they have to wait indefinitely. For them, a clever website has already been designed. Check reporter lets you enter your own visa information (date of interview, date of approval, consulate, visa type) and update it whenever your application is processed. This has helped create a comprehensive database of processing times from November 2008 onwards. Processing times have been shortened considerably over the past three years.

I hope this information helps people who are in the process of applying for a US visa. If you ever go through it, as the Visa Officer who interviewed me would say, "You are only paying the price of being very smart".

Kitchen Chemistry

2011-06-13T09:37:00.003+05:30

I have been drafting posts for a while now. But nothing I write really agrees with my mood. So I have a stack of unpublished posts on blogger.
One thing that agrees with my current state of mind 100% is baking. It has been a delightful one month back home. I have been experimenting happily in the kitchen. So I thought I will share some of my happy monsoon-special recipes with my readers.

Banana-walnut cake

You need...

1 1/2 cups flour (you can also replace this with whole meal wheat flour for a healthier version)
2 eggs
1/2 cup melted butter (in India, you can use homemade butter too. No need to buy processed butter)
1/2 cup sugar (you can replace this with Kanak Gool. Talk about self-endorsement haha!)
1 cup mashed banana (it is a good idea to just mash the bananas by hand. It gives the cake that rustic feel)
1/2 cup crushed walnuts (crushing in a pestle and mortar instead of grinding in a blender also adds character to the cake)
1 teaspoon grated nutmeg/ nutmeg powder
1 tea spoon baking powder

How you do it...

1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.
2. Melt the butter and sugar in a glass bowl
3. Add eggs and whisk until everything mixes well
4. Slowly add flour and baking powder; maintaining the consistency of the mixture
5. Add mashed banana, nutmeg and crushed walnuts. If the mixture is too viscous, add some milk.
6. Cover a baking tin with a thin film of butter. And add the cake mix. Make sure that the cake mix does not occupy more than 3/4th of the baking tin to allow for the cake to rise.
7. Bake for about 40 minutes. Test whether it is cooked using a skewer (for beginners, if the skewer comes out clean, Bingo!)

I am actually crazy enough to sit in front of the oven and watch it rise. But I understand that not everyone has such an unhealthy attachment to their work of art. :)

How you serve it...

Goes well with tea, coffee and happy company.

Variation: Apple cinnamon cake
Instead of using Banana+walnut, you can replace the fruit element with apple+cinnamon. In this case, unfortunately, you can only use white sugar to maintain the aesthetics of the cake. :)
If you wish to make this variation, peel the apples and boil them until they are soft. Blend apple and cinnamon into a paste and add it after step 4 above.

Happy Baking!

Going back to Charles Dickens

2011-05-07T15:54:00.017+05:30

I downloaded the 'Complete works of Charles Dickens' on my Kindle recently (thank Amazon for coming up with this blessed device). The toughest decision at hand before leaving Brisbane was which are the absolute essential books that I absolutely, positively cannot do without. After three rounds of serious grouping, I managed to narrow it down to eight kilograms. I had no qualms whatsoever about getting rid of two thirds of my entire wardrobe. In fact, I am sure I have created for myself a trail of unwanted garments going up to the Brisbane airport just like Seeta did, with her ornaments, when she was abducted by the cruel Ravana. So having a device that is handbag-friendly and can hold eight kilo worth of knowledge in paper, without making you sweat and panic is indeed a blessing for me.

I went back to Charles Dickens after about ten years. I read his books with a great adolescent appetite. Now I realize, most of it was just to put a 'Dickens Flag' on my "well-read-ness". The first book I chose to read this time is 'Great Expectations', and I cannot imagine how the seventeen year old in me could have appreciated it. Apart from the fact that I was immensely touched by the character Biddy, I think I missed most of the then-intangible and now-evident subtleties in the book.

I was drawn to this book again because of its mention in Amartya Sen's 'Idea of Justice'-- a highly academic yet refreshingly enlightening piece of work (which can only be ingested 10 pages at a time for someone like me). In his opening chapter Sen quotes none other than Pip from Great Expectations.

Pip is very sensitive to injustice and in one of his honest musings in the book, he says,

"In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice." Outwardly this seems like an obvious statement. Only upon reflection do you realize its perspicuity.Every adult, I guess, has a child in them that can go back and relive the grossest form of childhood injustice that was inflicted upon them.

When talking about the crystallization of memories, Dickens again makes me reflect when he says,
"Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day"
In his descriptions of an unfortunate orphan's thoughts, Dickens has planted carefully, these meandering memory lanes that invite everyone, no matter where they come from.

When little Pip goes away to town to play at Miss. Havisham's, he comes back feeling inferior about himself. The life that he has lived to that moment has never been labeled as 'common' or 'coarse' or 'low'. But fighting with this feeling of isolation, he wonders (and it brought tears to my eyes),
It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.

When the utterly discontented and ashamed Pip begins work as an apprentice for his innocent mentor Joe, and his conscientious admission,
I know right well that any good that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me, was something again that seems remarkably universal. The last three adjectives 'restlessly', 'aspiring' and 'discontented' make the sentence read as if it has been both conjured and meditated upon!

When the wise old Biddy talks to Pip about his attraction to the pretty and temperamental Estella, in one of their tender moments of truth, her words have been weighed and calculated to reflect and hide so many emotions:
..because, if it is to spite her, I should think-- but you know best--that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think--but you know best--she was not worth gaining over
I realize the significance of the 'you-know-best' now. It is such a subtle expression, yet without those you-know-bests, I don't think those lines would have so much meaning!

There is much more that I can add to this but I would like to leave the obvious for you to find out!

Goodbye Australia :'(

2011-04-30T04:35:00.002+05:30

I had never imagined myself tearing up at the end of my final PhD talk. I had practiced it in front of the mirror some 5 times before I actually appeared in front of a room full of audience -- most of them plant biotechnologists; who had no clue as to what my research really meant in terms of chemistry. But they were there to cheer me on. So when I reached my last well-rehearsed acknowledgment bit, I was fine until I thanked my family. When I started thanking Australia -- a place that gave me so many friends, I found myself suppressing that well-known feeling of having hot air trying to escape your throat and eyes. :(

It has been a hectic and enlightening three and a half years. I don't know when I am going to fully realize the value of this phase; both in terms of academic and cultural experience. But my guess is that I would continue appreciating this all my life. If there is anything Australia as a culture taught me, it is how to relax. I have still not fully grasped it, because I am an unnecessarily high strung person.

I will miss a lot of things about Australia. I will miss being woken up by this -- a kookaburra laughing in a tree. It is no use being used to hear the song of an Indian Koel if you are planning to move to Australia. The first time I heard a kookaburra call, I thought the bird was dying, and the first time I saw an Australian magpie, I thought it was a crow with a skin condition.Here's Danny Bhoy --a Scottish comedian (who is half Indian!), talking about Australian wildlife. And to be honest, he is not exaggerating! :)

I will dearly miss the Australian accent. How the sentences here end in inflection points and how the Os are uttered like a strong surf wave hitting the Australian beach. Here is a better description of the Australian accent by Danny Bhoy again.
I will also miss the Queensland beaches with their golden sand and deep turquoise water. Sitting on the sunny beach watching the restless Pacific were some of my rare, calm moments here. :)
I will miss the touch of the Mediterranean that Australia has. With Greek, Spanish cuisines almost an Australian staple. The small shops owned by European entrepreneurs, proudly presenting the very best from their countries, the Italian caffes and Greek tavernas.

I will miss my friends. I remember when I came to Australia, the only people I knew, that too through the Internet were my PhD guide and my would-be flatmate. When I landed in Brisbane my unreasonable worrying mind was wondering what would happen if the girl I met on the Internet is in reality a scary trap! :)

I value what I learned outside the lab more than what I did in the lab in order to get a PhD. It is a strange feeling to know more everyday yet feel like you know nothing yet. To see people who have lived lives exploring paths that never even existed in the road map that was carved for you when you were growing up. To meet people who have come a long way from their home but have still managed to carry their home with them. And then to meet people who have never left home, but have long journeys embedded in their hearts. It is quite perplexing to slowly see yourself lose the ability to make strong judgment. To see yourself as a collage of many identities and to be less certain of what is the most predominant of all of those. What is more surprising than being less certain about who you really are, is being happy about it!

Kabir and Kumar Gandharva

2011-04-15T04:36:00.001+05:30

Following the spiritual thread from the last post, I have two musical recommendations for you. Both are Kabir bhajans. I have always been fascinated by Nirguni Bhajans that celebrate the formlessness of the divine. Kabir bhajans are not just about formlessness; they are also lessons in detachment. Like this one by Kumar Gandharva. It portrays the spirit as a swan that flies away, all alone, making this whole world a mere visual spectacle.
Although the song is about detachment, Kumar Gandarva's sincere rendition makes it impossible not to attach yourself to it! :)
This one, by Kalapini Komkali (Kumar Gandharva's daughter) is a less popular but much more beautiful rendition of "chadariya jhini". The more popular version is by Anup Jalota. A short introduction to her style and her gharana can be found here. She transports you into the realm of an oddly satisfying emptiness. The poem establishes a parallel between human body and weaving of a shawl, only to remind the listeners in the end not to confuse this shawl with an eternal possession; for all of us have to leave it behind one day.

Where is your gold?

2011-04-14T03:55:00.000+05:30

I subscribe to a meditation podcast (yes, I am that bad). I am not a fan of how the West categorizes Yogasanas and talks about Buddhism. But I have seen and met so many dedicated Yogis outside India that I have stopped being cynical. Actually, I think I prefer being gullible to being cynical.
The usual course of how I listen to my podcast goes in two simple steps. I lie down in a comfortable position as recommended, with headphones in my ears. The next step is when I wake up next morning at 5 AM. Although I think that Zencast is one of the most genuine podcasts on Buddhist philosophy, I have very rarely made it to the other side of an episode in all consciousness.
But two days ago, the story of this golden Buddha made me reflect. This statue that weighs about 5 tonnes, was known to all as a 'clay Buddha' for centuries before someone discovered in 1957, that it was actually a statue made out of pure gold. When the Burmese army was about to invade Thailand, the monks covered this statue in clay to protect it from being looted or disfigured.
Although Buddhist thought has so many parallels and anecdotes to offer, I think this story is a parable in itself. There is much more gold than the literal gold these monks were trying to protect. It instantly reminded me of the Tall Poppy Syndrome, which is a commonly used phrase in Australia. People play down their achievements in order to not fall a victim to peer envy. I find that it is a significant part of work politics in every society.The fear of creating envy in others' mind is, believe it or not a genuine fear. It also has a name (zelophobia) if this source is to be trusted.
When you realize the worth of your gold, plastering it with a thick layer of clay would perhaps take you to a peaceful mind.

Where Children Sleep

2011-03-19T17:41:00.000+05:30

I saw a short review of this in the latest issue of Marie Claire. Then, I googled James Mollison. :)
It is a story built with photographs. He went around the world photographing kids and their bedrooms (if they had any). His pictures from Hebron, where ten year old Douha lives in a Palestinian refugee camp and nine year old Tzvika, who lives in Israel say a lot about the region without saying much. On the Life photogallery, I found the picture of seven year old Indira and her bedroom very moving. She works in a granite mine for five hours every day before going to school. There is also ten year old Sherap, from Nepal again, dressed in his red monk robes next to the inset picture of four year old child beauty queen Jasmine (Jazzy) from Kentucky, U.S., set against the larger picture of her bedroom. While Sherap sleeps in a bunk bed with a tiny bag hanging off the window, Jazzy's bedroom seems like it is made exclusively of ice cream and fairy floss, embellished with all the tiaras she has won in her four years of being alive!

The pictures also leave behind a train of innocent dreams. A rockstar, a kempo martial arts teacher, a pediatrician (or a model) and my favorite - an ice cream seller. :)
This was a very refreshing, yet deeply moving interlude.

The hypochondriac

2011-03-15T17:14:00.003+05:30

I must confess that I google even the most minor ailments that I suffer from. A few years ago, I started seeing a floater in my vision. Before I found out what it really was (and reassured by a doctor) I was gunning for permanent blindness. Just a few months ago, I could hear my heart beat in my ear. It sounds ridiculous, I know. What kind of an arid unromantic am I? But then I googled it and found that it was Pulsatile tinnitus (at least that is what I settled on after a lot of browsing, since my doctor had advised me to stay away from google after the blindness episode). Just after Christmas when it got really hot in Australia, I decided that my frequent thirst and fatigue was definitely related to the possibility that my pancreas have failed and I have contracted Diabetes. Since this runs in the family, I found that my thirst aggravated miraculously after I made up my mind about being diabetic. Sometimes when I feel low in the evening and very happy in the morning, I imagine that I might be bipolar. One day, after an eight hour day at my part time job, which primarily consisted of entering weights to the fifth decimal in an excel sheet, I concluded that I sometimes reverse the digits in numbers owing to a latent dyslexia. Today, in my breaks from data excavation, I am googling up "sore calves". Although I have a perfectly plausible explanation (an overdose of suryanamaskaras; 50 a day for the past one week),I would like to go with Pseudothrombophlebitis syndrome.I should not bore you with my version of being a hypochondriac. The following excerpt from the 'Three Men in a Boat' was the inspiration for this post. I think every one should have this book by their bedside. :)

"It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine
advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am
suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most
virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly
with all the sensations that I have ever felt.

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment
for some slight ailment of which I had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it
was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an
unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently
study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I
plunged into - some fearful, devastating scourge, I know - and, before I
had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in
upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of
despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read
the symptoms - discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for
months without knowing it - wondered what else I had got; turned up St.
Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that too, - began to get
interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so
started alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening
for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another
fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a
modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years.
Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have
been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six
letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was
housemaid's knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of
slight. Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious
reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I
reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I
grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid's knee. Gout,
in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my
being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from
boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there
was nothing else the matter with me.

I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a
medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class!
Students would have no need to "walk the hospitals," if they had me. I
was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me,
and, after that, take their diploma".

Imagine what would have happened if Jerome K. Jerome had access to Google!

Selected Amartya Sen

2011-03-13T17:10:00.000+05:30

I had resolved to put together selected works of Prof. Amartya Sen a few months ago. I stumbled upon some lectures that I had heard previously. In 2008, I wrote a review for one of his popular books The Argumentative Indian, in which he takes the reader through an entertaining yet refreshingly academic journey through India's history of public dialogue.That was the first time I read anything written by the Nobel laureate. However, since then, I have downloaded many of his more serious essays and articles on various developmental issues. His research in the theories of social choice is considered amongst the pioneering works in the field. However, he is better known for his work on famines and poverty.

I have a limited understanding of economics. Sometimes, I have to look up other references to clearly understand Sen's arguments but I think the struggle is worth it. The links I have included in this post are some of his famous academic talks. So there is bound to be a lag between listening to what he says and understanding it to the best of your ability, especially if you do not have a background in economics. Nonetheless, I would urge everyone to make the time to listen.

This lecture titled Identity and violence : the violence of illusion, takes a closer look at the reasons behind communal and religious violence, not just in the Indian context but all over the world. He articulates not just on how divisive politics works but also on how and why it is received so well in some situations. His book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, which I go back to every now and then is a thesis on the many faces of human identity. In his narrative, Sen elaborates from time to time on the many identities that a single human being could have without any internal clash with one another and how, the clashes occur only when a single identity is isolated and glorified and pitched against a rival. He criticizes the popular 'clash of the civilization' theory and the attempts by politicians all over the world to try and put the world's peoples into isolated boxes.
His thoughts on accepting the plurality of our own identities while scrutinizing each one one of them in an independent and critical manner is what the world really needs when it comes out of the Age of Religion. He is an atheist.However, instead of rejecting the existence of God, he takes us back to a 14th century Hindu text that accepts atheism as one of the schools of religious practice within Hinduism.

This New York Review of Books article is titled More than 100 million women are missing. Sen comments on the female:male ratios all over the world, with a special analysis of South Asia. The ratio varies significantly even between the states within India. Northern states of Punjab and Haryana have the worst ratios while Kerala (which ranks high both in status of women in general and literacy) has the highest. He frequently refers to this issue in his other talks as well and his analysis makes you reflect on how much of an enigma the Indian social fabric really is. This issue is close to my heart because it makes me aware that being an only girl child in a country such as India isn't the norm. When I read/listen to what Sen has to say about the development of women in India, I am also reminded of the many faces of feminism all over the world. In India, feminism exists with a passive resilience. We would never have a majority of Indian feminists reciting My Short Skirt. But millions of women are being empowered to have a little more control over their own lives and their own decisions day by day.

Lastly, this 1999 Kenan lecture titled Human rights and consequences is something I highly recommend. He begins his lecture by saying that people advocating the establishment of clear and uniform human rights around the world are looked upon as softies or impractical intellectuals. However, just looking at it through an Indian perspective, I doubt whether we as a diverse society unified under a common identity of being Indian, have even given the concept of human rights enough consideration. Sen not only defines the scope of human rights but also reflects on the process of granting a right. He speaks about the disparity in the perception towards human rights between cultures, classes and sexes. He conducts the lecture by constantly bringing us to the critic's perspective on human rights. That makes it more convincing than if it were just a lesson.

In one of the chapters in his book on Violence, Sen talks about Robindranath Tagore's short story - Gora. It is about the life of a devout Bengali Bramhin who believes in the superiority of his 'Hindu', 'Brahmin' identity to the extent of making it his mission. Years later, his mother tells him that he was adopted after his Irish parents died in the mutiny of 1857. His whole world comes crumbling down and he is faced with the ironic challenge of applying all the rules of his Hindu superiority to his new identity. In the end, he accepts that no matter what his real identity is, he will always feel at home in India.

Although we often stumble upon our own identities, it is not a mere discovery. Having discovered an identity does not mean acquiring it. Wearing it with confidence, conscience, flexibility and respect (both for our own and others') is a matter of careful choice. It is time that we all wake up to this choice.

Drive in

2011-02-28T07:38:00.008+05:30

I am fortunate to have very creative friends. A few of my friends decided to rent a projector over this weekend for a party. We made good use of it by watching two good movies in the back yard of their house, both of which have been nominated for the Academy Awards this year. Although it puts a serious question mark on my dedication to thesis writing, I must admit that for the first time, I have watched four movies that have been nominated for the Academy Awards before the ceremony took place. They are, in the order that I liked them, The King's Speech, 127 Hours, The Black Swan and Social Network.

There was a lot of discussion over why people liked The King's Speech. An analysis of "The Kings Speech Vs Social Network" happened before the Oscars. Here is an interesting article on why the former is likely to win (which it did!). For those of you who do not know what it is about, it is about King George VI and his long battle with a speech impediment. As a movie, it appealed to me more than Social Network because of the room it afforded for the actors. Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush both present their characters with remarkable honesty. I am a fan of Rush since the time I saw his portrayal of Marquis De Sade in Quills.
As it is argued in the article given above, The King's Speech may have the psychological effect of the age old 'triumph of the good and the honest', that human beings are subconsciously attracted to. At the same time, it has the element of breaching of 'established social hierarchy', where a king goes to a commoner for help.

Although it did not do a stellar job at the Oscars, Danny Boyle's 127 Hours is a gripping story. It is about an avid adrenaline junkie who has to go through an unexpected accident. I don't want to spoil the story so I won't say much about it. However, if someone had narrated the story to me before I watched the movie, I would not believe that it could be made into a ninety minute movie. So the USP of this movie is almost entirely in its making. I loved the background score by Rahman. It added the needed zing to the intense emotion of the storyline.

I loved The Black Swan because Natalie Portman tells the entire story using her face alone. She went through a physically demanding makeover for this movie. Both Natalie and Mila Kunis, who plays Natalie's rival, were on a 1200 calorie (and a 5 hour workout) schedule for their roles. But going beyond the physical transformation, Natalie makes the pain, the anguish, the surrender to discipline, the uncertainty of being in the most coveted position come to life through her facial expressions. It is a disturbing movie but it deals with psychological issues that are faced by human beings in varying degrees, in every profession, even though they are more severe in fields like fashion and professional ballet.

Social Network is about the journey of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. In reading the analysis of this movie online, I often came across a new stereotype that the media has coined - the rejected geek. He seems to be spiteful of the other two well established stereotypes, the hot girl at school and handsome 'dudes' who haunt the school gym and the basketball court. However, unlike the older stereotype of a powerless nerd, this new avatar is capable of doing some serious damage (and making some serious moolah). I enjoyed it for its pace that matches the pace of the age in which it was made.

Another noteworthy fact is that of the four, three movies were based on true stories.
Now, that I have played the movie reviewer, I should better get back to reviewing my papers. :)

Milestones

2011-02-17T15:42:00.002+05:30

I am almost* at the end of my PhD. So it is time that I should formulate my own version of the hardships I went through during this time. In my mom's (expert) opinion, no one remembers their PhD as a glorious time of their lives. Every time I whinge about something to her, she tops that with an exceedingly horrible narration from her own PhD. Some of her stories, for example, the one where she goes, "we did not even have computers back then", need some correction factors for the technological advancement over the years and its effect on mental hardships.

As a PhD student, you are used to your (evasive) milestones. However, there are a number of philosophical milestones that you need to cross in order to truly deserve your PhD. I am going to list some of those here so that my compatriots in various parts of the world feel good about themselves.

1. The first rejection

For all the stellar PhD candidates out there, who get their papers accepted in the first attempt ever, they should know that they are missing out. The first rejection is as important to a PhD as a first heart break is to a teenager. It validates your position in this world (as close to non-existent) so firmly, that without this important milestone, you may form a totally deluded view of life itself. Whether you are coming down from an impact factor (which by the way is not a realistic measure of journal performance) of 30 to 5, or from 5 to 3, the first rejection is essential to normalize your measurement of what your work stands for. It takes a while (and a good amount of alcohol) to get over it, but boy! does it build character!

2. The first peer review

Well, to put it in perspective, if the first rejection is to be compared to the pain of unrequited love, then the first peer review is like marriage. When someone rejects you, all you have to do is go to the nearest pub with your other rejected mates and try and forget it with some EtOH. However, when someone accepts you, you have to go through an agonizing, never ending self-improvement session to prove that you are worthy of them. It might sound crazy, but peer review is actually more painful than an outright rejection. There were many bright Sunday mornings, when just as I was putting some sunscreen on with a butter knife, I saw the dreaded email from the editor of the journal saying, "you now have two weeks to fix this. Otherwise your paper is going to be considered as a fresh submission". There are times when these reviews overlap with all your papers, together with the rather insulting Australian reviews you are getting from your own supervisor. In the end, it leaves you with only enough self-confidence that can exist in equilibrium with complete hopelessness.

3. Running out of scholarship

I don't this this is essential, but when it happens, it feels like a scene straight out of a sitcom. Just as you are letting out a satisfied sigh about exiting the lab for good and planting your bum in a chair for the final write up, you get an email from the student center telling you that your scholarship has been cut off. You go to the people responsible to renew it, armed with an entreating monologue and a pack of tissues and get only kind sympathy in return. One of the solutions offered to you is, "maybe you can request your parents to help", which is enough to make you cup your ears with your palms and run out of their office screaming at the top of your voice. Then you come back home and apply for jobs (and make dartboards out of the pictures of people who did not renew your scholarship). You are appointed (thankfully) as a research assistant in a project that requires an intensity of concentration that would put a 200mW laser to shame. You come home exhausted from the job and have to get back to writing. Your boss at work treats your job as a full time job and keeps sending you emails with attachments for your to read after work. As if that is not enough, you keep meeting other PhD students from work who have had their scholarship renewed for up to 4 years while yours was cut off in 3 years and 3 months.

4. The technology betrayal

I am hoping this is the last one of them. As soon as you sort out your employment, your visa and that ugly fight you had with your supervisor and sit in front of your computer, you realize that it is dead. It has to be out of warranty and you have to be broke in order for this milestone to work on your character. Sometimes I think all these inanimate things we depend on, actually have a life of their own. How else would you have your computer die in the most final stages of your thesis? I have to assume that it is to make the plot more riveting. Something similar to one of those guys who lose their job on the same day as their girlfriend of eight years dumps them. Fortunately, by this time you have learned that the whole Universe is against your PhD so you have backed up your data online. Somehow this philosophical F#$% you is unbearable for your computer and it declares that it will work only on the power outlet. Fair enough. :)

It reminds me of a quote by Saint Calvin,

"That's one of the remarkable things about life. It is never so bad that it cannot get worse."

There are silver linings too. Getting a job before graduation, having supportive friends who are always willing to help you out and cheer you up. Having people bring you your favorite drink when you are bawling away in your room. Being so tired every day that your mind is completely stripped of unreasonable fears and demands.
Most importantly, realizing the meaning of 'being grateful' all over again!

*contingent on numerous factors that are totally beyond my control.

Obituary: Pulp and ink.

2011-02-09T17:18:00.008+05:30

One of my most prominent childhood memories is the image of my dad on a Sunday, with his favorite newspapers around him. Baba would have Sakal delivered to him every day but on Sundays, he would walk to the nearest newspaper stall and bring home about half a dozen other newspapers too. His collection usually included Maharashtra Times, The Economic Times, The Times of India, Indian Express and The Hindu (on the rare occasions that it was available in Pune). His fascination with newspapers was a weekly cause of my mom's eye-rolling. Growing up in a city that did not hesitate to judge people by the newspapers they read, coupled with my dad's lack of loyalty to any one newspaper left me entirely undecided about what I liked - something I still struggle with when I read everything that is available to me.
The 'newspaper experience' in a middle class Marathi household was not just about what it conveyed in terms of information and knowledge, but also about the not-so-obvious feeling of pride that a young, hardworking man had for being able to have an opinion on the world.
Newspapers were the much needed cellulosic fodder for my dad and his friends' Saturday ruminations over endless cups of coffee and cigarettes. This metaphorical information grazing has since then stuck in my head, and I find myself turning into a cow in the virtual world every Sunday, visiting my favorite newspaper website pastures. So when I read this New Yorker article,
a little sigh escaped my lips.

It got me thinking about my own transition from the little girl fascinated by how 'her dad knows everything' to a young woman who knows a lot of unnecessary things. I have always been decidedly undecided about my take on mind clutter. I definitely tend towards hating a cluttered mind but sometimes, when a form or a face starts emerging out of chaos, I question my hatred. The death of the printed newspaper, I believe is going to be the metaphorical beginning of the new generation's chaotic storage and assimilation of information.

While I was going through these thoughts, I came across this incisive piece, in the New Yorker again, by Adam Gopnik. He characterizes people in three groups when it comes to the perspectives on the age of Internet - the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers and the Ever-wasers.

"The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment".

On one side he argues that all the big revolutions in the past, such as the revolution brought about by the age of printing, have been welcomed by both skepticism and euphoria. In the eighties, television was scrutinized, in the nineties computer faced a similar judgment. On the other hand, he genuinely questions our enslavement to our computers, going as far as calling Google the world's "Thurber wife". But somewhere hidden inside this mass paranoia over technology numbing the human mind, is a little hint of awareness that it is we who control the technology. I remember watching an interview of Rajiv Gandhi on the national television (Doordarshan) in India once. Actually, I remember it because of my dad's recollection of it on many accounts. In those days (early nineties), India was giving its information and T.V. broadcasting a new revamp. Someone asked Rajiv Gandhi what this exposure to television is going to do to India's kids. He simply replied, "there is a switch that turns the T.V. off". Today, almost twenty years later, you can see that television programs all over the world have standardized themselves to a common baseline - of empty melodramatic reality TV. Although TV has revolutionized human life in many happy ways, it has also left us with a lot to deal with.
As Gopnik rightly puts it later in the article,

"Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that."

Just then, as if it was all God sent, I came across this in NY Times, which talks about an iPhone application (app) to make confessions. It is not hilarious to me because it is Catholic. I have seen similar Internet versions of 'yantras' on Hindu astrology websites. It makes me wonder how the same medium that Julian Assange uses to deconstruct a society based on an unjust power (im)balance, is used to appeal to the traditional human mind by sending the ten commandments into an iPhone!

In a country like India, however, I think printed newspapers have a significant way to go before they become extinct. Newspapers and television are still the only dominant media of relaying information in the rural parts of India. It is also heartening to see the riskshawalahs in Pune blissfully immersed in a copy of Sandhyanand, ignoring your pleas to go to a part of the city they are not interested in.
We still perhaps have a majority that is not glued to their computers or iPhone. But even then, in the online edition of TOI, tweets are taken seriously. 'What-people-think', is now only a click of a mouse away. Common man/woman using the internet to express his/her views has become an important element in reporting news and analysis. This means that no matter where you live, in the U.S., Australia or Mumbai, your take on what is happening in India could be taken seriously (if you are good enough or attract enough attention). If you come to think of it, this is a position of great responsibility. We should all be aware of that!

The Freudian Kitten

2011-02-05T13:39:00.002+05:30

Do you remember Catharsis?
Well it happened again. When I confronted my flatmate about letting the cat out so that he does not wee in my bed out of anger, she threw a gem of a line at me.

"Saee, the cat pees in your bed because he identifies you as the weakest member of this house."

To which I replied,

"Okay then. Let your strong cat pay my share of rent from next week", and left.

I found a place within 24 hours. And I moved out in 2 days.

However, the Freudian psychoanalysis stumped me. Maybe it was due to spending a lot of time with my flatmate, but I actually began to analyze how I could have portrayed myself as a weaker person in a cat's eyes. At that point, I realized that moving out would be the best decision both for sanitation and sanity.

As I was moving out, it occurred to me that I was giving myself so much trouble just to avoid conflict. In order to do that, I was perhaps being perceived as 'the weaker member' of the house. Not by the cat, but by my flatmate. My moving out was a shock. As much as it was a shock to her, it was also a shock to me too. But my moving out made so much of a positive difference to my own life. I could walk to work, pass by the fruit shop, buy fresh salad on my way back and live exactly the way I wanted to live.

Sharing a house, a workplace, an idea is a difficult balance. It needs genuine mental audits. I have shared houses with many people over the last three years. They were all from different cultures and backgrounds. If there is one thing you need to ask yourself constantly to be a good flatmate it is, "Would I be okay, if this happens to me?".

When I moved into a new place, I had resolved that I would never again, make friends with any of my flatmates. The first morning, I heard a knock on the door and saw this utterly lost French girl - Claire, asking for directions to go to uni. I resisted for a long time, saying only a casual hello here and there. But just the way love strikes after a bitter heartbreak, friendship kind of squeezed her way between the two of us. So here I am again, planning a trip to the South of France some time soon, and practicing my (non-existent) French. Not to mention believing the ever-so-cliched-line - everything happens for a reason!

Cheers to Friendship. :)

In a perfect world..

2011-01-21T09:14:00.008+05:30

I am back. I knew I would not last with this silence business but I am glad that I did it.
Over the past four months, I have been acutely aware of only one of the many identities I have - scientist. Finishing up is a mirage in its own way. Now, I have decided to throw myself into the arms of hopelessness. It comes in handy sometimes. But the key is to be "really" hopeless and not just pretend that you are not going to pin your hopes on a date. From the heart of true hopelessness, sprouts a new beginning. :)

Before I stopped writing, I was intrigued by the studies done around gender differences in academia. There have been a lot of controversial debates on the issue. I followed it with interest because I am on the path of entering academia myself. Whether it is women in science, women in politics, women in business or just women doing something different, I find it all interesting.
In this post, I am just pooling together all the interesting articles I have read on this issue over the last four months.

Let us begin at home before we soar high into the academic skies. When talking about women dropping out of academia, investigators often use a term called the ' leaky pipeline'. Wherein, women are said to be dropping out of a pipeline at crucial points in their scientific careers. However, in India, there are places where girls drop out of schools at a crucial age, after puberty, due to lack of real pipelines. The absence of sanitation is forcing young girls to drop out of schools in parts of rural India. This is not even a case of unconscious bias. It is a glaring proof of how the lack of sanitation, which is a basic human need, affects one sex worse than the other.

This is a clever experiment on how a 15 minute writing exercise can dramatically change the gender gap in university level physics, which brings to our notice the radical change that can be brought about by a seemingly small exercise of reaffirming your own values. This Slate article further elaborates on how subtle suggestions pointing towards a stereotype can influence test results negatively. When women of Asian origin were reminded of their Asian heritage (prompting the stereotype that Asians are good at maths) they scored better. When they were reminded about their gender (prompting the stereotype that women are not as good at maths) they did worse. Even in female dominated fields such as biology, where 50% graduates are women, the number of women at the higher faculty level is seen to be dropping to >15%. This article about Nobel Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn brings forth various dilemmas women go through while in the so called leaky pipeline. It is rightly titled 'Why Science Must Adapt to Women'. Although such studies are often 'controlled' for variables such as age, I think unless they devise a 'control' for these constant schisms, where women get torn between their toddlers at day care and their cultures in shaker flasks, a real solution for the pipeline would not happen.
Another touching article I read, which reminded me of my childhood days - when I was growing up around a dad who would not hesitate to take a month off from work so that he could hang out with me while my mom was away. This FT article talks about women CEOs and their husbands. Although I do not like the overall tone of the article and the hastiness in matching evidence with preconceived ideas, I agree that having a relaxed and caring husband at home is one of the biggest boosts an alpha-woman could receive.

This is a Washington Post article about motherhood and tenure. Karla Murdok's statement, "One of the costs of working full time and parenting is that I don't feel that I do either job as well as I could, or should.", is worth taking a special note of. Tenure is not just about being smart. So conclusions drawn just by looking at the disparity of male:female numbers at a faculty level (e.g., by counting the number of men and women who have been granted tenure as full professors in different fields) tend to be unfair towards women.
Another often repeated comment about women at work in general is that women are averse to taking risk. They tend to play safe 'naturally'. Perhaps as an answer, Naomi Klein explains where too much risk is taking us. I really enjoyed watching this TED talk because Naomi takes up serious issues and it is still very funny. Especially when she talks about women taking lesser risks and says, "it turns out that being praised less and paid less has its upsides, at least for the society". :)
In her speech, Nobel Laureate Jodi Williams presents a realistic face of world peace. With examples of women bringing women together from around the world, she elaborates on the power of coming together for a cause.

I am not taking a strictly evidence based stand here. All I really want to do is absorb various perspectives and ruminate on them. I am not really an angry feminist either. I think it is not a "Male Vs Female" debate. To be able to solve problems related to inequality, the versus should be replaced with "with". In exploiting the potential of talented women, we don't necessarily have to prove that they are better than men. We can just make their lives better than what they were yesterday. The competition here is not an egoistic battle of the sexes. It is a competition with yourself from yesterday. Also, it should be looked upon as a competition to lead a wholesome life instead of just using one of your many identities as a benchmark for success.

I should acknowledge Nanopolitan for his vast collection of links and perspectives on the issue. I have been following his blog regularly for the past six months. I also thank Alok Shrivastava for extending a space for a lively debate and leading me to many of the places mentioned in the post.

See you again soon!!

PurpleMoon's on a break!

2010-09-22T04:16:00.002+05:30

PurpleMoon turns four this October. However, this year it is going to get the gift of complete silence, at least for a year. I have been contemplating a break for a long time. However, the proximity of a medium to express your thoughts and the eagerness to do it right away, has always interfered with that resolve. Since I grew up with increasingly sophisticated technology at my finger tips every year, I am curious to know whether I can hold my thoughts back and ruminate on them a bit. It is going to be just as difficult as it was in school when I was asked not to talk. Sometimes, when no one mentioned not talking, I would be quite for hours at a stretch. However, as soon as someone told me not to, I would get this obsessive compulsive urge to say something.
I think it is going to be an interesting experiment. :)
Thanks for being with PurpleMoon!!
I will see you next year, hopefully.

Is this what you want Mr. Thakrey?

2010-09-05T13:27:00.005+05:30

I have always opined on various issues. Whether it is discrimination against Indians in Australia or Indians in India. Living away from home, it is very easy to read something and fight over it on the internet.
I buzzed about an article in TOI a few days ago that documented the amazingly foolish verbal garbage that the MNS leader seems to dispense from time to time. Little did I know that this time, I am going to get to hear about the 'taste of Raj's own venom' so close to home.
One of my mother's staff members from Maarc Labs Pvt.Ltd., Pune, was bashed black and blue in Simbholi, UP, solely for being a Maharashtrian. He had to spend a week in the hospital.
Milind Paingikar, an engineer who comes from a village near Kolhapur was at the Simbholi Sugar Mills in Uttar Pradesh to carry out a quality control training for the chemists. He was mobbed by a group of goons and bashed unconscious as soon as they found out that he is from Maharashtra.
He recovered from his injuries and came back, only to confess that he is not going to give up his job just because he was beaten up. He is determined to go back to Uttar Pradesh again and continue with his work. He said that the beating did not hurt as much as the pain of being targeted as a Maharashtrian. It is brave of Milind to come back with a new courage but this could also have led to something else.
I don't want to go into a gross generalization but if a young Marathi man, coming from exactly the kind of "humble" background that Mr.Thakrey describes has to go through something so unexpectedly violent for no fault of his own, is Thakrey's propaganda really working?
Linguistic, religious and economic polarization should be stopped. Period.
Indians need to collaborate with other Indians. Any entrepreneur will know the value of nationwide networking.
We have to see through this as Indians and not let political polarization get to the streets, for that will only hurt the innocent.

Food for thought

2010-08-28T02:34:00.006+05:30

I have been following Jamie Oliver's food revolution for a while now. For those of you who haven't heard of him read here. He is also the recipient of the 2010 TED prize. His Food Revolution is a campaign that is run in the U.K. and the U.S., to understand how kids (and their parents) think about the process of making and consuming everyday meals. In his TED talk, he talks about how most deaths in the developed (and in the affluent parts of the developing) world are totally preventable.
It also shows little videos where Jamie goes to schools with a bag of vegetables and none of the kids can correctly name what he is holding up. I was following him on television too, where he went into high school kitchens and asked the cooks why the meals in the cafeteria were mostly pizza and french fries. The answer was that it is cheap and easy to cook and THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE BEING TOLD TO DO.
He interviewed some obese teenagers and asked them what they eat. The answers were shocking and so were their confessions about how they feel about being obese. I think being overweight/obese in your teenage years leaves much more than just weight to deal with for the rest of your life. It is a situation that has to be dealt with great care, love and a lot of positive thinking from the parents' side. Obesity does not get as much "sympathy" as malnourishment, mostly because it is a result of excess consumption, which is often related to indulgence and lack of self-restraint. Ellen Gustafson describes obesity and hunger as two sides of the same coin. Although her perspective is different, I think if hunger denotes the complete lack of food, obesity denotes lack of understanding about food. In that respect, Jamie has indeed done us all a big favor by being so blunt and outspoken about what is going on in our society.

Cooking a healthy meal is not that difficult. It needs a bit of creativity and patience. I was watching Jamie Oliver on one of his culinary adventures in Istambul. He went to the bazaar and bought an earthen pot. As he walked browsing through the market, he kept adding ingredients to his pot. Carrots, beans, pumpkin, okra, tomatoes, stock, lean meat etc. In the end he stopped at a spice shop and seasoned the contents with the spices that appealed to him. He put his earthen pot straight on to the fire. It was like coming home from the supermarket and putting your shopping bags in the oven!

Cooking also keeps you mentally healthy. The planning and execution that goes into it brings you out of your everyday stress. It is a healthy distraction if you are one of those work-obsessed people. From my own personal experience, cooking and exercise are the most frequently done activities that take me away from my computer. I consider the times that I am not using a computer very important times of my day. This is where cooking and exercise become a part of my emotional well being too. Growing up around parents who constantly experimented with food in all possible ways, it was inspiring to see how much of a change in attitude a mere change in diet brings about. One of the noteworthy experiences was when my mom was going through a detox diet that did not allow her to eat anything solid for four days. She became particularly toxic at work that week. :)
My dad's experiments with his blood sugar levels by controlling variables like diet, insulin doses, water intake, exercise etc., made me aware of all the chemical reactions that go on behind our skins. The dejection that baba faced at his failures, his dedication in going as far as plotting excel charts for his blood sugar levels and on his "25 years with diabetes" anniversary, calling the disease his best friend made me aware that very few things can be taken for granted when it comes to the chemicals in your body.
Life should not be all about food. Investing a little time in cooking everyday does not mean turning into a gourmand with epicurean tastes. However, taking that balanced time out and planning a meal for yourself, even if it is just for yourself, is equally important. It is not just food for the body, it is also food for thought. :)

The Art of Choosing

2010-08-13T06:17:00.005+05:30

I am currently reading this book by Sheena Iyengar. This talk prompted the purchase and since it is relatively new, I could not buy it second hand - an obsession I have acquired recently. I decided to write a review before I finish it because these days, my creative writing is at the mercy of the little breaks between my experiments and thesis writing. The reading actually takes place on the train and half an hour before I go to bed.
This book is a collection of psychological experiments and their balanced interpretation on how human beings or even laboratory animals choose their circumstances. Sheena did her PhD in social psychology from Stanford University. Her thesis titled 'Choice and its Discontents' won the Best Dissertation Award from the Society of Social Experimental Psychology in 1998. However, more than the award and the topic of study, what inspires me the most about her is that she has achieved this in spite of suffering from a rare form of visual impairment called 'retinitis pigmentosa'. In this book, she clearly mentions why she was driven to get a PhD in choice. Coming from a family of conservative Sikh immigrants, she had a limited choice of aspirations at home. However, she was meant to live an inevitable double life in the U.S., where free choice is at the center of the American Dream. One more constraint was added when at the tender age of thirteen she lost almost ninety percent of her vision, being able to perceive only the difference between darkness and light. In this book, she does full justice to that ability.
She has included cross-cultural experiments between societies that are rated highly individualistic and highly collective. In countries like China, India and Japan individual decisions are often influenced by a 'greater good' or a 'collective motive'. She explains this beautifully by using the rationale behind an Indian arranged marriage, which seems ridiculous in a Western society. On the other hand, in a Western, or individualistic society, kids are taught to exercise their own choice as soon as they start talking. In today's highly globalized world, where cultures are mixing, these basic differences in attitudes pose a lot of challenges in work places.
Rather than taking a 'black and white' approach to how one should choose, this book takes a balanced empirical stand on the exercise of choice across the world. I find it quite relevant to today's society that is being driven by instant gratification and very powerful, yet inadequately used technology. How we choose to utilize the technological power we are being given can reshape the new world. However, it is equally possible that we just drown ourselves into an incoherent noise.
She gives a voice to many thoughts that I used to have in my mind as an immigrant living in a highly individualistic society (Geert Hofstede ranks Australia at 90/100 in his comprehensive ranking for individualistic nations; India being 50/100). Even though I realize the futility of pleasing people by my individual decisions, I cannot bring myself to program my thoughts accordingly. I can process my thoughts to be more individualistic later, but I cannot, naturally, think that I have no constraints in choosing my 'destiny'. This schism sets me apart from my Western friends to a certain degree that is perhaps only obvious to me. Although, the idea of 'me first' sounds very appealing in theory, I am also equally intrigued by the actions of the 'passive (s)heroes' I have seen growing up. Even though having more money, more space and more time to think entirely for yourself is the mantra of self-development, the character that is built in close knit families, where people have little choice as to what will happen to them adds another important dimension to the human mind.
Hence when I see people who, quite reasonably, equate 'collective societies' to 'primitive societies', I sense that they are victims of a situation where they have studied only one side carefully. This book, brings together an in depth analysis of both sides. That is why, I had to write a review even before I finished it. :)

Cat(tharsis)

2010-08-04T15:24:00.005+05:30

In the past few weeks, I have had to wash my sheets three times. Our new cat Tom-Tom (we gave him this politically correct name after we were ridiculed for calling him G-string, and also after discovering one day, that he was a boy, contrary to our assumption) invaded my bedroom one day and declared it as his recreational toilet. He is toilet trained (Western people! Sheesh!) and also goes out in the bush like a real man (oops! labels Saee, labels!!). Somehow, for some unfathomable reason, he also likes to pee in my bed, whenever he gets the opportunity. Some of these Western habits of turning pets into humans astound me. Like, cat food. Every time I open a packet of Whiskas for Tom-Tom, I turn into a cynical, mocking Indian auntie. Why would you go fishing for cats, turn their fish into a disgusting paste, add all possible vitamins to it and sell it to people who own cats? Then, because they should have something harder to chew on, they make pellets of bone meal. Isn't all this processing and packaging in two different brands essentially serving the purpose of a whole mouse with its bones and flesh intact? This, the cat would find on its own, if it is treated like a cat and given freedom to roam around.
The fact that my bedroom has two doors, one that opens on the deck, and another that opens into the lounge makes it much harder. So there is a new, "have-I-forgotten-something" feeling in the already long list that I usually go through on the bus stop, sometimes making me return to check if I have both the doors closed. There is nothing like coming home to a smelly present in your bed. The last time I discovered cat urine on my sheets, I had just put a bunch of fragrant lilies in my room. So now, that fragrance has been tagged forever in my memory, with cat pee, like an unwanted, ugly picture on Facebook (yes, it is time that bloggers incorporate new similes in their writing).
So now, there is a cold war going on in the house. Between me and Tom-Tom. Initially, I was really concerned about it. Having lived with a compassionate flatmate, I think I have caught some of her cat-psychology bugs. So I started wondering what it means when a cat pees in your bed. I even went on to discuss this with friends who have cats. The general opinion seemed to indicate that the cat was jealous of me. He was apparently being territorial on me, maybe because he felt that I was getting more attention from my flatmate than him. I was foolish enough to try and analyze it further until I realized that it was just an experiment in anthropomorphizing animals. So I gave up on uncovering his psychological issues and decided to use combat instead.
First experiment was spraying my room with black pepper. Cats have really fleshy, tender paws. So I decided to deter him from entering my room by burning his ever-so-innocent-pink paws with pepper. It worked well. Every time Tom-Tom walked in, he used to start lifting his paws out of tune like a horse with an obsessive compulsive disorder. It worked so well, that I even thought of replacing pepper with chili flakes. Until that night, when I sneezed about a hundred times. In my sneeze induced high, I even remember hallucinating that my lungs were waving at me from outside my body. Second experiment, involved a spray bottle and some eucalyptus oil. Every time Tom-Tom walked in, I used to spray him with a five percent solution of aqueous eucalyptus. That did deter him but it also turned me into a maniac who would never want to leave her room, just so that she could spray the cat.
Over time, I realized that not forgetting to shut the door was the only practical solution. However, I also made two little gaps for Tom-Tom to step in and out of the house without having to depend on us to open the door. This seems to have alleviated his anger at my bed. The cold war is still on. It is more like a game now.
A little bit of retrospection also led me to believe in the power of Karma. As a kid, throwing cats off my grandma's balcony was perhaps my most favorite hobby. I cunningly categorize it as an educational experience now and with due respect to all the compassionate animal lovers, I think it IS an essential growing up experience to watch a cat fall off a balcony. In the first few seconds, you could see sheer panic in the cat's eyes. Half way through the fall, the cat somehow fluidized its body and always landed on all fours. It is a source of great inspiration in my unnecessarily romanticized metaphorical falls. I think this cat is taking revenge on behalf of his Indian brethren from a long time ago. Shame I cannot remember how many times I threw them off the balcony. I was also cruel enough to put about four kittens under a cardboard box and watch them go rudderless in panic. Can't remember how many times I did that either.
These episodes of Tom-Tom leaking in my bed have not in the least aroused any kind of kind forgiveness inside me, if that is what the Universal plan is. They have given me many more ways to get back at the feline species. Like clapping loudly around his ears when he sleeps too much, picking him up upside down with two paws in each hand, pretending to roast him on a spit, dangling a rag puppet around him until he gets exhausted trying to chase it, closing the cupboard when he gets in with his Sherlock Holmes whiskers, not stopping him if he dips into a wine glass that is still half full and hoping ,that he somehow drinks it. If all these descriptions have started getting him reader sympathy, let me also describe what he does in retaliation.
Climbing the big mango tree in the yard when I go out to get him in, leaving dirty paw marks on a freshly cleaned table, lying belly up at seven in the morning in my way to work to remind me of the luxuries he gets, emerging suspiciously from my room (without peeing) and making me abandon everything at hand in panic, using me to cuddle with when no one else is available and then ignoring me when his favorite girl is around.
I never really actively observe them in order to write about them. But if there is a creature that makes me philosophical, it is a cat. They will always awe me. I think, I will always have a love-hate relationship with the feline species. The only psycho-analysis I can do with this feeling is that both of us like to be the center of attention, in a craftily manipulated underplay. :)

मावसबोलीतल्या कविता

2010-07-24T08:22:00.006+05:30

Ιθάκη

Σα βγεις στον πηγαιμό για την Ιθάκη,
να εύχεσαι νάναι μακρύς ο δρόμος,
γεμάτος περιπέτειες, γεμάτος γνώσεις.
Τους Λαιστρυγόνας και τους Κύκλωπας,
τον θυμωμένο Ποσειδώνα μη φοβάσαι,
τέτοια στον δρόμο σου ποτέ σου δεν θα βρεις,
αν μέν’ η σκέψις σου υψηλή, αν εκλεκτή
συγκίνησις το πνεύμα και το σώμα σου αγγίζει.
Τους Λαιστρυγόνας και τους Κύκλωπας,
τον άγριο Ποσειδώνα δεν θα συναντήσεις,
αν δεν τους κουβανείς μες στην ψυχή σου,
αν η ψυχή σου δεν τους στήνει εμπρός σου.

Να εύχεσαι νάναι μακρύς ο δρόμος.
Πολλά τα καλοκαιρινά πρωιά να είναι
που με τι ευχαρίστησι, με τι χαρά
θα μπαίνεις σε λιμένας πρωτοειδωμένους·
να σταματήσεις σ’ εμπορεία Φοινικικά,
και τες καλές πραγμάτειες ν’ αποκτήσεις,
σεντέφια και κοράλλια, κεχριμπάρια κ’ έβενους,
και ηδονικά μυρωδικά κάθε λογής,
όσο μπορείς πιο άφθονα ηδονικά μυρωδικά·
σε πόλεις Aιγυπτιακές πολλές να πας,
να μάθεις και να μάθεις απ’ τους σπουδασμένους.

Πάντα στον νου σου νάχεις την Ιθάκη.
Το φθάσιμον εκεί είν’ ο προορισμός σου.
Aλλά μη βιάζεις το ταξείδι διόλου.
Καλλίτερα χρόνια πολλά να διαρκέσει·
και γέρος πια ν’ αράξεις στο νησί,
πλούσιος με όσα κέρδισες στον δρόμο,
μη προσδοκώντας πλούτη να σε δώσει η Ιθάκη.

Η Ιθάκη σ’ έδωσε τ’ ωραίο ταξείδι.
Χωρίς αυτήν δεν θάβγαινες στον δρόμο.
Άλλα δεν έχει να σε δώσει πια.

Κι αν πτωχική την βρεις, η Ιθάκη δεν σε γέλασε.
Έτσι σοφός που έγινες, με τόση πείρα,
ήδη θα το κατάλαβες η Ιθάκες τι σημαίνουν.

Ithaca
by Konstantinos Kavafis (1911)
(English translation. Source unknown)

As you set out for Ithaca
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - don't be afraid of them:
you' ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon - you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbours you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind -
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaca always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

------------------------------------

इथाकीला परत येताना..

इथाकीला परत येताना, नेहमी, रस्ता लांब असू द्या,
अनुभवसंपन्न आणि चिन्मयी असू द्या
आणि वाटेत भेटणा-या अक्राळ-विक्राळ नरभक्षक राक्षसांची, किंवा
त्या क्रोधांध, खवळलेल्या महासागराची भीती मुळीच बाळगू नका..
निर्धार पक्का असेल, आणि देहाभोवती त्या अलौकिक चैतन्याचा पहारा असेल,
तर हे राक्षस आणि राक्षसी सागर दिसणारच नाहीत..
कारण ते नेहमी मनाच्या त्या भयभीत कोप-यातूनच उदयाला येतात!

त्या रस्त्यावरच्या प्रत्येक रात्रीनंतर, एक नवा उष:काल व्हावा..
आणि प्राचीच्या त्या गुलाबी हास्यात, प्रत्येक पहाटेची
एक वेगळी भूपाळी असावी, जी अळवताना, भैरवीचा विसर पडावा..
तो रस्ता आडवळणाने यावा, छोट्या मोठ्या बाजार हटातून
आणि परदेशी व्यापा-यांच्या सुगंधी पेठांतून..
आणि झोळी कधी मोत्या-पोवळ्यांनी भरून जावी..
तर कधी थकलेल्या मनगटाला, गुलाब-चंदनाचा स्पर्श व्हावा..
पण पैंजणाच्या रुणुझुणूला, नेहमी, एक सुजाण, विनयी ताल असावा..

इथाकीची तजेलदार आठवण तुमच्या मनात नेहमी असू द्या..
इथाकीला परत येणं, हे जणू प्राक्तनच आहे..
पण म्हणून परत येण्याची घाई करू नका..
काळ्यांमध्ये थोडे भुरे, थोडे पांढरे व्हावे,
झोळीमध्ये नक्षत्रं असावी, पण त्यांची फिकीर नसावी..
इथाकीनी मला काय दिलं, हा सवाल मनात मुळी नसावा..
कारण इथाकिनी तुम्हाला हा प्रवास दिला..
हे पुरागमन तुमचं संचितही आहे!

कदाचित परत आल्यावर ती गरीब आणि थकलेली वाटेल,
पण तो तुमचा भ्रम निश्चितच नाही..
तुमच्या प्रवासानी तुमच्यासाठी
सगळ्या इथाकी उलगडल्या असतील!
------------------------------------

राजनी खो दिल्यावर डोक्यात आलेली पहिली कविता निवडली. यापूर्वी कधीच मराठीत अनुवाद केला नाहीये, त्यामुळे मन बदलायच्या आत पूर्ण करायचं आणि पोस्ट करायचं ठरवलं. ही कविता ग्रीक भाषेत आहे. पण इथे त्याचा इंग्रजी अनुवाद देते आहे. ग्रीकमध्ये "इथाका" न म्हणता "इथाकी" म्हणतात. म्हणून मी मराठीत तोच गोंडस शब्द ठेवलाय.
"घरी परतण्याकडे" असं बघायला मला फार आवडतं. मग ते नुसतं रोज कामावरून घरी जाणं असलं तरी. आणि जगात कुठेही भेटणारे, पण मनात त्यांची इथाकी घेऊन वावरणारे लोक भेटले की कावाफीच्या या उदात्त कवितेची आठवण होते. :)
माझा खो मंदारला.
ता.क. हा स्वैर अनुवाद आहे. कारण मला त्या कवितेला मराठमोळायचा मोह आवरला नाही. न राहून इथाकीच्या ऐवेजी सारखं कोल्हापूर लिहावसं वाटत होतं.

Don't call me a feminist!

2010-07-22T15:45:00.004+05:30

How many articles have we read about the role of women in a particular field?
Every morning as I walk to work, I listen to SBS radio, a radio station that is in liaison with the BBC World service. Every other day, I get a lecture on the 'role of women' in some male dominated aspect of work. Today, however, I am going to lecture you on something else. I am going to list the funniest women I have come across in the field of entertainment.
Not getting into the details of why women are not routinely known for being funny, I am going to start with Alice Tinker.
Emma Chambers plays the dopey Alice Tinker in BBC's Vicar of Dibley . Although her character in the show is peripheral, she personifies Alice. The show itself, is a far cry from the popular American sitcoms. It is about a woman Vicar, Geraldine Granger, who is sent to the small, country parish of Dibley. Unlike the chiseled leads in other shows, Ms.Granger is blissfully obese. The other characters in this show are equally "imperfect" in their own way, but that only adds charm if anything to the whole story. I think if I had to pick one example of Alice's goofy humor, it would be this.
Another funny woman, I came across in Australia is Kitty Flanagan . She is a regular on a T.V. show on the national network. She always manages to get everyone in splits. Kitty is the perfect example of how a just a little bit of wit can make someone bypass all the usual rules of getting noticed.
The crown, however, goes to Sofia Vergara of Modern Family . She plays Gloria in the show. For the first few episodes you are just wowed by the sheer oomph she adds to the show. If the entertainment industry is a medium of objectifying sexuality, Sofia is a solid example of how that is done. But the one thing bigger than her breasts, is of course, her sense of humor and comic timing. :) Her Colombian accent adds to the hilarity of her lines. Towards the end of the show, you realize that she is a completely clued up, sensitive and bright bimbo. Something you would not expect first time you see her. I could not find the funnier parts of the show on Youtube, but here's a teaser. You don't have to worry about losing interest. ;)
These three women have made me laugh a good deal in the past few years. Feel free to add your favorite funny women to this database too!
Cheers!

The degree of Indian-ness

2010-06-24T07:19:00.005+05:30

This , and related discussion on my buzz prompted this post.

I have nothing against people questioning their own identity. I do that many times. I think it is a sign of a healthy, functioning mind. However, when it comes to being Indian, there is no single rule that can define us all. Living away from home, I actually go through a series of panic attacks every time I have to go back home for a holiday. I attribute that fear to the fact that I am not yet strong enough to handle this culture switch gracefully. The discussion on buzz reminded me of a first hand 'Indian experience' I went through about two years ago.

I was supposed to be in India for six weeks in December 2008. As soon as I made my travel arrangements, I went out with my Australian and other international friends to celebrate. We were sitting in a gloomy bar, on a weekday afternoon, with the fresh memories of experimental failures haunting us. All of a sudden someone suggested that they should meet me in India for a back-packing trip!

I was not exactly supportive of this idea in the beginning. However, they talked me into it. All along at the back of my mind, I was worried to the core. I did not want them to be overwhelmed. I knew them all well and knew they had open minds. However, accompanying someone on a low budget trip around Rajasthan, was not exactly, my cup of tea. I had never done anything low-budget in my life in India. I had never traveled around on my own, around my own country. I had seen everything from the point of view of a spoilt tourist. Apart from that, the people I was supposedly going to escort had never been to India before. Their ideas about what goes on in India ranged from riding on an elephant to one's own wedding, to a land where everyone does Yoga on those silly, non-slipping Yoga mats!

The idea made me admire their courage (or ignorance) and the skeptic in me eventually unruffled her feathers. I spent a week in Pune before my gang of friends arrived in Mumbai from Goa. Since they were all using "Lonely Planet" as their travel Bible, they chose places recommended by the book. When I got into a taxi in Mumbai, the driver was a bit surprised when I told him to take me to a hotel close to cafe Leopold. He quizzed me about what a normal looking Indian girl is going to do in this firangi ghetto. I had to explain to him how I was showing around my Australian friends (actually by this time, two people from Holland had joined us too since they were friends of a friend I met in Australia, who was also in the group). This explanation was then stuck with me for the rest of the two weeks. I had to explain to every second person on the train, restaurant, hotel, rikshaw etc., what I was doing with these bunch of goras. We got bored of the same story so two days into it, we started making up stories just to see how our interrogators react. In one of them, I was married to one of the guys in the group. I made up some very creative Bollywoody answers to the questions related to the whole 'how-did-your-parents-take-it? question. Mumbai was extremely overwhelming for all of them. The sheer density of population on the streets was enough to make them claustrophobic. On top of that, a few of them got taken for a ride by beggars and taxi drivers. Overall the reaction was tepid, just as I had expected. Since all of us were committed to making it a fun experience, everyone was trying to look at the brighter side. There were plenty. Just walking down the streets of South Mumbai was enough to cheer everyone up. We had the much awaited "Mumbai-local" ride. Although it was not the cleanest places to be, everyone had to admit that the number of people it dutifully transports, ranging from women with huge, open baskets of fish to working class people, would put any transport system under stress.

The day we left for Jaipur, the Taj was bombed by terrorists. Some of my friends panicked and considered going back. But all roads back home went through Mumbai. So we decided to stay in Rajasthan and continue with our trip. By this time, they swore that it would have made no difference had they been traveling with an Italian or a Spanish girl instead of me. I was as clueless just about everything as them. The only advantage being, I could bargain in Hindi (they accepted this only because they did not know how Marathi my Hindi really is). We had to constantly keep accounts, haggle, wait for rooms to be cleaned, then wait again because they were not 'clean enough'. It was one of the most stressful times of my life, especially with the additional fear of more terror attacks. By this time, the colors of Rajasthan, the cheap, yummy vegetarian food, bangles, skirts with mirrors etc., had infused the much needed enjoyment in our journey.

Every person we met, however inquisitive about our personal lives had an air of harmless curiosity about them. Initially, even walking down the street with my friends was stressful. But when you come out of your own awkwardness and face people with the same honesty that you face yourself with, everyone joins in. We went to a really old Meera temple in Jaipur. At first, the priest gave me the look that seemed to say, "I hope you know what you are doing". Each one of my friends, then asked him questions about the temple, its architecture, about Meera, Lord Krishna and I was translating it for all of them. In the end, he called me back just as I was about to leave the temple and handed me a laddoo. As a gift for showing people around who are not from my culture. He only had one request, "Just the way you are showing them a slice of our culture, also explain to them the importance of being vegetarian". I was really touched by the way he put it.

The philosophy of this travel group was very simple. Eat everything, walk a lot, talk to as many people as you can and respect the local customs. We hardly ate any meat in Jaipur. We were eating hot street food only. One day, when we were in Ajmer, one of the guys in the group started craving meat. Since we did not want to take any chances, we went to a fairly expensive restaurant (from the Lonely Planet list) and paid Rs.500 for a single portion of continental chicken. That night, he became violently ill. We were living in a simple hotel called the Haveli Inn, in Ajmer. I woke up the owners who lived downstairs. The next morning, we had to take him to the local government hospital. This was my first time in a public hospital. I thought this is going to be one of the biggest points on their 'bad sides of India' list. The room was humble, but spotless. He was given intra-venous medicines all day and all night. All of that, including the rent for the room came to only Rs.2500. The actual medicines cost lesser than the chicken that had made him sick. The owners of the hotel sent their domestic help with bland, Indian, sick-man's food that was just what he needed. His firang charm made sure that he always had company in the hospital. With all the nurses asking him questions about his personal life. :)

He walked out feeling as strong as he was before. All of them took a list of medicines that the hospital needed frequently for treating kids with diarrhea, since that was the most common cause of hospitalization amongst kids living in poor neighborhoods. My friends bought a stock of those for people who might not have enough money to afford the medicines (and the fact that there are people who cannot afford it says a lot about where we are going). This was the only exception to an otherwise low-budget trip. They only kept enough cash to get by until they reached Nepal, donating the rest to the hospital. Without any intervention on my part, they were given receipts of all the donations and informed where they were going to be used. The hospital turned out to be the highest point of appreciation.

When I returned to Brisbane, we had a beer over our experiences. Although India seemed overwhelming at times, most of my friends were sure they were going to go back for a slightly upgraded holiday. Some were enticed by their visits to Yoga schools while others were floored by the beauty of the Himalayas. All of them chirped in unison that they definitely wanted to go back to Goa.

That trip was an lesson in many ways. Firstly, it was a lesson in honesty, where even though people look at you funny, you go ahead and do what you have set out for yourself. To be able to accept that your country is not perfect. To be able to present to people India, in her real form and let them make their own judgement. In the end, the message that I really wanted to put across got through. Without my having to spell it out. India doesn't care if you are a proud Indian! And Indians don't either. If you attract enough attention, they would give you a few curious looks. If you are dupe-worthy and look loaded, they would dupe you without any of their thirty three billion gods stopping them. Most of them are just looking for simple survival. In a deluge of people wanting to replace their place in this world. The country herself seems to me like this complacent mother cat. Watching a new batch of kittens amuse themselves as she lies down for rest. She does not care if you are proud to be a part of her litter. As long as you get your mouse and get by, all is well. :)

Think before you blink!

2010-06-22T10:36:00.003+05:30

I recently collected some karma points by being an experimental subject. Every now and then, graduate students get these near desperate emails in their inbox. Some psychology or optometry student wants them to be their experimental subject. Whenever I have time, I try and take part in these kind of experiments. Sometimes, for the students because they are good friends. At others, because I am interested in the experiment.
I find the role of being a "subject" oddly relaxing. :)
For one, you have to be a complete lab-rat. Without unnecessarily opining on what they are trying to do. Apart from that, it gives you an insight into how many factors control a single experiment - something that I myself have trouble monitoring, especially in the scary forests of organic chemistry.
These experiments were carried out using a range of contact lenses. As a "healthy" subject I was required to have no acquaintance with the usage of any kind of contact lenses. I had to go through a routine visual acquity test (I aced it, btw) and then I wore a pair of contacts. The movement of my eyes was filmed in an upward and a downward gaze. We started with soft, silicon lenses and ended with hard, poly (methyl metacrylate) ones. I was not told exactly what she was trying to find out. So during filming, I was asked to count from zero onwards until she asked me to stop. I did exactly what I was told. At the end of each session, my cornea was desensitized using aneasthetic eye drops. The numb cornea was then filmed for the same duration.
The moment she told me to stop, I stopped counting.
After all the tests were over, I rated the lenses according to the level of comfort. Just before I left, she confessed that she was getting inconsistent data.
She told me that she was monitoring the blinking patterns of her subjects. Even after desensitizing the cornea, she was getting inconsistent blinking patterns. Which made me pause for thought. I realized then that I was mechanically counting numbers without trying to control the thoughts in my head. All these years that I have been successfully using my eyes, I have realized that thinking affects blinking. I blink more when I think. To study my physical blinking pattern, I think the experimentor would need to numb my mind more than my cornea. When I told her this, she said,"I asked you to count! So that I keep you in the experiment."
And count I did! With an avalanche of thoughts going on in my mind at the same time. Those ten minutes of filming were like a gold mine of time! I organized so many experiments, wrote so many new posts, planned and scrapped so many dinner menus in those ten minutes!
A little bit of Googling led me to this . I should have probably offered a repeat analysis. I took the easy way out, by not doing so.
Next time, I will think before I blink! =)

About fears..

2010-05-23T07:36:00.005+05:30

Sometimes, accepting that you cannot handle a situation is more of a grown-up thing to do, than getting into it and being "grown-up" about it.
When in doubt, growing up is a better state of being than being grown up.
I don't know how long I will take to grow up with some aspects of my mind. But I think I have been a grown up about a lot of things since I was a kid. :)

Sometimes, when you are really angry, you can hear a voice inside that say,
"Calm down. This is not you. This is your jealousy talking". Initially I used to feel really mad at that voice. The basic question being, "How can I be jealous?".
Or sometimes when you get slapped in the face (figuratively), you mope about it as if the whole world is being unfair. Then this voice says, "I hope you know it, this is not you, this is your ego".

I know that I don't like swimming in the sea. It has been my problem since I was a little baby. I used to get moody on the beach and then start sobbing. I took swimming lessons. I love swimming in lakes and ponds. Or even a finite waterfall. I still can't handle the ocean. I have rationalized it so many times.
Maybe it is the vastness. The limitlessness that makes you feel insignificant.
Maybe it is the uncertainty.
You know you are not going to drown.
Why can't you just assume it is a vast lake and it ends on the other side of the horizon!
Nothing works.

Then I accept that some things just cannot be rationalized.
Growing up is not really doing everything without fear. It is knowing your fears better and better every day. :)

Big Bollywood Bubble

2010-05-12T09:20:00.004+05:30

Although I am not much of a Sci-fi geek, I believe that human beings are capable of living many realities simultaneously. There is an evolutionary trend which, when observed in retrospect, makes one think that people tend to arrive at the same conclusions using different roads. Alternatively, people also come to accept their own realities using different vehicles. If we take an imaginary picture of human beings on the Earth living their own realities, it would look like a model for some sort of a meta-physical string theory. Where people exist on all levels of emotional, economic,moral,cultural and psychological dimensions. One of these dimensions is Bollywood.

The reason for this long, winding introduction is the fact that I am trying to copy Raj.
Bollywood is a bubble. For people who enjoy being a part of it as a viewer, actor, director, underworld venture capitalist etc., it is a reality. Once you step out of it however, you cannot go back to it. I am very sure of the last statement. Whoever thinks that they can step in and out of the Bollywood bubble are most certainly still in it.
When I was a kid, about ten years old, I loved Sunday mornings for a number of reasons. The most important being a television program called "Rangoli". They used to telecast Bollywood songs from movies across the decades. One day, we had a self-proclaimed disciplinarian over for an early morning breakfast on a Sunday. When I stepped out of my room for my dose of early morning show, I was rudely denied access to it! I wasn't by any stretch of imagination an ego-less ten year old. If anything I had more of it then that I have now. It has taken sixteen years of ego-bashing to bring me to my current level of impudence.

I was caught unprepared. I gathered myself quickly and asked him why I cannot watch it. In reply, he asked me a few questions.
"Do you think, before they conceived you, your mom and dad ran around trees like the people in these songs do?"
"How do I know? I wasn't there. I don't care if they did!!"
"Would you like to see them dance around trees like that in real life? Would you like it if say, we go out for a picnic and all of a sudden, your mom and dad start dancing?"
"No." (Actually I was quite sure of that)
"That's why you cannot watch it. Because it is not going to change your reality for you. It is just going to take you away from it."

That exactly is my point. I am amazed at the sheer power of this mechanism called Bollywood, to turn a mind-numbing number of people away from reality. To an extent where it has become a new dimension in the different realities we can exist in!
With an annual turnover of $750 million, the employment it generates is a definitely valid and happy reality. The movies however remain as unreal and melodramatic as ever. An average Bollywood movie has survived on the girl-meets-boy-falls-in-love theme for too long. In recent years, there have been shorter experimental takes. However, big production houses still go for the traditional song and dance route. I realized how badly I was engulfed when I did not watch Bollywood movies for about eighteen months. After this de-toxifying hiatus, I had the terrible misfortune of watching Rab ne bana di jodi. That killed any "regrowth" of the Bollywood weed in my head. About a year later, I saw Love Aaj Kal which made me confirm that I should come out of the closet about Bollywood soon.

The more I get drawn away from the Karan Johar factory, the better I appreciate real cinema in India. Smita Patil in Bhoomika, Naseeruddin Shah in Masoom and Nandita Das in Fire. Masoom is one of those movies that makes me cry every time I watch it. The anguish of a betrayed wife, the guilt of the betraying husband and the chemistry between them that almost ruins a perfect family, has been portrayed with great care by Shekhar Kapur. And although it has songs, they merge with the movie almost impalpably. Prabhat theatre has produced some of the most meaningful Marathi cinema. Kunku is one such movie that is close to my heart. It brings forth the honest, angry and revolutionary rebellion of a young bride married to a very old man.
Some movies however, have to be appreciated for the music only. Guide is one such movie. I cannot, for the life of me, get over the songs and the lyrics of Guide. All the Guru Dutt movies have beautiful soundtracks. He was a person who was truly 'ahead of his times'. Some of the Marathi films like Honaji Bala, Ram Shastri and in recent times Natrang have music that has set its own unattainable benchmark.

What I don't understand is why do we still have to rely on the same routine if so much of an experimental cinema already exists in India? Why do Indian people prefer 'impractical' love to a nice and acceptable reality? Do we really, still, need the bubble?

Sugar- A bittersweet history

2010-04-28T01:13:00.003+05:30

I bought this book from the legendary Citylights book shop in San Francisco.True to the history of the bookshop, this book entertains you to the core in spite of its rather scholarly structure. The writer, Elizabeth Abbot is the former Dean of Women Trinity College, University of Toronto. She explains the evolution of sugar production along with the anthropological milestones it achieved on its way. In today's world, where sugar has already caused enough havoc, it is amusing to read about the initial reactions to the sweetener. It was a regular custom at Royal gatherings to make plates and spoons out of sugar and eat the cutlery when the dinner was over. To regale the grand audience, sometimes sculptures were made out of sugar. Sugar sculpture was a booming business in the early eighteenth century. Hollow sculptures were built around live doves and frogs. When the guests ate enough of the sculpture, the helpless birds flew out for their lives and the frogs jumped at the ladies' elaborate dressing gowns. Crazy as it may sound, in today's health and safety obsessed world, it was a big part of entertaining guests for rich people.
During the industrial revolution, sugar fueled the workers in factories in the form of tea breaks. The concept of high tea evolved during this time, when working women could not organize elaborate meals for the family.
This is just one face of sugar-evolution. It has a more serious and almost literally, dark face. Sugar Industry started slave trade across Africa. African slaves were sent to all the European colonies to work in cane fields. Abbot describes the plight of sugar slaves in well referenced, yet immensely moving descriptions. Although blacks were considered totally inferior to the whites, white men did not hesitate to devour their women. After a few generations of inter-racial mixing, the masters devised, like the writer puts it 'bizarre and complex' ways to categorize the offspring.
The offspring of a black and white was a mulatto. The offspring of a mulatto and a black was a sambo; the offspring of a sambo and a black was a black. The offspring of a mulatto and a white was a quadroon; the offspring of a quadroon and a white was a mustee; the offspring of a white and a mustee was a musteephino; the offspring of a musteephino and a white was a quintroon and the offspring of a quintroon and a white was an octoroon. Most of the last two classifications were 'white' enough to pass off as whites and therefore were considered whites!
Brazilian, French and Spanish sugar colonies had racial distinctions with as many as 128 permutations of mixes between native and white, native and black and native and mestizos (people of mixed European and native ancestry).
Skin color dictated the amount of back-breaking labor the slaves were 'destined' to perform. Slaves with a lighter skin tone were given domestic duties. As the skin tone got darker and darker the jobs went further away into the hot cane fields. This also lead to an establishment of hierarchy between the slaves which served the master's ultimate objective of keeping the slaves divided.
As the French chefs were inventing their irresistible chocolate mousse, slaves in Haiti and Jamaica were taking whiplashes on empty stomachs. Ironically, just like her creators, even sugar was subjected to color discrimination. Initially it came in a brown loaf, just like bread, as it was coated with molasses. However, towards the end of the eighteenth century sugar refining became just as lucrative as sugar plantation. The colonizers started shipping raw sugar back to the refineries in Europe in order to keep a monopoly in making the finest white sugar.
As the British strong hold in cane sugar manufacturing increased, Napoleon commissioned his scholars to discover ways of making sugar from sugar beet. Beet sugar is still produced in parts of Europe with climate that is unfavorable for sugarcane. Sugar trade played an important part in post-war treaties.
As the men and women in England began to realize the abject exploitation behind their cups of tea, an abolition movement was started. This motivated the British to move bases to East India (or India). The East Indian sugar was free of exploitation as it was not made by slaves.

Before I read this book, I had never thought of globalization in this perspective. Sugar trade put Africans in Louisiana and Florida, Indians in Fiji and South Africa and led to so much of mixing of races even in a time where it was completely against the social structure. And as sugar refining met international standards with the help of scientific commissions like ICUMSA, the minds and motives behind the commodity also underwent great refinement. My mother works as a referee to ICUMSA. It is not unusual now for black, brown, white, male and female sugar scientists to sit together at a table and exchange methods. However, if we look back to the times when it all started, this day feels like some sort of a Divine intervention!

Fusion Food

2010-04-09T14:10:00.005+05:30

I have had ample moments of "stupid enlightenment". It is when you arrive at a certain thought or a phrase on your own, only to find out later (courtesy-Google), that it has been arrived at and published decades before you were even conceived. "Fusion Food" is one such phrase. My usual way to unwind after work is call my mom. I give her an account of my extremely banal life by adding some spice to it. Not the dishonest kind though. I believe that you can only fit your curves the way you want. You have no moral right to create new data points. Anyway, I should get to the point before the nerd in me comes to life.
Owing to my obvious aversion towards talking about work, I end up giving my mom accounts of my culinary adventures. She has made herself a place in her circle with her empirically established epicurean tastes and likes to pass judgment, for no reason, on the food others cook. Since I volunteer to place my neck between the blades of her guillotine, I end up enjoying her judgments to a great extent.
What I like about her judgment is that she ends up anthropomorphizing all the ingredients.
"What did you cook for dinner last night?"
"I made Greek Easter Soup"
" Really? What are the ingredients?"
"I used chicken, mushrooms and spring onion"
"Oh! Poor spring onion. Why would you put a nice green vegetable like that in a soup with chicken and mushroom?"
"The recipe said so. Actually the recipe says we should use entrails of lamb and other animals that are slaughtered. I replaced that with chicken because you cannot buy entrails without the animals around them"
"That is just disgusting! I won't be able to get over this for a while. Why can't you cook normal food?"
I have no idea what "normal food" means. She thinks I am taking advantage of the innocence of my flatmates when I cook roast vegetables for them.
"How can you just chop pumpkin, zucchini, eggplant and onion and toss it in the oven without any spice? And they agree to do the dishes in exchange of THAT?"
"No! I add spice. Basil and chili flakes. I coat all of that with lots of olive oil too!"

The other day, when I told her that I made chole with Spanish chorizo, she requested me not to share my bizarre recipes with her anymore. She pulls a Raj Thakrey at the idea of making a cheese sandwich with Maharashtrian dry potato curry. She finds it culturally threatening that when I have my friends over, I sometimes serve mixed vegetables and paneer with tzaziki. When I told her that tzaziki is actually made from cucumber and yogurt with just an addition of garlic and vinegar she almost accused the Greeks of plagiarism. Indeed it is quite plausible that Alexander the Great allured one of her great^n grandmothers and stole her recipe of kakdichi koshimbir on his way out. Then when he was back in his home town entertaining his ten thousandth girl/boyfriend he suddenly ran out of mustard seeds and decided to replace them with garlic and vinegar instead!

Today, I was describing to her what we had for dinner last night. My new flatmate from New Zealand cooked a "fish pie". The ingredients of which are as follows :-
1. (Mandatory) canned fish fillets
2. Boiled, mashed potato
3. (Mandatory) canned corn
4. Hard boiled eggs
5. Half a kilo of cheese
6. Tomato
The end result was too much even for a left/liberal foodizen like me. In fact, the consistency and the appearance of the end result was too much even for the cook. So we were thinking about a makeover for the leftovers. Amongst things like deep-fried fish pie balls, fish pie popsicle, fish pie soup (5 times dilution),etc., we also ended up creating a fish-pie-roast-veggie-sandwich.
And instead of her usual state of horror, my mom surprised me with her two cents. Fish-pie thalipeeth and fish-pie kothimbir vadi. Making me write about it was her idea too. I am sure she would be a bit miffed with the way I paint her!
Kudos to you aai. I dream of the day when I can make you eat all that I cook!

Eve

2010-04-02T03:08:00.004+05:30

We still live the story of Adam and Eve
That began with a simple,
Unambiguous Divine instruction,
Of not eating the Fruit of Knowledge.
The innocent, primeval couple left it
Faithfully unquestioned, until..
Their oblivious bliss was choked
Between the glistening coils,
Of a slithering serpent from Hell.
It spun a web of irresistible
Almost compulsive attraction around Eve
And Eve gave in.

She could not hold herself back
From the Fruit, she surrendered!
And the coiling Serpent left,
With the scars of a million Births
On her primal, unsure Womb.

I love Eve.
Even the Garden of Eden faded
In the light of her careless Blunder
And Adam was dragged with her
Into the river of abysmal Sorrow.
Not just Adam, but the entire
Human existence as well!

Although they both created it,
Adam is just the Reason of Chance,
But Eve, in all her beauty,
Is the sole,Reason and Agent of Choice..

She appeals to me, not for the Philosophy
That surrounds her.
I like her way of self-surrender.
She chose her inevitable destiny
To have the fruit
And Lust was born.

Lust, is a labyrinth..
Eve may have given us
A lifetime of suffering
But she is also the one
Who opened this labyrinth for us
And showed us the beauty of
An unassuming, empirical God
That is silently superior
To the Obvious.

That is the debt humanity owes her
And can never pay her back!
She stands like a Goddess
In our circles of Lust and Sorrow
Because of her very first surrender..

(Translation of a Grace Poem from Marathi)

The Gods of Small Things

2010-03-21T07:14:00.009+05:30

This post is inspired by Tejas's post here.
I have always admired the Indian attitude towards newspapers. I see all the newspapers being dumped in the recycle bin here. However there is so much character about recycling news in India. :). Whether it is bringing up an old piece of gossip to refresh public memories before talking about a new Bollywood linkup or just plain old recycling of printed news.
With a little help from Wiki (as usual), I found out that India is the second country in the world with respect to largest newspaper circulation. As a kid, it was entertaining to travel just from Pune to Belgaum via Kolhapur to find so much variety in the newspapers and the attitude that goes into them. People actually judge other people by the newspaper they read! So a Sakal reader would have his brow furrowed around a Samna regular.

What intrigues me however is how just like our age old philosophy states,
वासांसि जीर्णानी यथा विहाय नवानि गृहणाति नरोपराणि
तथा शरीराणि विहाय जीर्णान्यन्यानि संयाति नवानि देहि॥
(Like a person discards worn out clothes and gets new ones, the soul discards worn out bodies and attains new bodies.)

the newspapers in India have so many after-lives in different forms. The "lowest" birth a newspaper could get (being politically correct lowest being of lowest value in terms of use) is the birth as the humble brown bag's Indian counterpart. Or even the "disposable plastic plate's" Indian step-brother. You can see it in all the bhel-puri stalls. On days when an enormous ennui engulfs your soul in the middle of an engineering exam, this newspaper plate makes a good after-snack reading.
Then the slightly higher form is this.

Beautifully hidden behind the colorful coils, this is certainly a higher birth for the humble visitor that comes to us each morning. :)
Some stores like Either Or, have made shopping bags out of newspapers. I find that concept very appealing. Not just in terms of the low cost of production but also in the way where for a store like that it is also a style statement.
I thought this was one of the most creative re-births of Indian paper. Where old Bollywood movie posters are used to make bags and sold by children on the street.
Another "higher" birth attained by the Indian news is the skirt of a kathakali dancer. We used to have a doll long time ago that eventually gave in to the monsoon weather. I realized how meticulously the newspaper was packed inside to give it almost the look of painted wood. Some of the not-so-spectacular lower births include wrapping papers for laundry. I was pleasantly nostalgic to find a Marathi newspaper bit in a kurta I wore first time after coming back from India. Also interesting is the use of newspapers in the kitchens. To wipe mirrors in the bathroom, to wrap green vegetables so that they don't go limp in the fridge. Painters use it to line the metal before painting, fruit sellers have custom-made newspaper bags for grapes and figs. When I was in school, I also used newspapers to cover my books instead of buying a separate brown paper just for that purpose!

During Diwali, newspapers help soak oil from all the fried savory stuff. Not to mention they are also an integral part of the atom bomb! One of the annoying images of newspaper recycling is the "morning after" Diwali where all the streets are lined with bits of "exploded" newspapers from all the fire-works. I was surprised to see this in a small Hippie town called Malenie close to Sunshine Coast, Brisbane.
It was bangles made from newspapers imported from India!! They were sold for $3 a piece and people seem to really agree with them! I hope some of it at least went back to the artists who made it!
I think this could classify as a higher birth too.

And of course, perhaps the most insignificant reuse of newspapers is the cows on the street using it as a source of fibre. But hey! Wait a minute. They can actually use it as a source of energy! There you go, I think this is holiest point where this post can be concluded.
Although waste management in India is not something that any Indian would be proud of, I am really proud of my country for being so resourceful with newspapers. It is interesting to see how seemingly insignificant jobs can lead to so much diversity in the use of the same product. The rag pickers, the raddiwalahs, the bhelpuri walahs, the maids, the housewives, the artisans hidden in remote parts of Indian countryside are silently coming together to make such a big statement! I think we should be grateful for all these Gods of Small Things.

Learning Curve. :)

2010-02-26T10:38:00.005+05:30

I like to teach myself. It is a great way to live life.
I have taught myself a lot of things since I stopped growing vertically (and that was a very long time ago). First, with a little help from my mom, I taught myself cooking. It was around the time when I was twelve.Risking the big revelation about my age, fourteen years down the line, I am still learning. :)
Then I learnt to feel good about myself. That's true, I did!
It is not easy to feel good about yourself in a rational world. The moment you step out you are given a million magnified images of all the little things that are wrong with you. This is not because I am cynical. This is true. In different contexts, different people see what you don't have. Sometimes, they put it across by excessively praising what you have. At others, they mumble and fumble and kind of blurt it out. Some are really direct. So they wait all morning to meet you, picking the juiciest adjectives they could embellish it with. Then, when they see you, you can see the splendour of a thousand sunrises on their face. If you have to, you take it. If you can't, which is a rare situation, you just fume and leave the room.
But when you sit down later, with a mug of hot chocolate (forsaking the marshmallow as a sign of mourning for the self respect you have just killed) you know, somewhere inside, that you are good. :) I have come to love that feeling. Only because I taught myself how to feel that way. You see, that feeling should not come draped in anger, or as a stilt for a dwindling ego, or as an equal and opposite reaction. It should be there. Like the very last, unnoticed mango in a crate full of hay. It is not easy. Feeling (really) good about yourself is a very difficult thing.
As years pass by, "feeling good" changes so many faces.So many strong winds carve tiny lines on the faces that want to feel good. I hope that voice inside does not get tired. I have a funny feeling it won't either.
I also learnt to learn. Sometimes, all of a sudden, you start feeling like you are all cooked and ready to be served. Then if someone tries to check you with a fork, it hurts! Precisely because you are not cooked yet. There was a time when I wanted to be cooked right away and not being able to step out of the oven made me really angry. Now I see it. God really prefers slow cooking and we should let him do it his way. Even if we oppose, it is not like a chicken can really get up and march towards the plate with angry slogans. :)
So even though I feel good, I never really let myself think that I am the best I could be. This is hard too, especially when you have learnt to feel good. It takes a while to get that balance. Needless to say that you topple and trip over many situations you would rather not live again.
Plus every new situation has many small situations hidden in it. So you never really know where you are going to trip. It is best to have a past. It keeps on accumulating anyway. I guess miles and miles of trudging through present is wisdom after all. :)
One of the most difficult thing to teach myself was to wait. I don't think I have done it successfully even now. You know how when you are in a long line, right at the end and someone jumps the queue in the front. There is so much learning to do from the time you start swearing in that situation to the point where you just change the music to a happier track when that happens. You learn to wait for things that you cannot help. Also for things, that would get much better if you wait. To make words wait until anger has left. To wait for rain for weeks and still find things you could cheer yourself up with. To wait for friends to understand what you meant when they got upset. To wait for a lot of things that could be done right away if you want but you know they must wait for you too!
One of the most useful things I have learnt is to be regular. Do something everyday. It gives your life a pace.Then retarding forces can slow you down only a little. Even if it is just watering the chili or running by the river or even cleaning the stove before you go to bed. :) It often gives you certainty that is many times absent from larger things.
Most importantly though, I have learnt not to stop dancing. You never really stop dancing even if you try. You just lose the audience..and then it gets better than you ever thought it would!
For as long as the music is in your ears, you should dance. Does not matter if it's the kitchen, the bathroom, the walk-in freezer or a deserted bus stop. :)

The Little Prince

2010-01-31T05:01:00.007+05:30

I just read this book, which was a present. It came with an assurance that I would love it because of the person that I am. :) It was completely true. It is widely known as a children's book but I think it is more an adults' book. It is about a little prince, who comes from an asteroid and shares his candid opinion about grown-ups with the writer.It is enthralling with all its fantastic ideas and innocent illustrations. Of little planets where there are one thousand, four hundred and forty sunsets in twenty four hours, big enough to be occupied only by a solitary, tired lamplighter!
For an adult, every line is a new hope. A new way of looking at ordinary life. To care for flowers, or even a single flower with full responsibility. To weep, to open your eyes wide and see what you have around you. To slow down and drink water. To see the stars just because they are pretty and not because they guide us to our destinations.To make every simple thing in your life a source of joy. To have friends and to think of them all the time!

We are all proud of our achievements as adults. The way we use the freedom we get as a consequence of being an adult, what we build for ourselves in whatever space that is "ours" in this world, and the constant urge to get somewhere that we yet have to get to! The pride we take in moving on and still being strong.
No one really pays attention to the huge sacrifice we make in order to turn into an adult. We lose our ability to believe in something just because it is true for us. We lose the ability of not comprehending failure and going for it as though it does not exist.
This is all brought back to life in this book by the prince and his flower. :)

You find yourself giggling like a kid in some parts and in some, your eyes well up even before you realize.
My flower is ephemeral, the little prince said to himself, and she has only four thorns with which to defend herself against the world! And I've left her alone where I live!

A must read, especially if you think you are a grown-up!

The side effects of globalization!

2010-01-21T05:16:00.007+05:30

Just a few weeks before I came back to Australia this year, an Indian was stabbed to death in Melbourne. Since then, at every dinner party, I had to explain the "real situation" to everyone. Indian television media is extremely hyperactive. I have said this before and I would say it again. The government had to issue an order of restraint to the media following similar reports of Indians being attacked after the unfortunate incident. Although this causes a lot of anxiety to people who have sent their kids to Australia and also others who have family members living here, one good thing about the whole media coverage is that both Australian police and the Australian government have been put in the spotlight. We cannot deny that it has not helped in a certain way. In today's times, any country would be reluctant to admit that racism is even a small element of their culture. Moreover, labeling Australia as a racist country is unfair. Some Australians could be racist but that certainly does not imply that the whole country is racist.
Amidst this frenzy we had statements from various Australian authorities. The Victorian Police Chief admitted that Indians were being overrepresented in the robbery statistics. Here's a quote from his statement:
"I have said from day one undoubtedly some of these attacks have a racist motive or there is racist elements to these attacks. Regardless of who they are, what they are, what colour they are, what occupation they are, my job is to make the state as safe as I can for everyone."

Now, lets go back to Mumbai. In the good old days of Mahatma Gandhi, Indians learned to boycott. We still do that in our own fancy ways by boycotting something as peripheral and frivolous as a game of cricket. So Mr.Bal Thakrey promptly roared in his own secure forest- Samna that he would stop the Aussie cricket team from playing in Maharashtra. The direct Gandhian line has taken to "relay fastings" where one member of the group sits on the podium on a "hunger strike" to wait for someone who takes his place later. :)
The radical groups have taken to violent boycotting of everything that comes in the way of what they want. In fact, these days it is hard to tell if they really want the end that they are striving for. These kind of statements can be compared to a Rakhi Sawant arranging her own Swayamwar on "reality" television. The whole saga is not really to get a husband, it is for getting everything that she would on the way to her alleged destination. Do we ever have a Mumbai chief admitting that he is responsible for every person's safety? When a Sachin Tendulkar says, "I am an Indian first and then a Maharashtrain", all the hyenas in Mumbai start tearing him apart. When the statement he made is so relevant because he represents India, not Maharashtra everywhere he goes!
Around the same time as the Aussie attacks came to light two years ago, Mumbai witnessed a similar style of attacks. The Marathi-Bihari debate that is still giving votes to the Thakrey family. Mumbai is the most sought after city in India. Everyone wants to be in Mumbai. Naturally people who speak the same language as the rest of Maharashtra would want to assert their importance. The latest official reaction to this issue is seen in the headlines today. To be a cabbie in Mumbai now, you have to know Marathi well and you should present a proof of over fifteen years of residence in Mumbai!
The day I returned, I got into a cab driven by an Aussie gentleman. He shed some light on the "other side" of the whole racist debate. Indian cabbies are attacked in Australia mostly because
1. They do not know the streets at all. They jump into a cab the moment they land in Australia and sometimes even do not know how to use the GPS.
2. They misuse the meter by hitting buttons when the passenger is not looking. Unless you ask for your printed receipt, you will never know you were duped.
3. They play Punjabi (Indian Bollywood) songs in the taxi when they have passengers.
4. Some or all of this is done on Friday and Saturday nights when most cabs are used by Australians who go clubbing and can't drive because they are absolutely sloshed.
Imagine if this happens in Pune. If you get into a rickshaw and the driver has no clue where you want to go and you have no clue either! If he plays loud Ganesh festival music while you are trying to have a conversation with your friend sitting next to you. Worst still, if they charge you Rs.1oo for a journey you know for sure should not cost more than Rs.25! Even if you are absolutely sober, you would pick up a fight with him.
I accept that not all "Indian cabbies" have these ways just the way I say that all of Australia is not racist. But the ones who get attacked and the ones who attack them both fall into the same minority!

Whether in Mumbai, or in Brisbane, the problem should be "unprofessional taxi drivers" instead of "Bihari (non-marathi)" or "Indian taxi drivers".

We should all condemn the attacks, in India as well as Australia. But we should not close our eyes to the reasons that cause them.
All of us know that it is unfair to attack people just because they come from a different country or claim our jobs but hey! this is globalization for you. This has been happening and will happen until the world becomes one color from mixing. Until the time when every person in the world cannot correctly trace their origins to a single ethnicity. Just the way Indian media and politicians make a big hype about "Indians" in Australia, with all sincerity and gratefulness, I would request them to do something about the intra-country racism that exists blatantly within India itself. This is an underlying reality about every nation. Whether it is visa procedures made more "stringent" for only certain passports or cabbies being abused openly and attacked in a faraway land. Just like the fear of unpredictable terrorism, everyone who is not white lives under a subconscious fear of being pointed out at! It is a choice that people living outside their country make very consciously. The only precaution you can take is to abide by the laws of the land and make sure you are not found helpless at wrong times.
Above this murky, angry and sensational reality lies another one too! Where Australia, India, China, UK, Poland, Jamaica and Fiji meet for beer in a pub after work on a Friday night. :)

Sarpanch Sahib!

2010-01-11T10:15:00.006+05:30

This is a new post in brand new year. Let me wish all my readers a very happy and more importantly peaceful new year. :)
I am in India for four weeks. So I have been very lazy with writing. I got my hands on some interesting books while I was out shopping. Sarpanch Sahib is one of them. This is a collection of seven biographies of female Sarpanchs (village heads) of seven different remote villages in India. What is more interesting is that each of these stories is written by a different female journalist who had to get out of her metropolitan existence to meet her subject in a far off village. Edited by Manjima Bhattacharjya, this book shows you a completely different and honest face of the Indian woman.
It starts off more or less to review the effects of the 73rd constitutional amendment that was done in 1993. It mandated elections to be held for membership to the panchayti Raj and reserved one-third of the seats for women. Since then over three million Indian women have become politically active and one million are elected to political office every five years.
However, the role of women in politics is still looked upon with doubts. This book travels through all the trials and triumphs associated with a woman leader and puts them across honestly, without even a hint of dramatic feminism.
There is Sunita, an Adivasi woman, Sarpanch of a Brahmin dominated Tighra village in Madhya Pradesh. I found her story inspiring. It took her about a year and nine months just to open her own account and access the funds granted to her for developmental work. She had to fight with men of power, men of higher castes and initially men (and women) of her own family. All of this just to start working as a Sarpanch after being elected by people. Journalist Manju Kapur narrates Sunita's journey from a ghunghat-clad skinny daughter-in-law to a fuller Sarpanch who looks into her opponent's eyes. She even jokes that all the fighting made her put on weight!
Or even the illiterate Chinapappa of Pachikanapalli, Tamil Nadu. She helped twenty one kids of the nomad Irular tribe with enrollment in a nearby school. She takes us through the struggles of being an illiterate Dalit woman. Each adjective adding a new constraint to her efficiency.
I am always stumped by the "images" that foreigners carry with them about India. Many times, their travel diaries are full of descriptions of the non-existence of women in India. I myself have been caught in never ending, heated debates about how Indian women are not as helpless as the West perceives. Reading this book opened my eyes to a new reality.
We should learn to measure success relatively. For me, Sunita who was married at ten, entered politics at twenty two years of age from a mute Adivasi background is much more emancipated than any metropolitan Indian or even Western woman. Not getting things done with bribes, getting out of her house to go to court because she has been accused on fake charges and silencing higher caste men are her achievements. They are probably bigger than any qualified politician (if there is a term as a "qualified politician"). If these struggles are delaying developmental work, it is like latent heat being absorbed to make something invisible happen- the empowerment of these women. Once they are powerful enough not to care, development will take place with a greater speed and honesty.
Over the past few years, I have learned to open my eyes to these realities that exist around me. It is easy to get wrapped up in your happiness (or sorrow) and not look around. But in every humble woman lies a great power. When you take a step back to look around you find that women who are on the so called lower rungs of the society pyramid are actually emotionally and professionally much more successful than you. Mostly because they have to deal with struggles that would never cross the path of an educated, modern woman. Their expectations are humble and their everyday life makes it impossible for them to dwell on their problems.
It is not so important to be better than everyone else. Sometimes that leads to loss of compassion. The true beauty of a life well lived is to be better than what you were yesterday and also to help others on your way, achieve that dream!

Chopticks and I

2009-12-09T09:42:00.004+05:30

I am often intrigued by the evolution of habits. Especially in cultures across the world. There are those questions that we often end up pondering over. I have a few recurring ones of my own. For example, "who would have declared jackfruit edible?". I mean the person must have been awfully hungry to open such an ugly looking fruit expecting it to be edible.
I also wonder almost after each of my encounters with Asian food over how noodles must have evolved. It is amazing how different cultures rely on different sources of carbohydrates and make them in their own way. Whether it is roti, bread, rice or noodles the basic purpose is same, to provide carbohydrates.
Or sometimes, much to my dislike, I see people happily opening oysters. Who would have first opened an oyster !! I secretly hope that there should have been a lag of a few centuries between the discovery of oysters being edible and people actually starting to relish them.
One of these persistent questions is also, "Which resident by the banks of Yangtze river would have invented chop sticks?!!". I mean, there must have been a point in the history of Asian food habits where one fine morning a plump little Chinese (or Japanese or Taiwanese) man (or woman or child) must have gone, "I am going to eat my food with these two sticks!".
Of all the things that I get tired from like explaining people what I do for a living and trying to preserve my long nails between my lab work, eating with chopsticks is one such utterly tiresome process.
What is more annoying is how Westerners follow the saying, "When in Rome do what Romans do". Most Aussies I know have a black belt in using chopsticks. I am usually the only one in the group who asks for a fork in a Chinese restaurant. But it is funny watching an Aussie insisting on using chopsticks while an Asian sometimes even completely bypassing the English language. :)
When words fail, they are comfortable pointing at pictures of coconuty Laksa soups. :)
I think this is the reason why most Asian women have perfect lean figures. You can only eat so much using chopsticks. After a while the painful effort of picking up your food with sticks must overpower hunger. That is what they should do to reduce obesity across the world. The day when an American eats a big mac with chopsticks there would be an answer to world obesity!
What also surprises me is that India with her formidable culinary arsenal of everything ranging from puran poli to kati kababs could not invent an innovative piece of cutlery! All we could think of was fingers! Although the way Indians eat using hands differs just as much as all the dialects in a single language, it is still a disappointment that the land that gave the world nothing (zero) could do nothing to revolutionize eating.
I must confess that I have fully inherited the Indian attitude. I look at food and decide how to eat it. If I can eat noodles with a fork and I already know how to use a fork, I find it taxing to try and learn a new way of eating noodles just to be a perfect Asian diner. When I see pizza for example, I automatically change over to using hands. And I must also confess that there is no greater joy in this life than eating cold fragrant curd rice with lemon pickle using nothing but your finger tips on a hot summer afternoon!!

Back to Square One

2009-11-23T06:05:00.002+05:30

Divisive politics at its best in Maharashtra.
Politicians in India are very fortunate because when they can't get religion to work, they have languages. When politicians have a go at all the micro identities that they could manipulate, it is a sure sign of them losing their own!
Just felt like quoting Tagore on this one. I think we have to go back to square one again!

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic wars;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action - Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!

Ten on Ten!!

2009-11-15T15:46:00.005+05:30

I have never really been an ardent fan of cricket. The only cricket I watched with a lot of passion was with my dad. On days when India played Pakistan, specially in the World Cup series, our household would come to a standstill. There would be no going out. We would not by any stretch of imagination think of watching anything else on television except the match. It was a beautiful time in my life. On hot summer days, day-night matches would come with ice cream as accompaniment. My dad would rush to the nearby Vadilal (a brand of ice cream that became extinct with the opening of economy) store and get slabs of it!
The atrocity of that Indian summer was alleviated by the jasmine flowers in the balcony, the ice cream and cricket!
Dad and I would follow the match right from the toss. A lanky Azaruddin standing next to a puffy Inzamam! As the coin was tossed up, I found myself doing all the little girl spells on it. The rest of the day was spent in front of the television.
These matches were played in two parts. In the conventional sense, it was divided as Indian batting and Indian fielding. For us, however, it was before Sachin and after Sachin. Sachin Tendulkar was responsible for a lot of my mood changes in those days. He would not know it I know, but just because this is all out there I should clear my heart. :)
Every time after an opening batsman went out at a sad score the little master would walk in, fiddling with his gloves and helmet. I would fall on to my knees and pray to him. The game then usually transformed to another level with every other delivery being swept across the boundary line like the ball had it all written in its destiny. In one of his "trips" Sachin would sweep over after over at an average of sixteen runs per over and sweep everyone off their feet. We lived each of those with our hearts in our hands. It was not a game. It was more like dance for me for it came as close to art as an Amjad Ali Khan on Sarod or a Jasraj reciting the Shanti Mantra in his soul-soaking voice.
Being a girl, I am not able to throw in statistics in a conversation related to cricket. Nor would I get red in the face when someone would say Sachin is overrated sipping on a coffee that they haven't paid for in Roopali.
Over the years though I have observed something similar in people who have consistently stayed on top. Be it Sachin, A.R Rahman or Rodger Federer. They don't play for us, they do whatever they do because they have been sent with that one purpose. Everything that comes as a result of what they do gets dissolved in the overwhelming presence of their art.
Kudos to Sachin! There would never be another one of his kind. :)

United Nations of Australia

2009-11-01T14:24:00.003+05:30

I went camping this weekend. We were a group of ten, from nine countries around the world. India, South Africa, Poland, Spain, Greece, Singapore, Germany, Iran and just to make the host country happy, Australia. :) We labeled the group as 'The UN'.
In my pre-Australia life, I never really thought of "meeting people" as a learning experience. It was always classified as "entertainment". Two years in Australia, I consider myself lucky to be in a country that is so disarmingly multicultural. Whoever thinks of Australia as a racist country should really be in Australia and find out for themselves. The climate and the culture attract a lot of people to this place, including people from European countries. So not every white person is really an Australian.
We were chatting over lunch and breakfast, cooking our own on an electric barbecue. There is a different kind of enlightenment in knowing history of a nation from the person who has been brought up in it. I had tried reading the biography of Nelson Mandela ( Long Walk to Freedom) when I was in India. However, listening to a native from Cape Town talk about his leader was a much more refreshing experience. When he talked about Mahatma Gandhi and how his principles changed the fate of South Africa, I ended up thanking the stars above our heads.
No one really teaches us proper history in schoolbooks. I found this out when I was talking to a Chinese friend and realized that he had a completely different version of the 1962 Indo-China war!
This is just politics and history. I think I should not even try to mention how much of a culinary vocabulary you can build doing these kind of excursions! Plus there is always a lot to talk about and to debate over. Usually, after the first few meetings the differences fall into their own place and the similarities emerge.
No matter where we grow up, what culture we are born in and where we stand in our accomplishments, the basic human feelings are always the same. This has been one of the biggest lessons of my life away from home and the conclusion is very simple- Friendship does not come with a passport!
We are all incomplete and so is the Universe. The things we do, our fates and the people we meet in the course of our journey complete us. In everything we do to complete ourselves we are unknowingly completing the Universe too. Although both these seem like a latent and futile aim, it does make the world a better place after all!

The Great Indian Novel

2009-10-25T09:20:00.001+05:30

I actually ordered this book following the Twitter controversy of its author Shashi Tharoor and it made me realize that there is indeed a positive side to negative publicity. :)
The Great Indian Novel is an ingenious attempt at narrating the recent Mahabharta of the Indian Freedom Struggle. Tharoor has assigned all the key characters of the Indian independence movement a Mahabharata equivalent. Dictated by Ved Vyas to Ganpathi, this novel is both satirical and equally moving. The characters are named and described so well that within lines of introducing a new character you immediately get the real people behind the character. Tharoor's Vyas seems a like a pipe-smoking-toddy-drinking old English chap but that does not stick between your teeth like an annoying bit of corn. In fact, this modern Vyas gives the whole narrative a crisp humorous style.
In the beginning I was a little cross at this humorous opening, especially when he tried to describe Mahatma Gandhi. However, as the book progresses Tharoor unfolds a deep respect for the leader in a sincere and moving description. His respect is refreshing in ways that are completely different and human to the usual rhetoric dedicated to Gandhi in Indian politics. He presents Mahatma and his work as an experiment and very carefully defines the scope of Gandhian methods. He talks extensively about the psychological effect that the Gandhian methods had on the masses, essentially making them work. This insight keeps you glued to the book although it is sprinkled here and there with long poetic interludes, something I thought did not match up to the prose.
What is remarkable is the ease with which each of Tharoor's characters fits with it's counterpart in the epic Mahabharta. Tharoor has not just classified the characters according to the epic but he has been able to translate for his readers what each of these represent psychologically.
Another aspect that comes forward in this book mostly because it is a modern take on the epic is the role of women. Tharoor's Kunti and Madri make you wonder if any of the later victories would have been possible at all without the liberties given to these women. Women in India have always enjoyed a place of power which is still evident. However the Indian woman very rarely comes out in the open about the powers she holds and it requires a careful study of every great battle to know which unsung woman hero really controlled it with her bejeweled petite hand. Sometimes, in India this passive control takes an ugly form too and makes me wonder if manipulation should be renamed as "womanipulation" for India. :)
The one woman that later came out in the open with her good and bad powers has been popularly hated all over India still for her actions. It makes you wonder if the reaction would be different had she been a man!

I think this book is a must read for anyone following Indian politics. It gives you an idea of how Indian politics has evolved and decayed from the Gandhian"politics of the conscience" to the modern day "politics of blackmail". I don't know how effective Shashi Tharoor will be as a politician but for this book, he gets full marks. It also gives an explanation for his constant tweets. For someone who is full of so many ideas, not expressing them for a long time must be hard! :)

This world is cruel and funny!

2009-10-22T13:29:00.004+05:30

Has anyone of you ever had those times that make you wonder how cruel yet how funny this world is? I had one of those today. I was supposed to be at a marking day. It is one of those university tutor sessions where all tutors are put in one room with all the assignments related to the units they teach. I was tutoring a course in Sustainability this semester and we were dealing with transport, housing and waste management solutions for a small lake town called Tonle Sap in Cambodia. So we were basically marking what "first year" students (the super enlightened ones) think should be done with this small town that lives off fishing.
Needless to say they came up with some amazing solutions. Like for example, building catamarans that cost $ 1 million each ( 5 of them mind you), spending about $5000 a month (each) on maintaining them, and charging all the commuters of Tonle Sap $2 everyday to use them. Then comes the clincher. They proposed that since the average Cambodian earns less than $2 a day, according to Cambodian standards, they should pay the drivers of these ships $75 a month!!
It stuck in my head because before I went for this marking job, I was reading 'The Great Indian Novel' on the train and I was bemused by Tharoor's description of how the British redefined "taxes" in various forms in India and how easily Indians accepted it then until someone else pointed it out to them!!

We were reading pages after pages of description of the abject poverty in the region and every two hours the table at the end of the room was loaded with refreshments. So I had to actually mark work that required me to understand if my students understood the concept of subsistence living while I was munching on grapes, making myself cups of fragrant Earl Grey and enjoying them with scones! To make things even more ironical I was being paid for all the time I spent there.
It is really amusing how different kinds of people in the West (well in Australia, I should be geographically correct and call them people of the Western East) think of the East. Some of them give me a happy shock by knowing more about Ashtanga Yoga than I do ( to be honest I don't even really know what kind of Yoga I have been brought up on). Sometimes they make these emphatic statements that Hindus still burn their widows in India and change the subject before I can take full control of my fury!!
The Western woman is emancipated. It is a really cunning word. She is free to choose! She is free to do whatever she wants with her life. In the end though, they all want someone to go down on his knees and propose to them! In the end they all want to have children. They all seem to have the same motherly and feminine feelings that their not-so-free sisters in the East seem to have but unlike their sisters in the East, they cannot guarantee that their feelings would be fulfilled. Because they are all tied down by freedom that they have chosen with such dignity! Too much choice ties you down in strange ways! I feel the same when I see twenty year old kids with backpacks full of different sources of entertainment looking blank and bored.
Sitting there in that cool air conditioned room today, I felt guilty in a strange way and on my way back, getting back to the Civil Disobedience that Mahatma Gandhi launched so many years ago, I also felt strangely grateful to be reminded that there are still people in this world that live on under $2 a day!

Downloading Friends. :)

2009-10-09T07:15:00.005+05:30

Raj's post inspired the post but this has been on my mind for a while.
Sometimes, when I am absolutely convinced I am living a loser's life, I cheer myself up using each of my places on the Internet. On a day, where all my reactions have failed and my supervisor has very candidly told me that my latest draft could be aptly described only in one word-horrible, I sit in a corner and read my own blogs.
It is a place to rejuvenate but sometimes I also become a bit schizophrenic and wonder who is the real me?
Fifty years ago, if someone said that fifty years from now people would be able to send their minds all over the earth without physically going anywhere it would have been sci-fi material. Today I have so many friends that I have never met and it does not matter one bit if I do not meet them ever! In the last few years, I have made friends at an alarming rate for the kind of person I am. There has been a steady increase in the people I actually meet and then make friends with but there has also been a rise in the number of people I have not met and I am good friends with. Fortunately for me, this is not through any of the popular social networking sites. It is through reading blogs and interacting with people who read my blogs. It has been an absolutely thrilling experience.
I am not really going to try and be humble by saying that I don't write to get noticed. I started writing as an experiment but when I realized that people like it, I was inspired to do it more often. I had been writing in the closet for a long time before I started writing publicly but I must accept that public opinion added a lot of depth, care and maturity to my writing. After the initial excitement of people liking what I write died down, I started following some blogs as well. I have met some of the most interesting people solely through their blogs. Gayatri is one of them. Now, she is almost like any of the best friends I grew up with but initially her writing inspired a lot of awe. The way her words do ballet in Marathi is truly inspiring. She has also been doing the proof reading for my Marathi blog for which I am very grateful to her. Alienknight (Dattatraya Gokhale) is another person who inspired me with poetry in the early days of my poetry blog. His art of expressing profound feeling in just a couple of lines has always made me challenge my own expression. Raj has made me laugh out loud with his Marathi blog. His style of writing always amazes me. I have grown extremely fond of his silly satire. His humor has a Puneri flavor to it and reading his posts sometimes makes you feel like you are having a goof-around time with a cutting chai on some Puneri Katta.
Mandar Gadre has been one such friend that I have not met as yet. His poetry and his photoblog are a collection of sincere and well crafted thoughts and images. Charu's photoblog has also inspired me. He is also one of those people I have met only once but know too well now. Shrirang Khandekar's photoblog is also one of the places that I respect on the Internet. I came to know of this because he was a regular in the comment box of my Marathi blog. One day I decided to track his page. I must say it was a humbling experience to realize a place like that exists!
Prasad has been one of the recent additions to this list too. His words are human and his writing never fails to move. Be it in anger or in innocence. His writings about Robindranath Tagore have revived the Banglamania in me during the last few months.
I have made friends with a lot of my followers too and I have reconnected with a few family members because they started reading my blog! My father has been my most consistent follower and this feeling always fills me up with a lot of happiness and pride. These days, my mom takes out time specially to follow my Marathi blog. So there has been a bit of family reunion in the space too.
People with families, living in their home countries might not realize how much of a solace this part of our identities gives us. Over these past two years I have known so many new people who have stepped out of their countries, their own comfort zones to try and make a place in the field of science. Most of my blog-friends are PhD students spread all over the world. Some of them are intrepid travelers. All of us are trying to come to terms with our own identities without following any prescribed ways to belong. Oddly enough, unknowingly we all want to belong somewhere. In my case, finding fellow writers and empathizing with their experiences is a way of finding my own closure. :)
Like the Bhagwad Geeta says in a somewhat weary tone, we have entered the age of hybrids. People traveling all over the world and expressing themselves from everywhere in their own language is one of the advantages of this cultural hybridization. In any case, I would really like to thank God for technology. Even though it is all man-made and designed, if you take a look at how humanity has evolved over the ages, it always makes me want to believe that it is a Divine intervention!

PurpleMoon Turns Three!

2009-10-03T02:34:00.001+05:30

I am awfully superstitious but somehow without any premeditation, I started writing on the third of October. Something which I would have done if I was thinking about it. :)
I think anything that adds up to three is lucky for me. So, today on the 3rd of October, as my blog turns three, it has got to be a very special day. :)
Although poor PurpleMoon has been somewhat sidelined due to my Marathi blog, it is still a place of a lot of attachment for me.
So Happy Birthday PM! May you have a long life.Less opinion and more funny stories. And may your creator never lose her mind!

Godparents

2009-09-25T05:22:00.002+05:30

I came across this new website, the brainchild of a close friend and his buddies. A selfless little place in a selfish world just to pool in money for young kids in need. It is a place where people who want to help can interact with institutions that can take them to the kids in need. More details can be found on the website.
Wishing them good luck and hoping that it really helps!

Ms.Idle Whiskers

2009-09-20T06:59:00.004+05:30

I am fully aware that anyone who wakes up at 5 AM on a Sunday morning is not considered normal by human beings. However, desperate times call for desperate measures and I had to wake up at that ungodly hour today to finish a few reactions in the lab. I personally find that I start becoming more and more stupid after 4 in the afternoon. So I have to use all my time before that to work. Otherwise I make mistakes that are irreversible or just get me into a mortifying gloom for the rest of the day and I hate repenting.

So I woke up at the break of dawn today. I was pottering around the house trying to make breakfast (there hasn't been even a single time in my life when I have been able to make one whole omelet. Somehow on the frying pan I always work in fractions. In the end I have scrambled eggs), when I heard an almost human knock and scratch on the door. When I opened, I realized that it was Ms.Cat demanding to be let in. I had to obey.

She came in running on her overweight paws and stood right next to her bowl and looked at me with a face that seemed to say, "You are just as slow even first thing in the morning aren't you?".

So I dutifully fed her and began to pack my bags to leave.In the meanwhile she sprawled on the carpet and began observing me with her wise owl-like face.

Cat : Where are you going?
Me : Work. You are going to get out of this house in another three and a half minutes.
Cat : Jeez! It is Sunday. Why do you have to go to work on a Sunday and that too at 6?!!
Me : Well, my religious texts say that you are born a human after many births. I guess it is more like a consolation for having cats like you.
Cat : See, your problem is that you (all humans) really think of yourselves as important. Even cats could write a similar text if they want. Where a kind, forgiving and unselfish cat refuses to kill an army of rats in front of him. Then a wise and cat meows him the essence of cat life. Urges him to stop grieving and do his duty as a cat. We just don't bother!
Me : God! You are not just arrogant and lazy but also blasphemous! I don't want to listen to your philosophy. I have things to do.
Cat : Why do you think that the things you have to do are going to make so much of a difference? I mean how do you matter to the world. I would say you matter a lot to your parents and a few close friends. You matter to me, mostly when the other girl who's much nicer to me than you, is not around. But from a global, like you say holistic point of view, do you really matter that much?
Me : (Damn! She is right!) Yes I do. I matter to myself. What I do makes me happy. That is all I ask!
Cat : This is what all those texts fill you up with. These are all borrowed thoughts. You have been told to find happiness within yourself. You know that in theory but you think that pretending to be practicing it will one day make you get there. So you pretend that waking up at dawn and smelling through one nostril would make you like the one that your Man-god told you he likes.
Me : What?!! What smelling?
Cat : The thing you do every morning where you close one nostril and then the other and keep doing it. I have recommended that to the list of "Humans are stupid" videos that Cat Rock

channel telecasts every Monday morning.

Me : Have I ever asked you these kind of probing questions about your life? Why do you have to make my morning so difficult? You ate your food. Now bugger off!
Cat : Well eventually I will. But before that, since I eat your food and I cannot stoop down to the level of a Dog and lick your feet, wagging my tail, I would like to barter some knowledge with you. Just out of genuine goodwill for once. Tell me how you define life?

Me : Something that you don't have.
Cat : Well, I would like to ignore that sarcastic comment. It mostly springs out of jealousy. To me, life is the time between being born and being dead. Two things you do not have any control over. It is like a waiting room. So in my view one should spend it doing minimum and just waiting. Catching a mouse or two every now and again but returning back to being idle whenever possible. It will pass on its own. Without any turbulence.
Me: Yeah, why not! When you have an idiot like me to demand food from and give these pointless lectures your life will sure have no turbulence at all!
Cat: This anger is not at me. It is actually directed at yourself. You would like to sprawl on this mat like me and doze off until the rats in the walls invite you to sharpen your nails. You mask your jealousy in virtue. Everybody has a loafer inside them. Get it out for once!
Me: Yeah okay. I will do that next Sunday. Now please leave this place.
Cat: Certainly. After you!
Me: No. Get out NOW.

Drags her fat paws out and sprawls on the lawn.

I must admit that the little creature has definitely done some thinking. I wish I could exchange lives with her sometimes. So much for taking oneself seriously!

Setting the world a-twitter

2009-09-15T04:59:00.006+05:30

Once again, one of those (boring) IMO (In My Opinion) blogs. Not that my opinion really matters, as I have said over and over again, but whenever I can I like to dispense my opinion just because I have it! Something that my city (Pune) taught me. :)
So the inspiration is this. I was actually really happy that Shashi Tharoor was a part of our fresh cabinet. I even started following him on Twitter but like most, I gave up Tweeting after an initial entusiasm of about three weeks.
In one of its own T-shirt quotes Twitter says that it is ' The messaging system we didn't know we needed until we had it'. At the end of my three weeks of tweeting I came to agree with it, and also ended up dwelling on it.
Why does a politician need to update people around the globe about who he is having dinner with? For that matter why does anyone have to update the whole world about what they are doing every single moment of the day?
They say that they do it for political transperancy but the amount of truly unnecessary information that they send out through tweeting does more harm than the amount of good their transperancy does. No one really needs updates from politicians all the time. At least not about how they feel in their daily meetings and what they think about the austerity drive.
I think healthy tweeting would really help resolve a lot of issues regarding politicians being absent from the common people but India is a little cosmos within herself. Although we are all hooked on to the net all the time, we still use tongue-twisters like austerity-drive to describe cost cuts in cabinet travels. When I first read that word in the Times Of India I could not help but laugh. It took me straight to the English translation of the Bhagwad Geeta, where a austerity is a wise man's lifestyle. :)
I don't think the technological evolution has really affected the Indian values to a great extent. We still respect a certain formality of conduct in leaders. So a Kevin Rudd can possibly get away with tweeting about his steak but a Shashi Tharoor still has to pay heavily for it.
I also think it dilutes rhetoric. Not that it is essential but the beauty of a well-designed and drafted speech is far beyond tweeting every hour from every corner of the world. There has to be a certain gap between thinking and expressing. IMO (again!!) it is one of the most important steps of expressing your thoughts in any form, whether written, verbal or even artistic. That time between thinking over something and then saying it is the most crucial time in the process of expression and I think Twitter (or Facebook for some) really robs you of that time. That is why speeches by the likes of Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi are still compiled and sold in the printed form.
I am not technophobic but I am weary of all these information blasters that the world is coming up with!
I love the concept of an e-book although I personally prefer a nice paperback in my purse, but audio-books just depress me to the core. They rob you of the pleasure of reading words and converting them into pictures in your brain right there. If you come to think of it, it is a very complicated process and that is why book lovers would never part with that privilege.
These days every one spends a lot of time and money on getting entertained. Even then there are a lot of people who get bored very easily. The real reason behind this is that we spend lesser time processing information in our own (private and hard-copy) heads and more time assimilating and dispensing it. :)
Just like my opinions I guess. So the (pointless) conclusion of this post is that you are more than likely to ruffle some Indian peacock feathers if you plan to set the world a-twitter. No matter how suave, tech-savvy and bright you are. In India you do what Indians do. :)

Too Good To Be True

2009-09-09T10:54:00.002+05:30

I am listing out all the Too-Good-To-Be-Trues (TGTBT) so that people can faithfully walk along their (self) prescribed paths without wanting to strangle their destinies.

1. Being able to go to the gym five days a week and have complete control over your calorie intake at the same time. There hasn't been a single week in my life with that kind of statistics and I am pretty sure there will never be, unless ofcourse I am stranded on an island with orchards with only a gym on it for a week.

2. Having a day where you don't forget to do something. I have stopped worrying about this. There have been days when I have packed my bag the night before, put my clothes out for the next day on the couch, my lunch all packed in the fridge, my papers in the bag only to realize after stepping out on the bus-stop that I have forgotten my cellphone in my bed. Actually, today is one of those days. On such days instead of cursing myself, I feel happy that my all-pervading-all-encompassing supervisor would not be able to call me to ask, "Where are you??!! Haven't seen you today!!" when I am sitting and reading in the room next to his!

3. Not having a single coffee in a day. This is now beyond even my conscious control. I mechanically make myself coffee every morning without even realizing that I am doing it!

4. Not a single person in your life complains to you about something or someone else. I have tried to stop people from doing it in the past, quite unsuccessfully and I consciously stop myself from complaining about things but having a day where no one you talk to complains to you about something is just too good to be true.

5.Walking into your supervisor's office the morning after you have sent him your first-final draft and hearing the words, "Fantastic. Send it right away!". Anyone doing a PhD will know how many "final" drafts you have to write before anything even gets remotely close to the word final!

Feels nice to know that at least there is a list of things that is certain, if not the most pleasant!! :)

Dreaminsomnia

2009-08-02T18:11:00.005+05:30

Recently I have been sleep deprived for two reasons. The first being my obsessive compulsive habit of getting up early and the second, my dreams. Sometimes I think when I sleep, my sleeping body is haunted by the ghost of some long dead script writer. I dream a perfect sequence of logical events. Moreover I remember it all in the morning and I am worried how much of a story it really is!!

In my latest dream, I dreamt that my grandparent's had installed an escalator in their house so that they don't have to climb a narrow flight of stairs. However, when I tried to operate it it got knotted up and turned into an electromagnet that went out of control. Soon, the neighbour's cars were all seen stuck to the escalator. While this was playing in my head one part of my mind was busy thinking whether an escalator could really turn into an electromagnet.

In another one of the recent ones, I dreamt that I wanted to get my nose pierced. I went into this really busy "Indian Market" nearby that had a piercing place run by Indian women that looked like witches. I asked how much they charged for a nose pierce. They said that they would pierce it and wait for two weeks for me to get a blood test. If I am infected, they would not charge me any money!! Very kind of them I presume. At least I would be happy about a free piercing job just before I die of AIDS!!

About two weeks ago, I dreamt that I was going to die in two days. It was a Friday in my dream and I was living with this old Aussie couple. They told me that the cemetery is closed over the weekend and because I would be dying on a Sunday, they did not want to keep me in the house till it opened again! So the good old chap insisted that they take me to the cemetery and bury me on the Friday itself to get it out of the way! Since I was going to die anyway, I might as well die in my own coffin! While all this was happening in my dream, I was constantly wondering if I should be buried or cremated. Finally I felt sad for the old couple and agreed to get myself buried before I die. When we reached the cemetery however, I got "checked" for the "symptoms of death" by a doctor who told me I was not going to die for a long time to come. The Aussie old man then refused to take me back in his car as he had not "prepared" himself for the eventuality that I live. So I had to hitch-hike my way back to Brisbane.

All of this could suggest that I am stressed. What amuses me however is the detail of thought that goes into it. How can a sleeping mind make up things like that? Although I often wake up tired from these kind of dreams, it is also very hard to control them especially when they have such macabre humor attached to them.

I slept like a log on Saturday night and woke up Sunday morning after thirteen hours of non-stop sleep. I must thank Hypnos and maybe pray that Morpheus takes over less often. :)

Rakhi Ka Swayamwar

2009-07-28T06:25:00.003+05:30

If the committee that wrote the Indian scriptures had a better foresight, they would have included "Rakhi ka Swayamwar" as a confirmatory test for Kali Yuga. In Satya Yuga, we had the beautiful, innocent and extremely cultured daughter of Janaka being married off to the brave Lord Rama. In the age of the male demon (as Wiki puts it) we see an item girl organizing her own Swayamwar with a popularity seeking T.V channel. What more, we see all of us following it with gusto.
Let me confess with a little bit of shame and a little bit of pride that I actually enjoy watching Rakhi ka Swayamwar. I say shame, because if I wasn't watching it and somebody described it to me, I would be revolted to the core of my conscience. I say pride because I have been able to analyze well why I like watching it and put it behind me.
I envy people who lap up popularity. I use that word because that is exactly how I feel. Not that I cannot do it but I am too scared of the consequences. I heard people saying, "WHO will pass through trials and tribulations to marry someone like RAKHI SAWANT?" There were a lot of eager candidates though!
Most of us started watching it as a freak show. Something below average morals (if there is such an average) and dignity. Each episode presents yesterday's skimpily clad item girl in exceedingly beautiful clothes. With all my honesty, for the first time in all these days I gave Rakhi's looks a serious thought. Apart from certain inherent features that she probably cannot help (or does not want to redesign) she is a very beautiful woman.
The way she puts her point across comes as heartfelt and honest expression. Although hilarious sometimes it does have a shred of soul-searching hidden in it.
I think we like watching it because we like watching loudmouths. We are unconsciously living their lives because we cannot live them ourselves. However, in doing that we also expect them to fail just the way they rose up publicly, so that we can make peace with the inner voices that seem to remind us of our morals.
This is just a stream of thought that I caught in my head. Does not mean that if there are no consequences, I would go ahead and do it!
I would not say that this is Kali Yuga though. I think this is the age of absolute personal freedom. In a land like India that was eclipsed with the caste system for hundreds of years we suddenly have some serious turmoil. The recent ruling about homosexuality is one of the positive outcomes of this expression of freedom. It has also lifted off the stigma associated with the fear to act against immoral behaviour. It is a little bit ironic that to be comfortable as a victim in a society, sometimes you need to wait for the morality of the society itself to weaken! The age of absolute personal freedom has somehow also given us the ability to overrule the morals that have been laid down upon us. However, for some the journey ends at that point itself. Ideally it should go on. When we reject something that has been mass-dictated to us, we should also evolve to make our own personal morals. That would really make this age come of age.
For me, Rakhi ka Swayamwar is the negative extreme of this expression of personal freedom. The funny side of it is though that if you have not made enough time to tell your kids stories from the Ramayana, they are going to associate the word "Swayamwar" with Ms.Sawant before they do it with good old Seeta. :)
So I guess it is time for toddler parents to bring out those epics and turn them into bed-time stories again. :)

White Tiger

2009-07-13T13:32:00.002+05:30

I bought this book on Saturday morning and I finished it Monday afternoon. Last year's Booker winner "White Tiger" by Arvinda Adiga is just as riveting as Shantaram or A Fine Balance. It is the story of a driver who works for the son of a rich landlord in the corrupt regions of India around the river Ganga. What struck me is the beautiful narrative of the usually overlooked species on the streets of India- the Driver. It is an enriching account of all the little things these people are in the habit of doing. The way they observe and sometimes even emulate their masters. The way they use all the time they have to spend waiting for their masters to come back from their meetings, shopping sprees or romantic interludes. These little character details make the depressing story a lot more real and even funny. There is also an "Rushdiesh" influence which only ends up complimenting the style.

The story is not anything new. It is the story of a country bumpkin who does everything it takes morally, immorally to make his own space in a country full of people. It is the way it is written that deserves all the praise. Really depressing truths about India and Indian politics have been presented from the eyes of a pragmatic little driver who just wants to make his own life. He never gets shaken from the corruption and the recklessness. He gets used to it and moves ahead. In the end, however turns around and surprises everyone by expressing his own sensitive side that seems never to reflect in his early life.

Adiga's use of metaphors as well as his plots sometimes melting into poetry reminds you of Rushdie.

When I finished reading it, I felt the vast difference between the way two people might think of India. How the rich landlord's son, being driven in a Honda City looks at his own life and his country and how the driver who takes him around looks at his own is poles apart! Although they spend all their waking moments being together in the same car. It gradually dawns on you that "class" is the new "caste" in India. The rift between the corrupt rich, the rich and the vast poor is getting bigger everyday. However even in this depressing jungle insignificant drivers are being turned into entrepreneurs every day. At what costs is known best only to those who do it!

Conversations with the Cat

2009-07-09T17:01:00.003+05:30

My neighbour's cat is now "our" cat. My flatmate and I have a joint account in loving the fluffy, grey cat that lives with us now. I am a complete cat person.

A man-dog relationship has moments where the dog could say, " What! You come home, I wag my tail and you don't even care! You are always worried about your boss or your wife. When are you going to stop treating me like a doormat!!"

In a man-cat relationship however the basis of any interaction is where the cat says, "Listen up smart guy. If you don't care I don't care either. In fact you should not expect me to care even when you care, okay? I care when I want to care."

This cat is extremely selfish. She has an open order of preference for the two of us. So when Danielle is at home, Ms.Cat would walk all over me and not notice me. When Danielle is at work and I am home she has to get along. So sometimes we have the following conversation.

Cat: Meow!

I open the fridge and pour out a whole mug of milk just for myself.

Cat: (Rubbing herself all over the couch and my legs) Meeeeow! *batting eyelashes*

Me: I get it! What do you want? Food?

As I walk towards her bowl she gurgles a meow in her throat that sounds like a cat relief from a sore throat. She puts her entire head into the bowl before I can put any food in it. So I have to wait for common sense to dawn on her before I let her eat anything.

After eating she comes back to the couch and stares at me with a face that seems to say,

Cat: Can I cuddle with you now for a bit?

Me: Now that you don't have Danielle you are just using me aren't you?

Cat: Yes. Is that wrong? Never mind. Can I jump on now and sit in your lap?

Me: Ah well. I don't have much of a choice do I?

Cat: (Jumps on) No.

Then she starts purring and it seems to resonate with my heartbeats. When she is sitting on your lap you cannot even go to the bathroom without upsetting her and getting an ungrateful hiss when you try to pick her up.

Some nights she sneaks into my room if I have left the door ajar and sits on my stomach as I sleep, directly looking at my face. It takes me a while to realize that there is about four or five kilos extra weight on the quilt. Then I pull my conscience out of the dream (in which I am usually extinguishing fires I made in the lab or dying) and when I open my eyes, I look straight into the two green gooseberries that seem to shine in the dark. This is what is really unfortunate about being me. You wake up from a nightmare to get the scare of your life with a fat cat sitting on your stomach staring at you!

She can take all the liberties she wants but if you turn excessively cuddly and try to give her a tummy rub, she would not hesitate to bite you. Even if you were the one who fed her about twenty seconds ago. Most of the times, they do not love you. They are just using you. However on those rare occasions when they elevate you to the next level and express their love by licking you with their sandpapery tongue, the feeling is priceless. It is like finding true love in a real world.

Some days she brings a dead rat and leaves it right outside the door as a "present" for us. Some days she just lies with her belly up surrendering herself to me. Some days she sits in the sun curled up into a grey ball while I am rushing out of the house, making me realize the futility of all my efforts.

There is no loyalty. There is no guarantee that you will be together for as long as the creature lives. There is also a fear that just the way she migrated from next door and moved in with you, she would find someone better again. However, every day as I get down from the bus thinking about a whole heap of other thoughts and find her waiting outside to be let in, I secretly thank God that we are still together!

I guess that is why I am a cat person. :)

Don't ask me what I think about it

2009-06-30T15:23:00.003+05:30

I have been blogging on my Marathi Blog for the past month or so. That is one of the reasons why I am missing in action here. The other is the gradually creeping fear that has finally got me of turning into a news analyst. As a result of my highly unproductive PhD life, I end up reading a lot of (unnecessary) news on the Internet. Owing to the fact that my own life is as dry as the vacuum dried pulp I make, the writer in me is forced to express opinions on things that are no way related to my life. I tried giving unsolicited advice to my close friends and as a result I have very few left now but making comments about news is very easy. There is always a vast majority that agrees with you if you manage to sit on the fence without poking yourself on the wrong spot. Eventually the majority that agrees with you ends up fighting with almost an equal number that doesn't and you do not have to involve yourself anymore. Soon, you are known as a person who opines in every plastic bag available everywhere in the world. Old men throw your name into the conversation when they want to raise the volume of the group loud enough not to let anyone hear the nasty one they are letting go under the table. Young men look up to you because they think that you have acquired all this knowledge through years of experience. All of this only when you are of the formidable kinds. With the way I am going I would end up being just a benign one. So I kind of realized there is no point.
I am turning twenty six this month. I have kind of decided to spend the next quarter of my life not having an opinion about anything. I am going to slowly deopionionate myself. This year I was going to decaffeinate myself but then I realized that an opinion is much more lethal than a coffee. So I guess coffee would have to wait to get out of my life. However, I might show much severe withdrawal symptoms from not having an opinion than I would from not having a coffee. In the long run however it will all be good. :)
In my supervisor's opinion I have not by any stretch of imagination done enough work to appease the Gods of PhD. So I guess not expressing unwanted opinion is more of a necessity than an effort. :D

How not to get attacked in Australia-an insider's view. :)

2009-06-08T11:48:00.005+05:30

To everyone who is worried about me, I am absolutely fine. I had stopped myself from writing anything about the recent 'attacks on Indians in Australia' only because I did not want to make a controversial post all over again and hurt nationalist and patriotic sentiments.

However, the hype that Indian media created over all of this was extremely annoying. It is funny when newspaper people are ready with editorials like "Australia-paradise lost?" in less than twenty four hours after the reports. More hilarious are the opinions expressed under them!

I read one such reply to an edit page in some newspaper where the commentator called himself an "ex-Indian" and criticised the 'disgusting' behaviour of Indian immigrants in Australia.

Why are Indians being attacked in Australia?

This question has a lot of words missing. Let me put it in all its perspectives.

Why are Indian males being attacked in Australia?

Why are North Indian males being attacked in Australia?

Why are North Indian males being attacked in Melbourne?

Why are North Indian males travelling late at night being attacked?

Why are North Indian males travelling late being attacked on train stations in Australia?

Let me answer these questions in the reverse order now.

Train stations are not the safest places in Australia. Or anywhere in any big city in the world. Even Australians do not travel late at night. The average Aussie who depends on public transport gets home well before six in the evening. They follow a European work routine from 7:30 AM to 4:30 PM. Women do not travel at night at all. The only people you find on the train after six is students working part time or just gallivanting around the place!

The most recent attack happened at 1:20 AM on a Sunday night. Australia is a weekend to weekend culture. Most of the nocturnal attackers on weekends belong to the group that believes in drinking themselves to oblivion starting Friday night and then going on until Monday morning. Unlike in India where the younger generation does not give in to these kind of temptations in their teens, it is very common in Australia. So on weekends, especially late at nights the trains are full of people who have no money and want more alcohol. So anyone who gets off the train and looks like they might have money is an easy target irrespective of where they come from.

Although Melbourne is a one of the most culturally diverse cities of Australia it is also known for its hippie and junkie population. To an average Indian sitting in India watching "Aaj Tak" this detail is almost never conveyed. Trying to expect cultural compassion from someone who is just looking for his next joint of Marijuana is going a bit far ahead in my opinion. So the easiest way of not getting attacked is not travel at two in the morning when you know you do not live in a safe neighbourhood.

I do not know what it is with North Indians and fearlessness but here whenever I am stuck in the lab late and returning home, it is like travelling on a train in Punjab. My own Punjabi neighbours often return home at 2 in the morning (with their cellphones singing loud Punjabi songs much to our annoyance). Maybe it is safe to travel at night in North India (which I still doubt considering that no one travels after eight at night in Delhi) but anywhere in the world be it New York, Mumbai, Delhi, Sydney, London or Melbourne, travelling at that hour is making yourself vulnerable.

The last question has a simple answer. Women (of any nationality) seldom travel that late or alone. Even before all this hype began, I resheduled all my experiments in a way that I can be out of the lab while it is still light outside. As winter set it, I changed my summer schedule from 8 AM-7PM to 7 AM through 5 PM and this was not because I am an Indian living in Australia!

I do not deny that racism could be a part of these attacks but it is not fair to take that one point and advertise it all over a nation of 1 billion people. There are a lot of other factors that contribute to these kind of attacks and mostly it is being at the wrong place at a wrong time. Moreover, when someone is beating you up at two in the morning for not having money they could steal, you cannot control what kind of (racist) foul language they use. I am pretty sure they have special swear words for white people too!

It has caused a lot of anxiety to people who have their children studying in Australia and it also gives a wrong message to the world.

Throughout my stay in Australia I have met a lot of full-blooded Australians who not only accept Indian people but also appreciate Indian culture. I have met Australians who have spent years learning Yogasanas in Pune and know the Bhagwat Geeta much better than I do. I have met strangers on trains who have made it a point to stay in the same compartment as me just to protect me from other 'suspicious' looking people. I have met Australian bus drivers who got out of the bus just to check if I am getting down on the right stop because it was late in the evening.

Just a couple of days ago, in the wake of these attacks as my flatmate Riju went to get a takeaway dinner, an Australian came up to her and apologised for the problem and even offered to buy her dinner as a gesture!

In a steak loving nation, "vegetarian" Aussies may be in the minority, but so are the thugs!

If I ever fall prey to racism myself, in a situation that can have no other intention, I will fight it with all my strength. However, labelling something that could have a lot of other motivations as Racism is just creating more of it.

The Incurable Nerd

2009-06-04T17:40:00.003+05:30

I recently installed a website traffic tracking widget on two of my blogs. It was amusing to see how many "flags" I got in a day. More than that, I actually knew who it was! So thrilled I was to see this happening that I started hitting my own page every half an hour. When I left I used to leave the "Australian" flag on my site confirming that I am the geek who goes back to her own website again and again. I tried the traditional way first. I used to immerse myself in lab work and forget that I even have a blog. Then at the end of a long, well-utilized day, I would check the "traffic" on my website. However, as everyone knows you can only have (at the most) three well utilized days a week. Anymore utilization beyond that and my head starts buzzing and I feel that the whole Universe is closing in on me.

I confided about this recent anomaly in my behaviour to a very good friend and he said that he could give me any flag I wished to have on my website that very moment. My first demand was Paris and I got it in two minutes. Then I made up my mind about Colombo. I got it before I could remember what the Srilankan flag looked like!

My friend stopped pretending to be a magician and told me that I could change my own location by using the "options" on the widget. That was enough.

In the past two hours I have been to Switzerland, Zambia and Kazakhstan!! So whenever I have nothing better to do, I change the country on my traffic widget and visit my own blog. So if anyone of you notices weird countries on my page you know who that is!! :)

I don't know what the point of this post is. I think it vaguely expresses the joy I feel in having this new nothing to do. Or maybe I am really ashamed of the sheer childishness of my actions and want to make up by owning up. Or maybe I am just losing it as a writer (if I ever had it that is) and using this space to write things that do not make sense.

In any case, as all of you get busy writing me off as a blogger, I would like to go to Mozambique.

PS: Please do not change your locations. That would really make my widget useless :(

The Vagabond

2009-05-31T18:46:00.003+05:30

Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway nigh me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river -
There's the life for a man like me,
There's the life for ever.

Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around
And the road before me.
Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I seek, the heaven above
And the road below me.

Or let autumn fall on me
Where afield I linger,
Silencing the bird on tree,
Biting the blue finger.
White as meal the frosty field -
Warm the fireside haven -
Not to autumn will I yield,
Not to winter even!

Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around,
And the road before me.
Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I ask, the heaven above
And the road below me.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Just remembered this poem from a long time ago. :)

Three Cups of Tea

2009-05-24T04:17:00.006+05:30

What can we do as human beings?

If anyone of us is pondering over this question, this book might give you the answer. This is the story of Greg Mortenson, an American climber who embarked upon a different mission after his unsuccessful attempt at the world's second highest peak K2. He is the founder director of the Central Asia Institute (CAI), which has built schools in Pakistan's and Afghanistan's remote hilly areas. Their emphasis is also on educating more girls as in these areas, girls are more or less likely to stay home than go into the bigger cities in search of jobs like boys. When educated girls stay home, they become community leaders and pass on what they have learned. Moreover, just because the founder is an American these schools do not make "young Americans" in Afghanistan. The curriculum includes a healthy mix of subjects with nothing that could be labeled "anti-Islamic" but far away from any kind of extremism.

When I write down this information, I can sum it up in a paragraph. However "Three Cups of Tea" co-authored by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin is a book that makes you introspect. With every new chapter I read, I realized the potential of just one man to change the lives of so many people.

This is not a story of a rich and famous man who does not know what to do with his money. Greg was almost broke in the early years of the conception and execution of this idea. On his way back from K2, laden with disappointment at himself, he got lost into the small village of Korphe at the foothills in Baltistan,Pakistan. After a speedy recovery from K2 assaults under the care of the village head of Korphe, Greg spent some time understanding their culture. He was shocked to see the little kids of Korphe learning their lessons on the frosty ground with sticks on an open ground. They had no school. The teacher came from another town twice a week and the children were essentially left on their own during his absence.

This led Greg to make a spontaneous promise to the people of Korphe and he came back again and again with whatever money he could gather in America to give them the school that he promised.

To let his mission proceed peacefully, Greg became one with the culture. He learnt Urdu and Pashto. On one of his detours he was held hostage by the Taliban for a week. In a country where Americans are misunderstood with just one look at their passports, Greg had to cross many language and religion barriers to prove that he had peaceful intentions. In the end, his attempts were generously rewarded, even by the members of extremist groups.

This book also gives you a lesson in sustainable development. Local cultures and local people are the biggest agents of bringing about any change in a society. Impatience and hurry have no room in civilizations that have stood the test of tall mountains and hostile weather. This book also gives us an insight into what Greg learned from the Balti people.

All along it is also peppered with the magnificent descriptions of the tall mountains that surround this area of the Earth. Extracts from texts previously written about them and each chapter comes with an old Islamic adage just below the title or even something said to Greg by a common villager that is full of wisdom!

More than anything else, it brings forward the power of "the religion of goodwill" that is understood by followers of all religions.

For me, this book was a lesson in charity. Charity is not something you put off until you earn enough to donate and not be bothered. This man's struggle taught me that the willingness to help less fortunate transcends the boundaries of personal comfort. For months, Greg lived in his car to put together some money for his school. On his way back to Baltistan, he sold his car off and pitched in that money into the school funds. Fortunately he met a wealthy physicist Dr.Jean Hoerni who sent him $12000 with a note saying,"Don't screw up". :)

Dr. Hoerni left a million dollars for CAI but this was when the first school was built and running.

Whatever is written about America as a political force in Afghanistan is wiped away from your mind with every new page of this book. By the end you realize that in this "real world" it is not selfishness and ruthlessness that you need to survive. Kind hearted, sensitive and even outright impulsive attempts at making this world better still work wonders. What you need is just the patience to see them through!

You can help here.

Remember, even $10 is a lot of money for children living in these areas!

Why ponder thus the future to foresee

and jade thy brain to vain perplexity?

Cast off thy care, leave Allah's plans to him

He formed them all without consulting thee

Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat

Congratulations India!

2009-05-18T06:24:00.009+05:30

I don't know if all of my readers are happy with the results of the recent Loksabha polls but I am!
Apart from the fact that this win has given India the much needed stability it also says a lot about our leader Dr. Manmohan Singh. Amidst the constant accusations from the opposition for being "the weakest Prime Minister" India has ever had, Dr.Singh has been a silent leader. India's foreign policy showed a significant improvement over the last five years. India has not made a lot of unnecessary "noise" as it did when she was in the hands of the NDA alliance. She has impalpably grown, sometimes even at a GDP of 9% and forged relations with all the world leaders.
The Congress (or now the UPA) may have been accused of dynastic politics but the one good thing about this alliance is their adherence to the "secular" and (almost) "non-aligned" image that India made for herself post independence. Add to that the plethora of "scholar-leaders" that they offer including the PM himself. It is also heartening to know that people like Shashi Tharoor have decided to get their hands dirty by stepping onto the shop-floor with Congress. However, it is a great responsibility and I hope that they shoulder it well.
The biggest task any leader does for his followers, consciously or unconsciously, is giving them an identity. Fortunately (or unfortunately) in India, there are a lot of "two minute noodle" identities available for politicians to stick on the foreheads of their followers. Just being a Brahmin in India has so many variations! You could be a "Chitpavan" from Maharashtra or an "Iyengar" from the south. Every group has hundreds of different rivulets of people joining it from all sides. So it is very easy for politicians who don't do their homework everyday and just want to make some quick scores before the exam to label the people of India on religious grounds.
India is finally casting off her religious labels. In a recent study it was found out that amongst the G20 countries, only two are growing at positive rates. China at 6.5% a year and India following at 5%. Considering that India is still a fully working democracy, this growth rate is speaks volumes about us. So when Indians are making their own "Indian" identity, I don't think there is any need anymore to think "religiously"! :)

Silly Mistakes

2009-05-06T05:40:00.002+05:30

How does something that is perfectly plausible in your head end up being so outrageously stupid in reality?
Today I put an overhead stirrer in a carefully acidified solution to collect the precipitate and forgot to check the rpm knob before I started it! I have little holes in my lab coat now and I have to do it all over again. Obviously considering the chain of events, it should not even be stated that it took me two days to make that solution!
I wish I remembered it more often how forgetful I am. In order to minimize my trauma, I have almost reduced myself to a no-woman. I do not have a big hand bag that contains about half the universe in it. I do not wear make-up lest I forget to wear it one day and scare the wits out of my friends. I am even willing to give up my cell phone so that I do not regret forgetting it somewhere!
The good thing about being forgetful is that you forget that you forget and then you don't nag yourself about being forgetful. :)

Ms.Universe

2009-04-25T16:39:00.005+05:30

I think the "Miss Universe" pageant is the limit of lack of hope and imagination for human kind.

What is the difference between "Miss World" and "Miss Universe"?

By crowning someone "Miss Universe" every single year we are potentially making the following absurd assumptions

1. That there is a lack of hot aliens in our and the neighboring galaxies. I mean I am sure that if they are more advanced than us, the alien women might be watching these competitions every year and going, "Yeah right. This is the new Ms.Universe. How can you even qualify in the preliminaries with two eyes!!"

2. That beauty is more of a seasonal, annual phenomenon usually enhanced with fake eye-lashes and fake attitude.

3.That the difference between being the most beautiful woman in the whole world or the Universe is an "answer" that seems to please everyone in the room but not make much sense.

4. Beauty is as profound and as deep as the Pacific but nonetheless there is a cut-off limit for weight and height.

Think about how much limits these pageants put on our imagination! How depressing it is for all those men out there to know that the Earth is all they have got. If they have to choose the most beautiful woman in the entire Universe seven continents is all they have. I mean what about Venus? Maybe somewhere far away in the frigid cold on Pluto there could be a bunch of astonishingly beautiful women!

Then again, how do you compare a beautiful curvaceous beauty from Africa to a lanky American? Beauty is as relative as the word itself gets. I walk down the streets of Brisbane and I am bamboozled everyday at how hard it must be for God to keep female beauty so unique and fresh over all these billion years! There is no face on the street or no body in a train that is similar to other, each with her own aura and the little cloud of thoughts that rest on top of her head like her own tiara. Little bejeweled fingers that go in and out of bags to find cellphones and long eyelashes that stare out of the train windows in anticipation!

I recently read a report about the controversy over the Miss USA pageant this year. An openly homosexual judge asked one of the finalists if her state should legalize gay marriage. She answered that she believes that marriage should only happen between a man and a woman. She was given the runner up position and criticized for speaking out against gay marriage. The judge then went out and used explicit language against her!

I agree that the world is progressing in attitude and I am one of those too. However that should not make us give up respect for the conservative. Letting others believe what they want to is I guess the first sign of being open-minded!

If a beauty is finally being honest enough to say what she really thinks (instead of the usual 'world peace') should she be publicly humiliated for expressing her personal opinion?

I don't know about Ms.Universe or Ms.World, I personally think that every human being is beautiful in their own unique way and I totally stand up for Alien Rights. :)

India Polling!

2009-04-14T12:51:00.006+05:30

Has anyone been following the election campaigns back home?

Apart from the usual mud slinging and a bit of Gandhi Vs Gandhi, there are two really positive things that I noticed.

The first one is the candidacy of Ms. Meera Sanyal from South Mumbai. It is very heartening to see a banker give up her secure job and jump into politics. What is more reassuring is the fact that she knows she is the odd one out in a jungle of corruption yet is confident that she will win!

Another is Shashi Tharoor contesting from Kerala. He could have easily got into the Upper House (Rajya Sabha) through the Congress. However he chooses to be chosen by the people. Kudos!!

Politics everywhere is just as dirty but when explorers and travelers choose to turn to politics, it helps clear the detachment towards politics that people seem to be engulfed with! India is one of her kind when it comes to choosing leaders.

With 714 million registered voters, a total of 35 states and union territories, each having its own language, and 543 constituencies all over the nation it looks like a big elephant getting ready to salute his new king! There are 1055 political parties in India. I was trying to count just the communist parties the other day off the top of my head and I was surprised at how many communist flavors we have back home![1]

It is not just about numbers. The median age of my motherland is 25.1 years! That is just as old as me (actually a bit younger to be honest).[2]

So it is not just the world's largest democracy it is also one of the young countries of the world! All the dramas included, it is not such a bad place to be in! When the world's biggest (and working) democracy goes to polls, we must not forget that it is also the place for the world's biggest film industry! =)

Good Luck India!

1. Election in Numbers (BBC)

2.Demographics of India (Wikipedia,the free encyclopedia)

PS: Thanks Gaya for this!

Sleepless Note

2009-04-12T20:34:00.003+05:30

Before I get really busy again I have to make a note.

I met Viju Kaka again when I was in India this time.

On the day I was scheduled to fly back to Brisbane, he came to see me with a big chocolate and his digi-digi. :) We went for a short ride before I got into the car!

Just like my childhood memories, the pragmatic firing of his Enfield is still the same. The feeling you get even when you are a passenger is just as refreshing. So to all the guys who are (unnecessarily) passionate about bikes, I understand you!

Another someone interesting I met was Vrinda Moushi, my mother's childhood friend. I had been in touch with her for a long time before I met her. It was funny looking at aai turn into a schoolgirl again with her!

Awareness and Knowledge

2009-04-08T15:58:00.003+05:30

Today, I was on the bus with a couple of friends from Uni. They were talking about the word "aware". It got me thinking. Almost every language I have been exposed to uses the phrases "to know" and "to be aware" differently. There is a very beautiful difference.

Knowledge wears a grey suit.

Awareness has wings. :)

You can easily replace one with the other. Like you can say "I am aware of that" instead of "I know". However, when you are really aware, you know but you cannot explain how it makes you feel. When you are aware you know that knowledge is not everything. That there is a certain degree of levitation associated even with ordinary life.

Like knowing that water droplets run over a lotus leaf like mercury but then taking one on off on the tip of your index finger and feeling it!

Knowing that you breathe all the time in order to survive but closing your eyes and trying to follow your breath in and out of your lungs.

It could be knowledge and sensitivity together. It could be knowing with a flexible mind. More so a flexible ego. Better still, a flexible, knowing mind full of compassion. Is that awareness?

It is an evasive, ethereal word.

How would a Westerner react to "अहम् ब्रम्हास्मि।"?

If you translate it literally, it would be considered an expression of an inflated ego but I think it is closest to how we can explain awareness.

That is what separates scholars from enlightened ones. The fact that they are aware of the God within them!

Opinion!

2009-04-01T08:03:00.006+05:30

I guess having an opinion on everything is the first sign of getting old. :(
Ten years ago I hardly had an opinion on anything and I had a constant feeling of being empty.
Ten years since then I struggled hard to have an opinion. I still feel empty and I make much more noise!
Opinions are overrated. They have a range of validity and when someone gets too stiff on their own, life turns around and pokes them in the eyeball. It is one thing having an opinion and another being taken seriously. As a twenty five year old, I try to make as much sense with my own life as possible but I also feel like attaching a disclaimer with my opinions. Most of my thoughts about various situations have changed drastically over the past two or three years. So if my own life goes at the same pace, I may not agree with my twenty five year old thoughts when say, I am twenty seven.
So is it really worth asking for my opinion and then getting into a fight with me?
Another annoying thing about opinions is that they make a fluid medium to get into a pointless debate and when confronted to express your opinion it is really difficult to refuse to express it or lie. This makes it increasingly difficult to look forward to a chilled out beer with no heated conversation about religion!
They are very good if they are free of emotions. However on certain occasions, people just want to strangle you for having an opinion that does not match with their own.
The most beautiful aspect of opinions is that everyone else can be wrong! =)

खिचडी

2009-03-12T05:04:00.003+05:30

मी मराठीत लिहू शकते!

मॅक (अाणी मंदार गद्रे) यांचे अाभार!

चालक शिकत अाहे. तरी चू.भू.द्या.घ्या.

Intrepid Worrier. :)

2009-03-02T17:14:00.005+05:30

I thought of having lunch with my flatmate Riju today. She was supposed to be in the university all day. I called her to ask her if we could meet but she did not answer. I called her back in half an hour and still no answer. Then the obsessive-compulsive-neurotic hormone was activated inside me and I kept calling her every fifteen minutes. With every unanswered call, I made up a better scenario in my head. Initially I assumed that she left her cellphone at home. It was a good assumption. However then it seemed really impossible that someone like Riju would ever forget something like her phone at home. Then my creativity kicked in as well and by the end of hour three I was sure that our house had been broken into and she had been tied to the chair while they swept through the house.

My miserable thoughts were interrupted by a loud ring. She was absolutely fine but had forgotten to get her phone off the silent mode.

I don't like to worry. No one does I guess but every time I am in a situation where a very simple reason makes perfect sense, I end up refusing to accept it and waste a lot of my time worrying about multiple impossible outcomes.

It runs in my family though. So sometimes when I worry a lot about why I worry, I blame it on my mother's side. My grandfather used to be a freedom fighter in the struggle for Mother India's independence. However he is a better "worrier" than a "warrior"!

I went to the U.S when I was fifteen years old, all by myself. My parents and my grandfather put me on a plane in Mumbai and returned to Pune. However my mom and my grandfather turned into a mixed doubles team on their way back. They used to throw these "worry balls" at my dad and he tried to play them both all alone. My mom thought instead of getting down at the Hong Kong airport, I would mistake Bangkok for Hong Kong and get down there instead while the plane waits for an hour (although my ticket screamed aloud of my next destination). She made baba call up the Hong Kong airport to make sure I had reached.

My dad was taking his momentary shaving solace in the bathroom (because that is the only activity my mom could not join him with and annoy him) when my grandfather entered the bathroom and locked the door from inside. My dad was prepared to get hit in the head but my grandfather bowled him over with his question and left him speechless for a while. "What if Saee's aunt does not come to get her at San Francisco at all?". To which my dad calmly replied,

"She has a return ticket. The Cathay Pacific staff would promptly put her back on to the next flight to Mumbai". When I (finally) reached and called them, my dad was almost in tears from being free of two worry maniacs.

I am the third generation of victims of unreasonable fears in my family. If you look at it from your ground state, the worries that take up most of your healthy, productive work-time are extremely ridiculous. When I am not in it, I can give a three hour sermon on peace of mind. When I am in it, I jut turn into this scary psychopath. Sometimes, the things that I imagine about my close ones are right out of a crime scene. Even as a child, if my mom did not come back home at a certain time, I used to think that the Sikh terrorists kidnapped her (yeah, they were really big in the eighties when Indira Gandhi was assassinated). Once I even told my neighbor that I am scared that Longawal kidnapped my mom and he almost had an attack of asthma laughing!

My dad's genes might have made me a little bit less of a neurotic though. He always told my mom, "Worry is intrest paid on trouble before it is due". Even as a five year old I knew that my dad would say that line at least thrice a week to her but as a twenty-five year old, I still find it hard to apply it to my thoughts when I get worried about silly things.

Every now and then though, there comes a cool summer evening where you stroll by the river and think to yourself, "Right now, there is nothing in this world that I should be worried about. It will all fall into place".

I wish my life had a little more of those evenings though!

The Reader

2009-02-22T18:29:00.006+05:30

I watched this movie starring Kate Winslet this weekend and I was moved, perhaps after a very long time. It is about a middle aged Nazi guard (Kate) who ends up having a very short affair with a fifteen year old boy. She is square, rough and almost insensitive under normal circumstances and he is romantic and well read. In between the time they spend together, she makes him read to her because she is illiterate. The story unfolds into an unexpected plot (which I am not going to reveal here) and circumstances bring them face to face at a later stage. She is a wasted old woman and he is a tired middle aged man. However even though the story starts with a steamy love affair, it brews itself into a situation that all bibliophiles out there would appreciate with all their heart!

The beauty of this movie is not just in the story but also in the way it is made. Her acting never lets you come to a point where you can label her actions as right or wrong and in her square, illiterate, impatient and insensitive way, she manages to make you admire her even though the story demands the exact opposite from you. She has been rightfully rewarded with an Academy award today. :)

There is a radius of conditioning around all of us. Within that radius, we learn to call something right or wrong. Moral or immoral. Fair and unfair. Laws sometimes take care of all our myopic concerns in great details but they do not necessarily lead to justice all the time. Beyond that radius which varies country to country and culture to culture, there is a vast expanse of individual volition. Where all laws and regulations seem insufficient. This movie takes you to that realm of thought.

I would really like everyone to watch it! =)

Cheers

PS: Raj I hope this makes you happy. :)

A world free of status messages. :)

2009-02-19T14:19:00.002+05:30

As a kid, I used to be genuinely amused why aai got really angry after my dad's mother made a comment that was in no way related to her. Something like, "Mrs. X is a really good mother. She gave up her job to raise her kids", made my mother cry her eyes out for hours together. As I was growing up, I gradually began to understand this method of indirect communication among human females. It was used a lot on my mother's side too, especially by her aunts and my own grandmother. Although on their side it got a bit more arcane and you had to know a lot of Sanskrit to know that you had just been insulted. In my late teenage years I also found myself deciphering these kind of comments for my mother and complicating our lives for no reason at all. I guess it is a part of honing a woman's instincts so that she gets to control the competition around her.

These days, just like gossip and love, this kind of communication has made its way to the virtual world. These kind of cryptic messages are posted as status updates on the famous social networking website Facebook. It is a sheer treat reading a Facebook page in between (unsuccessful) experiments and I must thank all the girls for this Ektakapoorization of Facebook (FB). One day as I open my FB account I find the following status message conversation.

Madhuri Dixit "is angry that some women flirt with other girls' boyfriends"

..half an hour later..

Manisha Koirala "thinks that other girls should know how to keep their boyfriends to themselves"

..two hours later..

Madhuri Dixit "is shocked that a certain girl defends her actions instead of apologizing for them"

..half an hour later

Manisha Koirala "feels that girls should stop accusing others and accept that they are themselves insecure"

This goes on for ages. Peppered with comments from other girls who have committed similar (but milder) crimes and just check to see if the writer is aiming at them. Once they are sure it is not them they pipe in with their own versions on jealousy and insecurity!

Back in India we used to have a deluge of cold wars even between best friends. In my group of four best gal-pals, I am pretty sure there have been plenty combinations of back-biting and jealousy under the label of "right" and "wrong". In fact it is one of the only factorial that I can really work out. I learnt permutations and combinations putting all the women into groups of sister-in-laws Vs daughter-in-laws. It is a lot easier to visualize.

This time when I went back to India, I went out with one of my core group girls. When she started referring to one year old hazy statements, I decided to destroy all my bastions. Over a cup of hot cappuccino in Cafe Coffee Day, I let out the ultimate truth about female friendships

( I am sure there was a halo around me just for two minutes). In a group, there ARE no secrets. I told her that I had forgotten who my real ally was and that in the long run it does not matter. All of us have compromised equal amounts of principles and we are even. :)

It worked! Although I do not know if I should be happy about it.

I have been jealous myself and found jealousy really stifling. I am sure our common guy friends enjoyed these wars with just as much relish as I enjoy these FB status messages. I am not really sure if I am over it as yet, but I am positive that none of us would ever get so creative as these ardent Facebookies to express our anger. :D

It is a journey after all. There is enough "man" in a woman to be able to slap another one of her kind on the back and go for a beer. There is also enough "woman" in a man sometimes that makes him sit at the bar for hours talking about his boss's steamy affair with his secretary. The challenge is to get it to balance and even that is very dynamic!

However, I would really like it if the world was without status messages. :)

Any opinions? :)

Caterpillar

2009-02-10T06:44:00.003+05:30

I was sitting in the lab today waiting for a reaction and I made a caterpillar from magnetic stirrer bars. Took me way back when I was three years old and over at my grandparent's for summer vacations. One morning I woke up with an itchy back. I walked straight out into the kitchen and when my ajji saw it, she diagnosed it as a caterpillar squish. It was the first time in my life I had heard about caterpillars and the fact that in my grandparent's house, these kind of pillars just fall from the thatched roof during summers.

Then it turned into an obsession. Most of my holidays there after were spent hunting for caterpillars. Green, red,black,brown and even blonde. Sometimes my cousin and I would come back with a matchbox for my grandmother that was full of caterpillars neatly arranged next to each other! Someone also told us that if you feed them mulberry leaves they turn into butterflies. So we tried to set up the butterfly-fication experiment for our poor guinea caterpillars. Each matchbox had our hostage caterpillar and a mulberry leaf. :)

Since we had raspberry vine and mulberry tree growing out in the front yard it was very easy.

One day went by and there was still no sign of butterfly. With our four and five year old patience glands, it was really difficult to carry on with our experiment beyond five days. There was severe grandparental pressure too, that came from some sort of humanitarian approach. At the end of four days we had a martyr. So we decided to stop the experiment because ajji told us that God would not like it.

All along that summer, we used to get caterpillar bombs from the roof all the time. I remember waking up after several afternoon naps with caterpillar hair stuck to my neck or my back. Ajji used to rub marigold leaves on it to calm us down. The green ones were the worst. It was like getting stung by a bee.

On days when the hot summer evening would unfold into something that fermented my thoughts, I used to use the caterpillar sting to get rid of all my four-year-old anxieties. :)

At others, I used to observe my caterpillar-squish-mark with great pride.

It seems like a really long time now but it feels like it was yesterday. I went to meet my cousin at her in-laws house this time when I went to Kolhapur. She was dressed in a sari with a big "mangalsutra" around her neck. All day she told me how she manages her new house and what her husband likes the best from all her inherited recipes. I was still coming to terms though with not trying to look at her as the girl in our caterpillar experiments.

I guess the reason why we revisit these kind of memories is because it is boring living in a world where there are very few "first times" left. Nothing I do now matches the joy of looking at a hairy worm and finding out that it is called a caterpillar. Of knowing that it is the raw-material for butterflies!

Dedicated to my cup of coffee

2009-01-26T16:19:00.004+05:30

On one of those "adamant teenage evenings", when I was pestering aai to give in to one of my expensive demands, she put me up for a really funny challenge. She asked me to write down a hundred reasons why it would complete my otherwise whiny,cranky and incomplete life. (I should thank her for her patience with my growing up moods).

I went into my room. She must have thought I was too lazy and that such a big thinking task would make me give up my demand. I came back an hour later with a bit of paper with my "hundred reasons". She was amused. She folded the paper and said,"This is not dissatisfaction, this is creativity applied in the wrong direction". She smiled and true to her word (as always) let me have what I wanted.

So many times, we find ourselves defending our bad habits. Overweight people are always overworked. Smokers are always stressed. Alcoholics are always depressed. Extremists always oppressed!

Moving along, I have a list of reasons why I defend my cup of flat white every morning. I have this internal dialogue every day as I am about to get off the bus or the train.

Me: Come on! Do it today. Just have the courage to walk past that coffee shop without faltering or halting to smell the beans.

Devil Me: You woke up at 5:30 today. It is going to be a long day, with the gym and so much reading!

Me: But you should not depend on coffee! You should be strong enough to face your day without it. You are young and you get enough exercise. You should be up and about without this stupid habit!

Devil Me: You make sense. Let me meditate about all that you said over a cup of coffee.

Me: You are a weak person. Just accept it. You need caffeine reinforcements to stay happy and enthusiastic. If they pull out this coffee-brown mask off your face you would just be a complaining pain in the neck.

Devil Me : Whoa! You are the good mind aren't you? You should inspire me by saying good things. Don't use this sinister blackmailing on me!

Me: Okay. Think about all the money you'd save! 3.50 per cup multiplied by 5 - a week! Then multiply that by 4!! You could save so much!!

Devil Me: I really need a coffee to get all those multiplications done. We will do it over a cup of coffee today and if I am convinced I will quit from tomorrow onwards.

Me: I assure you, once you walk past that coffee shop without buying one you will be free. It is your coffee-moksha. This is how we get trapped in worldly things that drag us down from the true path of liberation! There is sheer happiness within you. Just be strong and wake up to it! It is high time. All the coffee shop owners around the Uni know you by your first name!!!

Devil Me: It is NOT the coffee. It is my eyes.

Me: Okay now is the moment. You are just hundred meters away from the kiosk. Take a deep breath. Think about how much you would gain by not giving into this temptation. "Yes we can"!! We can do it. Just have faith.

Devil Me: Had you not been nagging me so much all this while, I would have been able to give it a pass. Now I am stressed. All these romantic ideas of a coffee-free future that seem to clash with my hectic reality have usurped my energy. I need a kick now. So I am switching you off until I finish this piping hot cup of mocha.

Me: Wait!! You can't do that!! This is cowardice...*mmfffffmmm*..let me go! *mmfff* *sigh*

I guess I should listen to the sane one more often. This could be one of those little holes in my character that could turn into something that cannot ever be patched! :)

Gee! I am stressed. Time for a coffee!!

To Facebook or not to Facebook?

2009-01-13T07:04:00.006+05:30

A few days back, one of my friends here who hasn't been using any kind of social networking website asked me if he should join Facebook. I was surprised to realize that I had no encouraging words for him. A few years back I used to be logged on to Orkut for almost all the time that I spent awake. Although all my friends lived within a radius of a healthy twenty minute walk around my place, we still talked to each other on Orkut more than in person. Now that I am five thousand miles away, strangely enough I have developed a strong aversion to all these groups.

If any of the seasoned Facebookies happens to see my profile they will immediately conclude that I have no life. :)

When you are a serious Facebookie, you update everyone else about everything going on in your life. People who are "single" on Facebook update everyone about their new partners as soon as they get them and you can also see a tag that leads you to their new girlfriend/boyfriend when you click on it! Then there is a deluge of new pictures on their profile and the spectators of this blossoming relationship applaud by posting encouraging comments. Needless to say that all of this gives the fellow Facebookies a lot to talk about.

I used to get emails from Facebook asking me whether I knew any gossip about my Facebook buddies that I would like to share! I was happy and sad at the same time for such an open and innocent legalization of gossip in the virtual world.

Sometimes though these status updates really crack me up. Just the way you get updates about people getting together, you also get an update when they end their relationships! It is a funny picture imagining someone returning home from their break-up fight (or break-up discussion for "mature" users) and logging in to Facebook to declare it!

The same goes with pictures. You have to have a lot of pictures on your profile to make people believe that you "have a life". So everywhere they go, serious Facebookies are looking for material for their online albums. The brand new world of digital cameras just makes it a lot easier. I have seen so many retakes for the "perfect Facebook picture" that I am sure their cheeks hurt from smiling the perfect fake smile.

My friends nag me all the time about pictures. I am the kind of person who absolutely hates being a tourist with a camera hanging around her neck! I had a long stop over in Singapore on my way back from India. I was thinking of getting a room for myself and sleeping it off on the airport. However, severe parental and peer pressure made me go for this bus ride around the city. When I was in two minds about it I was reminded of how fortunate I am that I get to see so many places at such a young age. It was also laced with a little anger at God for giving such a destiny to someone who is so wrong for it! So just to pacify them I took this three hour trip around Singapore.

The moment I got on the bus, I dozed off. I woke up an hour later when our guide had finished explaining almost all the important things on the bus. We went for a walk around a river that looked exactly like the one in Brisbane and everything in the city was as colonial as London, south Mumbai or Melbourne. So when I was talking to one of my friends later, he was really upset when I said," Oh! Come on. It is all the same. I really enjoyed my nap in the bus though". I don't know why but the holidays and places that I have really enjoyed have always been unplanned and sometimes, in the haste and hurry of making a picture, we forget to make the mental images that last all life long!

Another thing that really annoys me about Facebook is the "photo-tagging". For non-Facebookers (or losers) it is a way of posting the picture on every profile in its content. So if you happen to go for a party where you are photographed ,without your knowledge, enjoying a solitary moment of nose-picking, the moment your host has finished doing dishes it will be up on Facebook and everybody can see it!

Or when you lie to someone that you cannot go to their party because you are planning to finish your paper (only someone who is not doing a PhD can believe that) and are seen turning into a vodka-rocket the next day at someone else's party ..right on Facebook!

Some girls also have the "Miss Photogenic" disorder. They would take a lot of pictures with you and only tag you in the ones that you look your ugliest (and they look their prettiest). I have heard that these days girls prefer making best friends with other girls who are uglier than them so that they can have a "relative beauty contest" on Facebook.

These are just the highlights that really annoy me. Amongst other things are the "gift" applications. Where you send each other trees that grow with time..virtually. Also sometimes you get roped into these automatic "evaluate your friends" applications that make you compare everyone on your list with each other!

It is a vicious circle. Now that I am on Facebook, I use it to minimum. Only to stay in touch with my best friends who are now scattered all over the world.

But if someone comes to me asking if he/she should join Facebook, I would ask them to turn around and kick them out of the door and say, "Go play outside!!"

Monday-Moksha

2009-01-06T12:55:00.004+05:30

Every Monday comes with a silent sadness. Pushing a spoonful of soggy cereal into your mouth at 6:30 AM. Wishing that your existence were a dream hitting against the shore of your Saturday morning eyes. You find yourself fighting with the same sorrows that you battled with last Monday morning and yet they seem so fresh! Like somebody's beautiful, everlasting wife. You know it is going to get better. That something called "time" makes everything better. That even if you waffle and float through the Tuesday and Thursday and turn yourself into a door-knob (or a door-mat for a dash of extra pity) Friday will arrive and lead you to your well-deserved (who cares if they really are!) beers. Most women tie their hair into a tight bun on Monday mornings and let them down on Friday nights. Most men are seen wearing silver cuff-links on Monday mornings and rolling up their sleeves on Friday nights. It is all a perfect circle. We all wait at the gates of the Monday-Moksha on Sunday nights and almost all of us are born again on Monday mornings. Little babies walking in stockings and stilettos. Wearing mascara on the train.

Yet there are those few annoying ones. Who never seem to look like they hate their Mondays! You would find them tapping their leather-clad feet to the tune in their ears. Or drinking lemon juice on a Yoga mat on a bright Monday morning. They would never feel depressed on Sunday nights or even excessively ecstatic on Friday afternoons. You like them first and try to get inspired but then it is too hard. Then you wonder how they do it. Analyze and conclude that it is impossible to be so happy on a Monday morning. Then you label them abnormal and think that it is just right to be absolutely miserable on a Monday morning. Mostly because most of your friends on the train agree with you. It is just impossible to avoid the weekly circle that brings you to a Monday reincarnation.

Maybe those really happy ones would get tired one day and join the club. And you would get to say,"See! We were tellin ya! It aint so easy buddy"!

But it would never happen. =) Because once you attain your Monday-Moksha, you are free! Free from weekly rebirths. Just because you break the perfect circle.

The "M" word.

2008-12-14T10:25:00.003+05:30

I was really excited about my holiday this year. I even had a count down on my desk.
The only thing that scared me was the fact that December is wedding season in India and I am a 25 year old Indian girl!
I don't know if I should really write about this on my blog. : Especially since my baba is my most loyal reader but everyone is entitled to their opinions, moreover everyone is entitled to MY opinion!!
Over the past few years, I have made my own independent observations about Marriage (wedding) and Indian girls.
Just the way there is a huge rift in the economic equality in India, there is also a significant gap in the power equations between men and women. I see my maid's daughter being beaten up regularly by her inebriated husband and at the same time I see "eligible-daughter-in-laws" dictating "my conditions to marry you". I recently went to Kolhapur to see my uncle who is looking for a bride (through match-makers) for his son. I was really amused when he said that they were excluding any "applications" from Pune because the eligible girls from Pune are really scary. :)
One of my mamis gave me an update about the recent "list of demands" from the girl's side in an arranged marriage system.
1. I will not stay with your parents. If you expect me to stay with them, I expect that you have a paid cook.
2. I work late hours in the office. So I would not like it if I have to take part in too much house work after I come back from work.
3. I want to know how much from all the collective property you are going to inherit (This is not an exaggeration. I have heard about and even seen girls who want to know these things before they get into an arranged marriage)
4. I am a progressive woman. So I would not like to take part in every other festival that your parents may want to celebrate.
5. My money= My money. (which later translates as "my-money-my-money-your-money-my-money")

Some of these things make me think that the "arranged marriage" system in India is gradually collapsing. There was a time when this system had turned into a prosperous business. I even remember my parents volunteering to pool their respective single friends and trying to match them! Thankfully none of that worked. =)
However, it was a really informal, cheerful and positive effort to match up people.

I understand that it is hard to be an "Indian Woman" all the time but I am completely against this "professional" way of finding a companion. Any relationship needs compromises. There is a bigger joy in giving up freedom to make people happy. I have seen my mother do all of that as well as have a flourishing professional life. We all did our bit to make the business grow. My dad took care of me while aai was away working in sugar factories. When she came back, she made up for her absence by cooking some of the most delicious food I have ever had. My parents married against my father's parent's wishes. So my mom did her extra best to win their hearts!
The reason this was possible I think was because both my parents, all their minor differences included, always lived a "wholesome" life. Even the everyday things that you do like exercise, cooking, gardening and shopping add character to your companionship and help in taking a lot of stress away.

Even in the West, marriage is still a very serious thing. People do not get married unless they are absolutely sure about each other and are willing to have a family together. Sometimes, they have kids in their late thirties and still end up having very happy families.

Indian girls are on the brink of a revolution. Our ideals (our moms) have come from a generation that accepted every marital obstacle with a resolve that they will make it work ( because they had no other choice). This has made them more powerful and patient than any other generation of women. Since we are faced with such ideals and have grown up in a relatively liberal world, we refuse to accept certain things that would only make other's happy.
Also, most of the girls who are getting married only think about the "wedding" and not the marriage that lies ahead, and for years to come. All the planning and expense goes into those three days when the wedding is going to happen but very few plan for the long (and happy) marriage that lies ahead.
My generation of educated women in their mid-twenties could turn into a "dream-come-true" for the Indian woman. The only thing missing that I find in almost every girl I meet ( including me sometimes) is the complete lack of patience and foresight.
Who you are is completely in your hands. That is the beauty of life. You are free to be whoever you want. Your everyday life is completely yours too. You are free to wake up with the Sun on a Yoga mat and skip dinners to lose weight. :)
You are free to go back to school whenever you want. Know yourself well and get used to your own personality. Know little things about yourself ( like you could have also been one of the greatest tap-dancers the world has ever seen) and be happy about knowing yourself well.
However, Marriage is one thing that is not in your hands alone. It is something that is almost a destiny and even the West accepts this with all their analytical thinking.
So sometimes these "professional match-makers" make me feel extremely claustrophobic and then I end up thinking that overcoming the fear of living a lonely life could be easier than falling in the traps of these matrimonial websites. :D

We definitely need to tame the alpha-woman gene around here though. ;)

The Argumentative Indian -- Amartya Sen

2008-12-03T10:43:00.008+05:30

I picked this book up from Crossword in between my shopping sprees on Dhole Patil Road in Pune. Not even once did I imagine that it would enlighten me so much just a few days later.
This book, written by Amartya Sen is a beautiful work of extensive research written in form of essays. It talks mostly about the history of public voice in India and covers massive time-spans.
Some books come into your life at the right time and I think this was one of them.
I was reading about Rajput-Mughal marriages in between my travels in Rajasthan. Unfortunately all of India and the rest of the World was witnessing brutal violence going on in Mumbai at the same time.
This book systematically talks about various plagues that have been infecting India post independence. One of them is sectarian politics, which was started in India by certain political parties with abject irresponsibility.
India has seen and even conceived so many religions that by now she should ideally reach her religious "Moksha".

Amartya Sen talks about this journey by calmly presenting well-referenced facts about India's religious journey. If I see my mother-land from the wingspan of a beautiful peacock that flies across three millenniums, what is going on now not only disappoints but also fills me with sad frustration.

It also raises some interesting questions. For example, whenever there is a communal riot in India there is a tendency to label it using religion because that is what it is crudely based on. However, in all these riots, even the ones that occurred in 1944 before independence the majority of dead people came from lower income groups. People who live in slums and have no security against someone barging into their hut and raping their wives. We never see a Shahrukh Khan being killed in a riot and I think considering the extent of idol worship going on in Bollywood, I don't think they even think of Shahrukh and Salman "Khans" as Muslims. All the religious labels are carried around by poor people who have to go out everyday in order to keep their children well-fed. Even today as we watched live terror on our television sets, the first victims of random shooting were people who were returning home from work in the local trains.

When the whole of Mumbai goes to work the next day after a terror attack, there is also an element of helplessness in their courage. If they could afford to stay home, I think some of them would.

Another interesting observation made by Amartya Sen is the position of women in India. He gives statistical figures about the female:male ratios all over India, even including states like Rajasthan,Delhi and Maharashtra known for sex-selective abortions. It is not surprising that India fares badly in this respect as well as some areas like women's health. Almost half of the female population in India is anaemic and most of the cardiovascular disorders that occur later in life are a result of the fetus being undernourished during pregnancy. Apart from this, India also leads the camp when it comes to domestic violence, wife-beating,dowry deaths and deprivation of property rights for women.

Despite all these statistical facts, India has witnessed many powerful women leaders. India, Pakistan,Bangladesh and Shrilanka have all had female heads of state while countries that have had a much longer history of self-government like the USA are still to get their first female presidents.

Sen also talks about undernourishment in Indian children. It is shocking to know that India beats even the sub-Sahara countries in Africa in the number of undernourished children. There is still severe hunger in the lower classes in India although the State granaries are full of excess food grain. A lot of government money is spent every year just to maintain these excess stocks but none is distributed over the country where it is really needed. This is apparently because of the pro-farmer policy of the government. They refuse to sell food grains at a lower price because the farmers who produce it should get a better price! Sen calls it a case of "friendly-fire".

Sen invested some of his Nobel Prize money in reviewing the condition of primary education in some parts of India. The results are appalling. Lack of education still haunts us and various loop-holes have been found around the concessions made available for the poor which are then used by the wealthy and corrupt. He also talks about the various "unions", like the teacher's union for example, that initially worked against injustice but now as the primary teachers get paid well they have moved away from the poor students coming to them making them somewhat unsympathetic.

This book makes you realize that there are certain things that are just not valued enough in India anymore.

One of them is life. Since there are so many of us here, a few getting shot in a random terror attack is no big deal to the politicians.

Another is poverty. My Australian friends who came along with me to see Rajasthan would pull out money for every beggar on the street. Some of them had tears in their eyes when four year old kids ran towards us for money outside a temple. However, a few days later they realized that if they give money to every beggar on the street, they would probably have to go begging themselves after a while! You come to a point where you run out of sympathy and start thinking about yourself. Most of the Indians have gone beyond this line of sympathy and hence sometimes appear selfish.

This book however gives a strong message of the value of Democracy. All the progress that India has seen post independence is because India is a democracy. People still have a voice. Although sometimes they have to scream for attention. Governments have been ruled in and ruled out completely on people's will. The army has stayed within her barracks unlike Pakistan and the press is free. Although these days I think that the television media in India is fast turning trashy, pandering to the lower tastes of human mind. Newspapers in India are one of the best in the world.

Every generation reflects the effects of the atmosphere they grew up in. Today's "Jihadis" grew up in war-ridden Afghanistan in the 80s that could have filled them with irrational anger and extremism. However, the babies of the Jihad-ridden world would (hopefully) grow up into compassionate agnostics or better still, people who know that Religion was made for Humanity and not the other way round.

We are at the edge of another revolution and it is just unfortunate that some of us have to lay our lives to start it.

My sincere respects to all those who have given their lives in this terrible war.

And I am grateful to Amartya Sen for this book. Happier even to see that it reflects the fairness of work that a humane-scientist can bring about!

I am not Aishwarya Rai.

2008-11-21T09:30:00.005+05:30

Inspiration : Madhura's blog
The statement is "All girls like being looked at", and Madhura has given a really humble and honest account of her take on it. I went to primary school with her and I must say that I always thought it would have been so much better if I had Madhura's gooseberry-green eyes. :)

I spent all my childhood on stage. So even before I realized that I would be "looked at" at a later stage, people were looking at me! I absolutely enjoyed being looked at as a kid. I still remember the butterflies that I got in my stomach. Even when I was (over) fed to keep me happy before I went on stage to dance, I felt a vacuum in my belly before I stepped on. The jingle of ghungroos,the rustle of silk, the smell of about two dozen garlands of jasmine in my (fake) hair and the pleasant itching from the bangles and necklaces..all of it made me exceedingly happy. When on stage, all by myself, I knew that everyone below was looking at me, judging me, evaluating me. Amongst them were my parents too, proud and happy!
However, it was not always pleasant. Once I remember coming down with acute conjunctivitis and I had a performance lined up for my dance teacher's concert. I was in no mood to do it because my eyelids stuck to each other even when I blinked! My mom however made me get out of bed and live up to my promise. I had never hated wearing kolh so much before as I did that day! I still remember standing in the wing wearing glasses and mopping my eyes with cotton to avoid ruining my make-up! I think I was just ten years old then.

As I grew up, I turned exceedingly ugly and I actually do remember missing those lights and that attention when I stopped dancing. In the meantime, however I was "looked at" in speech and poetry festivals when I represented my school. I must say that attention was completely devoid of vanity. :)
I used to be this roly-poly, chubby teenager reciting R.L Stevenson or Keats on stage. I was into high-school theatre but I was never "looked at" by the members of the opposite sex with any significant curiosity! During those days, even though I did not particularly enjoy being looked at, I had to go through the horror. :D

Then there was a series of "take control of your life" weight loss programs. Running, skipping, swimming and Yoga coupled with "No carbs at night" and a fatless life. I must confess however, that it did not have any effect on the way people looked at me until the time I stopped caring about it. :D
Then it started again. Now in a different sense. And I must confess in all my honesty that when people look at you when you are just walking down a stupid street (without knowing that you can dance,talk and make them laugh) it does feel good!
I remember being extremely thrilled once when a coffee shop owner gave me a five minute lecture on why he found my eyes pretty. Even though it was instantly eclipsed by comments like,"He is just selling his coffee".

But then there are ways in which people look at you too!
Some of them might as well have 1-10 flash cards to hold up when you pass by!
Some of them look straight into your eyes and burst into an honest uninhibited smile.
Some have this expression that says,"There is something about this girl but I don't know what it is. She is not pretty for sure." :)
Some of them are just waiting for you to look back at them so that they can throw a really overwhelming compliment at you.
Some just look at you, fail you and move on to the next!
The look that I enjoy the most is when sometimes I show up in the lab in my hippie clothes on a weekend and someone sees me. It is like looking at retro Coca-Cola bottle when you are used to having it in a can!
The look that I have been the most patient with is when you are with your "breathtakingly beautiful" girl friend and they give you a sympathy look!

Over the years I have developed a theory to explain why "Most hot chics end up having really lame conversations". We had a discussion on this with my friends in Australia.
Hot chics usually realize that they are hot as soon as they turn 14. So they become extremely complacent (sometimes even annoyed) with the attention. Hence the other means of getting attention like
"being a nice person"
"having a sense of humor"
"being intelligent"
"understanding others"
are not utilized by them.
And being naturally attractive makes them neglect the "work-out" arena as well as the "health food" department.
So being really hot at a very young age is not necessarily a good thing. :D
I might sound a bit superficial but I think a lot of activities that we end up doing are motivated by an urge to be noticed.
I am just as grateful for the "ugly teenager" phase as I am for the earlier and later phases of my life. It has given me an opportunity to improve and also an ability to make peace with the fact that I am not Aishwarya Rai. :)

The Journey of a Book :)

2008-11-13T17:28:00.004+05:30

I was inspired to write this because of something I read on Vishnupriya's blog. I am not doing much these days (that must be obvious from the frequency of my blogs), so I spend time blog-browsing. Jumping from one blog-roll to another. :)

Well, this post reminds me of the journey of my favorite book. I refrain from writing about my personal life in my blog but I guess I am in a time and place in my life where I could, at least once afford that luxury!

"To Kill a Mocking Bird" is by far one of my most favorite books. I read it first when I was seventeen and I vividly remember sitting in the balcony of my third floor apartment in Pune, overlooking a really boring street below, reading that book. It was a gift from someone. It came all the way from Lausanne, Switzerland. Actually, now that I think of it, it came from Amazon.com from a credit card payment made in Switzerland. :) So let us say that it actually came from America. It was the first time ever in my life that I started getting gifts because I was "charming". :) I guess that was also one of the reasons why I liked that book so much.

I became the official spokes model for that book since that time. I gave it out as gifts to all my friends and the friendship that really made me read that book came to an end almost right after I read it! I even found myself getting angry at that book, but I couldn't. I read it about three times before I finally put it into the cupboard that showed off my reading!

A few years later, I got the opportunity to introduce another friend to it and it travelled all the way to Germany, I guess. I had a few good coffees after it came back to India but I just kept having coffees without getting the book back! :)

Then it was time for my friend to pack up and go away and in the last minute frenzy, my book was overlooked. Once again I turned into a grumpy old woman and just before I left for Australia my best friend got me a copy of the same book just to cheer me up! :)

I forgot all about it when I arrived here and dutifully immersed myself in a lot of article-reading. Then on my 25th birthday, I got a package that came all the way from America (again!) that contained a birthday card and my lost book! I think that kind of completed a full circle for the poor book which is I think almost ten years old now!

It sits on the shelf on my desk. Not as shiny as it looked before, but definitely full of character!

I think my copy of "To Kill a Mocking Bird" has been to more places than I have been to! I wonder what it would say if it could talk.

It would probably say in its old and shaky voice, "Sometimes, excuses make better reasons! I am one of them. "

I was very possessive about my books when I was in India. So much so that I even had fights with my dad over them but these days, I would be glad to give out all my books (except my Calvin and Hobbes) to whoever wants to read them. I think my copy of Mocking Bird taught me to be generous. :) Because there is a greater joy in meeting again after even the tiniest hope of meeting is lost. There is a bigger happiness in getting a fat fed-ex package from the other side of the world for something as stupid as a borrowed book. :)

It silently reinforces many beliefs that age and immaturity keep us away from!

Cheers to my book and for all the circumstances that made me write this post!

Kolhapuri Marathi

2008-11-08T13:50:00.005+05:30

I am a week away from going to India for a holiday. :)

This is somehow making me more and more nostalgic.

I have always been really proud of the city that I was born in - Kolhapur. Every city has a personality. Like how Paris always reminds you of fashion and perfumes, Switzerland reminds you of chocolates,knifes and Roger Federer (how is he doing these days?) and Brisbane is for the Gabba and beeah (beer). In India too every city comes with her own aura.

Pune , the city that I grew up in is where everyone talks like a book. Even when they want to insult each other, Punekars tend to use "Kalidas" and "Shakespeare" from their arsenal of knowledge. Shopkeepers close their shops from 1pm-4pm in the afternoon (to enjoy an afternoon nap) and if you want to make "shrikhanda" when you expect people for a dinner on a weekday you have to schedule the "chakka" purchase taking Chitale Bandhu's convenience into account!
Everyone including the fruit seller in Phule Mandai to the ticket seller at the railway station think they are somebody really important and special, which would also explain my behavior at times. :)

However my birth city is a complete contrast to Pune and sometimes I am really glad that I got the opportunity to go away from Pune and look at it from a Kolhapuri's perspective. If you talk like a book in Kolhapur, they interrupt you (usually with swear words that would lose their charm if I use their English equivalents) and tell you that you are not normal. While talking like a book is not normal in Kolhapur, adding about 50 grams of red-hot chilly to 200 g of chicken curry is completely normal. However not being able to eat that (and breaking into cold sweat when attempting to do it) is completely abnormal. The assal Kolhapuri equivalents of all the internationally accepted swear words are thrown in into any conversation. Even when it is the galli-gossip going on between two women. So while a Puneri might turn into a red tomato with such bad language, it is extremely essential in the Kolhapuri conversations. During one of his most composed and contemplative moods, people would hear my grandfather reciting the Bhagwad Geeta. However, in moments of extreme anger or extreme pride he would join his fellow Kolhapuris in dispensing the usual bad language.

The most endearing aspect about Kolhapur is her laid-back attitude. Kolhapur is not Mumbai. Everyone has time for you. When I go and stay with my grandfather in his house in Kolhapur I just have to stand in the balcony to get dinner invites. While I am enjoying an easy cup of tea with ajoba, almost every person passing on the road below stops and talks to me for a few minutes and ends the conversation with a dinner invite. :)

Needless to say that it takes a lot of courage to accept a Kolhapuri's invitation, for most of the times the food is too hot to handle.
Some of my favorite places in Kolhapur are the Khasbag misal, the bhel-carts in Rajarampuri, a crazy little restaurant called "Vahini" somewhere in the city, the Mahalaxmi temple and everything around it and Rankala!!
I came across this video which best describes the spunk, innocence and happiness that this city radiates. :)

Just 7 more days to go! Yey!

From Kolhapur to Brisbane

2008-11-03T06:27:00.002+05:30

I don't know about everybody else, but the memory of my existence starts from a very specific day in my life. I remember my life in discrete memory packets (such a geek!) from the time when I was two. It starts with a hot and humid May afternoon in Kolhapur. My granny was reading out stories from the Arabian Nights to me and I heard my cousin climb up the wooden steps. I think it was a Saturday and she finished school early. I was too young to go to school so every now and then, I used to be dispatched to Kolhapur to spend time with my grandparents. When I heard her foot-steps I was overjoyed (as a real playmate was better than imagining a dog with eyes the size of saucers) and I rushed out into the living room. What I saw is a permanent memory in the folds of my brain. My cousin was hopping up barefoot on the wooden steps because apparently she had removed her shoes on the street and accidentally stepped in dog-poo.

When my aunt saw this, she rewarded her with a whack on the head and took her straight to the tap in the garden!

Due to her soggy mood that continued in the later parts of the day, I had to get back to Arabian Nights.

All my memories are associated with the stories that were read to me or the books that I read during those times of my life. Even the apparently idle and boring phases of my life have their share of books. :)

I started off with Arabian Nights and Aesop's Fables, which my grandmother used to read out to me at various times in a day. I thank her for her patience and willingness to open up my imagination and I thank the God of Technology who was dormant in the 80s. This stopped the invasion of television in my life when it was least desired. I started reading pretty soon and graduated on to the usual fairy tales that all girls read.

The later parts of my childhood are associated with the Adventures of Dennis, which has been one of my most favorite books. The copy that I had was a translation from Russian into Marathi and I think it was funnier than the English version.

During this time ajji (my grandmom) continued her impalpable reading and introduced me to some of the finest work in Marathi literature.

On hot summer evenings, we used to sit on the balcony of the pretty house in Kolhapur and read plays. Sometimes ajji used to pick a character and my cousin and I used to pick our own. We would pass the book around and try and enact the play as if it were real! I read Sharda (G.B.Deval) and Ekach Pyala (R.G.Gadkari) during the summer holidays when I was around ten. With every summer break that came after that my taste in literature got one step further. Ajji slowly introduced me to Marathi poetry, which inspired me to write some of my own. She is a big fan of Bha.Ra.Tambe and Suresh Bhat.

During my early teenage years, our evening balcony sessions were full of poetry. One for each occasion! Needless to say that Marathi poetry and Marathi Natyasangeet go hand in hand. You have to learn to appreciate both in order to be a theatre-going-snob in Pune. My ajji is very creative and in order to make it all interesting for me she also included Acharya Atre's Zenduchi Phule in the poetry section. So every time she read out a sad and serious poem, she used to top it with the parody version that Acharya Atre came up with! That phase was indeed a lot of fun.

My ajji was however "not-so-impressed" with Pu.La Deshpande. So my admiration for him grew only during the school sessions when I was in Pune with my other bibliophilic friends. I ventured into reading English literature only when I was about thirteen years old. Those were the "rebel" days of my life when I refused to go to Kolhapur and preferred to stay in Pune during my summer holidays to be with my friends. I guess that is just as much rebellion a middle-class Maharashtrian can get away with anyway!

Although like all average school girls, I had my share of Nancy Drew from the school-library, I started reading seriously only when I turned into a teenager. Suddenly my life was filled with W.Somerset Maughm, Agatha Cristie, P.G.Wodehouse and a little bit of Wordsworth. However, I never really gave up on my pursuit of Marathi literature. As I found myself turning into a young woman, I was exceedingly fascinated by Marathi poets. Na.Dho.Mahanor and Kavi Grace were amongst them. My parents realized my inclination towards poetry and gave me an open road to chase whatever I wanted to. The fact that I was fascinated by abstract Grace or rustic love-poems by Mahanor when I was just fifteen never bothered my parents. I did feel a bit out of place because of my tastes in entertainment and I am pretty sure some of my school-friends thought I was a bit weird during those days. I turned into a loner for a while and this is when I read and loved all the poetry that I have ever read. Poetry has always connected me to people and I tend to get fascinated by people with a way with poetry. It doesn't matter if they make it or just say it!

During my days as a student of Chemical Engineering, my reading took a back-seat and it was seasoned only with the Harry Potter series (I have read and followed all the books and I avoid watching the movies because I have my own versions of Harry,Ron and Hermione in my head).As I eased into engineering however I began reading again and that phase was marked with a lot of Alpha to Omega series by Osho. This was something I picked up from my grandfather who did not play a major role in my childhood reading. He is a follower of philosophical writing and has read various versions of the ancient Indian scriptures, especially the upanishads. I also discovered Richard Bach during these years and read a couple of books by him which have made me think differently. Most of the Bhagwad Geeta I know is through the long (digressing) discourses from my grandfather in the wee hours of the morning. He loves getting up at 4 AM and if you wake up around that time he makes sure that you are turned into a disciple. Although I dozed off in between his metaphors (and ajji's heart filled with pity) I am really glad I was introduced to it by someone like him.

These days reading is not as regular as it used to be because of long patches of research reading. However these days I am reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is an analysis of human thinking!

I think that you are what you are because of the people you grow up around. I was fortunate enough to have enough romanticism, philosophy and science around me. It has helped me see everything there is and also choose what I like. My reading buddies (ajji,aai,baba,Neha and Ameya) have helped me develop my own personal culture. When you are away from home, your personal culture is one of the most important means of survival and progress!

I am grateful for this journey!

PhD Moods

2008-10-17T09:22:00.008+05:30

Doctor of Patience - When you write unidirectional emails and wait outside your supervisor's office to get your report read.

Doctor of Procrastination - When you keep counting "Days Left For the Presentation" and feeling good when you multiply the figure by 24. :)

Doctor of Paranoia - When you imagine yourself being deported to India because the examination committee found a typo in your report!

Doctor of Paraphrasing - When you condense a 8000 word report to 4000 words and it still means everything that it meant before.

Doctor of Persuasion - When you persuade yourself to go on with your research by giving reasons like "This is going to be the next big thing the world will witness"( Hahahaha! Dream on!!!)

Doctor of Pandemonium- When you have to look into your shoe rack for the article on dissociation chemistry of ionic solvents in front of your supervisor.

Doctor of Presentation - When you think that you can distract the jury from your erroneous experiments by wearing Chanel no.5.

Doctor of Pedagogy - When you find yourself giving flawless advice to fresh PhD students about things that you yourself had to resubmit three times.

Doctor of Poverty - When everything including your haircut and pre-paid recharge is scheduled in concert with your next pay-day.

Doctor of Philanthropy - When you vacate seats in trains and help old men cross roads in a hope that God adds this credit Karma to the completion of your thesis.

....And Doctor of Philosophy - When you actually start believing in consoling quotes like "Failure is the first step towards success" because you would go insane if you don't! :)

Happy Birthday PurpleMoon

2008-10-03T06:17:00.001+05:30

It has been two years today!!

I hope it goes on.

Thank You all for the inspiration!

:)

He still lives.

2008-10-02T06:37:00.005+05:30

( The Times of India 2nd October Photo Gallery)

...and now let's sing together!! Shall we?

Talking Science

2008-09-29T12:25:00.003+05:30

I don't like scientific, technical writing. Period.

Apart from the fact that everything has to be accompanied by a proof which is enough to discourage disorganized article-readers like me it is amazingly boring. I read articles at train stations and due to the chronic absence of stapler at my desk, I sometimes leave half of my reference on the dining table. Then when I come to work I always have a pathological longing to write about the parts that have been left on the dining table.

Scientific writing for me is like dressing up a beautiful gypsy woman in a black work-suit. Make her wear pointy heels even though she is used to walking barefoot on the grass. There is no room for being quirky.

I remember when I first got my solvents to experiment with, one of them had a "strong repulsive odor" ( yeah that is how I have to describe it). Initially, because it had a long chemical formula which was a bit of tongue-twister, I labeled it "the stinky IL" in my lab-book.I got so used to that name that I mentioned it by mistake in one of our supervisor-student meetings and Les, my supervisor was genuinely amused.

I get criticized time and again for my writing style which incorporates more freedom than it should. I try to keep it normal though.

These days since I am writing up for a report I keep thinking of boring words on my way in and way out. Simple rules like replacing the word "explore" with "investigate". I tend to have more "compares" and "evaluates" in my mind. I am off reading Calvin and Hobbes for the past two weeks and I invest my time reading NewScientist over lunch.

Honestly though, sometimes technical writing is a bit too pretentious. It is a bit bewildering when someone fills an article with something like,"It is highly unlikely that this theory of randomization would not appear to agree with the other three theories published on the matter". I honestly hate the use of the word "highly" and "unlikely" together just to top it with something like "would not" later.

You feel like saying, "Oh come on dude! Just say that your stupid theory agrees with everything published before! I am on a serious caffeine dosage here!"

I think one of the most serious impediments in the enrichment of the knowledge database of PhD students is the resistance offered by phrases like "juxtaposition of associated variables" or "aberrant variations in the conductivity of ionic solutions". I know the meanings of all these words ( reading up for GRE never goes waste) but when they combine in those kind of poisonous combinations, the result is always soporific.

I have also observed that it does not matter how funky your work actually is as long as you can go on and on about it in combinations of above mentioned words, everyone thinks you are the reincarnation of Einstein.

The best way to describe the physical appearance of my dissolution experiments for example, is "Poo from a dog with a tummy upset". Of course this is stretching it a bit too far I know but when I write it down I have to say, " the end result of the dissolution experiment is a dark brown low viscosity fluid". Now anyone would remember it more the first way than the second.

When I get a nice infra red peak I feel like calling it , "beautiful, slim peak at 1700" but instead I have to call it attenuated or sharp.

It is one thing doing experiments and another writing about them! For in the lab, you always see people talking to their reactions.

"Look at my HPLC data!! Isn't it absolutely gorgeous? Aww you little funny peak there! How cute you look in this clear background!"

Or sometimes when something is not happening,"Come on you little piece of S***. Turn brown!! That is what I want!!"

In the end however, as much fond as you are of all the little reactions that you make,when you write it down it turns just as tasteless as the paper that it is printed on!

God help me finish this report!!

Leela and Mayah

2008-09-21T17:15:00.003+05:30

I keep coming back to Osho all the time.
I read this story in one of the Alpha to Omega books by Osho which talk about the teachings of Patanjali.
Once Bodhidarma went to China and the emperor of China went to see him. He went to him and said that his mind was really restless and he wanted have a peaceful mind.
Bodhidharma asked him to bring his mind first with him. When the emperor heard this he said,"Don't be ridiculous. My mind is with me. It goes where ever I go".
To which Bodhidharma replied, " Okay so you are certain that your mind is inside you. Now I would just like you to point it out to me. Just close your eyes and show me where it is and I will make it peaceful".
The emperor closed his eyes but he could not find his mind. He realized that it was actually a process not an organ. He opened his eyes and told Bodhidharma that he could not find it.
Bodhidharma smiled and said," It is at peace as long as you can't find it".

True Yoga is the situation of no-mind.

The life of a common man is such a farce. There is a mess of present to deal with. Thoughts ranging from,"Is my milkman adding water to the milk?" ( Excuse me for this metaphor for I do not remember seeing a milk man since I was six!) to "I think I should get a better car than my best friend". We are fed up with so many small things all the time and then in between all this chaos there are moments of joy. When we come home from a tiring day at work and our kids show us what they painted at school. Or walking home hand in hand with our beloved ( even though we fought about being hypersensitive just last night).
Then there is tomorrow. The glossy, scented tomorrow that is almost certainly going to be better than today.
All of this is created and pre-lived and relived by the mind and we can't even point it out!
If my knee hurts, I know exactly where the pain lies but when my mind hurts I can never really figure out where to apply my Tiger Balm!
So sometimes, walking back home under a nice starry sky, I find myself secretly wishing that it would be so much better if I did not have a mind!
Everything would be easy. I would not "mind" most of the things that I usually "mind".
It is such a surreptitious word! You don't realize how much you use it unless you put it in quotes. :)

Most of my Western friends here think that this whole idea of no-mind and not chaining yourself to tomorrow is full of inertia! The West is ambitious ( they always have their armies ready to invade!). They can logically explain to you why it is essential to keep moving ahead in life ( by finding better jobs, better homes and better women for yourselves!). It all makes sense. It is true but all this mathematics is a function of mind again! Like some nasty mathematical functions, mind goes in loops as well. Money loops, Power loops and Sex loops.

I really appreciate the word "Mayah" that the Indian philosophy has given us. I like the words "Mayah" and "Leela" alike. Mayah is the illusion that we have thrown ourselves into with our minds.
It makes everything seems logical and right. All our chases are justified ( even though it is an oil chase in Iraq neatly labeled as "war on terror"). Unless we pull ourselves out of it we do not realize what a mirage it is and the only way we can do that is by being without a mind for a while.
"Leela" on the other hand is a nice and happy word. It does not have the kohl-lined-gold-dusted black eyes of Mayah.
If Mayah is the evasive beauty ( that is about seventy five percent silicon), Leela is the little girl that runs up and down the steps reciting a Sanskrit poem for fun!
Leela is the rabbit that jumps out of the magicians hat.
Mayah, is really God's Leela just to keep his little kids busy with something to do! Only some of them realize that they have been given balls of wool to play with and I think Patanjali was one of them!

Disillusion

2008-09-17T11:13:00.005+05:30

The author of this blog is (supposed to be) busy gearing up for a "show us what you did with our money for a year" report. Sincere apologies for not being regular!

Over a long period of about ten years, I had confirmed that I am among the top two percent when it comes to "interesting" people. There are certain basic things that you need to be very confident about ( without sounding like a big show off) and being an interesting person is certainly one of them. I should specify that I mean interesting in all the absolute form and not like a substitute for saying, "This word is a polite way of barfing".

I am also confident about other things without any doubt or fake humility. For example,I know I am fit. I know that I know enough exotic words in English to freak out an average Australian. :)

However, sometimes you come across one little moment in your life that makes you wonder if you have in fact all these days been living an illusion. Not that it really matters for I believe that life is an illusion anyway! Most of my "certain" conclusions are God's "Joke of the Day".

I must confess though that I am not particularly proud of this disillusion.

I went into my stats class one day ( equipped with skillfully "made" up jokes on the probability theory) and began my lecture. Twenty minutes into it ( As I was firing away at sixty words per minute) I saw my student phasing out. I thought it was just one of those paranoid imaginations of mine and went on. Ten minutes later I saw him look down for a while and then jerk up as though he had just realized that he was supposed to do something. Then every five minutes later he would jerk again and it took me about three sets of these kind of jerks to realize that he was trying to ward off sleep. It was an outright insult!

So what if I am talking about mutually exclusive events! Isn't that interesting when I tell you little (sad) stories about blondes and brunettes belonging to two mutually exclusive sets??!!

Every time he tried to fight sleep I remembered how much time and effort I had taken to make this lecture more interesting and it indeed was! At least in my bathroom mirror with toothbrush in one hand!

One hour into it and I became really depressed all of a sudden. I had this massive cloud of sadness looming over me. I asked him to go out and get a coffee. He didn't even let me finish the word coffee. While he was on a break, I found myself googling the words "probability" and "fun" together. The results were too complicated for me to understand and actually figure out what the fun part was. So I decided to stick to my practiced version. It is funny how when you are teaching, time flies and when you are being taught it goes at a pregnant snail's pace. So even before I could finish figuring out what to say next he was back which meant hope in capital letters. So I went on for about thirty minutes more and realized that coffee had no effect on his alertness.

When I finally got out of the room, I could not find my way back to my desk because my eyes were fogged with self-doubt!

Honestly, am I that bad? Is everyone around me fooling me? Am I being used without my knowledge for a reality (?) show?

Although he did say before he left that he was playing video games on play station all night ( which is a legally accepted excuse in universities these days) I still found it hard to accept that someone could be so innocent about sleeping in a one-on-one tuition.

I felt like I had taken an exam and I knew I was going to fail even before the results were out ( I know that feeling very well but I think this feeling was worse) .

I walked around with a long face for two days but I had to pull myself together for my next class. I did. This time I had to teach "History of Life on Earth" and I tried to relate it to everyday life by using this .

We had a laugh but it was still difficult to keep him entertained.

So I have one less illusion to deal with now. I hope God compensates me for this one soon. Maybe by making me realize that I can actually swim three kilometers in an hour! =)