About fears..

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

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

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

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

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

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. :)

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. :)