Betaal ka sawaal

Oh! King and other readers, if you know the answer to this question and still hold your peace your head will split into a thousand pieces. (Or something a little less biblical sounding than that. Damn! where are those Chandamamas when you need them? In Usha Bala’s attic along with The Children of Willow Farm Again, for sure.)

Ok, the question is this – who wears Chirag Din shirts? First of all, is it a real company that makes real shirts? Are these really to be found in the open market? What? What is their consumer profile? What are those ads about? Does anybody ‘get’ them? Do you suppose some people are really beating down the panes of retail store windows demanding this product, as we speak? Or do they make inscrutable ads, with obviously time-warped men and women that nobody would admit to identifying with, for tax purposes.

These questions have buzzed around my head for more than twenty years; feels like more. So now it’s either your head or mine that is going to burst.

There you go!

Been tagged and maligned. (I wear the sweetest expression normally and don’t bear grudges.) But the tag is fairly simple and only requires me to rehash some of the old stuff.

Post 5 links to 5 of your previously written posts. The posts have to relate to the 5 key words given (family, friend, yourself, your love, anything you like). Tag 5 other friends to do this meme. Try to tag at least 2 new acquaintances (if not, your current blog buddies will do) so that you get to know them each a little bit better.

Family: people in my family have a common failing. All of us talk constantly about our family. So I am sure there probably are several references to them throughout this blog, but this one features us all.

Friend: here – a record of a very fun time we had, my friend and I.

Myself: if you did a search on this blog, ‘I’ would probably throw up the most results. That’s how it is I suppose, never did pretend to be about anything other than me. So then, to choose just one…Hmmm…maybe this one?

Your love: is it a cop-out to do an “andha routaa?”? Why naat I say! So I give you – this.

Anything you like: who came up with this tag, da? Anyway – here. Because I am parched for a swig of rural India again and some lone travelling.

I tag Sheetal, Gayatri because they are sure to have interesting stuff for all categories, and need to update their blogs, even if only with a tag posts. Footloose to challenge her with subjects other than Africa and corporate angst. Australopithecus to see what he will do with this sweet innocent tag.

The We of sport

Written after the first flush of victory had dissolved into a dazed dense inward high. Hence the slightly drunk quality.

To be a pixel in a picture, stardust in a galaxy, synapse in a body, one of a billion cricket fans!

Not the banding arms of jingoists scavenging the ephemeral dust of human joy and despair, seeking to raise the spectre of a forced national identity, propped against a manufactured enemy – No, not that! Nor even material for the heart-high fences raised by the parasitic media in a bid to create more consumable identities. It is not to establish, or know, but to sense through the ether of sublimated emotion, that for the space of some moments there is more out there being exactly like me.

These individual lives we live, each of us born to life in an apparently unique point in a time-space, forging our way through a million milestones of resistance straining for independence from the blackhole of universality, for an identity, for a voice, for separation – to me always a little puzzling; on days like these, unfathomable.

Too much drama about a trivial thing, do you think? Should I be saving the rhetoric for a large tragedy or a private one? For societal revolution?

But only the most sublime artistic temperament can find in great grief the detachment required to truly find the quivering life of it. The lesser people need a device of distance, the obvious ploy of playacting to help be both within and without a moment. To us – the ordinary people – give us sport. In sport, through the ardency, the anguish, the allurement, the elation, there is always a subliminal cognition of its fantastical nature, of its being removed from the real and the core. This luxury of distance affords us the opportunity to vibrate at a comfortable pitch. Sport can make a world resonate in fine-tuned orchestra of a million minds; it is altogether breathtaking music.

Whew! That wasn’t so bad!

This morning before the start of play, in the lead-up session, Harsha Bhogle was taking us down for the pitch report when he said, “Is it a pitch? Is it a trampoline? Will the keeper have to stand near the ropes?” Something queer happened to me just then. I think I tried to laugh but it came out like a shudder. Ten days of nervous anticipation had left my system somewhat battered.

Really, there has been so much said about the Perth pitch, I had begun to supplant it in my fevered dreams with the moon’s surface. The darned pitch was more talked about than Gopal’s hilsa. Plays, concerts, readings, home, hearth and Hyderabad... no place was safe from assault. You could be talking of Jazz, infants, modernism or aurekaal sambar the conversation would veer in the most eerie fashion to the pitch. And move forward in almost choreographed lines:

First somebody would express regret that Sydney was our one real chance.

Then the group would sigh.

Then somebody (quite often me) would open and close their mouth in a frustrated show of naïve optimism.

At which somebody would waggle their eyebrows and say ‘Perth’ in wan tones of wisdom.

This would be the cue for the most statistically inclined of the lot to tell us in traumatizing detail why a score of 78 for 8 would be cause to cheer.

There would then be a moment of silence.

Followed by a half hopeful half petulant, “yes, but on a good day… “

Embarrassed laughter by all concerned would put paid to that particular segment of the conversation.

As a result, such horrific visions had I drawn up of whizzing missiles and bouncing bludgeons that I woke up in a cold sweat one night wondering if they made the helmets sturdy enough and if increment tonics could possibly work on thirty four year old men; this, despite the fact that I had been assiduously practicing my hooks and cuts with nightly regularity before dropping off to sleep.

So I can’t express to you what a relief it is to find that the Perth pitch is not in fact a missile launcher but a nice regular, if somewhat bouncy, cricket pitch. 297 for 6 may not be the best first day score in test cricket, but stap me if I complain.

Taare zameen par

What I wrote yesterday immediately after watching Aamir Khan’s Taare zameen par was emotionally garbled. After several attempts at writing myself into a semblance of balance I gave up in disgust. I hoped I would be more lucid and less churned up after an entire normal day and night. But it seems that the hangover will not abate so easily.

Flower child

There is this kid who brings my mother flowers every Wednesday. He has been coming for about three years now; he used to accompany his parents earlier, now he comes all alone. I don’t think he can be above ten. He comes with a pre-packed polythene carry bag in which are the assortion of flowers he has decided my mother should have that week. My mother and he seem to have some sort of understanding and she is quite happy to let him have the decision. She and he invariably find much to talk about. She knows, I think, most of what is most important to him. She usually does of most people.
He is really a very engaging child; a bit taciturn, very conscientious, and has such a sweet air of duteous self-importance, that I am always tempted to tease him out of it. He came today when we were having tea; he rang the doorbell and called out. He sounded so delightful that I spontaneously uttered some cooing noises that must revolt any self-respecting ten year old, leave alone this rather superior one. To make matters worse I had a Bourbon chocolate biscuit in my hand which I had just been about to surrender to. Naturally I offered it to him, naturally he refused. So how to press him and save his pride? The big guns were called in and duly had their effect. He wasn’t to say he never ate biscuits?! Oh! So he only doesn’t when people offer it to him? Did he always maaro so much style? And finally the biscuit was popped into his pocket. He grunted something about looking silly on the roads and trotted off.
During the monsoon this year (we had a considerable one) we were a bit worried for him. He used to come in soaked to the skin each time with an ineffectual plastic cover draped over his head around his ears. He looked a little pathetic and determined not to show it. He said quite prosaically that he could not afford a raincoat and an umbrella was a nuisance. I hoped his constitution was as resilient as his spirit and let it pass. In some cases sympathy is always an insult.
But today after our silly tussle over the refused biscuit, I was stupidly choked. There is such a thing as too much pride, and it is invariably born of necessity. A child should not need it.

A crowded day

'Koi mila tho haath milayaa kahin gaye do baatein ki

Ghar se baahar jab bhi nikalaa din bhar bhoj uthaayaa hai'

-Rustam Sahgalwafa

Last year, when we were on our trek around the Sahayadri ranges we stayed one night at a huge gufaa. When we explored around in the light of candles we realized that the cave already had an occupant; an old happy looking Baba who was rather nice about the invasion of his privacy. He brought us extra light and guided us around the cave. When we retired it was calming to know that he slept in the chamber next to ours.

I wondered about him as we said goodbye the next day. Just things like, how did he come to live in such queer isolation? does it really suit him so well as to give him that wonderful aura of contentment? What does he do for food? Does he ever get lonely? Were a bunch of high spirited holiday makers a welcome change or an unavoidable irritation to be borne? Or neither?
I remember I felt a pang of envy.

And I know that was pure rubbish. I know for a fact that I would be driven raving mad inside a month with such an existence. So why the inappropriate envy? But we will crave the things we don’t really want…

But today out of the blue I have been thinking about him. Well of course there was a trigger, there always is.

Most people cannot avoid people (I mean large numbers of them) for the first quarter of their lives. But later if they choose carefully and work very hard towards it they can manage an existence of minimal contact. When I started down this path, I had not thought about it in those terms, but this is the kind of life I seem to have achieved and for the large part I am content with it.

But sometimes I take a fancy for certain activities that are necessarily social. And I think to myself, it's only people! How bad can it be? I am reminded every time.

Nothing depletes me a much as boredom. And nothing is as boring as having to present my social face to a group of people who will only give me theirs. And this kind of boredom is far worse than the kind that is associated with standing in the snake-queues of a reservation office or waiting out two-hours in a dentist’s anteroom. In those situations your mind is entirely free to wander and entertain itself. But if you are an adult and cooped with a bunch of other adults determined to be social you find yourself in a stressful situation where a wandering mind will be construed as a sign of great rudeness or worse shyness; which will only attract even more well-intentioned and resolutely surface attention.

Today I voluntarily inflicted upon myself such a situation. I came back so exhausted that I have uttered less than half a dozen sentences to my bemused family. I write this for therapy.

I admit I sound like a very poor sort of creature even to my own ears and I suspect I have indulged myself far too much over the years.

But I find it impossible to handle groups of people.

My mechanical smiles hurt my cheekbones.

The social glitter off so many polished surfaces hurts my eye.

The always palpable insecurities of people in groups hurt my nerves.

Restraining the desire to escape hurts my muscles.

Please give me people, I know I need them. But one at a time please.

Little by little we grow…

One has acquired one’s first long lens and one is thrilled to pixels. A couple of stray remarks by the Mater and one’s own reaction to the same had one worried that one may have also inadvertently acquired the NAS*- a deadly condition that those in the know say is a degenerative disease. But when one recollects that one was the kind of vichitra प्राणी that worked with a fully manual camera and a single lens for a decade before going digital somewhat kicking and crying, one is able to laugh away those fears. One feels quite sure that the long-standing habit of parsimony will prevail over epidemic passing fancies.

The first 1MB has been gobbled up by creatures and things around the house- so just nice ordinary pictures there, nothing great in content or form. But something needs putting up to mark the occasion. So kindly indulge.

*Nikon Acquisition Syndrome

The Mind of the Maker

I borrowed ‘The Mind of the Maker’ by Dorothy Sayers on an instinct at the British library recently. This edition was published as a part of a series – The Library of Anglican Spirituality. For some time now I had been meaning to get hold of some of Sayers’ Christian writings just to see what kind of theologian she was, so I was quite happy to have found it but I was a little afraid that I would be disappointed if it turned out to be a bit propagandist in nature.

I needn’t have worried. However devout a Christian Sayers was, her writing is brilliantly detached and superbly incisive. Plus she writes about my most favourite topic, the relation between Art and spirituality. God! That sounds hopelessly inadequate, but I imagine it is because ‘spirituality’ is such an abused term these days that it is impossible to use the word without it dredging up a hundred common connotations. But that is without help.

In ‘The Mind of the Maker’ Sayers uses a compelling analogy of the creative artist, more specifically the writer (of The Word with all its Biblical implications) to elucidate the doctrine of trinity. Or perhaps it would be righter to say that she uses the statements in the doctrine to explain the creative processes that converge in an Ideal work of Art.

The most appealing aspect of Sayers’ thesis is that she doesn’t ‘argue’- she states. After a surfeit of academicians who use the ‘argue and withdraw’ tool to impress their audiences with the solidity of their academic objectivity, it was a rare pleasure to read an extremely well-ordered thesis presented almost as facts. I am personally convinced that that is probably the only valid way when one is talking of matters of theology or Art. Simply because in some matters rational debate will take you only so far till you reach a stalemate. A person who will rationalise life on his dying breath has got to be uncommonly foolish.

And it is an uncommonly good book that can find coordinates for the ‘Trinity’s Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Three Persons) in the Idea, Energy and Power – the three elements within a ‘maker’s’ make-up that together and simultaneously ignite, fuel and sustain a work of Art.

Through this schema Sayers guide us through the meaning of Free Will drawn parallel to originality in Art, Evil corresponding to Bad Art, Real love equaling True Art, and my personal favourite, what she calls very interestingly Scalene trinities – which correspond with the various types of Less-than-ideal Art, and she lets us in on how to identify what exactly is ‘wrong’ with such a piece of flawed Art.

Most, most fascinating stuff.

If you are interested in theology or Art, or the correlation between the two or just plain writing, this book will probably interest you.

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• I am struck repeatedly by how all the major religions of the world essentially say the same thing. Very often the kind of imagery and knowledge-constructs are so similar it really gobsmacks me. The Three Persons of the Trinity are crazily similar to the Bhramha-Vishnu-Maheshwara of the Hindu trinity or even to the Shiva-Shakti-Kundalini concept.

• Also I am tying myself into knots about this one: see the workings of the Trinity are very similar to the Hindu concept of Dharma. Okay, now the word Dharma comes from the root ‘Dhri’ which of course sounds like ‘Tri’ but actually means ‘that which holds or sustains’. We know that the Hindu theology holds the Trinity as the mechanism through which the world as we know it is sustained. Of course Dharma is a much much older word and concept. So I am thinking maybe ‘Dhri’ comes form an older form of ‘Tri’. What say?

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I have never had any deep knowledge of Christian theology, in spite of being educated at a convent for the first fourteen years, or probably because of it. I must have crossed myself thousands of times, and muttered the words “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” not quite knowing what I was committing. I think I had a grasp on the father and the son (often equated with Christ) but I wasn’t ever sure who the Holy Spirit was. Considering the fact that subsequently the subject of theology has become a prime favourite with me I am quite surprised that I had never explored the doctrine of trinity or in fact any other aspect of Christian theology until this recently. I blame this squarely on being subjected to the mundane peripherals of the religion too early in life, which made it familiar but somewhat uninspiring.

A master's voice

Have you heard Mehdi Hasan sing Ab ke hum bichde? He sings it like a dream. The first sher is okay and some others are really good, but you don’t think of all that when you hear him sing it – they all sound uniformly brilliant.

Today was a long-bath day (pedicure included) and this was my song of choice. The bath turned out longer than I expected and so I had to make up another sher to go along. It has the same khafiya as the maqta, but is different in content.

Ab na woh tu hain na main hun na woh maazi hai Faraz

Jaise do saaye tamannayon ke saraabon mein mile

Ahmed Faraz

Ye aane ka chalne ka jaane ka sabab

Ho ke seharaon mein phir ke saraabon mein mile

Another one happens as I write-

Aag-e-hijr mein jalaa di thi tere shumaar-e-khata

Shaayad tarq-e-ishq ki wajah tere hisaabon mein mile

Cleaning the closet

The eagle-eyed will notice that this blog has now been neatly filed under labels. Let me tell you that it has been the most arduous task especially when one realises that there was nothing ‘neat’ about the posts to begin with. As a result they have most of them been labelled half a dozen things.

But must say this labelling business is very self-indulgent activity. It has you going fondly over a couple of year’s worth of vomitorious verbing. Naturally I am ever indulgent because I have a policy against cringing for past selves. So I have resolutely ploughed through the archives of this blog with a grin plastered onto my face. I have valiantly resisted every temptation to hit the delete button. One or two things I have noticed which I will remedy now.

Reconstructing Faiz:

Sometime back I had a post up with an alternative take on Faiz’s Raat khoyee huee… Sheetal assures me that it is disgustingly lazy to put up a version of a poet's work without exhibiting the original for comparison. So that has been remedied here.

Neurotic therapy:

I realized during this labelling process that I used to have some remarkably healthy habits. People who know me will avow to the fact that I have never actively concealed my neurotic tendencies. But in the past I had developed a system of healthy release, which I seem to have misplaced along the way. ‘No fret all action’ is my motto so I am just going to annihilate my latest brain-bug by a few nicely placed bytes:

_________________

It was as usual a situation where my eyes were constrained to watch a certain frame for a prolonged period, and my hands were powerless to ease the pain.

It was the first play of the Hindu Metro Plus Theater Festival and I was looking forward to watching Love letters with pleasurable anticipation. It is quite usual in these two-actor psychological dramas for them to go real easy on the props. So no sweat there. In fact I was quite happy to see that instead of hanging around without a thing to do with their hands, the actors were in fact given the task of arranging a set of cubes* in various (quite inspired) formations that not only were used as furniture/props but also doubled up as symbolic and mood creating elements. So far so good. Each actor (Rajat Kapoor, Shernaz Patel) was give a ‘L’ shaped block and a solitary cube with different colour on each face. Shernaz’s character was an artist so her cube had one face with some nice graphic-type art.

I did not know if the original productions had used the same techniques or if it was a Rage productions innovation but I was quite impressed and looking forward to seeing exactly how many different ways these simple props were going to be used. Also I was seated in the balcony**, which gave me the best possible vantage to really appreciate the lighting.

If only is a sad phrase.

• If only the art director had seen fit to give Shernaz Patel a crash course in the critical importance of symmetry.
• If only Shernaz Patel’s LKG teacher had smacked her bottom hard each time she drew a Squiggly when she was asked to do a Standing up line.
• If only some good US uncle had thought to replace toddler Shernaz’s (haphazardly arrangeable) building block set with a Leggo set with GROOVES.
• If only Shernaz Patel had fallen off a couple of times in rehearsals from the top block because she persisted in arranging it lopsided instead of placing it EXACTLY on top of the bottom block.
• If only Shernaz Patel was not colour blind.

See, half way through the play I even tried to convince myself that the damned woman’s pathological inability to comprehend and execute a straight line is just a well-planned reflection of the character’s unbalanced nature. But she had to go and ruin it all by placing the blocks in a manner befitting a well-aligned space rocket for a couple of scenes. So naturally I relaxed and prepared to watch in peace for the rest of the time. Oh but the torture of hope!

She slipped, people, she slipped. No, not physically (which would have ruined the play for everybody) but back into her sloppy ways. She arranged and she arranged - letting show just that bit of beige behind the black, creating a nice little curve from two squares - and my nerves frayed just a little bit more... she had gotten on my nerves in Black, but that was nothing compared to this!

I am convinced that I came back from the play with considerably less enamel on my teeth than I had going in.

___________________

*A device which has come to be known as Pippin's boxes, the trusty internet tells me.

**Being possessed of a very superior intellect I had naturally chosen the Cheapest & Bestest option, which was not the fate of other unfortunate folks.

Tazaah tar

Qaid-e-zeest se fursat ka zariya nahi tha

Maine apna khuda tarasha nahi tha

Mehfil ke behlane mere paas us waqt

Rudaad-e-hayaat thi falsafa nahi tha

Waqt hi ke irade beimaan nikle

Varna imaan se woh shaqs bewafaa nahi tha

Nazar andaaz hotein hain jo ashnaa mehfil mein

Un mein hum bhi shumaar hain andaaza nahi tha

Umr bhar karvatein badle hain asvi

Neend jab bhi khuli savera nahi tha

Notes from a trek around Madhya Pradesh ( with update)

• Some sleep is more important than a lot of food
• From now and forever buses (long-distance carrier types) are always going to make me shudder in pavlovian response. I have been permanently scarred now; nothing can disabuse my mind of its belief that buses are chambers of torture

Sub notes-

1. In cases of particularly sadistic and disobliging drivers, one need have no scruples in dismantling the speakers and fixing the wires (the end entirely justifies the means as has been satisfactorily demonstrated)

Sub sub note:

Care should be taken not to lose the screws, lest a badly put back speaker lands on your head during the night

2. It is an inescapable fact of life that during a night journey you will require all of the things that have been securely packed under yards of tarpaulin on the roof of the bus, and none of the things that you have in your trusty rucksack

• Climbing up up up a steep steep hill is always worth it
• Spotted inventory: Item, two jackals, in particular beauty; item, a moonlit wolf, stuff of firelight tales; item, birds - treepies, paradise flycatcher, woolly-necked stork, more- in jungle resplendence. Point to be considered: does this compensate for not sighting a tiger at Pench?
• Kareena Kapoor has more spunk than I had credited her with. Has gone up a notch in my estimation (no nothing to do with Saif)
• Always check for Russell’s vipers before you dry clothes on tree trunks
• An 18mm wide angle lens is not nearly wide enough for god’s world
• Determined bonhomie is very nerve-grating; it is also to be mistrusted
• Hot springs are fantastic things; politicians are bores, no exceptions to be had; litterers should be super-glued to garbage cans.

One or two pictures-




Sheetal and Shweta at Vulture point
















The Yogi

Update- Especially for Gaga’s edification

We went to the spot in Panchmahri where they shot for Ashoka. A lovely deep pool of water surrounded by rocks and the path leading up to it was treacherous. The forest guide who was with us told us that that for one scene Kareena Kapoor had to sprint along this break-your-bones-trail and dive headlong into the pool (she was supposed to have been chased by goons or whatever they called them in Ashoka’s time). I, who had gingerly made my way down, feeling for every loose rock and pebble and regaling the general public about my views about the unwisdom of getting your rubber footwear wet, was very impressed with the vision of Bebo blithely haring down the rocks.

Needless to say she was to be rescued in the film. The guide tells me they got a local boy to dupe in for Shahruk. You are seeing?

I am saying doodh ka doodh pani ka pani.

Blowed over

I was one of those silly people who turn their noses up at 20-20 cricket. I mean you know those usually gripes. Too bachha, all flash no technique, just a cynical little commercial idea and all that. Well then yesterday happened. And I don’t know if all the same arguments still hold good - right now I don’t care. Last night was kutthe ke maze.

The campaigners of 20-20 could not have had it better if they had staged it! Hell, what fun it was. Imagine an India-Pakistan match in the first major international tournament ending in a tie and then going on to be decided in the crazily football-like bowl-out. Like they once famously asked- who writes these scripts?

I don’t know if I was giggling so much because of the relief of India’s making it to the next round, or because it was late and I was possibly in some yet undiscovered sleep zone, or because Sehwag’s giggles were infectious.

We were watching (I think) the first ever bowl-out in the history of the game and nobody quite knew what to do. Both teams were transformed into sets of silly school boys both embarrassed and excited at the same time. But this bowl-out thing is really the silliest thing you ever saw and terribly fun.

All round too this tournament is turning out to be hugely exciting, spectacular fielding, fabulous batting, and desperate bowler-batsman clashes. Aha! Fun, fun, fun!

I don’t think that 20-20 is going to wipe out or even diminish the other forms or anything dismal like that. I reckon its going to spill a flood of options and we’ll have it all the better for that.

Whatever, I am game!

In the shadow of the crib

Dramatic sounding title and all, what?

The picture was taken in bright afternoon light and had such stark shadows that it was not to be resisted.

Sunita had just come to fetch it after work and I had to quickly take a few shots before she took it away. It must have been a long day for her but she waited patiently, indulgently even, as I took the pictures. She understood, I think, something of the sentimentality that had me going.

In fact I fancy that it stuck us both similarly when she helped me bring it down from the attic yesterday. Big, heavy, strongly wrought, old fading green – it weighed oddly of memories as we manoeuvred it out of the narrow attic door. It came down with pipes and cartons and old furniture. All to be sold for scrap. But we did not know what to do with the cradle. Sending it back to the attic, for another twenty something years, to be decided about later? Too foolish to be considered. Fortunately Sunita took a fancy for it. She has no immediate use of it – her own daughter is only sixteen, but she couldn’t resist it. It was that kind of cradle.

Objects do record life, you know. Some more than others, perhaps. A cradle, I think would do this more vividly than most. Emotions around a cradle are sharper, more lucid and somehow… universal. Joy, anxiety, pride, sleep. All basic, all intense. This cradle of my childhood told of all this and also of peace. For itself it proclaimed a solid dependability. It was a happy cradle.

My mother tells us it has rocked three generations of babies in our family and the first to own it is over seventy now.

But attics have got to be cleared. And overlarge wrought-iron cradles have got to go. But I am glad that it hasn’t gone to the Kabadiwala’s just yet. Its inheritance of impressions won’t be broken down to scrap just yet. Its good that the cradle managed to convince Sunita to take it home with her.

*Aaten hai gaib se…

I write as always to clear my head. It works for me like a good vigorous headshake; a bit like a dog juddering dry after a forced dunking.

I found Wislawa Szymborska on The Middle Stage recently (Many thanks CC!) and have spent quite a lot of time gluttonously trawling through her poetry. Redundant to say, I suppose, that I loved her. Her work I mean. Or her too actually. But in different ways and her work more. See, this is the reason I always strenuously avoid knowing too much about the people whose work I like. I have now reconciled to the fact that it is logical and efficient to make note of their names so as to increase the probability of finding another piece of work to enjoy, but I really wish I could always draw the line there. But it is incredibly difficult nowadays to resist something that will take (as Google unfailingly informs us) less than a quarter of a second. So it happened that I knew quite a lot of Szymborska’s life, opinions, and even a bit of her character even as I began to know her poetry.

Now I find that knowledge of her context informs my appreciation of what should have ideally been only me and the poetry. Suddenly the poems are no longer ephemeral shimmering chords of empathy altering their nuances with the colours of my mood; they are now loaded with political intent, carry baggage of time, place, personality and context. Now they are more solid and… lesser for that. No, too dramatic to say that the pleasure is gone, but diminished certainly.

The thing is, a piece of poetry or a work of art – the very best ones I mean – is always so much more than the sum of parts of the maker, even all the best parts. Nothing in a whole person can ever compare to that glorious event of inspiration that precipitates a work of art. Nobody is as wise as their work, as spiritual as their ideas, as wonderful as their paintings or as centred as their sculptures. Moments are what people cannot be.

I think it is unwise and quite misleading to seek for the root of art in the psyche or context of the maker. All real art has an identity quite individual of the artist. It is the artist’s curse and privilege to lend the use of herself to labour the weight of inspiration and birth a unique entity and then, her generosity that she offers it to the world to relate with as it likes. It is unrewarding, I say, to go dissecting the gene pattern of such offspring.

Talking then of inspiration, it is true that some people are visited far more often by the jinn than others and we have a name for those people. Genius! we say, and rightly so. But genius is its own reason, and we have no cause to analyse it further. But I find it fascinating that a lot of the acknowledged geniuses talk uniformly of intense industry. I wonder then if measure of genius is how hard you are willing to work to capture inspiration? I think perhaps, it is about giving yourself generously, wholly on a glimmer of a gamble that sometimes, just sometimes, pays off – beyond all expectation.

But why should I try my uninspired hand at explaining it, better just let Genius do the talking… so I’ll leave this with something I found so singularly inspired that in it there is no space for any falseness. It says what I’ve been groping to say, as if there were no other words to say it.

The Joy of Writing

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

By Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

*Another genius talks of inspiration:

Aaten hain gaib se ze mazamin khayal mein,

Ghalib sariir-e-khama nawa-e-sarosh hai

Mirza Ghalib

Me bags spot!

I was tormented by unsettling dreams all of last night.

I finally have the Book, all 600 odd pages of it. I am strenuously reading page after page of it and not a word sinks in. I am dying to understand, but I might as well have the Russian copy for all the good it does me.

As if this isn’t hell enough, I am being constantly disturbed, phone calls, old friends popping in and asking for addresses of tailors, people asking for their house keys, Mauzwala, and anybody with the slightest pretext walks in. The night is aging in and my eyelids are drooping…still got half-way to go…panic…the morrow will bring spoilers in the form of howlers and I have to finish tonight…

All in all not very pleasant, but of course we don’t need Dr Freud for this one. The thing about not getting the book is from my inability to focus on my revision; my concentration is shot, because with three days to go I am too excited to sit still, leave alone be able to painstakingly pick through for Jo’s randomly strewn clues.

Also there are other important arrangements to be made. In-house security to be tightened, Father to be warned hourly about the importance of keeping mum and scanning the papers for potential spoilers and warning us in advance. Arranging for a stream of nibbles to arrive on said Day so as to provide sustenance without requiring both hands of sustainee.

Also one needs to provide oneself with the Spot. The perfect spot to plant one’s bottom, providing light, air, privacy and atmosphere. My sister being the smarter one of us bagged hers before I had a chance to say Expelliarmus.

So I went scouting for my own. I haven’t done too badly I think, only it will be nice if the day is a bit cloudy so I wont have to wear a cap all day.

What do you reckon? Magic enough?

Hands of my family

It is commonly agreed that my father has the most interesting hands. The father can be regularly heard protesting that he has no concept of beauty and that he is tone deaf and all art to him is unfathomable mystery, but this doesn’t stop people from regularly attributing all sorts of artistic virtues to him. That is mostly because of his hands. If truth be told I myself have a few not-so-secret ambitions for him. I am constantly dropping random hints about late bloomers, and gifting him art supplies (which are gathering dust among old Ananda vigadans and lecture material) and always finding some secret merit in his telephone and bedside doodlings. What’s to say I won’t be rewarded yet?

Father's hand in drama (actually he was just impatient to get to his mosaranna, because there was a power-cut and only two measly candles were guarding the rice in the kitchen against the creatures of the night)

I cannot be objective about my mother’s hands. I doubt if people can. I never could apply the usual standards to them, because of course, to me, they are unique. And so how to present them? I’ve been a wee bit sly and cut out a picture from a larger one to present her hand in a very well known avatar- the hand that wields the power. Here the remote is only a symbol of power because to be factually correct, the lady is not terribly fond of the remote unless it’s sporting season.

My sister has my father’s hands and his feet. Which we all think is a good thing. This picture is out of a slightly crazy-lazy half-hour one afternoon, when we were trying to freak ourselves out. Hands, I mean hands without a context are such weird unnatural things…
I have chosen the most normal looking of the lot because I don’t fancy a very lethal Mottekai the self same hand can deliver.

That leaves my hands. For some reason (I don’t know if this happens to all children) I was really fond of my hands when I was a child. They had identities separate from, individual of each other. I always considered my right hand to be the bully, and I remember rooting for the underdog. But now I am just glad to have them (godkeep). Grateful and glad. I am genuinely content when I work with my hands or even when I am just watching somebody use their's well. I like things made by the hand. They seem alive. My happiest memories are associated with busy hands and aching back. So then presenting - Happy Hands!

Against rationality in art

I happened to read an interview of Mallika Sarabhai in today’s paper, in which she talks of how she can’t dream of performing something like the Geet Govinda or what she calls ‘the simpering woman’ in the present atmosphere of gender politics. She adds that she understands the spiritual significance of submission. But it is obvious she cannot stomach the more ordinary associations. Sarabhai is quite a prominent feminist and what she ‘thinks’ obviously effects her art.

Of course Mallika Sarabhai is entitled to her outlook and her particular stance but it brought me right back to something that always bothers me. It is a general question especially compelling to me in a post-modern world. (I don’t know but we may have turned post-post-modern while I wasn’t looking)

Where should art emerge from? From our sex? From the gut? From the heart? Is it a form of expression then? A product of our minds? Or do you let the spirit guide you?

Most ‘what is art’ essays raise these questions but it seems to me that in the main, ours is the epoch of the mind, and to my mind that is a shattering pity.

For a longish time now the western world and hence with grating promptitude the whole ‘civilized world’, has set the Human Mind on a ridiculous pedestal. The ‘thinking person’ is the highest creature, ‘thinking art’ then is most superior. Art as defined now needs a context, a history, information, and the scent of activism thrown in for good measure.

Any connoisseur worth his champagne wants to be made to think. Give him food for thought; make him wonder what you could possibly mean, keep a tally of the number of allusions you have made, let him count all possible symbolic references, throw in a signature style, make sure you have a surgically dissectible form – he will probably proclaim you a genius. If as a byproduct he has been aroused, or moved or uplifted, he will probably shuffle a bit in embarrassment or perhaps proceed to diagnose the exact ingredients that produced the effect.

All this I think is not only incredibly boring it is also reeks of a state of self-important adolescence.

Of all the faculties that we have been afforded the one in which we have been shortchanged the most is the Mind. It is self-deluding, very inaccurate, ineffectual, disastrously limiting and has an unfortunate tendency to smugness. And to choose this one power (if power it is) to bank so heavily on – that just seems plain stupid. Rationality really is the millstone of transcendence. With art we have our one of the few real chances of transcending our limitations and to lug it with the burden of rational thought…

Apart from this well-developed allergy for rational art I haven’t really been able to make up my mind where I like my art to come from. But one of the best takes I have ever come across is Ken Wilber’s. He talks of Integral Art, and I really think he has something going there. Very briefly, Integral Art is one which spawned by our sexuality and winds its way up through various levels of our consciousness to be distilled at every stage. If this is an Ideal-the most refined form, then there could be equally appealing raw forms directly springing out of either from say -the heart or the gut. Whatever the source, the impulse needs to be both ‘real’ and spontaneous. And pure rationality is anything but spontaneous and its realness is extremely suspect.

In fact I would imagine that art emerging out of any other level has a better chance of achieving its end that the art born out of pure thought. I am sticking my neck out a bit here but I really think toilet art is more honest and purely motivated than for instance Damien Hirst’s intellectual attempts at inducing whatever he generally wishes to induce or the entire gamut of niche-scoping ‘stylists’.

If all this sounds like I hate all things conceived by pure intelligence that’s far from the truth. The mind can be a fun tool, science for instance is a terribly exciting way to pass the time, and economy, planning and design are all damned useful things in ordinary life.

But art is about the extraordinary. What I am probably asking for is to be shaken and stirred beyond the limitations of my mind, not within them. I’d like to cease to relate to my world, however briefly, as a function of the mind.

Reasons Roger Federer will win today

• He’s due. The crystal ball at the edge of my desk is fairly shimmering with it.
• He has been playing his first gear/second gear act all through the lead up to the tournament and lately, all the better to bamboozle us, my dear! Today! He’s going to do his thing!
• That boy Nadal is quite quite brilliant, but all that aggression is just a little off-putting. Today is the day for subtlety.
• I’ve ploughed through the innards of the internet* and would you believe it? Not a single close-up of that incredibly sexy thing that is the neck of Roger Federer. So I’ve pulled out all the stops and the photographers of Roland Garros have been Imperiused to concentrate all their attention on that neck. And of course the perfect photo-op would be when he lifts that glorious set of sinews to place un baiser parfait on his first French Open cup

*for some reason the net threw up quite a few pictures of Marat Safin’s neck. I’m really not complaining…nope!