kaatib's reviews

abstinence

2012-01-06T13:42:00.001+05:30

I can’t be certain of the dates;
Should have been many births back
Clocks won’t tell me (or you) how many -
Their circular rebirths deny my dog-lives.
A wrong step at a time
As if to escape
The blocks of calendar swooning across this red hall way
Swaggering as I play with the tiny flat piece of mosaic between its tables
At times by a leap, at times by a step, at times blindfolded;
Hoping to step on the line.

Kokowaah : Review

2011-12-12T19:24:00.004+05:30

Kokowaah is the story of a writer who is facing his block phase. Henri, the writer, is seeing the worst of his career as the show he penned has been cancelled due to low ratings. He is what a writer stereotypically is, living in privation, with just enough going about in his life, with an insurmountable addiction to alcohol and tobacco, very much bohemian with no dearth of women hitting on him, with no space in his grey cells to remember their names, and of course a broken marriage. Just then his past comes to haunt, in the person of the charming and cute Magdalena. Here is how Henri himself puts the quandary he is in: as a fairy tale where the knight Henri and the princess he is supposed to rescue for the King mistakenly consume the love potion and make love to each other – a love which was never supposed to happen between the two best friends. Yet, there was no antidote and so they have Magda.

Henri’s wife Katharina has made it big in the publishing industry, and with what? With the script that Henri threw at her in their break up rage. A script that was much the labour of Henri himself.

As Henri and Katharina finds warmth for each other. But Henri lacks the courage to reveal the truth of Magdalena to Katharina.

At the other end is Tristan, who has brought up Magdalena believing her to be his daughter.

What follows is a triangular conflict with Henri at its center.

Kokowaah / 2011 / German / Till Schweiger / 123 mins.

Directed by Till Schweiger, who also plays the part of Henri, this film could have been a poignant essay on parenting. However what goes wrong is the editing. Just when the movie should have touched you poetically with slow and brooding movement and music, it rushes into jump cuts and loud music. The music volume drowns the film in its pace at the wrong places.
The movie plays it well when it comes to Magdalena (Emma Shweiger). We do not have here a hapless kid who is in need of care and love. Atleast it is not that pity that the movie plays on. Magdalena surprises you by her independence and her no-nonsense attitude.

As usual, alcohol, smoking, etc are the habits that one should get rid off in the process of becoming a responsible parent. And as usual, it is love that finally helps you kick the butt.

This song is not that: the Jesudas effect

2011-12-07T15:42:00.012+05:30

I had earlier written about the experience of watching Urumi. I had not discussed the movie then. Nor do I intend to do it now. But the movie was recently in the news. Following McKennitt’s plagiarism suit that the movie has lifted two of her compositions “Caravensarai” and “The Mummer’s Dance” for “Aaro Nee Aaro” in Urumi, the Delhi High Court has restrained the producers from using the song in the movie’s upcoming Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and English makes. The court order is a first in the sense that plagiarism or “inspirations” from music from abroad or within the nation has been an established practice and has not attracted penalties.

Ideas travel across continents, routes of silk and wind unwinds themselves to these sojourners, and ideas do wrinkle. Either of aging or of gaining wisdom. No, they should not be clubbed.

K.J. Jesudas is no ordinary singer. For one, he has completed half a century of singing career. He is the epitomic Malayalee singer. Epitomic in many different senses. Epitomic in personifying all the ironies that plague Kerala. He is not your singer who dances with the troupe. Nor is he the flamboyant designer wear singer. He is draped in the whiteness. The whiteness that indicates purity very much in accordance with all the traditional notions of music. The whiteness that indicates the genius that music is supposed to carry. The whiteness with all its weight of tradition and genius that is so dear to any fascist society. Remember Benjamin, remember Krauceur. And the irony of that fascism in India’s supposedly most progressive state. That is irony number one.

K.J.Jesudas is that Christian who has sung one song each at the eighteen steps of Sabarimala, all in praise of Lord Ayyappa. Jesudas is the one to whose kirtanas Kerala wake up to. But Jesudas is also the one for whom the gates of the temples in Kerala are forever closed. Because he is a non-Hindu. K.J.Jesudas is that version of Kerala secularism who believes in the universal-secular nature of Hinduism. He is also the victim of the intricate hidden self of that universality-secularism.

K.J.Jesudas is one of the earliest singers for A.R.Rahman. K.J.Jesudas had predicted Rahman’s rise right then. While Rahman redefined the boundaries of voice in Indian film music, Jesudas remained the iconic singer to be emulated in Kerala. Jassie Gift could only be an obscenity in that industry, Kalabhavan Mani could only be substandard in that radiance. And that is the irony of the Malayalee. The weight of self obsession to the point of strangling oneself. That indeed is the ultimate self-love.

Legends has it that on many occasions the music directors will just have the lyrics ready. “Sing as you like it” they would say to Jesudas. Who are they teach Jesudas how to sing? Jesudas is that legend who said “enough of awards for me. Now give it to someone else”.

No matter how much of “lifting” has happened in Deepak Dev’s “Aaro Nee aaro”, it does not remain the same once Jesudas has sung it. For Jesudas is not just a singer. He is the Malayalee himself. He is the sandstorm, the hail and the rain of the silk route. No good remains the same as it was at its source. The road changes us all.

Not to mention that the song also has added tunes to it.

I post both the songs here.

Caravanserai by Loreena McKennitt

Aaro Nee Aaro from Urumi

Coming back to Malayalam movies. The industry is going through its worst crisis. Not even five percent of the movies produced can recover the costs. The number of exhibition halls are one third of what it used to be. According to producers, Kerala should stop exhibiting movies made in other languages. Their argument is that with the same ticket prices, one could a multi-million production instead of watching a Malayalam movie with a budget of a few lakhs. It is indeed a point, considering that the industry is not just about producers or directors, but also of the makeup man, the spot boy, the extras, the body doubles, etc, not to mention the many unknown faces behind the camera and even outside the set.

The difference between a Malayalam movie and a Bollywood movie, in terms of production grandeur can be summed up in the following clip. The movies featured are Bhool Bulaiyya and its Malayalam version produced a decade back, Manichitrathazhu. The sequence is the same. The psychiatrist and his friend sets out to trace the origins of the trauma that the female protagonist is suffering from. Now see how the two movies differ in their scale:

Rains, lands, memory and exile

2011-11-29T14:02:00.008+05:30

Zizek makes an interesting observation about poets. Nationalist poets, patriotic poets, poets in general, I guess. He compares it to the baby and the bath water. The practice is to retain the baby and throw away the water. He says, what we should rather do is to throw away the baby, and then look at the bath water, to see it in all its obscenity. The baby here would mean the idea – of nationalism, patriotism, even democracy as a concept, in general the stuff of poetry; and the bath water would be all that as it is put into practice. People tend to cling on to the idea – “yeah, it is practised so and so, but you know, that is just the idiosyncrasy of those who put it into practice. Actually it should have been...”

Zizek is definitely to the point.

Nevertheless, there is a sublimity to ideology, and poetry expresses it quite so well for the romantics (and that is exactly the bathwater when put into practice). Like rain. I read this piece by Shahina (we worked under the same supervisors for our M.Phil), on the agony of the Malayalee women when they stay in Kerala, and the relative freedom they enjoy elsewhere in India. ‘Elsewhere’ can be misleading here. What they mean is, the metros – Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, etc. The articles are published in Nalamidam, an online Malayalam magazine. Coming back to Shahina’s piece, I was quick enough to notice that what made her writing so beautiful was the constant reference to rain. It starts raining, like a good Bollywood movie, at the most beautiful of situations, situations of freedom, situations of longing, of agony, of pain, of nostalgia...

Strange, for here itself is the baby and bathwater situation. A bashing of “reality” and a love for the “conceptual”.

Rain is so for the Malayalee. Especially for the one who is away, like Kamala Das speaking to the nocturnal rain (rathrimazha). In fact, I recently read this beautiful poem by K. Srilata, which again begins and ends with the rain. What was even more fascinating was that she condensed my entire PhD project in a few lines:

But land is memory, dream, belonging.
Land is rains arriving,
Drowning in their wake a million struggling black ants
(“Land is Rains Arriving” from
Arriving Shortly; Rs.200)

******

Reading Hour, a bi-monthly published from Bangalore (and available in all metros) published my short story: “Coils of a Desert Sky”. It is the story of a variety shop owner Abdu, who was formerly a theology teacher. The story tries to chronicle the last few months of his life when he has to battle between knowledge that is obvious and the hidden one. It touches upon a not much discussed aspect of the Qur’an.

I thank the publishers for the green signal (pun intended).

*****

Read The Sense of an Ending recently. Quite a compact book, with recurring images. I read that it is not his great work, but that the Man Booker was just a recognition before it gets too late. It will make a good movie. The novel is about a man's memory, as it confuses itself, caught in a maze of pure fabrication, misperception,and misrepresentation. Quite a counter point. I can already see the movie in my head!

Tariq Ali’s Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, which chronicles the everyday life of the family of Hudayl. The novel, which is conceived of as an alternative history, and is the first part of the Islam Quintet, starts with the incident of the Spanish invasion of Granada. The author starts with the incident of the Spanish army burning at stake the books from the one hundred and ninety five libraries in Granada. That is an interesting starting for an alternative history, considering how the allegations on Islam have always been riddled with the stories of Arabs soldiers burning down books of the old world wisdom, in North Africa and elsewhere.

Similarly serving the alternative history is Ali's decision to refer to all places as they were called before the invasion. Thus Granada is Gharnata, Seville is Ishbiliyya, etc.

However, the repeated use of the imagery of the burning books could have been better used than by the rambling soliloquies of the characters constantly in anguish over the incident. That little subtlety is missing in this book. That is not to say that the book is a litany of complaints. It definitely is not. It captures the lighter moments of Hudayl household, the many domestic dramas, the tales of promiscuity. It also gives a very contemporary critique of the Islamic society, for its feudal ways and its entrenchedness in the class order (in India, the caste order, the Ashraf-Ajlaf divide, etc).

Tariq Ali is to be appreciated as he makes the in-your-face connection between the conquest of Islamic Europe and that of South America. Subtlety remains his weaker point.

Shadows is to be read along with Amin Maalouf’s Leo the African. Maalouf chronicles the story of Leo, a Muslim and then a convert to Christianity and then back again. Leo is again from Granada, but one who chose exile rather than live under the invaders’ regime.

*****

premonitions

2011-11-16T20:13:00.004+05:30

Killing
Is a strange sport
As you slowly bring close the flame;
The pitiful insect -
Its wings
Fluttering violently,
And then resigning
As if to the blossoms of a spring of the other world;
Its eyes
Lowering
Stupendous then be the flame
Nearing as it is
Closer still.
And then the rustle
All the childhood fries awakened in your memories
Banana, potato, tapioca, jackfruit
You relive all the distance
The distance between the stone and the mango
The fish and the colacasia leaf
The rain the paddy field and the hostel
And then you take your revenge
Slowly
Feeling the fire burning it way in through you
Through your nerves you restrained in an empty house in the sultry neighbourhood.

Killing is a strange sport
Killing yourself
Nearing the flame
Now fluttering, now resigned.

When Gaddafi steps out

2011-10-20T23:55:00.007+05:30

And there it ends. Gaddafi succumbs to wounds. The columnist at the Time wants to believe that his last words would have been “don’t shoot”. Everyone has a right to his wishful thinking. And the Time wish is only just as innocent as its opposite – that he would have died fighting, in arms with his comrades, the last man in the last town of a long lost ideal smothered by reality.

Like most other leaders of the Arab world, Gaddafi lived in us through his pictures, pictures that blew him up to a hero, a David who would one day stand up to the Goliath. Davids and Goliaths – enduring myth from a region where power is never equal. Ironically, in the modern day imagery, the Goliath holds David’s star. It was against the backdrop of that star in blue (a colour which is absent in the flag of any other country in West Asia) that Davids rose in public imagination. And how many of them – Yasser Arafath, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi... But the David was, is, humbled again. Yet again.

Gaddafi lived in us, so far away from the Mediterranean shores, in the strangest of ways. “Usr” in Arabic means toughness. When we cross far from the Arab mainland into the Malabar coast, that word transforms a bit and come to mean a liminal space between naughtiness and stud-ness. To have “usr” and “puli” (Malayalam for ‘sour’) was to have some dignity and honour in life. And those kids who had “usr”, those kids who were loud and naughty and running around chairs - at family gatherings, at Iftar meets and in all those occasions when people gathered -were nicknamed, with so much love, as Gaddafi.

The painful bind that we were caught in during the First Gulf War couldn’t have been if not for the presence of the imagined (not just an imagination, but also as the looming image) of the two blue flags. On the one hand, in alliance with the Arab sheikhs were our means of livelihood itself. On the other, praying for Saddam, was our “usr” and “puli”, armed with the lores of generations, subdued by false hopes. Saddam lost, and the Arab kings continued with their beaming smiles from their framed photographs hanging from our walls. After all, it were they who transformed this community to its present state of luxury, from a generation of indentured labour in the tea plantations of Nilgiris and Ceylon, and the rubber plantations of Malaysia. Saddam lost, and we lost our dignity and hope. Strange how the figures of Gloiaths can turn even vicious oppressors into heroes. Saddam lived on, in hoardings, in places named after him (like the Saddam beach), in our local elections, in our day to day lores, passed on and on.

In all probability, if experience does hold any light to the future, we would never know how Gaddafi died. However evil the person, there is some poetry in holding on to evil. Like the evil itself can turn to something good, like Antigone’s and Gudrun’s refusal (from Zizek’s Sublime Object of Ideology), or (and most of us just don’t say it), the poetry in the death of Hitler, the way how he refused to be the exhibition piece of the Allied victory. Would he have actually said “Don’t shoot”? We’ll never know. More people are killed by words and images than they physically are. The Ottomans in their early modern primordiality engineered eternal death, the death from commemoration rituals. For them, the solution to avoid rebel pilgrimage sites was to throw away the rebel’s mortal remains to the gluttonous oceans. In the information age, the second and eternal death happens by engineering the murders through images and narratives spread through the ubiquity of internet. When internet lore takes over the folklore, by its bombardment of images as opposed to the painful recollection and rendering from memory, rebels are desacralized not by hiding but by over exposure. Quite strangely though Bin Laden was thrown to the sea, much like the Ottoman practice. May be the images had reached a breaking point already. In internet too, too much of an exposure can engender the citizen out of the subject.

This is the passing of an age. Gaddafi, Saddam and Mubarak were quite different from each other. But they were all product of the same time of history, a time when the Arab version of socialism compounded with Arab nationalism. That age has come to an end.

Concordance

2011-10-04T02:25:00.001+05:30

I,
Prayer bead,
Somnolent trickles of a purple sky,
Hours
Counted
In funnelling smoke;
You,
A few tenses
Caught in prepositions.

Hazare Khwahishein Aisi

2011-08-22T16:53:00.003+05:30

Many many years back, at the time of the first elected communist government of the world, which was in Kerala, there was a slogan which went “kerala naattil naattiya chenkodi, delhi yil jnangal paarikkum” (the red flag we have hoisted in Kerala, we will fly that in Delhi). To think about it, there was some kind of growth process implicit in that slogan, though it belonged to a party then more than ever, considered any decentralization of power a sacrilege of the central authority of ‘people’. Cut to Anna Hazare, the Gandhian. As far as i know, and I know great men only because many other men quote them (greatness definitely dwells in a susceptibility to be quoted), the great man Gandhi’s one of the most quoted lines is that the soul of India resides in its villages. Such a statement points to an absolute way of being – there is no progress, nor regression, no migration, nor outsourcing, it is stable – in the village. So on the one hand, we have a slogan which envisages an India which develops out of a province and then reaches the capital, and on the other, a permanent place for the Indian soul, which again, is not at the centre, but at the province.

What disturbs me most about the ongoing hysteria about Anna Hazare and India’s own Jasmine bloom is its vast inequity of geographic representation. So, now that you have a ten thousand or a twenty thousand supporters, you can force a bill on the parliament? Usually No. But if you are in Delhi, yes. And how do you reach Delhi? Not through a sustained movement in the villages, not by foot trailing India’s forgotten paths, not by rubbing against the dirt and grime of the monsoon stricken forlornness, but directly flown in, without any touch of those places where, the real Mr.Gandhi said that India’s soul resides in. Isn’t it just a blatant supremacy of metros that has been brought to fore in India’s ‘popular’ uprising?

I can speak only from my limitations. From my situations and sorroundings. Born in Kerala and having spent a considerable time there, I know that a few lakhs in this country of one hundred plus crores doesn’t represent too much of a popularity. I for one know that, the CPI (M) state conferences in Kerala has an average of atleast 5 lakh people converging. I also know that when Indian Union Muslim League wanted to show its strength to CPI(M) in Kerala, even that regional party with barely two MPs in Indian Parliament could muster that many people to attend its Malappuram District Conference a few years back. But they cannot hold the central government to ransom, because they are in a province?! And all these lakhs, whether of CPI (M)’s or other parties, comes to a few seats in the Parliament. But not for Team Anna and the media. For them the few lakhs which converged in the metros of India seem to represent the soul (and sole) -body of India. Forget it, the entire 3 crore people of Kerala have only 20 seats in the Parliament, while a few lakhs claim all the 545 to themselves!!

The worst victim of Hazare’s protests, if it succeeds, will be the federal structure of India and its decentralization of powers. How is it that crowds in India can force a government to legislate what will then be applicable to the whole of India? Why should then the people in the provinces accept at all a power in which their voices are drowned in the distance, while those in Delhi are amplified live through the apparatus of a 24 hour live illusionist?

Hazare’s revolution is in toto unGandhian. It is totalitarian, and worst, it is totalitarianism of the bureaucracy. ‘Meritorious’ (with all caste-class configurations that the term implicitly carries) citizens will be handpicked (by? The corrupt government!!) and then they will rule over the elected representatives. There is a clever hide and seek going on in this formula.

Here is how:
Point 1: supposing the politicians are corrupt, and also supposing that the politicians are nevertheless elected by the people of this country in a fair manner, and that the people do have a right to organize and to fight elections, you will have to conclude that the people, the winning majority of them atleast, are corrupt.
Point 2: we retain the premise that the politicians are corrupt. But we maintain that these politicians however are not the true representatives of people. In that case, the conclusion can only be that the democracy of this land is flawed.

Which one will you choose, Hazare? Neither!!

The clever game that Hazare and his Team plays is that they never come to either of the conclusions. If they come to the first conclusion, they will have to concede that their movement, after all, is not a popular one, but rather a minority of puritans out to teach the corrupt majority of this nation a purging lesson! Or worse, you cannot be pointing fingers anymore, unless you follow that old school teacher's logic of four fingers pointing at yourself. If on the other hand they utter the second conclusion - oh then comes the flood and fury. For what else are the Maoists, the tribals, and the many anti-state movements, armed and otherwise, saying? That would definitely hurt the corporate interests. Oh, why would you risk that?

"First as Tragedy, then as Farce" –the tragedy of the unheard revolutions waged each day on the land and the river, and for drinking water, and against all those who take away what was God-given; and then the farce of the crane mounted cameras, the exclusives, the candle lit marches – Media surely have ways to keep Marx alive, in quotations, of course, as every other great man!

The Rooftops of Tehran : review

2011-08-16T12:14:00.005+05:30

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."
Charles Dickens might have penned a few memorable lines and few lines worth memorising, in a career then called meteoric, not just for its pace, but also for the impending doom, but hardly any matches those that commence A Tale of Two Cities. Down to the latest London riots, the sentence is oft quoted even when the best of times has been such a far cry. As for the worst times, as far the adage goes, times can be worse that none can adequately fit the bill. What makes Dickens’s line so quotable is that like Tolstoy’s happy families, revolutions are all alike; but the aftermath of each is distinct in their own way.

As for the Iranian revolution, unlike the French Revolution or the Vietnamese War, accounts have focussed on the aftermath rather than the Revolution itself. Examples abound. Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, for two instances, narrate the sexual discrimination and oppression of desire in post Revolution Iran. The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubas III, more from the viewpoint of an exiled Iranian upperclass, speaks more of the privations, emotional and material, of life in a foreign land, and of the impossibility of returning home.

What strikes most about Mehbod Seraji’s The Rooftops of Tehran is its reluctance to flip, so ever easy, to this Iran-after-revolution bashing. The bashing, justified it sure is, tires nevertheless most often by the flippancy. Stark black and white contrasts does not do justice, except as a political rhetoric can make the voice heard. So, while not discounting the power of rhetoric, and equally the power to recognise it when one crosses it, let me excuse myself in favour of a story that has more to it than just political oppression. This is a book that brings back smiles of those days when one fell in love for the first time, the time where daydreams were indeed what days were made of, and those titbits of conversation, those occasional glances, the tree shades (cherry tree in the novel; mango tree in our memory) under which we sat, we read, we discussed, we boasted, lied, blushed and just hid when cascades felt then drowned our dreams in languorous longing. Pasha’s and Zari’s teenage love do not slip into long paragraphs of soliloquising adoration (not that they are boring when in the right hands), but is well balanced in humour and wit by Pasha’s best friend Ahmed. Some of the best moments of the novel, where you slip back into the teenage reading experience, are the conversations between Ahmed and Pasha.

The novel has its own twists and turns, fair share of tragedy and some heartfelt feel good in the initial build up, but a novel on Iran cannot be exempt from politics. Politics forms the backbone of the novel, except that the era depicted is the oppressive rule of Shah, its totalitarian torture, exile, its exuberant displays, its reign of mistrust, and its dirty hate-thickened underbelly.

Published by New American Library, the book also has an interview of the author and a questionnaire at the end!

Rustles at the Golden Temple

2011-07-18T12:45:00.008+05:30

If one loses ingenuity, it is highly likely that one loses it in childhood. Just remember what our past times were? I bet they were the most ingenious one I had ever come up in life. Mostly a lonely child, I had to discover newer and newer ways to entertain myself. In those “good old times” television was not so much of an entertainment, let Doordarshan be my witness! At the same, for those who aspire to be serious while being ridiculous, I was often called in by an excruciating super ego to invent the reasons and causes and the great benefits available to mankind behind my inanities.

So one day, when I had tired myself of transferring entire weaver ant nests to close proximity of brown ants and relish their fight to death, I imagined myself to be a seismologist and ventured to find the effect of earthquakes on anthills. I soon rushed to a fireworks shop some seven kilometers away, bought tube like red fire crackers which comes in a bunch of forty or so tied up by a large knot and intended to be lit once and heard thirty times; I also bought half a dozen plastic straws. At home I unknotted each of those red fire crackers, dug with a pen tube a small somewhat narrow pits near an anthill, took the thread of the fire cracker through the straw and buried the fire cracker in the pit just deep enough that the thread can reach the surface through the straw. Next, I lit the thread. The cracker did burst, but surprise, the anthill didn’t register the seismic indulgence!

A similar ingenious pastime that too had to do with sound, fire and fury was to watch coconut shells catch fire in the triangular brick stove at home. Serendipity it definitely was, but unlike other scientific experiments that could be replicated, the coconut shell burning has much to do with luck. Remember how it caught my fascination that they erupt in several flames, each separate from the other, and they fuse for no reason, and they rustle and buzz and then fade and mute, and then again, out of nowhere, a crack, and then a high period of fire, a crescendo of rustles, and again the many odd flames as if lit from a lamp. My aunt used to watch me, stationed by the stove for hours, even as she warns me of the rice frothing out, of having exhausted the cooking schedule, of over using the shells and depleting the firewood stock and such; just as my cousins used to wonder, all of them from their safe distances of an elder age, the weirdness, the ridiculousness and the imbecility of reigning over a kingdom of ants.

All this was a necessary background to what I actually had to say. Which is that, I recently made a trip to Coorg, or more exactly Madikeri / Mercara. Thirty kilometers from there is the Golden Temple, in Kushalnagar, which is south India’s largest Tibetan settlement. When we reached the Golden Temple, it was some sort of a prayer time. No sooner than the prayer I don't actually know if it's something else, thanks to my ignorance of Buddhist practices) started and there was a coconut shell burning in my memories. The same pace, the same rustle, the unexplained lulls, the unprecedented highs, the beating of the drums at times louder swifter, at times as if on a retreat, a crescendo unexplained as a natural phenomena. The golden Temple has enough fire burning around it in furnaces, but this went beyond any of them in its persistent hums and periodic rustles. There is a lot to say about architecture, a lot to say about the history. But since I am capable of neither, if I ever I shall write about Golden Temple, I shall write about childhood memories and of curses and of exile and of dreams and of a place called home. I might also write, may be in the garb of a story teller from another age, of a people who trapped the winds of their homeland in a gilded metallic windchime

Salt & Pepper : movie review

2011-07-17T11:38:00.009+05:30

Though more suggestive of a variety of facial hair that one acquires in one’s more mature and arguably more charming years (the latter applies only to some people), “salt & pepper”, if we avoid the connotation and stick to the age old denotation, has more to do with gastronomic realities, appetites, tastes and such. Aashiq Abu's Salt & Pepper entertainingly and intelligently blends both these aspects of the phrase – age and food. Essentially a story about two individuals past their reasonably marriage-able age discovering each other over the art of cooking, it is a story that begins with a food home-delivery order gone astray. Started with a bitter note of them calling names at each other, the abuses soon transforms to words of comfort, care, all wrapped in quotidian concerns.

Kalidasan (Lal) is an official at the archaeology department and Maya is a dubbing artist. While Kalidasan is carefree about life and hardly feels the need for female warmth, content with his male cook and the latter’s and his own cooking skills (in a very straightforward manner – no, nothing cooking there!!), Maya (Shwetha Menon), the dubbing artist is depressed by her single status. She drowns into tales of past relationships and her impeding astrological configurations each time she gets drunk with her friend Meenakshi and her landlady.

Kalidasan and Maya soon discovers each other over the phone, in an elaborate five consecutive days when they prepare, each of them separately in their own individual houses, Joan’s Rainbow cake. However, the apprehension about one’s own age and physical appearance compels both of them to launch a cautious defense of mis-identity and impersonation for their first ever meeting, and so the story line gets complicated exactly when the first half ends.The second half does not live up to the expectations set by the first half, partly because of the weight that impersonation deals on the story line itself. Though touted as the first movie with Lal as the lead-character, the second half dilutes it to quite some extent.

Lal has been an actor for the last 13 years and a director for the last 21 years, and it is hard to believe that it took all these for a director to take that ‘risk’ – yes, he is dark and more suitable for a villain, but his capability for comedy has been recognized for atleast a decade, beginning with Thenkasippattanam (2000, Rafi Mecartin). Moreover, his performances are stellar, in this movie as well as in others. Shwetha Menon can carryu off the serious role quite earnestly, Mythili is just a side show and something of her antics draws quite loud boos and comments. The surprise of the movie is Baburaj in his funny elements, and one senses no mismatch here though the actor has forever been a goonda so far in his career. Asif Ali simply can’t act, no offence meant, he should just do something he can and is good at.

Pay a bit more attention to the movie, and you can taste the salt of nostalgia playing throughout the movie peppered with a social commentary of the newly invented, formed and fabricated urbanity of Kerala

painting a girl

2011-07-07T15:02:00.000+05:30

If I could paint, I would have never written this. Instead, I would have just painted her in all the colours that she lives in. For instance, had my hands been deft enough, I wouldn’t be searching for words to accurately describe the loneliness of her nights. Blue would have done it beyond my words, it would have brought to relief the azure nights of multiplying distances. She liked to be restless in such nights, like restlessness itself was a boon to be sought. In those wandering of everlasting distances in her courtyard she slowly figured out how the flowers she hardly noticed under the sun has quite a different colour, a different life, under the moon. Violet ventilated with red would accurately depict those flowers for you. If I could get a drop of Yellow, and trap the soul of Green in it, it would accurately describe the place where her wandering mind ended up unable to figure out what exactly causes her into thoughts of suicide and murder, or at times a little milder longing to bang her head, throw the teapoy against the television, or just break a bottle and thrust the longest and the most slender glass piece into one’s wrists. However, the Yellow and Green cannot be reached before we picture the Beige which stood for her skin right before she would rip it of life; the rusting Brown of murderous intent; or the polka dots of Yellow and Red as she contemplated death on a road accident. If I could paint this, I swear, I wouldn’t have bothered you with all this. Reddish Brown could have easily convinced you of its status as the predestined resting place of a girl who wanted to die but was confused how to and death came for her before she could prepare a note.

a movie and some optimism

2011-06-22T13:09:00.003+05:30

Watching Urumi was on top of the to-do list when I came home. Readers of my blog are well aware that I was slightly smitten by atleast one song from the movie. And for quite unknown (to me) reasons, and inspite of the questionable quality as well as veracity of the post, not to mention the outright “I don’t know”s, that post continues to be one of the most viewed in my blog. A few weeks back, I made a call with much concern to my only film-buff friend (the ‘only’, for much practical reasons when I am back at home, applies to ‘friend’ too) Praveen. I was to come home in two weeks from then and I was not sure if the movie was going to stay. Praveen was very confident. It is not going to go out for a very long time. I should have known that for a great many people one’s own judgment of things works in quite ascriptive ways, ‘I like it, so people should also like it’. The good thing, the flip side, of such a thought is one firmly grounds oneself among people. I think it is better than saying “It’s a good movie, but people won’t like such movies”.

Coming back Urumi. Once I was back home I realized that it is not playing anywhere that is between my home and Shornur Railway Station (which is one and a half hours’ distance in a public bus). I made a frantic and complaining call to my friend and he was still quite cadre, “wherever it is playing in Kerala, repeat, wher-e-ve-r, I shall let you know, and if you want, I will give you company too.”

Quite true to his word, three days later I found myself in this place where we never go. There are reasons why some places remain static like that. Places expand in footfall due to very limited factors in my part of the world – they should have one or more good hospitals, one or more well-known schools or colleges, one or more amusement parks or a regularly picturised waterfall… this list might utmost have one or two more points, not more than that. The movie theatres follow rather than lead these developments, and A-class theatre status (they are also called “release-centres”) is anyways a quite recent phenomenon for small towns when a few movie distributors rightly calculated that the only way out for superstar movie from the creeping hisses of Shakeela is to release movies in atleast some three score theatres at once and thereby make it more “democratic”.

At the theatre, there were hardly 20 people. The ticket distribution, which starts with a bell (like in schools), started just fifteen minutes before the showtime. But most and most importantly, and this was very strange considering that the movie had ample skin and more than enough gorgeouness – Genelia, Vidya Balan, Nitya Menon, Tabu –that there was no hooting, no whistling, not even one comment at all those action sequences. I couldn’t believe that our class assumptions can go awry at a very democratic (there was only one range of tickets- Rs.30) rundown theatre where all you expected were jobless people (like myself) coming for some cheap thrills. Especially that even multiplexes are not all that “decorous”. Everyone seemed to be enjoying the movie. My prejudices would have forced me to think that they might have all fallen asleep. But we all rushed back after the interval except for one guy who was savouring chota Gold flake, watching it drizzle over the paady fields that bordered the theatre. Definitely not sleeping.

I do have things to say about the movie, and I would definitely not write “Genelia + Urumi = Genelia”, but that I will reserve for another day.

The Other Colours of Monsoon

2011-06-14T19:12:00.005+05:30

I don’t know what his name is, but a Malayalam writer has once noted how monsoons have rained good books in his life.

It has been raining white since last evening. The breaks are very short, the rains most heavy. People continue with their lives nevertheless. Everything is a bit damp, that is all. The evenings are particularly sluggish. It is indeed quite a heartening thought that one can sip coffee and sit through the monsoon nights, dreaming of songs to be sung and revolutions to be waged, but practicality often dampens the initial stages. After all, one has to find one’s way to the kitchen in the powercut house, and a single wayward drop of water on the floor sponges its way through to one’s brain.

Nevertheless, the aroma of coffee is the perfect better half of a dreamy book on a monsoon day. I had thought of many different ways to start this blogpost, but now ultimately I have come to the central portion of each, once again proving how as someone who loves the art of writing, I am quite inferior when it comes to the actual task. The intro is quite lengthy, but the point is quite simple, that how Pamuk’s Other Colours has infused so much of nostalgia for an unwritten word from my pen! So much of a nostalgia that I have been dreaming of monsoons which never rained in reality, and have been renedering colours to actual monsoons spent in quite quotidian ways starting from cursing the wet morning papers to ending it with cursing the empty water tank because the motor pump couldn’t be of any help because there was no power the entire day.

But, to stick to facts, monsoon has indeed presented good books in my life. I remember that it was in the monsoon of 2006 that I read Pamuk’s The White Castle. That was the first book by him I had ever read. I had bought it for a very strange reason – Prof. Ashok has been singing Pamuk’s praises. I was skeptical. But I wanted to know, just know what kind of writer this is. At the bookshop I found that The White Castle is the slimmest of them all, and I bought it! I fell in love with the book with each page with each situation. Right from the first paragraph, describing the movement of ships in the Bosphorus.

And, I still maintain, The White Castle is the best book by Pamuk (and I have read My Name is Red). The theme of identity swapping is not new, but is always quite exciting. Though Pamuk doesn’t mention it among his influences for writing the novel, in the essay on The White Castle, or the Afterword he has written for the novel (both published in Other Colours), one memorable example is from Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez’s identity swapping is loud, colourful, dramatic, while Pamuk’s is slow, so slow that you won’t realize that you have been swept off your feet, duped. Indeed, Pamuk knows this very well, witness the final paragraph of The White Castle.

If there is anything that I like about Pamuk, then it is this softness of his strokes. They don’t leave you helpless, they don’t force your head in prostrate by its gripping genius. If anything, they inspire you, they make you attempt a few, however incapable, strokes of your own. If Marquez is the pained and agonized Michaelangelo letting out the whims of his genius (genius – djinn- spirit- residing without oneself), Pamuk is the village school teacher – you stop your game as he passes by, but you know he can take some of it.

Sulaikha's Daughter

2011-06-03T12:37:00.018+05:30

There are some people I want dead. I know... I know it’s mean to be speaking like this. After all they have all come to take part in my wedding. My uncle, whose shirt barely conceals the business plans going on in his stomach; his son who always came home in the summers and who found great philanthropy in drawing water for all the neighbours, women all of them, who assembled after the dawn prayers to collect water from the only well which didn’t bare the marbles children threw off on and off in a year’s squabbles; my uncle’s wife over there, complaining of the injected watermelons, the annachis* whose appetite seems to be unsatiated with each day of filling up the trenches they dug around coconut trees in the beginning of the summer...

There are some people I wouldn’t mind gone forever either. My aunt over there, the one younger to my mother, who invented complex conspiracy hatched by my mother and me to gobble up family wealth every time I smile at one of my cousins, her hands are today forever occupied by those earring that she is wearing; that cousin of mine who is giggling with some friend of hers in the corner – I don’t know what she discusses, but she always giggles, at times in group, but at times alone and with the corners of her eyes curled as though she knows what I have done.

What have I done? It’s not important. It’s the first day of the four day long wedding events. That is important. Yet, not everyone thinks of it the same way.

My eldest uncle is not here. He will not attend this wedding. ‘After all’, he constantly asked, ‘what is the hurry for a wedding?’ he asked when he first learnt that my mother was getting eager to get me married off. Days passed and the other uncles, two of them, two of my aunts, and my mother herself was at it. Finding boys from distant relatives, running through newspaper matrimonials, informing the real-estate-broker-cum-marriage-broker-cum-second- hand-vehicle-broker Avaranka, preparing horlicks and chicken samosas, egg bondas and nescafe. Boys came, boys left, some said education was a problem, some found their nuclear families wanting in the care and joy they might be able to able to give for a girl from a “big family”, some thought being only girl child would create logistic-emotional issues. No one said I am dusky, no one said I am short. No one spoke of the post-marriage deficit they would face if they marry a girl whose father was no more to get the son-in-law a job, a share in the local jewellery, a car for taking her home every two weeks... people are generally kind, you see.

As days passed my eldest uncle stayed more and more away from our house. The few times he came, he turned sour. ‘Sulu’, he would call my mother, ‘it’s a bad time. Don’t do it now.’In those moments his eyes would constantly shuttle between the floor and my mother's ears.

My mother, his brothers, my mother’s younger sister, all would go in unison – ‘we need something to forget about it’.

The day the son of the timber merchant through Avaranka confirmed his willingness to marry me, my eldest uncle turned up in his Tavera, his face wrinkled than usual, his voice getting caught in his lumpy throat. He didn’t take off his slippers. ‘Sulaikha’, that was the first time he ever addressed my mother like that, ‘how can you forget Babu. He lived his life there’, he refused to sit down, his mundu was half up, his right toenail pressed against the marble floor, his fingers trembling, shivering, his silver ring with the white stone from a goat’s gladders come out loose often. ‘God will not forgive this. By God, I will carry this injury to my grave.’ And then again, trying to stop his sobs bursting out into maddening loudness, 'he was my son, he was like your son...my son'.

He knew if he stayed there anymore he would howl like a child. He hurried out, broke a slender branch off the bottlebrush planted in the west corner of the courtyard, hurried back in, ‘here’, he raised it up to my mother, and broke it into two. ‘It’s over’. I was watching all this standing by the edge of the half open door. I think he took notice of me as he was leaving. I think he stared into me, deep into me, and then hurried out. Were his eyes accusing me, or were they just asking for a word, ‘not now, mother, let some time pass’.

As my mother came back, and I know the corner of her eyes, her nose and her lips were moist, she too stared at me, like her questioning eyes, her flat nose, her restless lower lip would all melt and ooze into my eyes. She stared at me, her hands supported on the sharp edges of the wooden door, her head slowly sliding against the door, her ears feeling the depths and protrusions of its woodwork.

Did she know too? She must know. She is my mother. But... I never wanted him dead.

Babu was not disgusting, though there were times I wished he was stabbed by someone in a wayward fight in the streets, or he met with an accident, or went to coma for the rest of his life. I had just pushed him that evening. I have pushed him many times even before. Like the first time he dropped my mother and her younger sister at the hospital to see a relative’s new born baby and came back alone. I hadn’t gone, though I would have loved to see that baby. I had swelling in my right feet, the right corner of my forehead was aching, and I used to get a feeling that something, some invisible body of nerves, was exiting my feet every now and then. He sneaked into my room that day, and before I could turn and see him, his lips were pressing against my neck, and I could feel his lower body scraping against my chilling bowels.

I pushed him away, and I think he hurried out. I just lay quiet in my bed.
He was persistent. May be he loved me. May be. In the siesta hours when the house was asleep and the old woman from the neighbourhood washing clothes at the well, he would come in, regularly. First there were kisses. And I think he did love me. In the raging monsoon when the sky flashed and the house was on guard against burglary, he would sneak in, and fondle with my breasts, grip them hard, pull it to a corner, as he stiffens, his foreheads on a battlefront running in his head. As my lips curled at its corners and my eyelids shut half and my eyes rolled upwards to avoid looking at him, seeing him all the way, as his eyes glistened, his feet froze, I would pull his hair, in the hope that they would come out, in the hope that he would bald, that no girl would ever look at him, at his pumped triceps, and that his triumphant cheer would disappear, forever.

That day when the skies were still heavy and hanging he insisted that I go to the pumphouse in the evening, when the house would be busy savouring the monsoon masala mix tea, and that he would be waiting there. I told him no, several times. He was insistent. In such moments his lips would loosen up, his eyes would droop, he wouldn’t speak. I hated those. I always wanted to see him defeated, insulted, laughed at; but I never liked seeing him in the dusky light of a tragic hero. I wouldn’t allow him that triumph, that advantage of claiming that he actually did love me, but I turned him down. I wanted to see him, in his devouring savagery, in his disgusting stiffness and tremble.

I agreed to go to the pumphouse.

Later, in the pumphouse, when he made an attempt to pull up my green skirt with the golden borders, I said 'No'. He was a persistent boy - in his grasps and grip, yet I said no. But he was at it, my forehead cheeks lips ears neck all were constantly kissed, kissed again and again that I couldn't open my eyes, so strong so fast so frequent. But below I could feel him, his fingers digging deep, my back bruised against the mortar walls of the pumphouse. He was a persistent boy. I had to push him. What else I could do. Did I shout? Did I make a scene? I just pushed him. Into the weedy pond that turned green in the daylight and sparkled in the night. That very pond where he taught me to swim.

That night he didn’t come back. Nothing out of the usual. The next day his body came up floating, his feet clothed in green slippery weeds. His red checkered shirt couldn't contain his pale stomach bulging out.

And to God shall we all return. Strange souls roam the monsoon dusks. The pond was accursed anyways, offlimits at noons, dusks and later. He should not have gone swimming there.

Let’s not dwell on it now. After all, it was tragic. He won. As they kept his body on display my eyes were stuck at the fifty paise coin they balanced on his puffy stomach...

Whatever.

Tomorrow is the mailanchi** night. Tonight I am sneaking into the mosque graveyard. It’s not that far from here. And I am not afraid of ghosts. I want one leaf of the henna plant growing by his grave to colour my hands. I have heard that the plant has grown really well.

After all, Babu was a nice boy.

*annachi: derogatory for Tamil migrant labour
**mailanchi: mehendi

last night

2011-05-19T11:00:00.002+05:30

Last night’s nightmare was of unknown paths
And of heavy grasses that grew in them
And of a lone traveller
From behind,
closing by,
His torch light, elusive,
for the certain serpent waiting,
Waiting.

Last night’s nightmare was also of a flood
And of anonymous boat travellers
To destinations etched in twilight,
That we waded through to but we never reached,
And,
The doorways to the brown-tiled houses,
Yet, were dry.

But this morning’s memory was of a voice
A foreign tongue lengthened at the hisses
Like in the old talcum-powder-cap-and-string telephone games;
Of the cold December nights
swerved in serpentine meanders;
This morning’s longing
was
for a rain.

speaking of us

2011-05-12T05:52:00.000+05:30

We speak,
First,
Of the marks on our fingernails
Dotted, white, uneven,
And we speak of the good luck to come.

We speak,
Then,
Of the itches on our palms
Gnawing in,
restless, as we speak,
of the fortune soon to be acquired.

We speak,
Again,
Of the twitches on our noses,
(your nose turned redder when we fought)
And of all those who
Might be
Bitching about us.

And then we speak again
The tickles, the dead feet, the fatigued arms,
The coldness on our hands,
The warmth of my breath on your chin,
The wriggling sweat drop ...

We speak
First to our silences
The exhausted luck
The wayward fortune
Your silences about me
Mine about you

the dream algorithm

2011-05-06T05:33:00.008+05:30

what do you do when you wake up to a nightmare at 4 in the morning?
Think of complex things that might intrigue you, perhaps... like something that makes you feel like you just dreamt of your girlfriend and a female friend of yours!!

So that's what I imagined; and then imagine which of the Big Bang Theory characters might have had that dream!!!

and here is the algorithm

dedicated to all the BBT fans

summer burns

2011-05-05T00:46:00.001+05:30

Nostalgia is a strange feeling
Being as it is –
The dampness of cockroach shit
And pages eaten at the edges
A few letters gone missing
And the dark brown spots at the spine
Of a yet-unopened book;

Being as it is
The reach of shadows
Through the window mesh
On a night spread out on a bamboo mat
Lived out in white clad souls
Of hairpin curves.

Nostalgia is a strange feeling
Cracking in, as they are,
As an afternoon of unfinished sights.

A lone sweat drop, a burning eye

translation of Chimmi Chimmi

2011-04-14T11:42:00.006+05:30

This song from Urumi , written in Ernad dialect of Malayalam, has been haunting me so much this morning that this is the least I could do – transliterate and translate.
One word is incorrect, if you can help! Also, please improve the translation

Chimmi chimmi minni thilangunna varoli kannenekku
The twinkling twinkling lustrous eyes are mine

Poovarasu pootha kannakane anjunna chelanekku
The curvy portia tree shape is mine

Nada nada enna nada kandal theyyam mudiyazhikkum
Behold my gait and even the theyyam dancer removes his mane

Nokku
See
Vellikinnam thulli thulumbunna chelu
The silver-pot-tumbling shape

Kolathiri vazhunna naattile valiyakkarane kandu kothikkum
A young man of Kolathiri’s realm lures my eyes

Illathulloru amba thoranganum (?) kanda kaliyakkum
The .... of my illam makes fun of me

Samoothiri kolathe aanunga(l) mullappoo vasana ettu mayangum
The men of Zamorin’s land get high on jasmine flowers

Valiya penne kannezhuthikkan varmukil odi varum
The rain clouds rush to kajal my eyes

Pooram podi paareettum
The festival dust is risen

Poorakkali aadeettum
The festival dances done

Nokkiyilla nee
You didn’t look at me

Ennittum
Yet

Nee enthe mmmmmmmmm
Why didn't you .......

Chimmi chimmi minni thilangunna varoli kannenekku
Poovarasu pootha kannakane anjunna chelanekku
Nada nada enna nada kandal theyyam mudiyazhikkum
Nokku
Vellikinnam thulli thulumbunna chelu

Vidilla vidilla vidilla vidilla...
I won’t leave you, I won’t leave you...

Poovam penne kolachu vechoru karimbu villathe padathalava
Oh the commander of (I have no clue :])

Valeduthu veeshalle jnanathu murikkum poovaakkum
Don’t sway your sword, I will turn it into a flower

Alli malar kolakkadavilayi aluthi pennungal kandu pidikkum
By the flowery pond the women might discover us

Naattu nadapp othavar nammale kettu nadappakkum
They will marry us off according to the custom

Enthellam paadeettum
Whatever I sing

Mindathe mindeettum
How much ever I talk without talking

Mindi yilla nee
You never said a word

Ennittum nee enthe hmmmmmmmm...
Yet why didn't you ....

Chimmi chimmi minni thilangunna varoli kannenekku
Poovarasu pootha kannakane anjunna chelanekku
Nada nada enna nada kandal theyyam mudiyazhikkum
Nokku
Vellikinnam thulli thulumbunna chelu

Cross Connections

2011-04-11T09:49:00.008+05:30

Once upon a time
By once upon a path
There was an old house.

An old house,
Double-storeyed
With wooden windows,
A few rooms below,
Just two above.

In the courtyard were rusting metres, faulty metres, unused wires
A few smashed tubelights, inexplicable graves of unexpected goods
A few bricks here and there
And you always wondered the whereabouts
Of the brat of this house;
On the walls were charcoal writings,
A few thick lines of oil
Such a brat he should be –
All I saw was “Down Down”.

In the drawing room where horlicks was served
When marriages were fixed
And black tea, when death was mourned,
A spectacled man sat
Matching digits, tallying lifestyles
Penning connections, manning cuts;
Further in, in the grandmother room*,
Desks after desks were busy
Joining the arcs, spanning the geographies, drawing the territories
Of the intricacies of her bosom;
You often wondered why she was so quiet,
Why she never interrupted
In those bad translations in foreign tongues.

We had often gone that way
In summers when the evening birds were the loudest
As they mosaic-ed the gravel path from their trees
Or in monsoons
When the asbestos shed for those in waiting
Amplified the drenched complaints.

Once upon a time
By once upon a path
There was a KSEB% office;
And you wondered where the kids in their angst left
And the grandmother dried withered and powdered away
And all you had were piles of brick
That would be sold
To another house in the making.

* thallappera : the central room of a house, literally "the old woman house:; supposed to be the core of the house

% Kerala State Electricity Board

the toy car

2011-03-08T15:45:00.003+05:30

In my sixth year my father bought me
A toy car
Metallic red, with opening doors;
Soon I started driving it, over,
Over the hills and valleys
Blanketed over my parents’ sleeping hours,
By the alleys of the secret pleasures under their bed;
and in the waking hours
through the slums and minefields and quarries and wastelands
spread over the kitchen,
war-torn over a stray hair in the lunch curry.

It was difficult,
Driving the car into my dreams,
In my dream-house I forgot to build a parking space;
The many trains I boarded and got down
And got lost and cried and entered the forest,
The many strangers, those with beards and those in helicopters
Those who pickled children and those who drank their bones,
Everyone revolted against the car;
Worse still, the ironing girl, my lonely neighbour,
Cried at a protracted farewell prospect.

It was even more difficult, driving it to the school,
Batman was generous enough with a self portrait,
Superman with four,
The real-man from the senior class
Found it worth five cluster-bomb marbles.

I might have travelled thousands of miles,
Indeed I had to go on a few light year missions too;

But one day the war broke out in our drawing room...
Of the many collateral damage,
A tea cup a curtain rod and an old wall photo,
My car,
Metallic red, with opening doors,
Eloped with the ironing girl.

Caging who? Pinjar and some woes

2011-03-07T23:42:00.013+05:30

As part of Women’s Day, which falls on the 8th of March, a group of students screened Pinjar, a 2003 movie directed by Chandra Prakash Dwivedi, and starring Urmila Matondkar, Manoj Bajpai, Sanjay Suri and Priyanshu Chatterjee.

As I got out of the hall, even when I could hear the often chirpy high pitched and at times hesitant reticent “it was nice”s, I was aware of my own discomfort of the movie, a feeling of “but…”.

Not to say that the movie was really long, the songs too many and staccato-ing the narrative, often causing much ruffles among the audience, and the acting extremely what some of my friends would better understand as “nyakamo” (oh, that horrendous sequence of brother-sister affection in the beginning of the movie!!). But my discomfort was definitely not due to such pervasive factors, but something a little more specific. May be I can note some of the more conscious ones here:

1) The movie, consistently, dilutes down the central message of the movie – that women are often reduced to pawns in the battle between communities, that rape and abduction are more of a political nature than can be drowned in the interpersonal drama that ensues between Paru (Urmila) and Rashid (Bajpai) in the movie. The movie concentrates on this interpersonal aspect thereby effectively watering down its own stand that women are often unheard and their honour in itself is a grand conceit of this gameplan.

2) While the abduction of Paru is real and her sufferings naggingly long like a perpetual sob (especially when it is by Urmila), that this very act is retribution is just a narration, a story telling by Rashid. This then already skews our sympathy, may be fair enough for the movie, entirely towards Paru, which is then to be compensated by Rashid’s good conduct. It is this unevenness of the movie that then works against itself, which lead to reducing the political question into an interpersonal melodrama.

3) This unevenness is there in the way the Partition violence is picturised too. While partition brought out unpredictable cruelties in both the Muslim and Hindu communities, this movie, by virtue of the claim to a specific location, squarely manages to depict Muslims as the perpetrators (the movie is set in Punjab). While it might be historically true that in Muslim majority areas they were indeed the inhuman and vice versa, one cannot be blind to the fact that memories are formed in stranger ways and more encompassing ways than the details of location would allow us. And that unconscious memory when evoked in this particular manner in contemporary India, can only serve to put the minority community in the defensive – a community which is forever thumped down in India by the constant demand to own up the Partition of the country.

Worse, the movie is even counter factual and only serving the nationalist commonsense, which is what has forced the Muslim community to live in shame for the last six decades in India. This commonsense works by drawing a binary of secular/communal. History is slightly more subtle than this binary could afford. Pakistan was, first of all, not solely a Muslim League initiative. In fact, until 1946 Muslim League was not even sure if they wanted a separate nation or just a autonomous unit within the Indian federation. Second, Congress members were not the ever peaceful and secular ones as the movie shows. There have been historical reasons why Congress was considered to be a Hindu party, the least of which is their constant opposition in legislative councils to acts which would have benefitted Muslim peasants in Bengal and Punjab, and elsewhere, which is what gave Muslim League their weapon against the Congress. Third, Muslim League was not the sole Muslim party in India or in Muslim Majority provinces. There were Jamiatul Ulama, Ahrars, and Khaksars, all of which consistently sided with the Congress but were much more regressively communalist and yet were given the ‘secular’ garb by the Congress. Thus when Muslim League had women squad and also women speakers, these women were forced not to appear and address public crowd by these ‘secularists’. Fourth, the idea of Pakistan was equally supported by communist parties. Fifth, Muslim League itself, as a rhetoric, often worked through the discourse of subaltern resistance against landlords, unlike the ‘secular’ Muslim affiliates of Congress whose arguments were mostly religious. And, sixth, only one by third of all the Muslims in India ever went to Pakistan. Ayesha Jalal’s book Self and Sovereignty is an excellent account of these subtleties of Muslim politics in India prior to Partition.

Thus, while the movie pays lip service to secularism, it is at the level of emotions deeply anti-Muslim.

4) This movie, like many other movies with Muslim characters, often posits a trajectory of redemption for the Muslim character solely dependent on his acting against the main trends of his community. Thus we see Rashid’s family is for attacking the Hindus, the entire community is in arms, arsonists, looters and rapists, while Rashid has to seek for the redemption of his self through acts of individual penance. This is in tune with the ruling discourse which victimises Muslims and constantly keeps them in a position of self explaining and in need of proving oneself. The redemption, the nod of approval, should always come from the majority community.

I think Khamosh Pani, another 2003 movie, directed by Sabiha Sumar, would have been a better movie to screen. But ya…

Cold : Haiku for March 6

2011-03-06T15:17:00.000+05:30

Distant worlds away,
Alone, the long tailed bird sings
The wintry haiku

shared with Haiku Heights

Mark Zuckerberg and the Ecstasy of Judging

2011-03-05T17:34:00.007+05:30

A single point on The Social Network

There is something empowering about The Social Network, the semi-biographical flick on Mark Zuckerberg. And that empowerment is, in my opinion, due to sole fact that we are left at the chair of the jury, high browed, ready to twirl them as we pronounce our judgement on the youngest billionaire of the world.

What can be the only emotion, fleeting though it is, elating nevertheless, than of judging the greats of our very own period, just so that we don’t sink into a depression that we, while in our twenties, were still testing the effects of cracker induced tremors on ants that lived under the deodar at your courtyard, while some others there were working their way out to become billionaires, incidentally ofcourse? Judges we are, and as from an old newspaper article we read, always in love with his heels when we are confronted with Achilles.

This would, at first sight, the one I would go by for want of anything better, would explain the particular format of the film, where the biography is obsessively cut to the inquiry room. While these scenes place us at the jury’s seat, the cut to the mode of omnipresent narrator equips us to be in the role of the judge.

And incidentally, while the movie is hailed as a movie masterpiece of the new century, the format of judging, that of placing the audience in the seat of the judge, is not a first. I was immediately reminded of the book on A.R.Rahman by Kamini Mathai (The Musical Storm), a book which the musical legend himself categorically stated that it is not an authoritative biography. There again, the format is the same – you can’t be a legend unless you make a few enemies. And as I blog this, I am listening to his songs. Unusual, for I always find music to be disturbing my thoughts. But not now, and that might be the message of The Social Network - that you always love to be close, very close indeed, to a legend.

nocturnal question

2011-03-05T12:12:00.002+05:30

At times I see him in the front,
Limping deliberately,
Slowing down that my paths cross his,
And at times he stalks,
My feet weighed down by a sulking pulse...
Death,
What road-sign do you seek
between syllables
in the mossy bricklanes
of this blanketed hushed whispered
night?

Dramatis Personae: On a trip to Delhi

2011-03-03T07:54:00.007+05:30

53 hours on train; 16 hours in Delhi. An excerpt from: Day one, Train to Delhi.

Dramatis Personae:

In the beginning: 5 Hindi speakers, all of who has gotten on from Bangalore, and therefore were there before me. One of them, the guy in blue t-shirt is very jovial. Sings along Rafi and Kishore, smiles at me and passersby. Is forever cracking jokes with the other four. I being on Side Upper, have a good view of all of them, and a good distance too.

After one of them got a call: The Hindi speaker in pink shirt is actually a Kannadiga.

Two naps later: The Blue T-shirt asks the one sitting opposite: (all conversations translated from Hindi, not very reliable) : “so many of our soldiers on the border. The temperature is -25C. Who wants to live like that? Everyone wants to live a happy life. But a bunch of youngsters think otherwise. And so all those people have to stand guard there. Tell me, is it written in Koran that you can kill people?”
The other guy: “Qur’an says that we can fight for our rights. Now, every place every religion have their black sheep. Now let us take the example of Kashmir...”

Then: Three of them are brothers. Visibly. And they are from Kashmir.

“...anywhere else the Army would say a sorry. But not in Kashmir. “

Hours later: the blue T-shirt guy distributes a card. It’s of a medical shop in Thrissur. On the other side is the portrait of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.

I ask him: “Do you work in Kerala?”
“No. I am from Bangalore. Are you from Kerala?”
“Yes”, I say, but quick to add, “but now from Hyderabad.”
Rest of his conversation with me was in Malayalam. Name, purpose of the trip, where in Kerala, the beauty of Kerala...
“So where are you from?”
He laughs.
“Darjeeling?” (I had heard him speak in a tongue which was similar to Bengali, but not Oriya or Assamese as far as I could understand)
He laughs. A hi5 with the Kashmiri eldest brother. “why, I look like a Nepali?” Laughs again. “Yes, Darjeeling.”

The eldest Kashmiri brother shows more interest when I mention Kerala. He turns to me and says, “Oh, Kerala? There are a lot of them in our place. Around 800 from Kerala, during the apple season, in our place alone”

Sounded incredible to me. Kashmir! Who dares!

The brothers themselves are in apple business. He gives me his card. Fruit merchants from Shopian. “You might find it useful. In the apple season a lot of people from your place come. They go around in villages, collecting apples. Yet, people think Kashmir is a dangerous place. It’s only as dangerous as it is for Kashmiris. There is no hatred for others.”
The blue T-shirt guy interrupts, “But my bag was deliberately run over by a bus, the very first time in Kashmir. The driver even turned back and mocked at me!”
“See, it’s highly possible he didn’t even know how to drive. If one person hurts you in Kashmir, ten will stand by you. Kashmiris are like people of the south, helpful, calm.”

I turn to the Blue-T shirt, “So you are from Art of Living (AoL)?”
“Yes, I am a teacher there.”
A few hours pass by. The train has reached Bhopal. A clean shaven, 30 something guy in blue sweaters, formal trousers, come and fill the Side Lower. By now, I was with the group. The TTE comes not much later.
TTE: “55?”
The AoL guy: “there, in that corner, with a book. Very dangerous person.” Laughs
The formal guy: “What is dangerous about me yaar. We Bhopal people are very saadharan.” He sounded not so amused.
For the first time, the AoL guy appeared slightly disturbed. Earlier, during a phone conversation, he had broken down. But even then there was something easy about it. In half an hour he was back to songs. But this time it looked like he was pricked.
“Sir, I am sorry, I was just joking.”
“It’s ok. You guys have your fun. No issues. Tell me, now that you have called me dangerous, which is this place of yours that is so great?”
“Oh, I am from Gwalior sir”. He can only be lying.

Dramatis Personae: A Kannadiga, three Kashmiris, a formal guy from Bhopal, a Malayalee,and a universal citizen.

movies on middle east : what it doesn't say

2011-02-27T09:51:00.013+05:30

This is a response to the article which appeared on TIME webpage which claims to give a crash course on the Middle East:

The movies that TIME article recommends are : Omar Mukhtar: The Lion of the Desert, The Battle of Algiers, Fire in Babylon/Lagaan, Cuba and Hamburger Hill.

Some points that are worth knowing:

1) The triangle Omar Mukhtar-Gaddafi-people’s movement is very tense as none of it fit into each other properly. Omar Mukhtar, the leader of resistance against the Fascist Imperialist Italy, was a desert warrior and a Sanusi. Sanusis were Islamists. The movie Omar Mukhtar ends with the scene in which a little boy comes and picks up Omar Mukhtar’s fallen spectacles and runs away. This little boy, it was claimed, was Gaddafi. Thus Gaddafi was touted as the inheritor of the Omar Mukhtar legacy. Yet Gaddafi is no Islamist. In fact, Gaddafi is part of an earlier wave of Arab revolutions – the Nasserite-Arab Nationalist revolutions, which again, like an irony of history, started from Egypt in the Arab world (actual beginning is in Kemalist Turkey though). And under Gaddafi, Libya was renamed from the United Kingdom of Libya to Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamhiriyya (Jamhiriyya, or Jamhooriyya is an Arabic word meaning “Republic”). So the inheritor of the Islamist tradition was a Socialist. And now, Gaddafi is accusing Al Qaeeda (along with many others) of formenting trouble in Libya. Gaddafi even warned that Libya will become an Islamic Republic if the protests against him succeed.
Muhammad Asad’s Road to Mecca has some interesting firsthand accounts on the Libyan war of Independence. And it’s an awesome read.

2) Battle of Algiers depicts the oppressive French regime in Algeria, the resistance to it by armed fringe groups and the more popular uprising. But this is no introduction to modern Algeria. The present Algeria is caught in a civil war between the Arab Nationalist-Socialist National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Islamists.

3) The other movies mentioned in the article have nothing to do with the Middle East. Cricket doesn’t have takers anywhere in Middle East. UAE and Morocco have cricket teams, but they hardly count.

So, here are my suggestions for an understanding of contemporary Middle East:

1) The Yacoubian Building
On the underbelly of the "prosperous" Egypt.

2) Paradise Now
A meditation on the Israel-Palestine Conflict

3) Under the Bombs

A mother goes searching for her son in the bombed south Lebanon. Belongs partly to the road-movie genre. Unsubtle. Yet worth watching.

4) Caramel aka Sukar Banaat
Of everyday life of five women in Beirut, Lebanon. Very aesthetically done.

5) Syriana
On the politics of oil and fundamentalism

And since the TIME has indicated a Vietnam connection - Hamburger Hill - I suggest a better movie to watch, which connects Europe to the Middle East and Vietnam, set in the period of the Vitenam war and the Bloody Munich episode - The Baader Meinhoff Complex

Haiku for Feb 26

2011-02-26T10:06:00.002+05:30

I, ephemeral,
flutter of an evening sky,
high, aloof, aloft...

Haze : Haiku for Feb 25

2011-02-25T09:56:00.000+05:30

And thats how we see
The evenings by the mornings
A few hours’ lifetime

a few things on I am Number 4

2011-02-25T09:23:00.004+05:30

I hear populations simmering around the world, I hear revolutions calling, I see edifices coming down as if they were slowly surely eaten from inside likes the ants of Persia (Remember, ‘We Iranians are like ants, you see mighty buildings tumble down one fine day, for we have been silent and been eating away from the inside’ from Muhammad Asad’s Road to Makkah). There is a war world over, and we take the side of the underdogs, the one who is just armed with stones, taking on the might of tanks and all that science provide for homicide.

Avatar worked on this sympathy (along with other factors, which includes the more difficult part of making a movie visually convincing). I am Number 4 attempts to work on this – and only this – factor.

Ok, I am Number, as a story, is quite appealing. A very small number of refugees from an outside planet, armed only with daggers, in hiding in the universe, against the bad guys equipped with very aesthetic high-tec weaponry. And why should we the meekly inhabitants of earth be concerned? For the bad guys’ next target is earth, and that will happen soon after the nine refugees are sentenced to eternity of the elements – a grey pixellated ash to be precise. And, the bad guys’ are not colonisers, so forget thinking of getting employed by them in lower end offices. They are ideologues of scorched earth policy – destroy everything, flatten it out, rubble it up.

But it is exactly this part, this only part which might have made the movie appealing, which is missing from D.J. Caruso’s movie. The film is a much shorter version of the book, but where it has shortened it also falls short. There is no rendering of what happened in that alien planet. All that we know is what we said. But if it is just said, then why a movie?

And the more human element in the story is the part of Sam Goode. His father has gone missing without a trace. And he is called “UFO” and jeered at by his friends, all because he believes aliens to be real. When his belief is transformed into knowledge, when he witnesses the Number 4’s power and the latter confesses about him being an alien – that is the only poignant part of this movie which is otherwise a stupid special effects show, and, it fails to be even a spectacle.

The special effects are at times laughable and all the time kiddish. They could have avoided those alien machine guns with red bullets, which looked like a giant version of ‘Made in China’ toys.

Ok, now the more important part. What is with endogamy and children’s movie? Why can’t a vampire be with a human? Why can’t an alien be with a human, especially now that the alien has so well disguised himself not just in human shape but also in human emotions? This insistence on racial purity with “your father didn’t die so that you can be with a girl”, this is neo-con ideology fanged. Luckily, this movie will not convince many.

Haiku for Feb 23

2011-02-23T18:35:00.000+05:30

We made a promise
Against the flowing river
Unknown to ourselves

the many deaths in 7 Khoon Maaf

2011-02-23T12:04:00.004+05:30

Hi All, I have blurred out spoilers as much as possible, and made it metaphorical as much as possible. I strongly recommend you to watch the movie and then read this; otherwise it wouldn't make much of a sense

Susanna is not just another name.

For the starters, Susanna is not a name that is pervasive in Bollywood. It reeks of exoticism, as that which is not natural by being the extremely natural (for isn’t that what we mean by “exotic”?), as with whose name aberrations don’t stand out. For Susanna itself is an aberration is a time of self-orientalism. It is not a name that lends itself to a natural Indian-ness. There is something foreign about it. To pursue further, Susanna, atleast for some of us who is aware of the Malayalam movie Susanna, is also a name that has been in the popular media, easily identified with a promiscuity, a sexual promiscuity that is anything but just physical; one that is deeply emotional, one that is caught in the intricacies of the female psyche, one is that is embroiled in a drama of longing and belonging, of partings and partitions. Vishal Bharadwaj has added so much to the Ruskin Bond story Susanna’s Seven Husbands; yet Susanna remains Susanna.

It is important where Susanna’s saga begins. And it is important where Susanna is located. In Pondicherry (mind you, not Puduchery), where the vestiges of a foreign rule remained well after our celebrated Independence – that taint we never acknowledge, that strip of land whose history is never easily fused into a pre-/post 1947 binary. Pondicherry is a blindspot in the saga of nationalism. A blindspot that is characterised in our literature as that place where the nationalists fought the foreigners and yet finally fled to the foreign lands (like in M.Mukundan’s Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil, translated as “On the Banks of the Mayyazhi”) or as the place where 14th July, the Bastille Day, is still celebrated with French Tricolour, or as the place of the double-citizens.

Susanna’s saga begins with the death of her father. The Christian father, the Hindu mother. The Hindu mother is long absent, and according to atleast one review I read, the reason for Susanna’s aberrant nature. The Christian father’s death can, to me, be only read metaphorically. And that metaphor is that of the final coming of the Indian state. Susanna’s saga, I read, is a saga of the many deaths and murders of the Indian state. Rather, it also sounds like the very author-sanctioned meaning of the movie.

Susaan’s first husband Edwin Rodrigues is not just another military man. He is that epitome of state that acts against its own people. He is who has been awarded for gallantry in recognition of his role in Operation Blue Star. (Notice, how when those words are pronounced, the camera lingers on the Sikh militarymen present in the crowd, as if they tell us the audience ‘look, we are here’, as if to remind us all that this is a political saga by authorial intentions).

If the Operation Blue Star hero is left to be devoured by a dark cannibal of unknown pedigree, the subsequent husbands are equally interesting, for their life with Susanna as for their death. Enter Jimmy the Rockstar. What exactly is Jimmy’s undoing? Jimmy’s career represents that phase in Indian history which is characterised by what is called “the economies of desire” (Aditya Nigam and Nivedita Menon), the phase where the centre lost its monopoly of dissemination of information, and alternative cultures (symbolised by T-Series, or what Peter Manuel calls “The Cassette Revolution”) sprang up, but, as in the case of the rockstar at the fringes, often unavailable to a national audience as a whole. It is therefore important to note the scene in which Susanna’s household is watching Jimmy on Doordarshan. Jimmy is the appropriating state himself, finally consumed by the market of desire, and hence killed.

Wasiullah Khan is Freud’s Turk himself – resigned to death but frustrated often by one’s sexual prowess, and therefore in constant need to prove oneself on the female body, marking his fangs of desire in the circular cleft on the waxy female self. Wasiullah is the poet under the shades of chinar in the boiling Kashmir. He is a poet - sensual, calm and softspoken. But home is where the state put its minority in the defensive. The Uniform Civil Code was all about discovering the perfect soft spot that can bleed from within. As much as one sides with the story of the doubly victimised Muslim woman, the need to distance oneself from the discourse of the rightwing regarding Muslim women has been amply realized.

Nicolai Vronsky, the Russian spy, also denotes a change in India’s foreign policy. The Vajpayee regime, which supervised the second Pokhran, also denoted a change from our pro-Russian to pro-American stance. When Vronsky gets killed *********, one is however, unconvinced. This is also the only part of the movie where it loses its episodic character. Keemat Lal, the local subservient policeman, is now an important man with the intelligence. The death of the Russian imagination in our nation is easily elided with the rise of a new state culture of vigilantism, and also notes in popular culture a phase where the state is no more in opposition. Keemat Lal is he who is the state sleeping with what was considered the opposition to the state. Keemat Lal is that which denotes the whole scale appropriation of the oppositional practices into the very discourse of state itself, the recruitment of the subaltern for the statist projects, the new knowledge economy of native informants guised as scholars.

Susanna is ailing after the death of Keemat Lal. Tarafdar, the Bengali alternative (how much of an alternative?) medicine guy brings her back to life, **********. And that is his undoing, for which he deserves death.

But the final death, that is metaphysical. Jesus – the original martyr who gave up himself for others’ salvation. The radio spelling out the Taj hostage drama. The state’s salvation is premised today on this modern giving up of the suicide bomber. The suicide bomber explodes in an act of metaphysical warfare, so that the state survives. Susanna is that suicide bomber. And the state survives after its many death, as the spectre of the suicide bomber lends it life.

haiku feb 22

2011-02-22T10:38:00.001+05:30

A call to the clouds
Fables woven through the dead
Or to live a lie

bliss

2011-02-21T14:51:00.001+05:30

Fainting lullaby
A drop of morning drizzle
And a few goodbyes

break up

2011-02-21T11:58:00.000+05:30

You can of course walk out
My strangles will not be hard enough to kill you
Nor do I think I will beat you up
For after all, you were always
A stranger.

Though i feel my nerves
Breaking at the ends
Though i feel my head
Compressed from all sides
Though i grasp for words and they go running away
Leaving me with primitive and loud sounds
I know I will not beat you up
For you were
Always
A stranger.
Instead I might bang my head
On the wall
Or on the floor
Make a few cuts
Over the hands you often played
Tiptoe
With your waxy fingers
Or I always boasted
Belonged to a girl.

You can of course walk out
But I don’t promise you smiles
When I see you on streets;
I am not that encompassing
that memories go hiding in my hugs.

Let me also not pretend
That you will forever be welcome
I don’t want to be stamped
By feet trod on rotten leaves
Left in haste by a morning drizzle.

The Citizen

2011-02-19T10:36:00.000+05:30

This day it came as dandruff
Flaking out
Ruffling
Itching
Troubling...
I was afraid
That it might slide down
Unknown to mine eyes
Unrepentant to others’ prejudice
On to my shoulders;
Or
may be
Celebrate its martyrdom
In my afternoon tea.

I didn’t want to take chances
I was wary of
Martyr-
tombs
Erected on my shoulders
Processions that
Erupt from the underthoughts of my ears
Slogan-
chanters
In my phlegmatic throat
Self flagellations
In my dry and bleeding nose.

So I decided
To take refuge in
In the black and white
Of my eye

A newspaper is a nice sight.

This day it came as dandruff
On a lifestyle ad
And it went well
With the morning tea.

the cavemen

2011-02-15T13:10:00.000+05:30

This little bottle will keep us all asleep
Snores won’t wake our bliss
Nor wayward talks, our somnolence

That is how we went to sleep
In this cave
Long ago
Assured that the fires are still burning
And our coins neatly counted and parted

When we woke up
The coins were still there
Our sweaty palms hadn’t put them to rust
Our hungry stomachs led us to the street

Surprise! The dogs were barking at us
The shops were well stocked and luring
We held out the coins but the food was not forthcoming
The shopkeepers had all gone mad
We knew well the groans of our stomach, the glitter of silver
But they seemed to have forgotten
Our rational tongue

And thus we went to the village well
And we walked down the lane sizing our shadows
At the deadend we were fine
Our shadows made it cross

And so is the story of the cavemen
The men who went to sleep
Assured of their treasures
And afraid of their tongues

on roads

2011-02-03T22:49:00.000+05:30

There are journeys and there are journeys of the mind. My longest and the most persistent, the most colourful the most detailed yet the most abstract journeys were English cross country. That was in my 1st standard, or may be a bit earlier. The A3 size English text book I had, had detailed pictures with numbers marked against them, and a box below mentioning the word for the each of the objects depicted. The centre sheet of that book was a picture of a junction, evocative of London, with its red double-decker bus, the names of the shops, the signboards etc. At the same time, it was not a junction of the present either. The picture before me was not the celebrated first world where people queue up to get into buses. And that was the most exciting bit about it. A boy running behind the bus, a few cars which were as soap boxes as our Maruti... it was a curious mix of the unreachable, in time and in space, a mix which was never blended in the first place, and so its allure.

The longest and the most persistent journeys were made with that kid running behind that bus. We have made it to all of those places, the zoo in the north, the beach to the West, some street inscribed in golden letters to the south. The east is where he comes from. The East is where the journey began. I have walked with him by the streets, forayed into the shops and tried to see all the chocolates they had in their glass cases, I have forever wondered who lived in the curtained first floors, have tried talking to the other people comfortable seated in the bus, and have imagined cycling down the bent beyond which the street curled out of our sights.

Back home mind journey is a favourite past time, over the dining table, with the TV ever on but never given much attention, we undertake mind journeys to all directions – the beach to the West, the hills and the dams and the forests to the East, the theme parks to the South and to the relatives in the north. Home, unlike the boy, was not placed a direction. Home was which set the directions. Praise the Lord, many of the mind trips have become a reality sooner or later.

All this about mind travel for a variety of reasons.

Reason 1. My feet have been itching to go somewhere, anywhere. You know, I am one of those souls who have been living out of the same hostel room for the last three years, and the same hostel for the last six years. At times I get tired of it. But even then my patience is quite impressive, even to me.

Reason 2. And because Reason 1. is unfulfilled, I have been turning to means of catharsis. So I have been watching a few road comedies these last few days – Eurotrip, Roadtrip, Sex Drive, and the next in line is Sideways. But they fail to bring in any catharsis. My desire to get away is becoming painfully consuming.

Reason 3. But then I did make a few travels in January. Koottayi (beach),

Tusharagiri (hill, waterfall and forest; but more to north of my house than east),

and Bharathappuzha (river)
.

Reason 4. And as if all this were not enough, I am reading Making History, Drawing territory (Ian J. Barrow, 2003), and the part about route surveyors, those people who had to set out drawing a map making the journey, making pictorial representation of the relief, the dangers, adding notes on their personal experiences, the cartouches, all that stuff is making my feet itch even more.

The journeys I watch are caught in the intricacies and silliness of cross country. An Omni would do, but I’d really love a few hundred miles of ride on a highway.

n.b. Koottayi photo courtesy : Aby
also, pls let me know if you know similar road movies

serendipity

2011-01-03T15:53:00.000+05:30

Ei Ala you have created a paradise
Out of words minted in dreams
Come down and see if you could
Smell the flowers or feel the breeze

Ei Ala, what of a postcard have you made
Out of the most dreary of reality
Step down and see if you could
Spot any children with innocent smile
Any bird with a song not of hate
Any gun that fires just for justice...

Where in your dream layered by soil sun and sky
Did the smoke of vanity escape your sight?

Ala, the spiders here are not of Thaur,
Nor is Truth in fate’s refuge

Christmas reminiscence

2010-12-25T11:20:00.000+05:30

There was a time, years ago, when, on a Christmas day, we feasted on tapioca. It was the winter NSS camp. NSS – National Social Service, a ten day public work that you have to do to qualify for Graduation. There were two other options – NCC (National Cadet Corps) and CSS (Compulsory Social Service). The first one is highly disciplinarian with odd timings and a national camp in which you are made to shit in a hole which is not very deep – there and nowhere else. To risk redundancy, not much of an attraction. CSS on the other hand would mean 30 days of work, with people you don’t know, often in very small groups. Also, the certificate should come from the Panchayat and not the College. Since sadism is a virtue in direct proportion to the level of bureaucracy, it was hardly anything to crave for.

NSS on the other hand would mean the entire final year batch of a college, BAs, BScs, BComs, everyone, would descend on a village, usually away from the highway (the life vein of Kerala) and then would be assigned some work – cutting a canal, a road, etc. The high concentration of workforce, like the case with the cooks and broth, means shifting half a kilo of mud a few metres away would involve four people. Very “social” for sure, and with the distribution among gender very equal, it was of utmost “service” to those who wanted to start, start anew or just savour an already budding “something”.

So, on Dec 25th of 2004, we were in this village in Malappuram District, cutting a road on what was otherwise a narrow stream. The mud was loose and still damp from the waters that ran downstream from the top of the hill. Rains had stopped just a few weeks back. As usual with those camps, we were not the only ones to work. The people from the locality gladly extended their service. The men worked with us, the women constantly kept us refreshed with Tang and Rasna and occasionally coconut water too, and more importantly, they cooked for us all the three meals for us, and was much enthusiastic as their well maintained houses were invaded in hordes. The breakfast was mostly upma, lunch mostly tapioca.

I don’t know how much of each Christmas we carry forward. How many of the caught-unawares and furtive glances and shared dishes meant anything later. I don’t know if we ever associated the strangers of that village, the warmth of their houses, the dampness of the mud and spending nights on benches, with that piece of paper we got at the end of our graduation. Somehow they were unconnected. Issued in the college office by the most mechanical of the staff on the last day of college, it was like the perfect antidote to an emotional goodbye. But then, how many goodbye-s did we say in life? How many and many? How much of each Christmas did we carry forward? Was there a Christmas every year? Or, is the meaning of complacency a deafness a muteness a blindness as life moves on ploughing its way in its ironic creativity?

The 25th of December in 2004 might have been just another day in another year. But as always, it’s what we say that keeps it alive, it’s that we dream what makes it desirable. Christmas stars still look the most attractive in red. Like the one on the corner of the white flag which adorned the way to our college. I don’t know if the flag is still there where it used to be.

remains

2010-12-08T02:05:00.000+05:30

The thought of a dead rat
Wakes me up
From my hurried siesta
Built over the somnolence of
A nauseous baldness.
As drizzles flake in
As in a languorous ball
Over my camouflage jacket,
And fade in over my skin,
I get anxious
To smell out
The remains of my dead
Scattered, God knows,
Over wells and dustbins and the ploughed land
And, no, over the roll-on deo.
As in this drizzle
In this languor between earth and heaven
Will they flow in and wade against my feet,
Or puddle and feed tell-tale beasts,
Or remain, as the elusive wetness
On a tiny patch of melanin?

The holes on the window mesh
Industrious vicious incisive
I still manage to plug them

But where did the rat go?
Where did our dead go?

many steps to a new phone connection

2010-12-02T20:15:00.000+05:30

Get a handset which has cool applications like “Life Tools”

Get it activated “somehow”

It is not giving you much trouble. Just one or two or three messages every morning, which at times can even be as good as an alarm. And you never bother looking through those messages either.

More than 25 days is past. One afternoon you notice that your phone is vibrating too much. You are in a meeting. You wonder how friends have become so fond of you that they message you so much.

You wait eagerly for the meeting to get over, and to read all those messages so full of love. And you see “15 items received. Life Tools”.

You open the application and a message pops up with a red exclamation mark fifteen times – “Corrupted message received. Message deleted.” Mein Gott, all zis ѳime zou hath been corrupt!!

The time then is just 3pm. Since God created (Wo)Man(?) in His image, he shared some of His patience with them too. So it is almost 8:20pm now. For the last 5 hours you have been at the receiving end of atleast 5 items of Life Tools per second. If they were just Tools you might have been a capitalist by now. If they were just Life, you could happily be a seditious poet, if not God the ultimate Monarch Himself. But because it is Life Tools, you remain a hapless customer.

So you decide to coax cajole or beg to Nokia. You call them up. The executive puts you on hold several several times. “There should be an unsubscribe option there.” “no?”

He makes you go through each option of each folder. Waste!

Panacea: “Restore Factory settings.” Should cure everything.

You rate 5 out of 5 for the executive in the electronic assessment that follows. You are bound to be happy.

You realise that your call was not toll-free. You have spent Rs.30+

You “Restore” the phone. It purges you of ALL your contacts. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

And Life Tools are back in action!!!

Call Nokia again. It says, “Working hours are from 9am to 9pm. Please call back during those hours”

You’re killed. But you can never be broken. So you decide to call Vodafone.

Nice chap. Says, “I’ll send you a message. Forward it to 1909”. The message is simple – “START DND”. Nice chap. He could have just told me. But he sent me a message.
Forwards it to 1909. Reply “Your DND is already active”

And the messages keep keep keep coming. You are punnily patient for 24 (!!!!) hours.

And then you decide to get a new phone connection.

QUITE TIRING, ISN’T IT?

phone-man-ia

2010-11-16T15:47:00.000+05:30

I didn’t know when
My phone had turned a man
Rumbling itself inside
At every call that never rang
Trembling within and screaming aloud, as it sits before the computer,
By the memory of its pretty fights.
I didn’t know how it caught on my frustration
And learnt how to receive and refuse signals
When
In the maps of its Unconscious
A terrible bitter palpitating war was fought.
I didn’t know how it learnt
To forgive
When messages get undelivered
And to be in denial
When messages never meant reached its mate.
Neither do I know how it learnt
To forget
And strew contacts along its way
Losing itself in busy trains,
Or cracking against mossy walls in a bitter fight,
Or, as a poem, just fade away
Along the corridors of forced oblivion.

jars and men : incomplete

2010-09-22T01:00:00.001+05:30

This night speaks of things I shouldn’t have done. Like held your hands on a drunken night; like stubbed that last cigarette before it was over… You told me things do happen at times like that, the time when you craved for cherries and then plucked the faintly rose one from your backyard, and then in all innocence of a wet tongue took that first sweet bite; oh yes, it turned out to be sour. Do you remember we use to joke so much, about the jars in our storehouses, in the dark corridors of our homes, where, in the unaware days of our parents when they sat, as the estate prices rose up and fell, as the mangoes bloomed and wilted, as the wells went dry and then flourished, we, in the dark corridors of pickled jars, (or were they cherries?) we exchanged a few warm drops of each other, and then we made fun of the jars, as they jilted and jolted, and rubbed against your hair, my shirt, hit against each other, made their little dances, as the estate prices rose and fell, as the mango tree was the family’s and not the family’s, as the canals were filled up and then made roads and then one the plantains appeared on what was road, as days still sped by and then all the known faces were unknown and then new faces became known and when cigarette stubs were no more flavoured and when your eyelashes got even more darker and when your dupattas appeared and then disappeared….?
The day you went out to pick that cherry, I don’t know where I was. I should have asked you not to do that. The thorns were very strong. What I didn’t tell you was that I too had tried that, in a summer, when the children from the neighborhood had stolen all the gooseberries and my mother said I was not man enough, I too had ventured, to pluck the cherries in my backyard, and then squeeze them in my mouth. For, if my mouth is not black enough, shouldn’t they be atleast red enough? If my tears are not manly, then atleast my blood ought to be!
I didn’t know what those jars meant either, than as siren signals for my sisters in the house, for my mother as she spoke in her siesta and her pillow smelled of her ever widening womb without giving any more boys, jars as sirens may be for men in the making. The first I pushed one of the jars and it splattered on the cemented ground before descending in the slowest slow motion possible, and then it hit the ground and then bloomed into red oil and dark stains which will then remain there forever, that particular day I know I was sneaking in a magazine there with a coverpage of a naked back obscured only by a perfume bottle that stood as a jar between me and the warm flush inside me.

to my love, in a raining dark night

2010-09-16T20:19:00.000+05:30

Let me think of a line that will capture you. Capture you not in its words, but in its very voice, as they roll out of me. Capture you, not in their design nor in their alphabets, but as my hands twirl at times to the right, at times to the left as I lose languages to your memory. Capture you, not in the pages, but in my mind as I force myself in this haze of smoke, as a sepia photograph etched somewhere between longing, belonging and alienation.

Let me find where in this rain is that drop which will then become your eyes. Let me also find in this powercut night a candle which will then be light which you so cast upon me. Let me also find in this messy room of mine the finest imperfection for all the indefiniteness that you are to me. Let me then gaze upon the sky and see if I can glimpse the eternity I so wish for myself when I am with you. Let me also screen the rattles and rustles of this raining night if I can hear that which can then be that laugh of yours each time you turn yourself to my baby. Let me then dive deep into the earth and beyond all the mud there is find a stream which will then be your teardrops each time I act like a baby. Let me also seek in this night the phantom lights of lunatics and see if anywhere in them I can catch the minutest glimpse of the mad man you make me. Let me also flow with these drops to streams to canals to rivers to ancient cities and see if in any of the ancient rocks there is etched your dimple which confuses all my sense of time in what seems like late in the night.

Let me then write this line. The first letter let the lightning bring as a warning. The next, let the thunder bring as an encouragement to go ahead. The next let the rain bring as hope. And the very last, the very last which will bring alive the light you are to me, let that letter be brought by you yourself; for I know no word will complete you if you are not there.

the three discourses

2010-09-07T03:53:00.000+05:30

You turn to the clock and say, “I am just a mute spectator, you go on doing your job.” The second hand and minute hand, as they go on in their mechanical tread, say, “Well, this is how it is. It is supposed to go on. For time is the truth.”

But what will happen if the hour-hand turns a hysteric, and asks, “Why should I move when you ask me to? Why am I who you say I am?”

to a trapped friend

2010-09-04T01:08:00.000+05:30

My friend

The last time you wrote to me, you told me you were trapped in your body

What to say,

I think I am trapped in this mind, that I wish I could just not be me

That I wish I were stronger

That I could forget

That I won’t cry over people

That my heartbeats won’t hurry when my lips slow down

That my hands shall not shiver when my heart is strong

That my room doesn’t have to smell of smoke because I am afraid it might betray the phlegm-smelling loneliness

My friend

Do you think there is a life after death?

And that we shall be punished, you and me,

For not getting the scheme right?

I’m told hell is a red place

The veins on my wrist are green

One day if someone comes back and tells me hell is not all that red

My wrist shall turn red

maps

2010-08-29T00:24:00.001+05:30

dedicated to Askar, my anchor in Valanchery, who, as is the fate of our land, has migrated to Gulf.

When he was a kid he used to play this game with his father. In the long afternoons of Ramzan, both of them would sit gazing at the world map.

“Laos”, his father would say, always taking care not to look at the map at all, not to betray the direction at all, staring at the yellow walls or at the window. Beyond that window the desert wind blew in a long wail.

He would run his finger all over the map. He would at times furtively cast a glance at the corner of his father’s gaze. Father would still be looking at the directionless world beyond the window. His immigrant eyes would in those moments be immune to the compactness of the map, wandering forever in the grains of sand that hit against the French window, seeking to locate the sand particles that caught in between the window railings.

Maps confused him a lot. They bewildered him in their rhymes and alliterations, in their curves and straight lines. He would touch each continent and try to catch their smell. Did they smell of chocolate or tea? Where was that dry yellow perforated smell in father’s mouth coming from, the one he so hated each time his father kissed him? Where were the hills? Certain names induced in him a thirst, certain others caused a pricking sensation on the back of his hand. In such moments he kept staring at the veins there. Green veins. Why are the lines on the map black? Can’t they be green or blue? At times his lower left abdomen ached as his father went on insistently with his countdown. Why had he so much to pee?

In hindsight, in a desert a map means so many things. They reassure you of some order in its madness. They induce smells, tastes. They remind you of changing times, like his father’s countdown. They remind you of an urgency even when the wail outside goes on, howling its way in. It consoles you, upsetting the eternity of the deep remorse raging outside.

Not here.

Here, as it rains with thunder and lightning, maps lost all meanings. Roads turned to canals one evening, and endless streams of water drowned the particularly tall blade of grass, the stone with a sharp angle, the point on the road to his house where gravels formed some kind of a face on the ground, the small opening between two stones where he had once seen a snake wriggle in, the small chunk of concrete leftover from the joint neighborhood project,…

An immigrant plays with maps, directions and time. At home as it rains, as it thunders, as it gets humid, as they sweat, they never found the time to play with maps. It might be that immigrant’s fascination that once his father was back home for good, their plantain grove’s watering canals got stranger, at times straight, at times taking weird turns; at times water flooding their way sideways as the canal took unexpected ascent. He would sit with his school atlas all day long, though he had passed out from school many years back. He would try remembering the smell of chocolates, coffee, the perforated yellow odour of his father. His father did not want to kiss him anymore. He remembered him going redder on face and balder. One day, from his house he saw chains spread across the grove. That day, he remembers, his father came in quite angry, and he was still sitting with his school atlas. His father came up to him, his eyes red, the sweat from his forehead should have been burning his eyes. His father pulled the atlas from him and tore it into pieces.

When the school atlas was no more there, he tried making map out of human beings. How distant was he to this boy, this girl, his teacher, the man he saw the other day on the bus, the auto driver who charged him no extra, the insurance agent who wanted for him a bright future? He drew circles in a notebook, one circle for each human being he thought of. Where were they overlapping, where were they separate? He coloured each circle, green, yellow, blue, red. He shaded some, for he was not sure. Like the tea seller who sold him tea. He knew his father but not him. How did those circles meet each other, did they ever meet each other? His listed down all his potential girlfriends – the girl in the house which had yellow flowers lining the path which led to it, the girl who called him her “bestest”, the girl who would wait for him at lunch hours…In a concentric circle, who is to decide which circle is the bigger one and which the smaller? Can there ever be concentric circles in a map of human relations?

Circles did not make much sense when he thought of this friend. He never spoke to him everyday. Yet he was always there. His house was always open, and he would always be there to welcome him. For someone who is there even when he is not there, what kind of circle will suit such a human being?

This Ramzan, when he finally woke up one afternoon, he saw a missed call. He called back. It was his friend's mother. No, his friend is not there. He would have called before he left home. Yes, he has gone to Gulf.

What map should he draw for someone who is not there but always there?

Picture courtesy: Aby.
Visit: http://www.abclicks.blogspot.com/

do i like rains?

2010-08-22T23:20:00.000+05:30

Do I like the rains? When it drenches my sides, as I travel in the auto? When it reminds my shoulder of the coolness of all relations beyond the warmth of a shared umbrella?

Do I like the rains? In our classrooms of the high school days, with neither a door nor windowpanes, but just iron bars cast across rectangular windows of thick concrete, lightnings of August reinforced in us the invincibility of barriers. The teacher would at first lower his voice, and then his pace. In the reddening veins of late afternoons, distinctions between the chair and the benches dissolved in the face of the greater gap between the outside and the inside. As the Muezzin’s call splattered feebly in disyllabic cracks, we in our classroom would realize that the power has gone off. On peaceful days, the teacher stopped the class temporarily during the Azan time, in deference to the call to mosque. On rainy days it stopped by the awe of the call of God.

Do I like the rains? Do I hear in them, as it hues the sky with phantoms of an advanced twilight, the dreams we held on to? In the country of our dreams everyone had an umbrella. But then did we mourn the loss of our nearness? In our bus journeys water dripped on to my feet from your wet umbrella. In the country of our dreams where everyone had an umbrella, we were substituting the warmth of togetherness with drenched and dripping bonds. Were you happy? I think I was. Blood never connected us. It had too much of history. May be water can. In our country where everyone has an umbrella, we won’t ever hoard water on our skins. We will only shower it on others.

Do I like the rains?

what you have and what you are

2010-08-18T22:52:00.000+05:30

Not very far from my village is the place called Thirunavaya. The place is historically important because it is the ground where every year warriors fought for their land under the banner of the Vellathiri, the earlier king, to fight the Zamorin, the conqueror from Calicut. And these warriors came to die or win. In other words, they were suicide squads. They failed each year and were killed to the last man, as they themselves wished. Their corpses were then dumped into this well, which is at present within the premises of the Government Hospital, and is at present a tourist spot.

Martyrdom inspires like no other. I have often wondered why the CPIM and SFI, as much a party and player of the bourgeois politics like the Congress, nevertheless awakens this spirit of Revolution each time they are in opposition. (If one acknowledges the disillusionment with the Party, one is also acknowledging the promise that the Party holds). One answer might be the constant rejuvenation of the idea of martyrdom of the past and the willingness to do the same at present. One of the more famous slogans goes like this:
Alakin attam chetthi minukki
Aavi parakkum chorayil mukki
Sir CP yude pattalathe
Nerittavarude pinmura jnangal
(we are the successors of those
Who honed the edges of sticks,
dipped them in boiling blood
and confronted the army of Sir CP)

Martyrdom, in the day of Jihad, however, has other predecessors – the image of Abraham and his son. Elsewhere, I had tried to imagine the frustration that Isaac (in Islamic tradition it is actually Ismail and not Isaac) might have endured in realizing that his martyrdom has been stalled by a divine intervention.

Faisal Devji, in his The Landscapes of Jihad, has an ingenious reading of the Abraham-Isaac episode. He says that Abraham’s decision to sacrifice his only son marked “the death of God”. That is, while God’s prescribed injunctions is against the killing of human beings, Abraham by relying on the revelation which goes against God’s own injunctions, was resorting to consciousness and thereby marking the birth of modern individual and thereby the death of the scriptural God. At the same time his son was himself not sure of the trueness of the revelation but was nevertheless willing to be sacrificed. Thus, Devji says, the modern Jihadi plays a double role, that of Abraham and Isaac.

Karan Johar’s My Name is Khan has an even different interpretation of the episode. But I didn’t quite get it. May be I should watch the movie again.

Pamuk’s interpretation of the incident has a different dimension altogether. In The Museum of Innocence, he refers to the episode and proclaims its lesson to be that an individual can indeed be substituted by an object (well, not an object, an animal, in the particular episode).

This then brings us back to the original Party question. Wasn’t Party all this while substituting real martyrdom with allusions to it? The question is where you stress. The Party is Pamukian, and is vigorously trying to museum-ize itself (pun intended). Confusion and doubt, however, dogs the believers. Confusion and doubt is the attribute of Isaac, the willing martyr.

Student Protest: Where do you stand?

Ok, on another note: The students of our university have been on strike path for a few days now. The demands are basic, better conditions of living and eating. Now that I was speaking of the Party, I am also reminded of the great springs of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Yes, hamare bari, tumhare bari, sabke bari, Naxalbari. Some of the teachers, if not many, belong to that period which is celebrated as the most revolutionary stage of student politics in India. Of course, the dream failed then (but might succeed, for isn’t that the power of enunciation, isn’t that the redemption after death?). And today I understand more the depths of its failure. The teachers, not all, are protesting the protest by the students!

Yes, the machine in the man has started working. The question is what I am and what I have. In other words, the difference is between a judicial use of public reason which can go beyond narrow egotistic drives and that of just occupying a symbolic space, that of being a part of the administration. Many students of the sixties and seventies, as they reach the 21st century, seem to have forgotten the revolutionary public reason and is reducing themselves to the symbolic space given to them by the ideological machine which governs the post Cold War era. A public use of reason will testify that the demands of the students are to be identified with, no matter which cog of the machine you are.

The symbolic space is just what you have right now, and is not what you are. After retirement, you are just an old man/woman, if your choice is to reduce to pre-retirement stage to just a faculty/administration. After all, what do you have that cannot be destroyed? What is destroyed that was essentially yours? Yes, what is essentially yours cannot be destroyed, it will transmutate but will live on forever. Your symbolic space however, is bound to be occupied by another.

to my brother from the mainland

2010-08-08T19:06:00.000+05:30

Hamara naam
kal vietnam
aaj Kashmir
- Varavara Rao

My brother
When your Gmail inbox expands
.000004MB each second
Leave me some space in it
When bayonets prolong my periods
And I live in eternal youth
This world might not be enough for me.

My brother,
I also need to say
Write me longer sentences
Longer than what I write to you
I hear there are new words in circulation
(You used to worry so much about interpersonal skills,
Oh no! Not for that stupid interview (for hardly any avenue remains))
It’s just that
I wish my cries shall find a space
To penetrate your pomo peace

My brother
It’s okay you are so far from me
And I am here cut off from you
Your mobile services, I know, hurts you a lot
All that spam calls while you are on work
I here don’t have any work
There is no need to collect firewood anymore
Our house itself a burning hearth
There is no one to feed either
And I have a lot to talk
Your mobile services give you extra talktime
Mine here, gives the deafness of the world.

My brother
I know you are in worst of times
Some recession and sort
I know I have been pretty useless
But I have got you a future plan
(Oh, these insurance guys are smart enough,
But I will show I am smarter)
I send this letter down the river
(Our rivers feed your round belly, our death, the roundness of your idea)
In a bottle, closely sealed I also send
Two drops of my blood, some grains of mud;
Twenty years from now,
I am sure,
You can sell them on e-bay.

My brother,
I shall stop now;
They have come

Oh, don’t worry,
Remember
I shall outlive you

wax

2010-08-06T02:55:00.000+05:30

U get a feeling u r quite too old
Ur grey beard lining the dark road,
Ur crown fatigued n bald grew bold

U get a feeling, just a year less than God
U wonder what code went odd

A fast forward on a seesaw board

a filmy dream as usual

2010-08-03T11:25:00.000+05:30

This is a dream I had last night. It is left to introspection to see how much of it was influenced by the fact that I was discussing the story of Inception with a friend and how much of it is influenced by the thoughts on “consciousness”

A particular man has been murdered. No, a lot of people, all young people have been murdered. A thirty five-ish man with a slight bald, dressed in casuals, has come to investigate the crime. The commonsense of the dream is that the killer is not a serious diehard fanatic or cannibal (not a silence of lambs), but a jestful college student. Ok, while all this looks serious, the dream was more like a farce. Though the first crime was true, what we subsequently see is that dead bodies, and two of them, I remember, were hidden in garbage vans under the garbage, were not actually dead.

Ok, I will describe the only scene I remember fully:
It is night, but it is like it is moonlit –we can see things though it is dark. It is a street with houses on each side. The street, the pavement and the houses with big glass singlepane windows totally gives the impression that it is somewhere in Europe. I can see what is happening, but as far as I remember, I am not a part of the dream. A girl comes out from the house on my left side. She has a laser gun with her. The investigator is on my right side, unaware of the girl, and what it looked like, eavesdropping on one of the houses on my right side. The girl points the gun towards him and shoots. Surprise! She was actually shooting at a flower (some futuristic flower that was!), which, by the heat of the laser beam, blooms, and then we see butterflies flying around the flower. A guy from the opposite house comes out and soon a fight follows which was more in jest than serious between the two. While the investigator, now aware of the activity behind him comes to ascertain if this guy is actually the murderer, I don’t remember how, but soon there is a long gunfight from random sides that ensue. A garbage van moves through the street and then we see two dead bodies, a guy’s and a girl’s, waking up from their sleep, their faces and everything covered like proper abandoned dead bodies and masks on their faces. It was understood that they didn’t know they were in that state. But they wake up from beneath all the garbage and arise out, but soon they hear all the gunfight and hide back into the garbage like dead bodies!!

Throughout the dream,the point of view kept on shifting. Though I was not woken up suddenly(by say, a knock on the door), this is where I think I woke up, and I can’t remember if there was an ending to this dream. Would have been fun!

Pele and India : the secret; and other musings as the World Cup ends

2010-07-11T11:50:00.000+05:30

The World Cup is coming to an end today. After Spain lifts the cup, it’s another long wait of four years. The Euro and UEFA and Copa will come in between, and the Premier League and the Liga will eternalize the long bee buzz of the stadiums, but nothing matches the World Cup fever. Nationalism wins over club allegiances, and even if they are not our own, we forge allegiances in the language of complexion, cultures, heritage, continents. In sports and war humankind is bound by the sense of “us”, in love I wish she was bound by “you”.

Since the World Cup is ending today, here are things that I will remember for the next three years, before new heroes, new flags, new slogans weave our dreams.

Favourite team: I started off with England, but, as usual, they were out early enough. In the last World Cup in the same scenario, I shifted my allegiance to France. This time they were out even before. I started loving Uruguay, may be also because I learnt that they are a nation of just 30lakh, which is one-tenth the population of Kerala. But that is a subsidiary fact. What I liked about them is their pace and strength, and more importantly, their respect for their opponents. Even the roughest team softens up a bit against Uruguay –that is Newton’s some rule. But yesterday Germany took “senti” advantage of it, going and cribbing to Uruguayan players each time the Germans fell.

Memorable Striker: Of all the promised fireworks, Messi was the only cracker that actually caught fire. But even that produced just a damp thud. I liked Gyan in the beginning, but I think in the match against Uruguay, he was acting like a superstar. Well, if you want to be a superstar, you have to act like one. He is also the most memorable for the bad luck that haunted him in that match against Uruguay like a well crafted voodoo.

Favourite All-rounder: Uruguay should give some Padma Shri type award to Forlan. What more can a person do – take banana freekicks, shoot corners, and score goals too! It is indeed an honour that Uruguay’s best campaign in recent years ended with that but-it-hit-the-bar freekick by him. Forlan reminds me of an archer in a medieval army. Klose is more like a suicide bomber. The first gives you time to pray, the second, only the time to curse your luck. Well, Paul had already predicted Germany’s win. Uruguay did the best for a losing team!

Favourite slogan: no song has ever captured my imagination as the simple but inspirational “oooooh kore’aaa, oohohoho Koriyyyyea”. But “Ghana is here, feel it” was an awesome slogan. And we felt it.

Now I will tell you a secret. And this secret is about Pele and India. Well, some of you might know this secret. But this secret has visited us only in our childhood, in our age of innocence. When we grew up pseudo-reality curtained our sense of the real real.

Pele retired in 1977. Why? The answer to this is where the career of world’s greatest football player (Maradona fans, please bear with me for the sake of this revelation) and one of world’s poorest football teams intersect. All of you know that there was this one incident when Pele shot a ball and it hit the bar and it was immediately found out that the post is one inch less and Pele was awarded the goal. After this, a certain goalkeeper from Kerala, India, to be specific Calicut, wrote a letter to Pele challenging him. The goalie was Bhaskar. Basically, Bhaskar challenged Pele that if he can score atleast once in ten penalty kicks against Bhaskar, Pele is indeed the invincible. On the other hand, if Bhaskar is able to ward off each of those balls away from the post, or if they miss the target altogether, Pele should obey whatever Bhaskar demands.

Pele accepted the challenge. The chosen venue was the Corporation Stadium in Calicut, which was inaugurated just a few months before. The witness would be the two men’s conscience and no one else. Everything would be top secret.

As Bhaskar stood to guard the net, he knew very well a new era is to be born. He will not just hit away, but catch tight each of those ten shots. There are higher hills in this land than the one in Rio, there were more furious floods here than in Rio, if Pele was bred on coffee, the Nilgiris are not far away either. In his pace he shall turn himself to a god out to guard the net with hands more than two in this historic fight for honour!!

The first shot. Top right. Bhaskar sprung up. Pele heard the Aamazon grasshoppers. Two hands, are they getting longer, darted to the ball and hit it, incapacitated it. The upper curve on the left corner of Pele’s lips darkened. Nine shots more. One goal, was that too much for him?

Nine, eight, seven….each one was caught firm in Bhaskar’s hands. Pele saw alive the yellow motifs of the street art under that 8yard by 8 feet rectangle. Six, five, four…Pele was perspiring even more, at times it flashed red and white in his eyes, a strange Mexican wind from 1970 blew inside the stadium and he could hear English songs mixed with an electric shaver sibilation.
Three, The crossbar shook under the effect of that shot. That one had hit the post and crossed into Bhaskar’s hands!
Two, in the paddy fields 500metres away by crow’s flight, nature drew the Indian flag in cosmic dimensions. Bhaskar’s blue goalie jersey reminded Pele of his own flag. “Order and Progress, the religion of humanity”, a French man whispered in his ears. The blue chakra, the blue globe…humankind has a fascination for cicles. This game is a game of straight lines, ruled by an inflated idiosyncratic globe.

The final shot. Just one more save and Pele is India’s, Bhaskar was bubbling inside. His left eye ached as if from a bright snowy light. He felt like it was flooding in his crown and that water will part his dark hair and flood that stadium. One more shot and he will shout aloud. The harbours of Calicut will take that news away to the rest of the world. Pele, one more save, and you are playing for India!

Pele hit the ball. Humanity…religion…progress…blue…green..yellow… voices murmured inside him. This shot right to the centre of the post. Bhaskar will definitely move away, he will have to jump, to that lonely destination of either regret or salvation each goalkeeper decides in his misery.
Bhaskar didn’t move. The ball struck his hands, they shuddered apart under the force. The ball struck Bhaskar exactly on the lower inner edge of his left chest. Bhaskar went down on his knees, both his hands pressed against his chest. He shouted in an dying whimper, “Pele, you are in In….” He couldn’t finish it.

Not long after, Pele retired.
In Rio de Janero, a Redeemer stood high over a crescent shaped river.

The Successor : a review

2010-07-09T11:08:00.000+05:30

When death follows death in familiar-yet-hushed pattern as an inevitable insurmountable fact of a totalitarian state, the pall of doom is so heavy that words attain a resigned tone. Though a less developed model of shifting narrators so beautifully employed by Pamuk in My Name is Red, the narrative style of The Successor is so aloof that one gets the feeling of reading under a feverish light (well that half-dimmed light mixed with a slight uneasiness when our eyes accidentally fall on a CFL lamp at the onset of a fever).

Each chapter is assigned to one homodiegetic narrator. But Ismail Kadare is not good at a political thriller, as he is at more profound issues of time, history and memory. I wish he had attempted a satire than a semi-whodunit. But the blurb, which describes it to be a thriller we won’t keep down is misleading. Kadare would not have meant it to be a thriller; the narration after the first quarter of the book does not chase clues to the perpetrator to the Albanian communist dictator’s death. It is rather an exposition of the hierarchies of a communist state. The last chapter is a fascinating end to this rather clouded hazy dark drama of power in a powerless forgotten nation.

What it is: The Successor, president of the communist state of Albania is dead. The death occurs the night before the Successor is to be pardoned for his “excesses” by the politbureau. At first it is supposed to be suicide. But the communist state has not gotten rid of the Christian taboo on suicide. The death is not sanctified and commemorated as is worth a leader. But soon suspicions spread of a possible murder. Investigations are underway. Surprises can infiltrate even a totalitarian state!

The Successor, by Ismail Kadare.
Originally published in Albanian in 2003.
English translation by David Bellos, pub.2005; Arcade Publishing Inc.

Leila : another rain story

2010-07-02T15:02:00.000+05:30

This happened some time ago. One rainy evening when the mosque some 200ft awa was giving its Maghrib prayer call and the continuous rattle of the rain soon humbled itself into a barely noticed rhythm, almost subliminal, against the irregular traffic and the prolonged nasal Aameen, his eyes were hooked on to the one chat box open on his monitor. The electric transformer, situated not far away by the roadside, had burst with one big spasmic bang. However, unlike car accidents, the mute nature of the after-event meant that there won’t be any crowd gathering to watch the drama, and by consequence, the traffic will continue normally. Well, in its methodical madness.

She was, as usual, taking much time to reply. And when she did, she replied in smileys. He sent her long questions, longer sentences. It amazed him how “:P” can ever serve as a reply to questions he cast borrowing the darkness of the darkest nights. Her “:B”s and “:D”s mocked his insomniac renderings by their stinginess. He had imagined the shorter words to be sweeter – the shortest and sweetest of them all the acquiescing “Mmm”.

The power had gone off with the transformer burst. The UPS moans grew longer with each of her answers. The internet café guy was growing restless. “Off…off” he kept on saying, looking at his direction. (He knew very well what occupied the ellipsis in between). Yet he persisted, and he will go on, until the UPS gives a final moan and the world goes dark in the orgasmic sting. Today he shall not back off. He told her, “ I think I’m in love w u.”

The UPS moan grew even longer. But life still shone bright. “Off…off”, he could hear from one corner.

And then came her reply, “Hey, I’ve a frn w me here. She wants 2 tlk 2 u.”

That was how they talked for the first time. Leila. That was a perfunctory conversation. And soon the monitor blacked out.

Leila appeared again some two days later and then a week later and then every single day. First they spoke about things like the books they have read, the places they have visited, movies and movie stars, places of further studies… But soon courtesy gave way to addiction. He started waiting for Leila, for the dead grey dot to bloom in green and then bleed. Her chat messages were longer, like they strangled the chat box from inside. When he tried writing longer sentences, Leila said “Don’t compete.”

Leila’s words started creeping out of the chat box to his mundanities, that he started waking up at two in the morning when the anklet wearing goddess makes her passage across his room, from the window in the south through the keyhole to the north and beyond, instead of recoiling in an understated fear, he imagined how Leila would look like. In the afternoons, on his way to the internet café, in the evenings by the textile shops, in the mornings at the busstops, he reasoned why none of the faces he meets can be Leila, for shouldn’t Leils be dark blue haired, shouldn’t she have broader forehead, half-asleep eyes, shouldn’t she be taller darker fairer browner bluer…

When not seeing her had the effect of forever uttering her name, he pasted a link to Taha Hussain’s ”Laila” as his status message. Next time Leila came online she told him, “Don’t profane me.” When the pain to utter her name aloud bothered him as an inner shiver at regular intervals, he decided to ask her phone number. She said,”You shouldn’t have to bear listening to me.”

He insisted. The far away blue heavens were cut asunder by red lightning veins. The thunder took four complete seconds to reach them. So that should be quite far away. But the internet guy insisted on disconnecting the net.

Her incompleteness ripped him off a fullness. He yearned to possess her, that he might show her how sacred and pure and lofty he would keep her. One afternoon when the vehicles had put on their headlights due to invisibility, he felt the need to tell her as a chillness in his stomach and a seething urge to pee. And so he told her, “ I love you”.
The answer took some time to come. But that was no answer, “Do u remember that evening?”
“Which one?”, which of the many shivery evenings that she presented him is she referring to?
“When u said u think u love Her”
“Oh…ya…”
“It was raining there that evening” Leila said, “u asked her a lot of questions”
“:”
“I thought u hated smileys”
“Did I tell u so?”
“Hmmm…may be not…accha, tell me, is it raining there still?”
“No. It was, not anymore”
Leila took some time. “Actually I was going to tell u…I won b coming ol anymore”
His cheek muscles grew stiff. He always hated the feeling on his forehead that there was an extra film of skin there. No, that can’t be. She would have meant something else. “Anymore? Mane anymore anymore?”
“ya”
His waistline was itching to the left. “y?”
There was a long gap. And then Leila came alive. “Oh! She is here. It seems She wants 2 tlk 2 u”
“Hi”, She said.
“Helllo…Long time”
“Ya, true”
“One sec, I wanted to ask something to Leila”
“ask”
“How did she know it was raining here the day I…”
“the day u…?? :P”
“ASK HER” how much more emphatic can he be in a chat window?

The red circle aged to grey.

From the west darkness licked the mountains one after the other in serpentine hisses. In a certain internet café in a certain small townone man hoped for a transformer blast.

verbose

2010-06-27T14:09:00.000+05:30

I kept on opening and closing the Chat History. There was not much to scroll down. I read each one of her words, in groups, in phrases, and then one by one.
I read them softly, read them in my heart,
I read them aloud,
At times together, at times in part.

I weighed each word, how heavy were they with derision? I wrung them; had they sweat, tears or condescension? I dried them; were they sulphorous?

I counted them, they were fifty two in all. Like the fifty two months between us. No, it was not the months nor the seasons nor the miles that separated us.
It was all going fine. We were friends, good friends. Yes, we too talked all night and dreamt all day. We laughed at each other’s jokes,
Made common friends and common codes,
We sent each other smileys no one else could decipher, we read in red what others never saw in blood;
We got wet in the white Junes and felt cold in the flaky Decembers, we counted stars one after the other and each time one of us gave the other a start or poked a feather, a twig, a leaf to the other’s nostrils.
Until…

I memorized each word, etched them on air, that its venom reach the depth of my arteries and blood my brain with morbid blue; I put them to fire, that it consume me in its engulfing spite; I grained them over earth, that it creep up the vines and strangle me in my dreams; I cried them over water, that it flood me in its bloating curses…

The words soon hovered all around me; letters straight and disjointed. I sensed deafness creeping in a raging monsoon,
An army of one hundred thousand invisible bees shrouded in a misty garb.

I closed the Chat History. The yellow star mark against it fainted, now at the edges, narrowing into a yellow spot, fainting from sight, passing in, as if through a tunnel, to somewhere beyond, piercing through the depth of the webpage.

The world darkens around me. In a tunnel of fifty two words, milestones can only belong to the past.

you told me

2010-06-22T13:08:00.000+05:30

in the History class, when
yesterday's pus oozed out of my today's wounds
you toldme you were proud of being my friend,
your smiles
silemcedthe war trumpets in my ears
the sweatdrops against your upperlip
cooled down
the racing warmth of my blood.

in the Sociology class
when "difference" and "resistance" clung on to my neck
in its disgustful algaeness,
you told me
howmuch you admired me
your words
in its slurping stammering fastpaced eloquence made me
caress
the itchy twitches creeping up my face.

In the Literature class,
when i buried my face in the drenched woodenness of the desk
you
woke me up
spoke about my "carnivalesque" life
you told me how you wished you were me
your tender fingertips on me
for once
made my skin, reddened in linesby the sharp desk edge,
adorable to myself.

and yet,
when I showed you my house
you called me
a petit bourgeois

perfunctory

2010-06-15T14:33:00.000+05:30

He has gone to collect stories

Far away beyond the hills of the blue flowers he is still searching it. Somehow these days he is drawn towards stories of books, and so he now reads novels after novels, all on missing books, forgotten alphabets, mysterious syllables.

And he wanted to know more.

He kept his ears pressed on mud walls, what if stories are caught between the trappings of firewoods, or have been accursed and turned to insects in the still fresh cow dung pits?

Yes, stories do get cursed at times, when they drive you to places you never wish of staying, when it compels you to wear garbs you thought you might be lucky enough to skip in this elaborate farce, stories that wed you to the donkey-phase of your life…

********

Finished reading Amin Maalouf’s Balthasar’s Odyssey. Though I like the craft, I should say I am disappointed by the shallowness of the central theme, inspite of its potential – the secret hundredth name of the Almighty. The author should have explored it further. As for the erudition claimed by discussing the various religious sects of the age (the novel is centered on the year 1666, yes, Annus Mirabilis), the strife in Europe, the trade route, etc, those are not so difficult and hardly needs “research”.

**********

Seen in the next village
The Brazil flex hoarding to the Argentina fans : Only fools can follow a drug addict and his team!
The Argentina hoarding to Brazil fans : Only fools believe laws are the same for men and god!!

2010-06-03T10:19:00.000+05:30

Yea I should belong to the earth sign.
How else do you trample on me so much?

the late summer sun

2010-05-26T11:16:00.000+05:30

Every late summer the green rays of the sun sieved through the foliage and scattering on the gravel paths give me a pricking sensation. Like all the generations which lived through pricky periods of world history, we seek refuge in stories of another age, and a few laughters that never age.

The itchy drench of last night, instead of bringing me thoughts of an advancing baldness or the latest lifestyle advertisements, led me to think of jokes. May be because we somehow associate laughter with good times but a good laughter always with tragicomic twists of our life that by each street corner and each new visitor to our house progresses even more acutely.

The specific joke which came to my mind was the one we have after eating mangoes. Yesterday after we had a full plate of mangoes, my aunt tried the joke, again, with my uncle. My uncle was turned elsewhere. My aunt called out loud, “ey!” and he responded. And she said “Will you please give company for this mango seed?” and threw it away. All of us, me, my two other aunts, my sister, my mother and grandmother, all of us then had some ten minutes straight of laughter, such laughters that you get when ages, relations, the geometry of familiarity and all its warmth get condensed into a single line.

In one of my earlier posts I have mentioned this joke that we have after eating mangoes. Which is exactly what interested me yesterday. Because in my childhood, as far as I remember, the joke was “Will you stand guard for this mango seed?” I sought clarification from my grandmother who said that even a third version of the joke was in vogue –“Will you help this seed cross the river?”

The itchy drench of last night, may be because my mind was partly occupied by Ismail Kadare’s The File on H. (which I finished reading last night, the last forty pages from 3am to 4 am!!!), brought me questions on how a joke retains its potential to amuse even after continuous usage, in this case, every late summer in every house.

(Kadare’s book is topically about the retention of epic ballads which have never been put to paper, thematically about the distance between the ear and the eye. It’s a short book, some 200 pages with fairly large fonts, and a very interesting book too.)

Every late summer a few raindrops make their way to our tanned and dirt lined foreheads. In the furrows of time they mix with our sweat and drip on to our eyes. Like with so many people in so many ages, the burning eyes produce teardrops and the cool raindrop a tinge of joy and songs of better days to come.

ethiyo???

2010-05-23T18:20:00.000+05:30

He was more disturbed by the thought of arriving. Every double-bell in the local bus, every slowing down of the train, every folding umbrella, every courtyard corner pipe about to wash someone’s feet, they always gave him a tremble. He tried probing within, of what guilt could accompany the hesitant steps, of what murmurs haunted the creaking doors.

He loved his home, nevertheless wished it were just an illusion to sing lullabies to and put to sleep. He loved the sound of home, but wished the metal wind chimes would drown the banter in thoughts of other worldliness.

The first day he was to arrive at his own home, he wished his mother had grown older with grey-er hairs, his father sounded more profound. It hurt him that things could be the same at home. For when he was away, home didn’t sound the same anymore. He wished the plantain would grow without watering, the moonlight would be the same every day, the power cuts would be longer but the drench would be of raindrops and not of sweat like now.

It hurt him that he has reached, arrived.

It hurt him more that he has just come back.

out of station

2010-05-20T11:19:00.000+05:30

When the stories ended he picked up his rucksack. In far away places, things might still be interesting. This heat, the sweat of the siesta, the unbearable weight of his own body after each afternoon of conversing with the absent presences, everything requires a painful liberation, the pain of movement, of escaping the comfortable inertia of self pity and self declared martyrdom.

So he set out in search of a story. Beyond the “Abandoned” railway outposts and the confusions of existing and non-existing pin codes, beyond the coloured ponds where myths took birth, beyond all that, he might find a story or two.

He might, in the meantime, decode the unwillingness of “yes”s, and the reason behind the slowness of days and the heaviness of seconds. He might also recall the corner benches and cribbing.

But he shall not forget, for his mission is to carve out a story, a story he might tell of himself.

the vocabulary of loss

2010-05-17T10:11:00.000+05:30

What do our memories say about ourselves when we didn’t experience them in the first place? It kept coming back to him, the memory, of having wet his bed, the mattress all soggy warming his back, while the boy who draws (only) Ninja turtles ran around the dorm screaming of an alien attack.

What do our memories tell of us, especially if we had yearned for them but never earned them? He had always wished he so wet his bed. He always wished that a dream would come to him in which he would be standing by the green paddy fields and peeing at the toads stacking by the sides of the furrows. And then, unaware of his real existence elsewhere, on this bunk bed, he would pee in a blissful length, never forcing it down his abdomen, but rather oozing it out slowly, memorizing each second of that emptying out as lovingly as the pleasure in squeezing out a thorn from his palm . He always also wished that a nightmare would shake and shiver him so terribly that the voluntary muscles turn involuntary. He wished that his dorm mates, each one of them, would ostracize him for the stinking dawns, yellowish floors and the stain marks on their mattresses, and then he would be forced to go home.

The first time he wished for this undreamt dream was one Friday evening, the only day when they were allowed to make phone calls to their parents, when his mother told him about the next town nercha (where they had forty one elephants in the procession, and numerous toy TVs, coloured sunglasses, plastic horns, etc, on sale…) they went to. He was always part of the plan. How could they go without him, while he was here, struggling everyday with his toothpaste in the morning, the blue plastic token of the mess at breakfast, the eight fifty group prayer, the biology teacher who asks questions and canes the hapless ones every single day? How could they do this to him?

When the season of dengue came and still his wish never came true, as was the fashion those days he also tried sleeping with an onion in his armpit. The onion was smuggled out of the mess kitchen, actually three onions in all by the guy who, it was thought, was better kept away. And he had to part with his only compass from his only geometry box to get hold of one of them. To avoid detection, he had stayed awake in his bed till late before he locked the onion in his left pungent underarm. When they woke him up, his docility had turned into sincerity towards studies and he let go of the opportunity to feign a fever, no, the deadly dengue. And he suffered a slight shoulder ache too.

He also remembers how he saw snakes, many snakes, creeping up the dark- brown stained toilet in the hostel. And he wished that this memory would freeze his nights with a drenching fever, like the one his friend Mohsin had. The fever went on for five days it seems, and he was forever speaking in his sleep. Doctors couldn’t help. Now he has a black thread holed through a five paise coin around his waist.

But he never dreamt of snakes either. And so he couldn’t go home either.

When it was the season of Madras fever and several of his friends woke up blessed with white films assuring them better sleep on their eyes, as they exaggerated the difficulty to open their eyes at the four-forty-five-in-the-morning prayer alarms, he wished he too woke up to such beige curtains of sleep and the coveted red eyes of fear and contempt. He remembers Close Up toothpaste was in high demand then. He never had the courage.

The memories weighed down on him by its painful absences. What do our memories say about ourselves when we wish they were our memories?

The Dreamer

2010-05-14T16:43:00.000+05:30

The red cigarette of Isabelle still eluded her. The beret, the blue gown, the chained hands, all looked down upon her with contempt. She had cut each part of that Eva Green poster, pasted it all in isolation, in different parts of the room, all beyond the reach of her hands, as if to remind herself of her own inferiority. Only her eyes could reach them. The cigarette-less Isabelle, with the crack extending from her lips to beyond her face, betrayed the mossy patches she tried to hide behind Isabelle’s feigned anguish and her golden brown hair. Today the contempt and naughtiness Isabelle’s downcast eyes emanated seemed to engulf her, as the elusive blue smoke of her un-ashed cigarette.

She had first fallen in love with that cigarette. Stuck between her lips, the redness was bleeding to plain ash, grunting, moaning through all the joys between her lips. Stuck to them; resolute not to fall off the tender hooks which still breathed life in her. The cigarette always looked away from her, as the glitter of parvenu from shanty existence. It was that unattainability that lured her to be one of its unseen fumes, to be puffed away, after the one deep inhale of reeking pleasure. It was that glamour of aloofness which led her to the mouth which smelled of secrets and forgetfulness and sounded of spring thunders.

If only forgetting was so easy.

On a wet September afternoon when her blue kurta still hugged her from the chillness of the just concluded rain, she felt at one with the glistening road, the fragrant earth, the reddish brown bricks and the shivering leaves, and he sat at a concrete side rail under the giant tree, a cigarette in one hand rested against the rail, while the other slowly scratched an imaginary line out of his face. She remembers that seeing him had at first tormented her, as if she was thrown out of an illusion of familiarity and oneness with the world and being the only one in the world, to an invisibility she couldn’t bear for its insignificance. His eyes were lost to scribbled images within himself, his fingers uncaring of the wet earth. If only he had touched the earth, if only its wetness had got to him, he would have noticed her as she would creep into him through earth’s veins. If only he had touched the earth, she would not have felt the need to conquer him, his sights, his probing touches.

It was still weeks before he first offered her a coffee. The lightning nights of late October reminded her of fury in nature, in herself. The clashes in the heaven, the numerous wings of Mikaaiyl and his army of angels, woke her up each night to flashes of crimson brightness in her abdomen piercing its way up as a band of misery around her forehead. A war demands a vanquisher. And honorable death.

The first time he invited her for a coffee her high pitched chirpiness was drowned in his silence. She spoke of her love for poetry, the turquoise floral print slippers at the nearest mall, the sleep inducing coffee versus the waking up coffee, the latest design on the ten rupee phone recharge coupon, her passion for collecting others’ stick-it notes from their doors… He smoked one cigarette, passed half of another to a friend.

The first time he spoke to her, he spoke something about a war and a book. He spoke to her about the air and fury, and she wanted to hear of the earth and its wetness. He spoke to her something about a thousand flowers; she wanted to hear about the oneness. He spoke of the cures of the future; she was still missing the familiarity of the past. Yet, he spoke very little, and she wanted to hear more.

The red beret on Isabelle jeered at her. If only forgetting was so easy.

The single coffee gave way to double coffee. He spoke about emancipation and body. She was puzzled how her body could be the end of the whole cosmos within her. He spoke of her headscarf, and being generous with shame that the world may drown in its own scriptures. She, of the written words’ life and inevitability. Now he spoke of oneness, she of difference.

On a cold December morning she deemed it unfair that an extra piece of cloth should separate her from millions of colder companions on earth. She felt the urge to be, once again, one with the world and with him within that one shroud of humanity, to dream together of warmer crimson skies. His sight will be hers now, and so will his probing touches.

Isabelle’s chained hand feigned captivity. In this war of sights and smells, the vanquished and vanquisher were just role plays.

And honorable death, an empty signifier.

(inspired by Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers)

class enemy

2010-05-12T12:00:00.000+05:30

As the years passed by he was more convinced how his various thoughts of suicide and his subsequent failure to bring himself to materialize them all stand vindicated.

In seventh standard when the daughter of the Doctor left him for his dearest friend, just because his dearest friend could buy her greeting cards but he never could choose which one to give her, and while both he and his dearest friend spent hours on end in the greeting cards and bangles shop deciding and debating, his dearest friend had in fact bought her cards when he was lost in thought how each line in each card could have been better, or would suit her less, or undervalued her, or how the message was outright ridiculous. The worst treachery of all was that his dearest friend had in fact hidden those cards from him, and when his dearest friend would at times disappear during the PT hours, or would join him later than usual as they waited at the bus stop, he always suspected it to be the vagaries of his dearest friend’s digestive system than the infidelity of hidden desires. Nor did he ever suspect furtive transactions even as she wore different set of bangles to school at a frequency which was only surpassed by his dearest friend’s egging him to visit the bangle shop more often and for longer hours, after all it was his dearest friend’s undying optimism that he might just finally find the set that suits her. In the bangle shop even as his dearest friend’s fingers with their perfectly curved artist’s-nails caressed the green bangles, or the black ones with the golden inlay or the newly arrived deep red bangles which reminded him of gore and induced revolting sensations, he never suspected the correspondences between his dearest friend’s caresses and his dearest’s accessories.

The day of the school tour when he was supposed to declare his love for her, the boys were dancing furiously in the bus to the latest Hindi songs, their pelvic thrusts making it even more difficult for him to maneuver through the bus as it climbed up the hair pin bends and braved the bumpy surfaces, the girls were all seated often giggling in soft tones, some looking out showing the least interest in the desperate exhibitionism of loose shoulders and unsteady heads, others lip-syncing and two or three others clicking the boys’ pictures. The sight of cameras, he remembers, was what made him also join the revelers for the next half an hour. When he exhausted all that he can try, like constantly stamping one foot on ground, folding both hands and imitating some kind of a flying motion (at time his elbows hit his ribs, at times others’) in sync with the stamping, holding both palms open facing front and moving them forward and backward with a slow head banging, moving closed fists together up and front alternately, etc, etc, he decided it was time to declare his love, now that he has proven himself to be not all that aantel.

He looked around for her. She was missing from her seat, which was the one right behind the driver’s seat, a glass pane with “A Road to a Friend’s House is Never Far” poster, which shows a boy climbing up the stairs to a house which seemed as high up as heavens, separating the two seats. Nor was she there in any of the front row seats, the seats allotted to girls. Through the half opening perpendicular angle vision the pelvic thrusts allowed, he spied each seat, and his eyebrows twitched from frustration. Until his vision reached his own seat.

Lo, There she was!

His heart raced, more of having finally located her. The implications of her sitting in his seat, of she having realized his love for her even on aborted greeting card plans and long-yet-unfruitful bangle missions, that brought a certain heaviness to his heart, the weight of which was directly proportional to the speed of his feet. He pushed, jarred, elbowed his way to the second last row, his seat. The coyness of her lowered eyes animated his adam’s apple. Her long eyelashes seemed shorter compared to the years he will spend by her side. Her green ear rings much less beautiful than what they would afford in their future years of companionship.

He was about to jump to the empty seat beside her.

The seat was occupied.
There, unseen to the dancing classmates, uncaring to take part in their kinetic joys, indifferent to the cameras and their promises for posterity, unsympathetic to their efforts to save the face of all ‘man’kind braving the cruelties of bumpy whirling roads, he lay, his dearest dearest treacherous friend, shamelessly burying his head in his dearest’s laps. Her eyes fixed on his friend, her handing sieving through his unwashed hair. The word “suicide” flashed through his mind, or was it scribbled on one of the rocks they just sped by?

His dearest friend did not look at him. Later he went seeking ultimate solace in the most male of all seats in the bus, the last row. His dearest friend, as far he would like to remember, never spoke to him after that.

He discovered the meaning of ‘class enemy’.

by sunset

2010-05-10T04:29:00.000+05:30

Far away they saw the roads, some cut as a straight line, some deserted and winding. She was always curious to know where the roads led and ended. She would point to each road and ask ‘Is that the road we came by?’

He didn’t know what to answer. He was lost in the thought of other lines, like those on her palms. The love line, the one that should start between the index and the middle finger and should point down and then arch back to the little finger, did she have that on her palm? What omen should the faintness of its beginning and its nonexistent arch hold for him? Where exactly did her lifeline end? In a graph of hundred years spread across her palms, what did the spires from her lifeline indicate?

Even as he surveyed the far away roads seeking for a plausible answer navigating by an imaginary compass, his left hand was slowly treading through each small strand of a line that occasioned her tender right hands. The occasional by passers, the smoking company of the four young men and their stares which seemed like a decade, the lone boy chasing away the dog, the family slowly making its way uphill, all of them made his left hand retreat for a while. In each of those seconds of retreat he felt like a child lost in a rocky desert, crying out loud and running through the boulders and pebbles of adamant sharp edged fate.

He didn’t want to tell her of endings. The roads carried on forever, as longs as feet were free to tread. He spoke of freedom, she of compulsions and turns and dead ends. His index finger traversed her Line of Head, from the serrated end through the inner palm. No, it did not lead up to the mount of imagination. Did that disappoint him?

When she fell silent in the glimmer of the city that stretched below them, he tried telling her the history of the place. Of the warrior’s appearance in the old man’s dream, the tomb without a body, the hopes tied to each string entwined with the hopes and lives of many others, the broken promises of next year visits, the seven circumnavigations and the innumerable prayers, the sacred footsteps and weary feet. Occasionally he would stare at her. And she would look away.

The uneven edges of his nail plodded on for wishful lines. And then her fists slowly closed down on his index finger.

He enjoyed that entrapment, as her palms closed down on the journeys of his fingers, the way his index finger were clung on to – the few moments where the lost child would transform to the guide and the seer. He wished she held him so, forever, that he didn’t have to feel the rough pebbles hitting against his inexperienced feet.
Trying not to acknowledge that she has noticed his fingers on hers, he continued the conversation. This time he tried speaking of lights. Of the lone ones on hill tops. ‘Do you think they are inhabited? How do they manage to climb up there?’ The drabness of the plain white lights, the nostalgia of the cream tones, the gliding lights of the vehicles, the memory of panees lights and its coloured plastic sheets, the darkness of the soot from the kerosene lamp…

She held his fingers even tighter. The retreating family made a silhouette against the flood lamp. The children were imitating racing trucks as they fled down the steps.

“Do you think running down is the most pleasurable thing to do? After climbing up?” She was looking at the children.

He didn’t know if that was question. And even if it was one, he didn’t know if he was supposed to answer it. “They are children.”

She turned back to the lights. Her lips stretched a bit, but the dimples didn’t deepen. “Do you like to race down?”

The rocks were still hot from the sun. The calligraphed silver prints glistened in the rare breeze.

“I have not thought about it.”

“I won’t,” she said.

Her grip was tighter now. She turned towards him. He noticed that the corner of her eyes glistened too.

“Tell me, where does the road end?”

after the mango season...

2010-05-07T11:20:00.000+05:30

As he smelled his fingers again, beyond the many shades of her unwillingness, indecision, acquiescence and regret, he could smell mangoes and summer.

The thought of mangoes brought to him the pain of loss. As summers approached after the season of dandelion, the air smelled of mangoes, first that of the watery ones and then that of the fleshy ones. The more watery ones, muttikkudiyan, are the ones you tap on the ground, punch a small hole on to it with your teeth, and suck it in, as the juice drips through the corner of your lips, to your checkered oversized shirts, to remain as a stain there, one among the many similar ones of blood and snot and the orange ice candy at Abu’s shop.

The more fleshy ones were always a more communal than individual experience. In the evenings when the sky turned violet, the young ones from the house stood guard, hiding behind the plantain leaves. The children from across the main road came under those violet skies to steal the fleshy mangoes, muvandan, tathamma chundan... He always enjoyed it most when they fired the first stones on those hapless kids, still in their white shirts and green trousers or skirts waiting all this time after school for the shimmering violet sky to arrive that they could find alibis in the ghosts of children drowned in the nearby pond. Ghosts never fled that neighborhood, but those children, Dineshan, Seinaba, Muthu, Kunjon, Malu, they all did, under the raining stones and calls of animals they detested.

In the afternoons when he and the others gathered around their grandmother as she sliced the mangoes, their fathers and uncles and occasional guests from distant relatives sipped milk tea and discussed thefts and intra religious rivalry and the true meaning of Oneness of God and whether or not women can enter mosques and the doctor in the neighboring village who can cure cancer. When only the seeds were left one of the children would give an alarm cry. A concerned uncle or aunt or a neighbor who had just come to fetch water from the only non-dried up well responded, “What happened?”

“Please stand guard for this mango seed” the children burst out in laughter, as grandmother chided them for their irreverent behavior.

The mango season was gone for long now. The floods from the sky turned the mango flowers deep brown and then black and dead. The years brought empathy with those fleeing children, rationality against the drowned ghosts and partition between uncles and aunts and mango plots. It brought him the stubbles on his chin and the cigarette in his hands.

He tried smelling those fingers again. Beyond the maze of the pain at the corner of her lips, resignation in her eyes, the deep redness on her nose, and the goose bumps on her arms, he could smell the smoke in his own eyes.

when we think of rain....

2010-05-03T22:48:00.000+05:30

The first drizzle. Faint. Shortlived.

The sky was dark in patches. The undecided nature of a guest, the unfamiliarity, the hesitation.

Today as it drizzles, it will bring him back the memories of the early monsoons. Monsoons that he hated, for it drowned the trains as it rhythmed past the paddy fields. After all, all the stories he knew were of journey. Of ships and forlorn travellers, of the misty hills and stranded promises. Just like how she was now, forlorn, as the train leaves before the first drizzle.

Monsoons, love, jealousy and fear.

When the April mornings get hotter, the indoors oppressing and the outdoors unbearable, she found reasons to continue being an optimist. “I want it to rain”, said she, when the sky was the least prepared for it; the clouds just a folklore.
That was when he discovered he loved her.

Not because she was beautiful, which, to put it fairly, he did think, but was not courageous enough to advance as a reason. Not because she was intelligent, which he knew, she was a bit more than he could afford. Not because she was loving, for after all, girls, though only in his painful idealism, and he was very well aware of its pain and its idealistic nature, girls were meant to be loving. After all, they fell in love with Satan, didn’t they?

He discovered he was in love with her, not because of any of this, but because he discovered she was self contradictory. She was an optimist and pessimist at once. She laughed at his conjectures of lasting relations, at his hypothesis of reciprocated love, at his conjuration of supposed correspondences of “wavelengths” between them. In paintings, she saw only the darker shades, in life, only so much light that it won’t blind her. She was afraid, of closed doors for its possibilities, of open windows for its translucence, of spoken words for its errors, of unspoken ones, for its humiliating transience as it betrayed her fleeting preoccupations. Yet here, in this hot April morning, below the burning blueness of the sky, she wished for rain. In fact, she believed it can rain.

And yet on further thought he figured she was in fact being fundamental in her love for darkness. But he also discovered that in times like these, her wish for darkness could indeed induce happiness. Like the thought of a drizzle. And he knew he was in love with her.

He wished it did not drizzle. He wished the monsoons were away. Strangely enough such thoughts always brought to him a photo his uncle had shown him long back. The photo was that of several strings suspended tightly from above in a City Centre of a faraway place he always wished he would be taken to some day. The strings had water dripping by it, as continuous that it looked like five lines of water were dripping from a source uncapturable and alluring beyond photos and all images he could picture.

In love he was hanging by those five strings of water. Water without the dark clouds. And he wished the monsoons would never arrive. Not just because that the clouds were dark. But because that would bring an end to the correspondences of their happiness. She would dance in the rain, he would stay away.

She might find others to dance with her.

Jealousy and monsoon had more than just dark frames, they also threw up contrasts of clouded faces beneath umbrellas, and the sunny ones getting wet in jubilation.

That was when he discovered his love for her. For, isn’t love calculated by the misery of jealousy?

Two and the power of One

2010-04-28T10:13:00.000+05:30

Two is not supposed to be good number, two people are not supposed to go out on a journey, for it is said that they will fail to act like a group. One is compulsion, three advisable, and more than three to be left to God's mercy.

Two is uncomfortable too. Two is the necessity out of which the victory of Oneness has to emerge. And no where else is this theme at work than in the life of Moses. Moses, the Prophet of the One Chosen people. He murdered two and had to depart in single. He departed in single and made a couple with the shepherd girl. He traveled in two, with his wife, and emerged from the story as the loner, the loner bestowed by God with the stick which turns into snake. The wife faded into the velvety night, in the brightness of Mount Sinai. Moses pleaded for a companion, a comrade in arms, and so was inducted Aaron into the regime of commandments and numbers. Again, Moses traveled in two, but emerged as the one out of history, the leader of the Chosen People. Aaron, like Moses' wife earlier, withered away in the haze of manna and salwa, and the gushing of the springs of the Promised Land.

One was yearning, two fulfilling yet unsettling, three, the stability. "A boy, a girl and a dog" was the magic formula for the on-campus couples. With more dog-haters, it is replaced by "a boy, a girl and a-bestfriend-who-can-also-double-as-a-child-and-a-judge".

Two is also is the test of patience. A ritual discontinued or impeded on the second day will fail to take off subsequently too, so it is believed.

Yes, that explains it: the promised victory, followed by the test of faith and patience, and then the ultimate uncertainty

On April 25th this blog completed two years of its existence,the journey of the two is over, hopefully. The triumph of One, after all, is the certainty of it being overrun by Two.

And beyond Two is God's will.

witness accounts of the games he invented

2010-04-21T22:51:00.000+05:30

In the afternoons and evenings when the single playground of the school turned a multi-specialty stadium with the seniors football and the juniors cricket and the surreptitious (because banned) marble throwing and all sort of hit-others-with-the-ball games with its ever changing rules, he preferred the loneliness of the last bench in the by then empty classroom, or to look at the lone tree with red flower which he could see far away beyond the high walls of his hostel, the tree standing exactly where the road took a photogenic bend. Beyond the tree and on either sides of the road were green paddy fields, with a straight row of houses, shops and a hospital sandwiched between them on either sides.

I am told that in the beginning the games he invented were innocuous. Like imagining that he was actually fishing in the canals at the far away paddy fields, and filling up empty plots of land with colocasia leaves designed like mugs and was inhabiting them with the fish he caught. Or imitating the frog hunters who went in there at the night.

It was sometime later, after he had gotten bored with those games and had returned to those hours of staring at the greenness of the paddy fields, the redness of the flowers and the blackness of the road which seemed to have a thin white film over it that he discovered that he could transform himself into one of the passengers of the numerous buses that passed by on the roads, passengers who were lucky enough to not be getting down at this town. This town, for him, seemed to have an air of grief over it, its two prominent institutions being this hostel and the hospital. Anyone who could be crossing and not getting down in this town should be a luckier soul. Unlike him.

The four storey school building, as I have narrated, overlooked the road with a bend, such that the corridor on the third floor almost formed 45 degrees with the road. Between the tree with the red flowers and the part where the road appeared right outside the school gate, the road descended to such levels that obstructed its view. On one such evening, he discovered that if he starts running from the end of the corridor (from where he could see the tree) exactly when a bus appeared there and then reach the other end of the corridor (which overlooked the gate) and reach the end exactly when the bus appeared at that end, then he could inhabit the body of one of the lucky passengers.

This was the game he played, in all earnestness as the report goes. That was when he discovered the pleasures of eating red masala dosa they served in the Indian Coffee House in the next town, of gaping at the noon show posters, of the markets where they sold swiss knife key chains, the empty lot behind the government veterinary hospital, of drinking from a borewell. Once he is even reported to have claimed with all seriousness against a host of questions of actually having watched at close proximity the actress who came to inaugurate the jewellery that was advertised in that day’s paper.

On Sundays, when the parents of others visited their sons, brought pastries and laddus and Dairy Milk chocolates, and later in the night when they exhibited, in a common show-off meeting held in each dorm the new soap in market, the toothbrush with twirling bristles, the comics which has the newly released Lion King and so on, he preferred to stay away, in the corner cot of his. He will have to invent games, games that people would play, games more interesting than digging deep into the wooden desks and simulating rocket launches with pens, leaking pens onto puddles on the monsoon watered floors and imagining oceans, mixing toothpaste with rat-poison and applying it on ants imitating the Iraq war and so on. The games that he should invent should be more than a passing fancy, something that people should return to, out of pride, revenge, vanity.

I am told that the game was successful, and many of the boys did end up parting with their three in one pens, slam books they had kept for the end of the year, etc. However, the exact nature of the game is unknown, it is well established that the game got over when a few classmates of his framed him by proving, to the hostel warden, that the game involved money, a punishable offence under the hostel rules. But that came much later. The arrival of the mediating sixth standard goonda happened before that.

waste and remainder

2010-04-17T20:23:00.000+05:30

Qara Koz, in your smiles, spring forgets her birth pangs, teardrops her burning saltness, sweat her fuming purpose,
Qara Koz, in your thoughts, time reinvents, the most beautiful of her syllables.

does it pain the most that you can't say what you say, that the rhymes elude you, metres confuse, words hide inside the cap of your pen?

Why should the mountain tremble and bow in fear when the Word descends on it?

Is might the real nature of Love? If so, is submission the true expression of being in Love?

but mountains and spring, seasons and nights, sun and rainbow, they all keep coming back to me. The dark eyes of Qara Koz find no metaphor nor comparison which match her estate.

The story, as you all know, is that the enchantment was after all a question of might, a might that slowly drips out of oneself, as one sets herself out to the accursed end at the stakes,

the most elusive of words are words that should explain the remainders
the words those remain like the unburned heart of the warrior saint at the stake,
the most elusive of words is the pain that heart might have sort to explain, the doubt which comes with the last nail on the cross,

after you turn your face away from me, after all the words have ceased narrating our story, after all the jokes have found their way to morgue to be resurrected as the painful nostalgia,
those might be the most elusive of words,

of fruits, seeds and cashew

2010-04-14T11:39:00.000+05:30

In summer, hands smell of the juice of cashew fruit. They call it a false fruit. Since I have told you the story of cashew’s creation once before, I shall avoid the repetition.

In Malayalam we say, “when you bite deep into the seed, you know the fruit is sour” (andiyodu adukkumbol ariyam mangayude puli). Cashew in that sense is not a false fruit, but an extremely honest one. The seed is right outside. And so honest that it won’t leave a sour taste in your mouth that you might in your nostalgic bull moments you can wish to ruminate and actually imagine it was sweet. Cashew is very very honest, it will just burn out your tongue and leave no taste behind.

Cashew burns out your tongue. Fire burns everything out. The one element that can purify itself. Even then, God in his Eternal wisdom made angels created out of fire to bow before man created out of earth.

I wish the world was a cashew, that the seed is right outside for you to see.

I wish the world was not rational. I wish it was irrational. For all rationalities are after all driven by an irrational core.

some mistakes

2010-04-12T00:12:00.000+05:30

Same old mistakes, old old mistakes, mistakes that would have by now graduated into habits,
I wish I could dismantle them, one by one, blow out the oven within me, give some chance for my heart to be really light than to be sagging down out of inexplicable weight
If only I could tell you, that the thousand flowers we left to bloom in our red youth, each one was just you, only a different you each time, that every spring thunder we wished for was the spring and thunder that was you,
If only I could tell you every minute matters

spring thunder

2010-04-08T05:34:00.000+05:30

Praise be to Lord who gave us sunrise and sunset, thunder and spring, that the deepest of our dreams find no other imagery

What can be more content than the sunrise? What colours elude its grasp, what voices hush behind its grandeur?

Back home we say of the dawn as the time when the spirits rise from their resting places. The muezzin call for Subh prayers reverberates, and the dogs starts howling, a long long howl that drowns the call for prayers. It seems dogs can see those spirits unseen by us. I often then tend to connect it with the paranoia about dogs in our place, a place where dogs are usually always on the run...

In a short while, the sun will rise. The world however, as I see it from here, is always awake.

What can be more content than the sunrise?

A tao story says about this particular man who was a workaholic. His disciples told him, "Master, take some rest. You only have one life." The Master replies, "Exactly why I should be working more."

The Sun cannot be caught in such a sense of obligation. For how many lives would the sun have lived already? How many million lives?

What can then be more discontent than the sun? Why this unending journey? Why this love for the night? Why this rendezevous?

Long back I have heard a story where a boy seeks to find the abode of the rainbow. I don't know if the boy finds it in the end.

Rainbow, colours, the complete arch, and the notion of a home.

My search was not for the rainbow. Colours - which of them will tell me why Cain killed Abel? Which of them will speak to me of pain and jealousy? Which of them will tell me of hope Jonah lived with within the gulp of the whale? Which of them will explain olives and pepper, and the smell of blood in the seas between them?

I knew I was not searching for colours. For no colour could answer the blankness of your answers, the unpleasant treading away of conversations, the strategic silences.

I knew I was searching for what lie beyond words.

And then I knew the answer about the Sun.

What else can it be longing for, than the blackness of the nights hidden in your eyes?

I fear

2010-04-05T18:11:00.000+05:30

I fear, for those broken sentences of mine,
I fear, as the words leak,
words I picked up from the twigs when sky was our roof
I fear, those dark moments You elude my fatigued hands

Hold me once where my sweat holds me down,
whisper in my ears "You'll be just fine"

I fear, the roads shall narrow,
and me lonely without a shadow
I fear for the dreams trapped in lost snores

If only you could tell me once
"You'll just be fine"

bits and pieces of

2010-04-03T10:15:00.000+05:30

Praise be to the Lord who gave us Suruma,from the charred bosoms of Mount Sinai,

When God decided to show his might, He gave us suruma,
Qara koz,
When He just decided to show His love,
He just gave me a glimpse of your eyes

Qara Koz,
I want to be God for a day,
and mould more magic out of the clay
Qara Koz,
I want to make this world even more beautiful,
the sunset more violet, the sunrise more blissful,

But Qara Koz, I know
If I wake up being God for a day,
I shall end up being a debtor to you;
for where shall I draw the purest of dreamy design
than from the depth of your dimple

of blood and other loves

2010-03-30T16:49:00.000+05:30

Eve my mother,
Shall I, in this hazy moment,
Forget the painful whiteness of my birth cord?
Magdalene,
Before the first stone and the first abuse
Do you remember the plucked tooth we threw at the hay stacks?
Hind,
Does blood taste as sour as revenge?

Away, away, away
Let feuds rest where days pierce the nights.

Qara Koz,
Where between your eyelashes
Did the Sufi song go to sleep?

Qara Koz,
One drop of your sight blinden me with blissful darkness

the black ants on dandelion

2010-03-27T20:12:00.000+05:30

in summer when our fields are loft with dandelion, we played with the black ants
as we boarded them one by one, on to the dandelion, to fly into the future
to return with dreams fulfilled and of the mossy milestones crossed

you and me and one thousand ants
such fun we had as we stamped out their file and ranks

We threw them away, out of our snot stained hands,
blew them away.

I remember some of them did come back,
and as we stared, they dropped down and went in circles,

the black ants we boarded to see the sweetness of the future,
ah, if only I knew
what lured them was the sweetness of our present

the story of the abject

2010-03-22T22:24:00.000+05:30

I dedicate this post to the crows of the world. They don't have anything to lose, and the world is anyways theirs (not Hyderabad though)

And this post is about the beginning of all stories.

For all stories have to begin somewhere.

Think about it. Before Noah, man didn't have a single happily-ever-after story. All his stories were of sinning, expulsion and murder.

The crow makes an appearance there, as the teacher, the one who taught Cain to bury his brother.

I am sure it's just a folk story. But it still is a story.

Man in his characteristic oedipal state, decides to kill off his father, the crow, his real teacher at the moment of destructive truth of envy. Kill off in a very symbolic way.

So when Noah wanted to know if it's time for his ship to anchor finally, he sent the crow. Did he or didn't he know that the crow might be hungry, for after all crow is a scavenger and the ship was filled by living beings and the crow was gracious enough to go hungry?

That is a mystery.

The crow not just surveyed the area but also fed on some corpses. The crow was declared outcaste hence.

This is the story of crow, and not just of crow but of all the outcastes, the ones who are kept away, of everything. Of course, there are reasons good enough to be narrated through generations.

This is man's first story of victory. And all his stories of adventure, sacrifice, piety, sincerity, all of them, need a crow.

speakin' to ghosts with Isaac

2010-03-20T10:22:00.000+05:30

I march to the death my God has asked, He mighty in heavens, I, here below in the vulnerable desirable earth.

Last night three ghosts came to me.
They spoke to me of the past, of the misdeeds of the past resurrected from the pale of supposed laughters,
they spoke to me of words floating in the air, syllables hanging by the certainties of a continued life,
they spoke to me of the guilt of excitements, and the paranoia of all assumptions.

They told me I have sinned.

Today I shall die an honourable death,
Praise be to Lord whose iced cakes of love need a blood stained knife to be cut and shared!

Now is the moment of death,
the floating syllables shall find its ultimate resting place behind the epitaphs drenched in forgetfulness
and I rejoice in the shroud of martyrdom

But the God the Lord the Almighty spoke through the winds
He needed some innocent blood,

the One who bore the names of air shattered my castle of victimhood

“Ibrahim, my father,
the unfairest cut of all
is to take away the lure of death.”

after the sufi talk

2010-03-17T19:42:00.000+05:30

what you are about to read is deeply widely childish nonsense. Don't give it much attention. This could not have been written by me. If it's not written by me, who wrote it? (footnote: the talk on Sufism and Indian culture by Scott Kugle; conference room, EFLU; 17.03.2010)
You are warned.

When they said there is no reality outside language, I was at a loss,
for what could i say of the inexplicable pain I had the days you didn't call?

Today he said there is no reality but God,
kill me of idolatory, in my lonely nights I have sought your darshan

the Real the Real the Real, the Real is calling me, where shall I hide the non-words of the wordless state?

If making others happy is the way to the One
hear,
you are on the way
for what shall i say of the deepening freckles on my face, when you appear far away,
what shall i say of the suffocating rapidity of heartbeats and the pinkness where my collar hides my neck?

you were warned

another year

2010-03-16T10:14:00.000+05:30

Ugadi
the sweet-bitterness of expectation,
one drop, and a year of repititions.

When a year passes away, I am only happy it does. The electric-chemical taste of the last year's drop, the never-meant-to-take decisions, the person that I am not, the unbearable weight of being a bubble, the magnanimity of names and categories and the reality of uselessness,
the one pain that refuses to vanish, the neem leaf as it is devoured from within a maze of mango chips drowned in jaggery water....

The one guarantee against all fetishes, the one ultimate fetish of the Oneness,
new stories abound now, of the sufi and his lost deadbody, of what realms were traversed in between the morsels of rice as he was served, of the abodes he disappeared to and came from,
new stories, one tinge of a sweet sacrilege, an expression of the ultimate human love.....

Another year.........

three malabar sayings; one conversation

2010-03-12T02:15:00.000+05:30

palli kaattilekku salaam cholluka: to greet the graveyard: to speak to the unheeding: words falling on deaf ears: my calling you beautiful and you speaking of others: the unanswered phone calls: a terrible pain I can't tell anyone: one ultimate irresolvable contradiction: the pain of yesterday, the hope of redemption.

padinjattu undiyittalum: even if he is pushed to the west: godless: one who never remembers God: one who is thinking of the goddess: one who is always thinking of the pretty games she plays with fate: one in whose yesterday a palmist cut a jinxed line: a song that reminds of smells and tastes like colours: three balloons and a cigarette butt

chaattappanenthu Ma'shara: what does Ma'shara (the final-judgement assembly ground) mean to Chattappan?: the wrong audience: the one who doesn't understand: you, or me?

conversation

he: have you....?
me: well....
he: are you the medical stockist?
me: .....(blank face)
he: ...."out of stock" for a medicine he never even saw
me: I don't know anything

a bus journey

2010-03-08T16:12:00.000+05:30

in Kerala:

the number of employees on a private short route bus (e.g. Valanchery to Tirur, approx. <30kms) is four - the driver, the conductor and two "cleaners" (also called kili, ie, "bird").

the number of employees on a long route bus (e.g. Calicut to Thrissur, approx. 120 kms; and more) is just three: the driver, the conductor, and one kili for the front door (the female door).

Not that the lone traveller was unaware of this, but he had pretty much forgotten the other unwritten clause: the passenger closest to the back door is supposed to act like the kili for the back door as long as he is in the bus.

it so happened that the lone traveler was traveling from Calicut to Valanchery on such a bus. May be because he conductor gauged the slight unfamiliarity from the traveler's face, he reminded (with a "please") to do the unwritten job.

but guess what?

the lone traveller fell asleep.

poor conductor, he was both conductor and Kili till valanchery

not cute anymore

2010-02-21T23:24:00.000+05:30

Read your poems before they dry up, this life without promises curl up the hairs, here there remain no dream to fight for,

only a furrowed forehead, and two drops of exasperation

the answer

2010-02-16T23:50:00.000+05:30

Long back, things were not so silent. Beside the kerosene lamp, each had a story to tell. That was when his father told him about the abode of angels. Seventy thousand angels entering it every second, never to come back.

Where do they go?

He never had a chance to ask. In the backtracks of alzheimers the momentary faded for the eternal, the new for the old.

Now, beside his father's grave he didn't feel remorse. This was his only certainty in life. More than his own death.

He couldn't recall much of his father. Years separated them through sands and seas, through petrodollars and deodorants his father was allergic to.

He tried hard. There should be something worth a teardrop. The last handful of soil will soon hide the white shroud.

Stories shall remain. And of course, the lone mehendi stem. That would grow firm, he was sure.

The grave didn't evoke much of a nostalgia. Nor did it say of any loss. The thin shrouded body, placed sideways. The six feet deep two feet wide qabar.

When did prosperity come knocking to erase off our deprivations?

Nor shall his father falter before the questions. Of God, prophet and faith. Of deeds, good and bad. Which language will he answer in? Which language would please the enquirer?

There won't be much questions asked. Stories and answers shall remain.

The mysteries of the sky, the unfathomable incredibles of the deep,

The unanswered question of the angels would have come back. In the reverse tracks of time, in the crossfadings of the earthly and the heavenly, in his stride towards days which vaporised in the heat of all that is new his father would have seen them, all seventy thousand of them, as they disappeared into the heavenly abode. His question would have come back to him, again and again. His father might have tried hard to answer them too, groping for syllables of a world that was no more his.

Only that he was never there to listen.

Seventy thousand angels. One abode. Each second.

After all, history too is an alzheimer patient. It took him back to the deserts his ancestors fled.

He tried hard. There should be something worth a teardrop.

He felt it on his forehead.The ash February sky loomed over. Alzheimer. The return to what has passed. One tiny raindrop.

And he knew the answer

the unseen

2010-02-13T12:25:00.000+05:30

And they entered the plains
an orange face over a violet curtain
the green borders swept in to them, blurring what was not theirs and what was,
each other's.

She took off her glasses
the dark marks on either sides of her nose

he asked her
so what can you see now?

I can see tomorrow
i can see the hallow that is ours
I can see the outline of you,
a silhouete against the promises you made

and the blackheads on your face

100th post

2010-02-10T23:04:00.000+05:30

Praise be to the one in heaven whose nature defies our thought,
This blog is some one and a half years old
and
This is my 100th post,
in the beginning I wanted to write letters
all letters talked of me
then I wrote stories
all stories were a tribute to human impatience
then I wrote on films
but then who will talk about me?

So here is my 100th post:

The seven seas, the seven continents and the seven skies lay bare in the eyes of the sufi. Within them he sees, dispassionately, all the follies, all the boasts, and sometimes the trickles of genuine humility.

This is the travelling sufi,

the one who is at the mercy of one boneless thumb,

of all the disguises, the one that helps him best is sanity of all humans around him,
and he clothes himself in the insanities of the universe,
of languages extinct and emotions obsolete,

this is the travelling sufi,

the master of all disguises, the eye of every glance, the quilt of all that is worn

yet, that one boneless thumb, the ultimate betrayal of the divine test, the ultimate hint, the one unsettling cheat of this closely programmed game of God

the one boneless thumb
and the seven seas, skies and lands can see the sufi

apocalypse

2010-02-05T01:18:00.001+05:30

What do you know of terrible loneliness? The one that eats you from within. That feeling when you get as you desperately wait for the crumbs from other people's free time?

I can say something of it. Of nights like this, when unending wait is the rule. Of the nights when you slip into sleep, fully dressed, expectant of certain footfalls on the corridor. Nights like this, when you make a frantic phone call, hope to get some reassurance.

Nights like this, when you know you are loved, but don't know how much or by who all.

This loneliness, eating me from within, a moth of dejection growing on the walls of hope. They keep coming back.

The dampness and damnation of all relations.

Forget it. Let the pages burn as you read this. Let no shreds remain.

Apocalypse is born out of God's dejection. Of all that humans know. So He decides to erase everything out, of all pages of human annal.

Desperation.Apocalypse. Silence.

And the need to begin everything afresh.

of rains, the forlorn traveller and some remainders

2010-02-03T23:21:00.000+05:30

Rain. The drops of pearl from the sky. A forlorn traveller.

Every time I try to remember the years gone by (the years before I came to Hyderabad), this is the picture which comes into my mind.

It is amazing how the weather crystallizes for us the images we have of others. For a long time (and even now the predominant) image when I think of North India is that of a copper red sun and barren land. Ganga and Yamuna never figure there at all. Funny.

Rain has been associated with all which invokes nostalgia in me. May be that is why many of my entries in this blog have been on rains. Of monsoons back home, of the gravel in the courtyard, of the stories told in the powercuts of a blissful monsoon...

There are many more stories -of the floods which never happened, of the black ants which lined our walls in the monsoon in an unending procession, of the long rains which lasted for days which happened forever in the past, of canals which were made into roads and were reclaimed by nature in every monsoon, of the time we innocently devoured many a bunds blaming our ignorance of the etiquettes of training to swim...

Everything good were connected to rain. Like how the latin American football, unlike the European one, is like a rain, with its moments of uncertainity, of downpour, of retreat, of pleasant surprises in the abnormally big drops, of bountiful offerings and unexpected thunders...

Rains, the metaphor for all the pleasant surprises, like the song I am listening to now -"Ek Meeta Marz Dene" from Welcome to Sajjanpur, like the movie about a couple, old and till in love, and each wishing that the other die before him/her for the other then doesn't have to endure a lonely life -Oru Cheru Punjiri

But there is a difference of the picture I told you I get when I think of my past. The dominant theme is of the forlorn traveller, me. But now, an old friend of mine has put up in facebook some photos from that time. It shows that after all I was not alone.

These are photos towards the end of my class X. Courtesy: Jasim C P

Genelia + CPD = Genelia

2010-02-01T18:45:00.000+05:30

Long before Om Shanti Om, a Malayalam movie sought to narrate for us the film industry in all its humour. There have been films dealing with the industry before, but their tone were grave, as dark as the dark underbelly they sought to expose (e.g. Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback). But Udayananu Taram, with Srinivasan as its scriptwriter, decided to make us laugh rather than sit back in disgust/shock. A wannabe actor (played by Srinivasan)steals a script from a wannabe director. The script is a sure hit. The wannabe actor trades it for the role of the hero. He makes it big in the industry while the wannabe director is till languishing in the dark, now even more painful as his actor wife has left him. The movie ends with the time proving that Udayan, the wannabe director, is the real star.

What makes this a Srinivasan movie is the ridicule to which he subjects the actor (himself) to. Rather than caught in the enigma of the world of glamour, we are laughing at its pompousness and absurdity.

As usual, Bollywood doesn't have a Srinivasan. The movies are therefore all about the stress of the celebrity life, the difficulties of getting in, the ethical baggage which keeps on haunting and stuff. Om Shanti Om is different, I should say. But what Om Shanti Om opened the gates for for not as hilarious. I still like Khoya Khoya Chand for its elegance, Luck By Chance was also not bad. But Halla Bol was just an old movie, the old Bollywood, forgotten the slighest of the bheja fry lingo.

Why Kaatib recounts all this is because, I's been a week past and Kaatib still can't explain why Chance Pe Dance was a good movie. Friends know that Kaatib likes most movies, and more so after two days of the watching. Kaatib will find reasons to like it. Like how the bit about break up was enough for him to rate Love Aajkal a good movie. Kaatib is still mulling over, but apart from Genelia and her crooked smile (which doesn't have to be in a movie to be liked) Kaatib doesn't know why he should like Chance Pe Dance

watching TZP in the age of student suicides

2010-01-28T01:35:00.000+05:30

if suicides offer a scope to study the society as having a mind of its own, there is no better time to study the students' suicides. In the last two weeks, around 25 students committed suicide in Maharashtra alone. What can student suicides tell us of the society that we are living in?

The immediate answers are: parental pressures, unsympathetic teachers, superfast lifestyle...

In our university, against a specific background of such discussions, a group of students screened Taare Zameen Par. One cannot think of a better movie if one has to speak about the issue and the misrepresentation of it.

Most of the reviews of TZP was lamenting that the movie is undoing its own message by ending it with a competition in which the differently0abled child grabs the first prize. True, if the message of the movie is against pressurizing the children to be 'first' all the time, it was pointless to show that the child ends up as first. This is like "i heard it works even if i don't believe in it" joke. "Of course you should think that your child should be first. Just Don't pressurize your ward to be first, and then he will be first." And then what if he doesn't urn out to be a topper?
That is indeed the problem. The film doesn't question us.

I will say that, contrary to what the critics might have wished for, the ideological casting of TZP could allow only such an ending. Why?

First, the question of victim. The victim here is a differently-abled person. This is a very convenient technique to draw imaginary faultlines in the society. It means, the specific form of handicap is not representative in nature. Rather, it is specific. It creates an imaginary other of able-bodied. In other words, by representing handicap as medical, it is erasing the social dimension of handicap -caste, class, etc.

Second, the question of the mentor. The mentor, played by Aamir Khan, if you remember, has his entry in a clown's outfit. He is the fool that Zizek refers to. A fool is someone who, when he says the truth, undermines it by the very status by his identity. Aamir Khan is never the ideal teacher. Instead he is an aberration, someone who failed to occupy the symbolic space.

This in itself is revolutionary. But not here. why? In other words, why do we have a competition in the end?

there is a need for competition in the end, a competition in which the differently abled wins. The ideological process which leads up to this is two:
1)Oh, that is a poor handicapped boy. Our sympathies lie with him. He should come up in life. Oh, we, each one of us is equal. So among us the fittest can survive. But he is handicapped and so he needs help.
2) This teacher is just a clown. He is not the authority to decide. So we need a real authority, the law of the father. Therefore there should be a "fair" examination.

a political film on the other hand should go with the law of the fool. Aamir Khan should be the judge rather than a mere competitor.

Taare Zameen Par (2007, Aamir Khan; Hindi)

Dreams, serious and otherwise

2010-01-24T03:11:00.000+05:30

There are certain things that only dream can tell us, and at times they need no interpretation, but a first hand experience,

Like the siesta dream I got last summer,

And that was quite characteristic of my siesta dreams. You don’t see people there, all you see are places, the green meadows by the canal, the lonely path to your house, the red bricks of your school...

And then that one time I saw this electricity board office. Rather, the building which used to be the electricity office. The office was shifted some 6 years back to a rather office-type (blank square buildings; Stalinist austerity is still alive when it comes to offices –village office, post office, electricity office, etc) building. The former building was a rented house (like the Police station still is). Not by the roadside, all those who wanted to go there, the ones going to pay the bill, the ones going to lodge a complaint, all, had to take a muddy road.
And the worst part of the siesta dreams are that you feel awful after waking up, an inexplicable urge to recover things that were never yours. To use quite a fancy term, “commemorative schizophrenia.”

Six or seven months after that dream I went home. In one my walks (this muddy road is also the short cut between two main roads) I found that the house is no more there. It has been broken down; reusable bricks piled up in a corner, a few sheets of asbestos still lying around. May be the government never paid them. I say that because it is a common phenomenon with the rich landlords over there that after a couple of “bad” tenants the house is broken down. For a purge may be. Or maybe the rich landlord was humbled in his riches by the rogue tenants.

I think, and I confess that I couldn’t make much out of it after the first watch, this is something that A Serious Man is trying to do. Set in Jewish America, this film is about a man who is not doing anything, and getting into trouble precisely because he is not doing anything.

Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, one of the most celebrated writers from Kerala, begins a book of his stating that when one thinks of childhood, which is like it happened a lot many thousand years before, one feels pathetic and also like laughing out aloud. Since laughter is better than whining, just laugh out. The Coens are attempting something of that here, I guess. For, not doing anything was what the Jewish community as a whole, and their elders in particular were accused of in those dark days of holocaust. In trying to laugh and make others laugh through Larry, the monstrosity of memories is played out for the world.

Another important theme is that of dreams without hidden meanings. Larry keeps on getting dreams (nightmares, to be precise). These are to do with his predicaments in life. But no one seems to be able to decipher his salvation. And the ones who can are insistent on shutting their doors on him. The meanings, if any, are those you have to find out by walking through that muddy road.

A Serious Man (2009; Joel and Ethan Coen)

one laugh at the communists

2010-01-21T03:54:00.000+05:30

My dear, we shall live together. But one day when I wake up, my dear, what if I just forget all my English and can speak only in my mother tongue which you of course don’t comprehend?

There is this story of a man who visited a communist East European country to know for himself, beyond all propaganda, the truth of life under communism. May be because death is, though an empty signifier, the most certain signifier, and by that very paradox of certainty and emptiness it renders human life unpredictable, the guy had a deal with a friend of his. The friend from the communist bloc is supposed write regularly to the friend in the western block. And since censorship is however a very predictable feature of communist existence, language can finally liberate its repressed double, the antonym. Blue ink, and all what I say is true. Red ink, and the content should be read as the opposite of what is written. One word, one ink, one meaning. One word, another ink, another meaning. Sign has liberated itself from the signifier and signified. Sign as the very source of pleasure. But if the sign itself was lost, untranslatable. That is the predicament of the globalised world.

Shifa shifa shifa

Let the nightmares go away by the certainty of sacred tongues, the hyperbole of medieval lyric, the incantations of forgotten clans and secret orders.
Monstrosity, laughter, music –the reality of Stalinism for Zizek.
But laughter is reinvented for the globalised world through Operation Danube. This laughter is the laughter of untranslatability. The comforting appearance is that of a historical, of an event past. the laughter is possible because the spectator is the god who understands both the language (Polish and Czech) and the distortions involved.

Are we, or are we not, laughing at ourselves?

Plot:

When soviets decide to take action against their own “sister” Czechoslovakia for “fucking around”, a Polish tank regiment is dispatched to do the job along with regiments from the other communist East European countries and Russia himself. The veteran of many a battle, “The Lady Bird”, however goes missing in action. The narrative unfolds as the Polish soldiers in the Lady Bird and the Czech “hosts” soon find themselves belonging to the same side (the anti-actually-existing-socialism side).

Operace Dunaj (Operation Danube)(2009, Jacek Glomb)

When Father was Away on Business: review

2010-01-18T10:57:00.000+05:30

Is sleep walking an apt metaphor for the political present of an unrepresented minority in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state?

May be I have said this many times before, but we in our place have this story of “potti”. They are female ghosts who lead people astray, literally. Either they lead you in the daylight in a human form or as a body-less voice. Or, if it’s in the night, they lead by a light, literally, the light at the end of the tunnel. People are said to have walked tens of kilometres in a single night following them. And then you wake up, in an unknown, unfamiliar place.
I am inclined to believe that this folk belief is not alien to the Balkans. For one thing, I know that my people share a lot of beliefs with the Yugoslav Muslims. Like the story of how the cashew fruit was not created by Allah but by the angel Jibreel (Gabriel). That is why its seed is outside the fruit.

“They are overdoing it” and “Who loves anyone in this madhouse”, both told in a private conversation, are enough for Mesha to be imprisoned in communist Yugoslavia. The Tito-Stalin split wreaks doom on the Stalinist communists. The story is narrated by Malik, the younger son of Mesha. The story is set in the immediate post WWII years.

In the 1980s, at a time when the communist state of Yugoslavia is looking West rather than East, Emir Kasturica’s concerns, differing from the narrated story, is less a preoccupation with the past than an anxiety about the future. Malik, the younger son of Mesha who has been sent away for his anti-Yugoslav state comments, is a sleepwalker. The last scene of the movie, where Malik wakes up in his sleepwalking feeling secure under the gaze of the audience, is an addressal to the world at large.
Malik and his elder brother Mirza are, like everyone else in Sarajevo, fans of the Yugoslav football team, constantly winning matches throughout the narrative. But each time the radio spells out the names of players, what is missing is the name of Bosnians (may be there weren’t any). We can see it. They can’t. This is the parallax views of sleep walking, the parallel universes and temporalities occupying the same space. And unlike the other narratives of the Balkans, let’s say Bridge on the River Drina, (or Kasturica’s later Underground) it doesn’t cast the Balkan as a space of constant war. Rather, it reads into the communist past a sleepwalking experience for the minorities who could see things that others didn’t, but who, from the vantage point of the present, were living in illusions, while now, having woken up in reality, is the time for reflections.

Otac na sluzbenom putu (When Father was Away on Business) (1985, Emir Kasturica)

Yogi; review

2010-01-16T01:31:00.000+05:30

This post comes later than expected (my own expectation). But Kaatib has been watching movies.

Another of the low budget Tamil movies, Yogi narrates the story of a street rowdy (Yogi). His attitude towards life changes as a toddler makes an unexpected entry to his life. In a complete conformity to the existing style, Yogi, though belonging to the breed of low budget Tamil movies which is causing a radical break on the ideas of what can and cannot be depicted on screen, continues with the established narrative style which requires that a third person's love (the first two being the mother and the father)for a baby needs a cruel or absent father to be justified. In this case it is both, Yogi had a cruel father, while the baby is not the biological child of his father.

Another interesting feature of the new wave of Tamil movies is its realistic approach towards life conditions in gullies while maintaining hyperbole in the fight sequences.

It might be the deep rooted suspicion that is within us, or may be the deep rooted suspicion that one is supposed to have when watching a movie on goons, drugs, and related crimes, I find it interesting that if there is a group of goons with one leader, the total number is usually four. If they are two, then one gets killed, if they are three, there is a constant possibility of the other two forming a nexus against the leader. But if they are four, there is always a choice of getting one to revolt and get killed while the other two realize the inherent goodness of the leader.

But more than the loyalty of the followers, it is the ever lurking possibility of a revolt against a mighty leader that holds our attention. We like to say stories of how Veerappan always carried a loaded gun, for he was afraid one of his own might end him; of the number of food testers that Saddam had; of the man who poisoned Stalin but the moment Stalin opened his eyes, kissed his feet, and then later fell dead, kicked him. More interestingly, it is said that Hitler had cyanide tested on his dog before he himself consumed it, lest it was sabotaged by the jews in concentration camps who packed them.

It is the revolt and deceit that sets in motion our curiosity.

Yogi (2009, Subramaniam Siva; Tamil)

Shake Hands with the Devil: review

2010-01-08T18:25:00.000+05:30

What characterises a confession is the personal element of it. This personal dimension is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it, given that the confessor is indeed confessing, honours the speaking subject by a chance of forgiveness while in the process rendering superfluous the voice of the victim, obliterating the existence of another narrative. On the other hand, by addressing it to God, the other of the other, it casts into truth an idea of the world where the other is dysfunctional, incapable or plain unsympathetic; incapable more than anything else, since see I’m still alive though I have sinned. Confession is the way to redemption precisely because it negates the other and honours the Other of the other, it proclaims the ultimate sovereignty of God.
Shake Hands with the Devil narrates the story of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) from the days before the Civil War through the Civil War, through the memories (“not memories, some kind of flashback”, says the character) of General Dallaire.

The confessional mode of Shake Hands with the Devil is then not merely a narrative technique of flashbacks, but a “formal” assertion of the breakdown of the other –in this particular case, the White guardians of the world. Instead, the media is cast as the Other of the other. “You should keep me alive”, this conferring of the power to keep alive or leave dead, the supreme notion of sovereignty, that is addressed by the confessor to the listener towards the end of the movie, is more of an address to the spectator of the movie.
The movie is a confession, mea culpa, but forgive me, for you are the all powerful. Indeed it is not the General who is confessing, but rather the super forces of the world, narrating their inaction, and redeemed even as they narrate it. Confession as a formal feature is then a double-edged sword: redemption of the perpetrator is one of them. The other edge of it is the sense of godliness it leads the spectator to falsely assume. And then the purpose is solved: to err is human; to forgive, divine.

Shake Hands with the Devil (2007, Roger Spottiswoode)

The Edge of Heaven: Review

2010-01-05T10:40:00.000+05:30

Straight lines, it can be said, is the ultimate fantasy. Primarily, we think that it is possible, that the laws of the world depends on a straight line of action and result, of revolutions and counter revolutions, of positive evolutions and benevolent “because”s. Symmetries are imagined out of points and straight lines; flags designed on them; stars, red and blue, owe themselves to its rigidity, certainty. David Albahari has written about the convolutedness of the straight line. Mourn it, bemoan it, but what if straight lines are impossible? It is said that if there is an obstacle between two points, then the shortest line between them is a crooked line. But what if the obstacles are many?
The Edge of Heaven narrates the story of two families, two crimes, two deaths and two states, entangled, yet parallel. Nejat, a Turkish professor in a University in Germany sets out to Turkey to find the daughter of Yetar who was killed by his father while Yetar’s daughter, a member of an armed Kurdish resistance group in Turkey, flies to Germany under a false name to find her mother. As efforts go in vain, one after the other, incidents multiply themselves.
The movie is divided into three interlinked chapters, “Yetar’s Death”, which is to do with Nejat’s family and Germany; “Lotte’s Death” which narrates the events in Turkey and is about Yetar’s daughter; and “The Edge of Heaven”, which is a coming together of the two families.
Death is a metaphor of suspended and unfathomable time. What makes the movie more than ordinary is the incorporation of this content into the form of the movie itself, with its temporal vacillations and its unrecognized intersections. The chapters themselves deny the possibility of a straight line of narration, with overlapping time frame and spatio-temporal disjuncture. The movie, however, doesn’t go beyond multiculturalism. In fact the very form of the movie, of the spatio-temporal disjuncture, of the simultaneous unfolding of the narrative in separate spaces, and the painfully parallel milieu, that of overlapped time, is in the service of multiculturalism. It is relevant to note here Walter Mignolo’s observation that the latest phase of American Globalization (the first being the Spanish-Portuguese, the second the British) reintroduces the discourse of spatial disjuncture while asserting the coevalness of temporal dimensions.
What I found interesting is the recurrence of the metaphor of young women and death when we speak of Kurds. It is not yet time to forget Pamuk’s Snow, where the suicide of young women is the reason for the author’s entry and hence the story itself. The Edge of Heaven, too, resorts to this metaphor of young women’s death. Edward Said has pointed out how Orientalism works through a mechanism of self-reference and intertextuality, and it is difficult to expose them because it is not a complete lie in the first place. Rather it is a mechanism of selective representation, generalization and appropriation of difference into intelligible discourse. The rebellious and sacrificing Kurdish woman might then just be the fantasmatic support for the discourse of “the sick man of Europe”.

Auf der anderen Seite (2007, Fatih Akin; German, Turkish, English)