stet

The case of the missing attribution*

2010-10-30T09:09:00.005+05:30

*This week, for the first time since its inception in August 2006, Stet was not published in Business Standard's weekend edition (October 30, 2010) . You'll find the likely reason for that in the second-last paragraph of the spiked column, reproduced below.

Update November 2, 2010: Business Standard's view that the post below was too dated to run is utterly unpersuasive, and I'm afraid I don't believe it. They also say that since this post was put up on the blog, along with comments about BS, the question of carrying it in the paper does not arise. We shall have to agree to disagree on this whole thing, and I will write a post about that in a few days; but meanwhile, I have terminated my arrangement with them with immediate effect. As of this week, Stet will no longer appear in Business Standard.

Given my own recent battle with the effects of long-haul travel, I have great sympathy for Aroon Purie. Jet lag is the worst. Did you know that sleep deprivation can give you Type II diabetes, heart disease, and plagiarism? It’s a real tiger-nado of a bummer.

Aw, I’m being unfair. It wasn’t Aroon Purie himself who copy-pasted large bits of Grady Hendrix’s Slate article on Rajnikanth into the ‘Letter from the Editor’ in India Today’s infamous southern issue on Rajnikanth. It’s complicated. Somebody sent somebody something and somebody got confused and, well, oops.

Except that it was Aroon Purie: his name is right there at the end of the letter. Allegedly he rarely writes his own editor’s letter—it is generally either drafted or entirely written by someone else, and he makes changes ranging from the minor to the major. The problem is that, no matter who put those words together, the buck stops with the name at the end of the piece. You would think that an editor might therefore either stick to writing his own pieces or care about his credibility enough to check what he’s putting his name to. If he doesn’t, it’s his mistake.

It is therefore ungracious for him to try to publicly pass-the-buck-without-passing-the-buck. If he has seen fit to be credited for lots of editorial letters that don’t ever mention “inputs from Delhi”, he shouldn’t suddenly mention them to explain this one—which, unfortunately, is the one he’s likely to be remembered for.

His weaselly apology tried a breezy, jokey style (“Jet lag is clearly injurious to the health of journalism”) to lay out an excuse that effectively hollowed out the mea culpa. It would have been more worthy of respect if he had said “Dear readers, I have unfortunately lifted half my letter from the editor from Slate magazine, and I’m sorry, and it will never happen again.” If he were truly interested in integrity, he would add, “Also, I’ve been outsourcing my letter from the Editor—what kind of Editor does that?—and that will never happen again either.” As a journalist friend of mine put it, those weekly letters are ghostwritten as if they’re speeches from a CEO, not letters from the Editor.

The total lack of surprise or shock about all this in the journalist community is the best indicator that Indian media is in crisis as far as integrity is concerned. Amongst other crimes such as those listed in the Press Council of India report which nobody in the media wants to talk about, is rampant plagiarism. Nobody in the media wants to talk about that either. It’s not as if ours is the only media in the world with big problems. But when ours is confronted with its own scandals, you can hear the clang of a fraternity closing ranks, followed by the weird sound of thousands of furious back-scratchings, followed by the thunderous silence of stones not being thrown in glass houses.

Everyone is human, so screwups are going to happen. Nobody is infallible, nor is anyone expected to be infallible. There are genuine cases of faulty memory and communication gaps and plain sloppiness. Unequivocal apologies can and should be made. But we’re at the point where it has become so commonplace to plagiarise in small and big ways that to many journalists it’s no big deal, and that’s the point at which we’re in trouble. Getting caught is not embarrassing enough yet—the media still mostly chooses to tiptoe around the doo-doo on the carpet, trying to be polite to whoever put it there. When we become a profession that respects itself enough to hang plagiarists out to dry, we will be a profession we can be proud of.

Off the books*

2010-10-30T08:56:00.002+05:30

All that the Shiv Sena had to do was to get one its youngest pups to bare his milk teeth and let out a couple of tentative yips, and Mumbai University fell to its knees, gibbering with fear. My chest is fairly swelling with pride in the efficiency of that institution: the Vice Chancellor took Rohinton Mistry’s book, Such A Long Journey, off the syllabus within twenty-four hours of being yipped at about how it is offensive to Marathis and the Shiv Sena.

Of course, the Shiv Sena is not to be trifled with, since its critical mass of brainless morons have always believed that the sword is mightier than the pen, and hold that vandalising property and beating up people is an attractive alternative to all that fussing about with democratic debate. The Sena is by no means the only collection of brainless morons (see the MNS, the Ram Sene, the Bajrang Dal and so forth), but it is one of the most tediously consistent bullies.

The case of Rohinton Mistry is not a call for a ban, merely a specific veiled threat directed at a university curriculum. The Sena’s lawyer says that the notion that the university acted under any kind of duress is merely an assumption. But it’s a fair assumption that if the Vice Chancellor was not under direct political pressure, the university has responded with what Rohinton Mistry calls the ugly notion of self-censorship. That says something horrifying about the effectiveness of intimidation, or the cravenness of our institutions, or both.

Lucky Rohinton Mistry, though. I bet the sales of his book will enjoy a bump on account of this, because there’s nothing as magnetic to most people as a thing that has been deemed inappropriate for their consumption—especially if it is so deemed after ten years of being deemed perfectly appropriate.

The lawyer for the Shiv Sena said, on a television debate earlier this week, that nobody “in the right frame of mind” could possibly tolerate certain passages in Such A Long Journey. This phrase, a brick wall of absolutism, disallows the possibililty of dissent other than on grounds of—what? Inebriation? A bout of melancholy? Childhood abuse? All-out madness?

On the other side, people opposed to the Sena’s stand point out that the “objectionable” critical views of the Shiv Sena in the book are espoused by a fictional character who cannot be equated with Rohinton Mistry. They point out that the book tears into not just the Sena but also the Congress and all kinds of Indians. These arguments are as short-sighted as those of the Sena—yes, the character happens to be fictional, and is not the same person as Mistry, but what if this had been a work of non-fiction by Mistry, presenting Mistry’s take on Maharashtrian politics? What if it had focused purely on one political organisation? Would the Sena then be justified? And would the University cave in?

If the answer to that is yes, then we are indeed the kind of tinpot nation that artists and dissenters of all kinds like to leave skidmarks in as they shoot over the border (though in this neighbourhood that would have to involve getting on a plane). The fact that the Congress chief minister of Maharashta has thrown his weight behind the Sena is disappointing at best, and confirms only that no political party will stand up to a bully and stand up for the freedom of speech.

So I suppose it will be left to the artists and dissenters to keep writing, from wherever they’re writing, and for everyone else to keep reading. One can only hope that the rate of production and consumption remains too high for the tiny-minded to keep pace with.

*Business Standard said that they were uncomfortable using the term "brainless morons" because (wouldn't you know it) the Shiv Sena "could cause trouble for the paper". I told them to black it out, a la censor's pen, to make it clear that they were self-censoring. Unfortunately they changed it to "@&*#$" instead, and did not run that change by me. I wouldn't have approved it because a) it's cowardly and b) it's meant to cover for an expletive, and 'brainless morons' is not an expletive, it's a descriptor.

Ode to jet lag

2010-10-16T11:04:00.001+05:30

They say a clear conscience ensures
That despite all that mankind endures
By the harsh light of day,
It will all go away
With those eight healing hours of snores.

That’s why I can’t help but feel cheated—
So much that I Facebook and tweet it
In the wee, wee hours,
As one more night sours—
This jet lag has got me defeated.

GMT plus, oh, five and a half
Is my home—at this point, what a laugh;
By my boggy old sinus,
My body’s in minus,
And the difference is making me barf.

Travellers throughout the long ages
Have known what a journey presages:
You sit on a flight
For what looks like one night
But is really three days in two stages.

The result is this vampiric state,
An endless, penumbra-filled wait
For the sun to emerge
And bring on the urge
To rise just to disintegrate.

More non-incidental effects
Of these intercontinental treks:
Disorientation,
And some constipation,
And other stuff much more complex.

It depends on one’s cosmology,
But for me, in this vile symphony,
The most terrible fate
I can delineate
Is being doomed to my own company.

I’d gnaw off my right arm to know
Of a good way to get this to go.
They offer you cures,
From sun shades to scores
Of tablets and potions; but show

Me a man who can shake off this feeling
(Of slowly and painfully peeling
The skin from one’s eyes
As one rigidly lies
Peering up at the inky-dark ceiling)

Before his own body’s decided
That the day that his long flight elided
Is made up at last—
And I’ll show you a past
Master of guff who should be derided.

They say uppers like Red Bull or Pepsi
Might help you to keep you in step—see,
But I hate ’em. Each noon
I collapse in a swoon,
In the python hug of narcolepsy

Each day I try staying up later,
And sleep with my phone on vibrator.
3am on the nose
I shoot out of repose,
As if jolted by defibrillator.

They say alternate carbs and proteins,
Baked chicken one meal, then beans;
You can try melatonin
Or a medical phone-in—
But there just are no good enough means.

Hoping to outwit time lag
Is like waving a karmic red flag.
As much as I moan,
One day per time zone
Is the rate of circadian drag.

So the fact is, dear reader, it’s crazy
To think you can just take the lazy
Way out of this hole.
My much-wanted goal
Remains distant, and fragile, and hazy.

The only available option
Is to implement the adoption
Of patience and rest
And hope for the best
And meanwhile just brew a decoction.

I must live in this temporal band,
And my body sure could use a hand.
But I’ll just have to lump it,
And get out my trumpet,
And cheer on my pineal gland.

At least it’s not getting much worse,
My modern day jet-setting curse.
But sleep-deprived minds
Make bad moves of all kinds—
Like, who wants to read lousy verse?

The Big Apple

2010-10-16T11:03:00.000+05:30

The other week I joked that I was tempted to run off and become an illegal immigrant in New York. This week I’m serious. [Note to immigration officers everywhere: This is also a joke, sort of.] Some things about this city have changed—it’s noticeably cleaner and the phone booths that used to stand on virtually every street corner are gone. But I’m sitting in Times Square, using free public wi-fi, and if it’s a little depressing that the capital of sleaze now looks much more like Disneyland, it’s still wonderful.

New York is my ideal metropolis. This is how a city should look and work. Mass public transport, including a fabulously intricate subway that is rarely more than a couple of blocks away and that, by the way, was built in the nineteenth century; street lights that take pedestrians into account; friendly cops who will give you recommendations for where you might find a nice little place to eat; people and food from all over the world; a throbbing night life; and incredibly tolerant people. And if all this means you get a few crazies thrown in for free, so what?

I walked around Ground Zero for a bit, since it’s the precise epicentre of the history of the decade between my last visit and this one, and the defining event of my generation. It’s now a big construction site. (Quite literally next door is St Paul’s Chapel, which famously didn’t suffer even a broken pane of glass, and where people volunteered their time after 9/11 to provide food and massages to rescue workers, festooned with testimonials.)

It’s all quite moving, in the way that these things can be, and yet, a couple of nights later I was in a great little bar called the Stoned Crow, chatting with a native New Yorker who thought that everyone should get over themselves and turn the damn place into a mall, and why was it taking so long to build the new tower and the memorial? It’s good to be in a city where people can separate the law of the land and its founding principles from what we in India are pleased to call our sentiments. (And speaking of great little bars, that’s the other vital component of an excellent metropolis. I wish Delhi would stop thinking that every bar should look like a Greek dwelling with candles in niches.)

Of course New York is the temple of consumerism, but the real pleasure of being here comes entirely for free: the great parade of people from every conceivable country (I crossed Central Park in a pedicab operated by a young Tajik who claimed—dubiously—that there are only a hundred Tajiks in New York, and also that his real job was teaching physics in a university) of every conceivable shape, size, colour and sexual orientation, wearing every conceivable kind of clothing, speaking every conceivable language and working at every conceivable kind of job. I could spend all day, every day, hanging out on the street, people-watching. Joy, thy name is diversity. And although people have tried to persuade me for years that New Yorkers are rude and aggressive, I’ve never found a single one that was anything but pleasant and helpful.

So much as I’ve tried to resist my impulses, I can’t. This is it. Wish me luck as I prepare to move into my hovel inhabited by twelve other illegals from Bangladesh and the Ukraine and start my life over, bussing tables at Dunkin Donuts and dodging the law until I’m able to start my own drycleaning business.

[Note to immigration officials everywhere: I’m kidding! Or not.]

New York state of mind

2010-10-16T11:01:00.001+05:30

The drive into Boston, Massachussetts from Logan International Airport was notable for one feature: crappy roads. But any smugness I may have felt about that had already been cancelled by the enormous picture on the front page of The New York Times that morning, which showed a stadium in Delhi looking like a bomb site that could just maybe double up as the venue for the swimming competition, if you don’t mind competing in floodwater.

The opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games 2010 will take place in Delhi tomorrow, and I do hope everything goes well, because the CWG needs another fiasco like it needs a hole in the… oh, wait. But really, I’m just saying that.

I remember feeling all het up about the CWG not that long ago, but then, on a wi-fi enabled bus barrelling from Boston to New York down a silky interstate highway, I realised that I now have only a vestigial sense that there was once something, somewhere in the world, that was bugging me for some reason. I’ve been reading occasionally about collapsing beds and fake bombs in stadia and unsightly people being booted out of town, and I’m trying to care, but the sight of fiery fall colours under an iron sky, of concrete canyons, and fifty nationalities in one metro car, is beating outrage hands down.

The closest I can get is a tepid consideration of the schisms that have sprung up between Indians over the whole thing. We were a perfectly integrated country before the CWG came along—and by country I mean, of course, set of Facebook friends—compared to what we have become: cleft into rival camps of Cynics and Patriots. Either you have to hate everything about the CWG, or you have to love it blindly. It’s like the Montagues and the Capulets: you’re either for us or against us. Sick-of-cynicism and sickened-by-jingoism would duel at dawn, except that they’re not talking for long enough to make the appointment.

Being a champion of moderation—if not in my own life then in everybody else’s—I’m going to gently suggest that it’s possible to be fair: cheer the good stuff and jeer the bad stuff. This may be confusing, because it will no longer be possible to think of each other as either unremittingly pessimistic or blindly loyal, but why not give it a shot? Black and white are classics, but grey is such a beautifully textured colour.

The pavements around some parts of Delhi look great, and in some cases when I say ‘look great’ I mean ‘now exist’; parts of the Commonwealth Village and some of the stadia look good at least in the photographs; and the airport is a darn sight nicer than it used to be, stupid carpet notwithstanding. Organisers’ rampantly misused and mismanaged public funds, there’s third-rate construction in several places, and the excuse that it’s been raining is contemptible because our super duper Indian wisdom and science has warned for five thousand years that during the monsoon, it could well rain, so it’s probably best to get stuff done before it arrives.

There, see how easy that was?

But maybe this wishy-washy middle ground is only a side effect of an enthusiasm deficit. Partly, that’s because it’s been an emotionally exhausting haul to Sunday, October 3, and when one is plumb out of time, resignation sets in.

But mostly, it’s because I’m in New York City, and everything in the world pales by comparison. Good luck to the CWG; I’m taking a break from caring.

Born again in the USA

2010-10-16T10:59:00.001+05:30

It’s been ten years since I made a trip to the US. The last time, in 2000, I was happily bewildered when they gave me a ten-year multiple entry visa despite the fact that I hadn’t grovelled, foamed at the mouth, nor indeed even asked. Yay, I thought, now I can go over whenever I like, for ten years! No more providing years of income tax returns and months of bank statements! No more feeling, in front of the visa officer, like a waste of space with a shady past despite having a spotless record with no instances of being jailed! I blew a year’s worth of my pitiful salary on that holiday—and of course never went again, on account of never having any money.

By the time you read this, I will be a week into my three-week trip there—this time in the south of the country. The only other time I’ve been in the south was during junior year in college, when three friends and I fled a nightmarish winter in Pennsylvania to spend spring break in the crown jewel of Louisiana: New Orleans. The heart of the action was on Bourbon Street, which at night lights up like a nuclear explosion and leaves visitors looking much as anyone caught in a nuclear explosion might.

Speaking of bourbon, that’s what the first week of my trip is about: a visit to parts of the American Whiskey Trail, which is a tourism initiative of the Distilled Spirits Council of the US. It involves lurching from distillery to distillery in Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. Going on wine- or whiskey-tasting trips is always a bit of a balancing act—one tries to keep it professional, but one is not all that big-built, and one’s blood volume is easily overwhelmed, and so one cannot guarantee that one will not wind up staggering around like Tallulah Bankhead, who allegedly could go through a bottle of bourbon in half an hour. According to a snippet in The Guardian, her last words were apparently “Codeine, bourbon” before she succumbed to the pneumonia she got from walking around starkers.

The point, though, is that what with the epic civic mess leading up to the Commonwealth Games, and the dengue and swine flu and malaria, and Kashmir, and the fact that income tax officers expect a bribe to hand you your refund, America is suddenly looking like a shinier, happier prospect than it has in the last ten years.

It is, after all, the land of milk and oxytetracycline-free honey. (They do have salmonella problems with eggs, and penicillin in pigs, but nobody’s perfect.) Does it feel much different than pre-9/11? I can’t tell you yet, since I’m writing this before I get on the plane on account of copy deadlines that don’t go well with whiskey tasting. All I know is that it’s a place where people go to seek refuge from whatever hideous combination of civic meltdown, disease and conflict they call home. I can imagine the relief and elation they must feel, those tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, as they sight the Statue of Liberty gifted to America by the cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

I feel a bit the same way myself. I’m seriously considering getting a false moustache and melting into the vast crowd of illegal aliens from south Asia who traditionally drive taxis in New York. I could change the name of the column and start over. Yes indeed; the bright promise of being all that I can be might prove to tough to resist, especially when blotto. Watch this space.

[Note to immigration officials everywhere: I’m kidding.]

How to save the planet?

2010-10-16T10:57:00.001+05:30

Bad news comes in threes, they say. In the last few days a friend’s mother has been diagnosed with cancer, another friend has lost her father, and a family has tragically lost a child. If this sort of thing is not actually happening to you, there’s nothing quite like a personal connection to bring it home with the full force of fear, tragedy or loss. There you are, living a perfectly happy life, and suddenly your insides are liquefied by shock, your mouth is dry, and your heart physically hurts. Your throat and eyes fill with tears, your head with questions.

Similarly, you might hear news of a friend’s success and feel the wildest elation. Or, depending on the kind of person you are, the aforementioned shock and horror—but let’s not go there for now.

The point is, you feel for other people. It’s called empathy, and all but the most interesting sociopaths amongst us have it.
In one of the many excellent animated talks on the website of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), economist and political advisor Jeremy Rifkin touches on the emerging science surrounding empathy (his latest book is The Empathic Civilisation; watch the ten-minute video, and also all the other videos, if only for the wonderful art).

In the 1990s, Rifkin says, an Italian laboratory discovered what are called mirror neurons in the brain. In tests, these light up when the subject observes another’s experience, essentially recreating that experience in the subject. In Rifkin’s words, “we’re soft wired to experience another’s plight as if it were happening to us.” The first drive, he says, is not aggression or utilitarianism, but sociability and affection—the drive to belong.

He traces the expansion of that empathic drive through history as technology and other factors shrink time and space, thus enabling empathy across ever-larger communities from tribes to religious groups to nation states. “Empathy is grounded,” he says, “in the acknowledgement of death and the celebration of life and rooting for each other to flourish and be.” Is it possible, he asks, to extend our empathy to the whole of the human race, and to the biosphere? Could the ability to do this prove crucial to saving the human species and the planet?

Good question. Then why do we bleed emotionally when someone we know suffers, but are much less moved by the suffering of large, anonymous groups of people? Perhaps some of it has to do with certain kinds of experience being alien to ours. Could an American heiress living in a Manhattan penthouse possibly feel for an Indian living in a discarded sewer pipe—could she go beyond merely acknowledging the injustice, or thinking ‘there but for the grace of god go I’, to really feeling the horror of hunger, discomfort, and insecurity? Possibly not. But could she at least, in her own way, imagine herself into as proximate a situation as possible? As we used to say when I worked at the travel magazine, Let your mind travel; your body will follow.

I’m no scientist, but I’ll stick my neck out and offer the thesis that, too often, lack of empathy—for the daily tribulations of discomfort, deprivation, illness, trauma, and loss—is a failure of imagination. Sometimes it’s an honest-to-goodness lack of experience; for instance, it’s almost impossible to empathise with the pain of jealousy without having experienced it. But more often, it’s a lack of willingness to do the work of finding personal resonance. Perhaps it’s also about psychic limits: there’s nothing attractive about pain, and empathy can be bloodying and exhausting.

But maybe fellow-feeling is the only way to translate need into action. I’d say it’s worth the pain.

Trailing clouds of gory

2010-09-12T16:27:00.001+05:30

Ever had somebody’s umbilical cord fall into your lap? This is the sort of thing they don’t tell you about when they’re extolling the joys of becoming a parent or grandparent. Economists have a technical term for this, and that is ‘hidden costs’. Have you ever had a kid tell you that you’re an ugly old woman/man and that you will shortly go blind? That’s what you can expect if you’re planning to have more than one kid. The technical term for that is ‘sibling rivalry’.

There’s a new baby in the family, and she looks like a fuzzy, plump little fruit you could bite into and have delicious pink juice run down your chin, assuming you’d recovered your appetite after the umbilical cord episode. Babies are tiny, beautiful miracles of nature, especially if they belong to other people and you just get to play with them moodily while you’re visiting for a couple of days. As the poet said, “trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home:/Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” His immortal poem goes on to skip over some other things that lie about us in our infancy, like the nuclear explosion of a bowel movement that can follow a baby’s two-week bout of constipation. For the uninitiated, do not assume that you could not possibly find fallout all the way up the back of the baby’s neck, and also possibly your own.

But there’s no doubt that having multiple children is a joy. They’ll be there to comfort you in your old age, to change your adult diapers and wipe up your drool and steer you in the right direction when you’re trying to walk into a wall, or a stranger’s house. You just have to get past the stage where you’ve brought them up, paid for their college education, and successfully kicked them out of your house.

There are, by the way, no guarantees these days that this will be a successful enterprise. As The New York Times recently wrote, at what I consider to be unnecessary length, kids just don’t seem to want to grow up and get their own place any more. I wouldn’t know anything about that, of course, but I do have this middle-aged friend who writes a weekly column that often features the mother whose house she still lives in.

Anyway, your children will ease you into old age and, when you’ve finally passed on to that great PTA meeting in the sky, they will have each other. They just have to get past the stage where the baby’s two-year-old brother tenderly murmurs “I like it the Baby Aadya” and then tries to poke out her eyes and yank her limbs from their sockets; which is also the stage when her six-year-old sister accuses you of negligence and says that you will become paralysed and your brains will fall out unless you play with her instead.

I’m going to visit my multifarious nieces and nephew at the end of the month. I love them to death, but it’s a good thing that these tender little blossoms grow in someone else’s garden. Some people are good at the endless hard work, selflessness and patience that come with gardening. I’m not saying I’m not one of them. It’s just that I’d rather gnaw off my own arm and slither over a bed of nails through sniper fire.

Plus, I figure that if I catch them young, I can brainwash them into believing that it’s only natural, after changing your parents’ diapers, to change your aunt’s.

Things fall apart

2010-09-04T08:13:00.001+05:30

When it comes to Pakistan, it wouldn’t be correct to claim that I’m entirely a dove. This is not because I’m so on top of affairs in that country that I can rattle off good reasons for this wariness—I barely know what’s going on in my own head, let alone theirs—but because I have, through a combination of scanning the headlines and osmosis, developed the general impression that one should trust, but verify. Which is another way of saying that on no account should one believe a word spoken by those double-crossing so-and-sos.

These days, though, my stony little heart goes out to the place. Pakistan is having what you might call a bad hair day, if you were to think of ‘hair’ as ‘everything’ and ‘day’ as many long years, and especially if you were given to epic understatement. You know all those people in the Bible who wander the world being blighted beyond belief? That’s what Pakistan reminds me of these days. Dawn columnist Kamran Shafi put it best in a piece with the self-explanatory title ‘Disaster after ignominy after disaster’. That sort of sums it up nicely. Let me stress that I’m talking here about my stony little heart going out to Pakistan the people, not Pakistan the state.

As if it weren’t enough that the country is generally reviled around the world for nurturing and exporting terrorism, and for diverting war-on-terror money into nefarious alternative projects, and for double-crossing their own allies, and for Kargil, and for stonewalling India on the 26/11 attacks, and for political screwiness that makes us look good, they have now been dealt this monstrous flood, in which vast numbers of people who have nothing to do with the shenanigans of their lousy leaders have suffered death, destruction, and general all-out calamity. That, while one of their preeminent lousy leaders sips champagne in Europe.

And in a situation like that, when your world is falling apart, and your faith in the world is worn a little thin, might you not look to the Pakistani cricket team’s matches in England for a little pick-me-up, since cricket is the other religion you care about? Actually, when you’re burying your children and trying not to drown, you probably couldn’t care less about cricket. But assuming you and your family are on dry ground, saved by luck or circumstance, cricket might be one of the saving graces about being Pakistani.

Did someone say Pakistani cricket? Oh. Er.

It’s not the walloping that the team got in England that we’re talking about, of course, but the marrow-curdling shame of being caught spot-fixing (as opposed to just the fact of spot-fixing, which in this part of the world is perfectly acceptable if you don’t get caught).

If ever there was a country that didn’t need more bad press, this is it, this is it, this is it. If I were a Pakistani, I’d be thinking about last straws. In fact, I’m thinking about last straws even though I’m not a Pakistani. It’s not a case of schadenfreude. I really do think they deserve better than what they’re dealing with. When a country is on its knees, you figure it can’t get any worse, and then it does. It ends up prone on the floor, and you figure that now it can’t get any worse. And then it does. It’s tragic.

Maybe Pakistan’s stars are just temporarily out of whack. Maybe one can have a bad hair day that lasts a decade, and come out sunny side up. Whatever it is, I wish them the best of luck. They need it.

Bombay, meri jawani

2010-08-29T17:17:00.001+05:30

Last weekend I made a visit to Bombay for the first time in two years, to attend a high school friend’s tenth wedding anniversary. A fair number of alumni from Rishi Valley School (which is in Andhra Pradesh) live in Bombay, and a few of us were coming from out of town to use the occasion as a sort of mini-reunion.

The first thing I’d like to say is that Bombay taxi drivers are great fun to chat with. Not one of them seems to be from Bombay, and they have a lot to say about Raj Thackeray, but they’re really much more interested in why you aren’t married.

“But what will you do in thirty years’ time?” one of them wanted to know.

“And you like being married, do you?” I asked. He conceded that it was a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea and dropped me off at the party at Churchgate.

The best thing about class reunions is the certain knowledge that no matter how much everyone has evolved, we will all immediately regress to our high school personas and express love as we used to, viz., “Eh! Bastard.”

The next best thing about a class reunion is that you can now drink and eat non-vegetarian food together without getting expelled—Rishi Valley was strictly vegetarian and teetotalling. We have travelled a great distance from sneaking a dried-out chicken leg, flat beer and cigarette on the hostel roof in the dead of night, to chucking flavoured martinis down our gullets while stuffing our faces with meat and dancing badly to ‘The Final Countdown’. You cannot possibly appreciate this distance if you didn’t go to a Krishnamurti Foundation India (KFI) school, but take my word for it.

Sadly, some of us have travelled an equal but opposite distance from staying up all night to hitting the sack at 10pm, and we’re all a lot fatter, but we’re not going to talk about that anymore.

There’s something Faustian about going to boarding school. No matter how much the paths of your lives have diverged, no matter how little you now have in common, no matter how much you wish so-and-so hadn’t ended up with such-and-such partner, you are bound for life to boarding school classmates in a way you aren’t to day school classmates. You might be a professor of atomic science, or the prince of a sesame seed empire, or a renowned theatre personality, or the founder of a world conquering design firm, or a partner at your own law firm, but your soul belongs to School and its atavistic call, in a way that it doesn’t to college or work.

Unless you went to The Doon School, in which case you never had a soul anyway, or The Lawrence School, Sanawar, in which case you’ve never heard the word ‘atavistic’. All this is because you ate chicken and drank while in school.

Anyway, the atavistic call of boarding school his means that when a critical number of people decide it’s time to get together, You Go. When someone is In Town, you All Meet. This is not a complaint. You cannot imagine how wonderful it is to greet people by saying “Eh! Bastard.”

So the reunion was great fun, and it was followed by further revelry at a pleasant joint called The Dome, and after that some lame people—who shall remain nameless—crawled home at 10pm, while everyone else partied on until 3am.

Now, back in my nineteen-years-on adult life, I’m back to reality. And that’s definitely the very best thing about school reunions: that they remind you of a time when everything you looked at was rose-tinted.

Physician, heal thyself

2010-08-23T17:16:00.002+05:30

Hello, consumer of news, how goes? I was thinking that since you presumably pay for your morning newspapers in order to get an objective, unmotivated assessment of what’s going on in the world, it would be interesting to get your view on this whole storm about the Press Council of India’s sub-committee report on paid news. What do you think? Oh, you didn’t know anything about any storm about any Press Council of India report on paid news?

If that’s true, I beg you to research it. At the very least it will anger, dishearten and depress you, and who doesn’t look forward to that on a Saturday morning?

Recap: After a lot of pushing by some journalists who still care about this sort of thing, the PCI commissions a sub-committee report on the widely-recognised phenomenon called ‘paid news’, in which journalists, editors and media publishers accept, or demand, payment in cash and kind from corporate houses, politicians and other individuals, in return for certain kinds of coverage (most damagingly, though not exclusively, during elections). The sub-committee report produces a thorough report that doesn’t merely mutter darkly, but gives concrete examples, naming names.

Guess what the PCI does with the report? It forms a 12-member board to figure out whether or not to publish it. Guess what this board does? It shouts the idea down and decides instead to write a tiny little hand-wringing abstract of it, in which a tiny little hand-wringing footnote says that the report will remain ‘on record’. ‘On record’ doesn’t mean ‘appended to the tiny little hand-wringing abstract’, or ‘available on the website’. It means, ‘when people call looking for the report, let’s refer them to the tiny little hand-wringing abstract on the website, and if they don’t fall for that and insist on the actual sub-committee report, let’s make them apply in writing for a hard copy, which we’ll take a week to mail.’

Then journalist P. Sainath of The Hindu writes about how the PCI buried this report. Guess how many newspapers follow up this little scandal? You only get one guess. It’s as if a bunch of emperors suddenly realised that none of them had any clothes on and decided to stay home instead.

Luckily we live in notoriously leaky times, so you can read the full report online.

At the beginning of the week there was a Media Foundation of India discussion on the PCI report. The panel included Justice GN Ray, Chairman of the PCI, and Justice JS Verma, Chairman of the Independent Broadcast Regulatory Authority. Justice Ray refused to say why the 12-member drafting committee had to be constituted, or how it voted, and stuck to his sulky position that the PCI has accepted the truth of the report, so what’s all the complaining about? Justice Verma’s main agenda seemed to be to cover for his pal, saying that the footnote can legally be interpreted as “incorporated by reference”, so what’s all the complaining about?

Concerned journalists on the panel called the PCI a ‘toothless tiger’. They talked about how in the 1980s and 1990s regional newspapers didn’t pay their reporters a salary, but gave them a commission on any ads they brought in; how corporate management is increasingly sidelining editors; how journalists are given lists of subjects to cover in a target number of column inches.

The PCI sub-committee report, the burial of that report, and the media’s lack of interest in that burial points to a complicity so deep that nobody can afford to turn the lens on themselves. It takes the idea that there are always a few rotten apples in the barrel, and shows that the one you bite into every morning is ridden with maggots. There’s no better reason for you to care.

Home alone

2010-08-15T17:45:00.001+05:30

The other day I was fondly remembering how my mother cooked endless meals for us when we were kids in Switzerland. She also spent a lot of time driving us to the doctor, cleaning the house, and picking up all our sheddings and messings; and while I have no recollection of her being bad-tempered about this with us, I do remember her listening repeatedly to a Bruce Springsteen song about getting shot at point blank range. I figure now that she must have been recalibrating the meaning of moving from the third world to the first-world nation.

Anyway, in a fit of gratitude, I took her out to dinner at a somewhat fancy restaurant. All that slaving for us has worn her poor body out to the point where a wild, splurgy dinner out means soup and a sandwich, followed by going to bed. I don’t know how anyone can drag out this latter process for an hour, but she has some shamanistic routine involving pots of cream, mysterious medicines, aromatic sleep aids, and an unbelievable amount of pottering around.

At any rate, at the end of the meal she announced her post-prandial plan, which was to go to bed. In the spirit of sharing, I announced my post-prandial plan, which was to go to my favourite neighbourhood bar and have a beer or two.
“How nice. With whom?” she asked.

“By myself,” I said.

Apparently this was the wrong answer. Her eyes developed the Hood of Anguish, which is what your mother’s eyes develop when she thinks that going to a bar by yourself is how alcoholism begins.

“Going to a bar by yourself is how alcoholism begins,” she said. I think I saw Ingmar Bergman giving her the thumbs up from behind a pillar; I definitely heard a ghostly violin playing just behind her left shoulder.

“I’m just going to have a beer, you know,” I said.

“By yourself,” she said, shaking her gory locks at me. “In a bar.”

Mother-daughter dynamics being what they are, if I’d had any doubts about the wisdom of my plan, which I didn’t, they would have vanished instantly. I smiled my steeliest smile, wished her a vigorous bout of putting herself to bed, and sauntered off to my bar, where I had a pleasant evening drinking my beer, listening to music and staring at the wind-blown trees. I was so irritated by her foreboding, though, that I had a couple more beers than I would otherwise—it was happy hour after all. In fact just thinking about the foreboding makes me need a cocktail…

No, but seriously, the fine art of going out for a reflective, solitary drink is dying. Even the waiter who attended my table kept looking around in befuddlement, saying, Ma’am is alone tonight? Yes, I said, ma’am is alone. Nice night, isn’t it? He looked deeply uncomfortable and scuttled off.

I sat there, nobody bothered me, I paid my bill like a responsible citizen, and buggered off home. It was great. I bet that if I’d had testicles instead of ovaries, none of this would have been anguishing, or befuddling, or uncomfortable-making; the Hood wouldn’t have appeared. How irritating can a parent be?

The worst thing about a nagging mother, though, is not having her around. I’m so fond of ignoring her ambient anxiety that a commentary-free life seems less luxury than chore. She’s gone off to visit others of her children (on the flimsy grounds that she loves them too) and while I should be out dancing on tables somewhere, all I’m doing is moping and missing her. In case she’s reading this: I may have to go and drown my sorrows.

Delhi 2010: The Commonwealth Shames

2010-08-07T12:59:00.000+05:30

Journalist: How come the roof of the stadium is leaking?

Official: Due to heavy rains, due to which water collected on the floor.

That’s the level of response we’re getting to increasingly pissed off questions about why a CWG Organising Committee with an elephantiasis-afflicted budget is unable to construct a waterproof building. Our representatives and public servants are treating us the way they always do, which is like retarded children who will hopefully get so involved in the drama of the story (rain fell! water collected on the floor!) that we won’t be tempted to dwell on the whole philosophy behind the concept of roofing.

I’m not going to say, as ex-sports minister Mani Shankar Aiyer recently said, that I will be unhappy if the Commonwealth Games in Delhi this October are a success. But that’s only because I couldn’t care less whether the Games are a triumph or a dismal failure, or poor-to-middling, or pretty good. I couldn’t give a toss whether our stadia end up being dazzling 23rd-century marvels or large leaky shanties; whether the athletes have a fabulous time or faint mid-event due to insufficient nutrition; whether the press shames India or covers it in glory; whether we win any medals or not; in other words whether, at the end of the day, Delhi puts on a good show.

If, on October 4, Delhi wakes up to find world-class stadia all completed, the Games Village ready for occupation, and the roads and pavements of the city magically put back together in spruced up form, it won’t make a whit of a difference to me. As far as I’m concerned we’ve already lost, we’re already shamed, and we’ve already shown ourselves to be a contemptible bunch of losers. Because while, like everyone else, I’d love to see a decent result, I would much rather have had a decent process.

A decent process would be a display of integrity and efficiency by the leadership, organisers, and implementing agencies at every step—that means managing time, and not treating public funds like a lucky dip. Integrity would mean motivating everyone involved with organising and preparing for the Games to get on board with the shared goals of a) doing a first-rate job of hosting an international sporting event; b) being left with a first-rate set of sporting facilities for our young athletes to grow up with, and a much-upgraded city; and c) all this at minimal cost and inconvenience to the people of India during the process. It means best practices.

This we have already hopelessly failed to do. So if Delhi doesn’t collapse into a giant fiery crater in the earth, I won’t think phew, everything went off all right. I will think of the shady outfit called AM Films in London, engaged at a cost of £200,000 without so much as a scrap of written documentation. I will think of a budget swollen to eighteen times its original estimate. I will search for a good metaphor for taxpayer money going down the toilet and, upsettingly enough, find it in the alleged purchase of toilet paper at Rs 4,000 a roll.

Much like the roof issue, our officials want us to give them more money because they have no time left, and to ignore the fact that they have no time left because they didn’t do their jobs, which was to do things on time. They want us to help salvage our ‘national pride’, and ignore the fact that we don’t have any national pride because of them and the fact that we put up with them. And I’m terrified that we will cooperate.

Two questions. How stupid do they think we are? And: How stupid are we?

A good man is hard to find

2010-08-04T12:20:00.001+05:30

The world being what it is, we cynics get little respite. Once in a while, though, something makes your heart soar. I felt that in April, when I saw a YouTube video called ‘Collateral Murder’. Now I’d like to find Julian Assange and give him a big hug and a kiss. And maybe a sandwich and a clean t-shirt. And maybe donate my life savings to his website WikiLeaks.org, which this week was to Rolling Stone’s general-slaying report what a nuclear bomb is to a firecracker.

The big deal is not what the 92,000-document ‘Afghan War Diary’ reveals, which is, in sum, that Pakistan is a creepy double-dealer and that the United States prefers to be bitch-slapped than to risk a geostrategic alliance, even as it hushes up its own indiscretions on the battlefield. Everyone knew that. The big deal is that graphic official evidence of it could impact US public sentiment, thus far contained by the curt phrase ‘national security’, and maybe prompt policy change.

But the much bigger deal is that WikiLeaks itself, in concept and execution, has come to the world’s notice as a game-changer in journalism and the way information is accessed and processed. For the first time, whistleblowers across the world have a relatively safe, technologically sophisticated platform where they can anonymously expose secret documentation—military, political, corporate or any other kind. Information thus declassified and released to the public is potentially volcanic. Is it even legal? Assange’s response to that is a metaphorical middle finger, and several wins in court. That, I like to think, should make the abuse of power a little less easy, or at least a little less carefree.

Some of WikiLeaks’s techniques strike me as similar to those of terrorist networks: armies of anonymous volunteer workers; cells of activity, each of which has knowledge of only a limited part of the system so that any compromise is also limited; an individual, mobile, guerrilla style of operation. Hundreds of people work with Assange, but WikiLeaks is more or less synonymous with the 39-year-old Australian, and almost nobody knows where he is until he surfaces for a TED Talk here or a press conference there. The New Yorker magazine calls WikiLeaks “not quite an organisation; it is better described as a media insurgency”.

And indeed, Assange—a tall, baby-faced, low-voiced, steely-eyed mathematician, physicist and hacker—is an extremist, a crusader for the just individual against the dodgy institution. He despises the cosy mutual back-scratching between journalists and ‘official sources’ that so constrains mainstream reporting. And he takes the fall for the whistleblowers he protects, so, paradoxically, this champion of transparency is paranoid and slippery as an eel himself, living an almost impossibly transient life. In his youth he went through 37 schools as he travelled with his mother; spent days in the wild by himself, has slept in parks and on floors. Today he lives out of a knapsack, sleeps in the houses of friends of friends or in hotels, and constantly changes his phone number and email address. Home is any of four places where he holes up if he falls sick.

WikiLeaks could well be vulnerable to manipulation and abuse itself; but Assange is something of a modern-day hero in a world that has too few. If you hadn’t heard of him before, chances are you’ll hear of him again. I wish him ever-greater paranoia and elusiveness, because I can just see shadowy officials in dark corridors trying to figure out how to get rid of him.

WikiLeaks has an India page. May many more Indians use it, and may many more keep track of it. God knows we could use some help with transparency.

Bieber blues

2010-07-24T14:52:00.002+05:30

I’m really annoyed with my little brother. It turns out that when he was twelve he could have pulled our family out of the working middle class and into the platinum-dusted stratosphere of worldwide fame and fortune—and he blew it, just because there was no YouTube in 1986.

1986 was when my parents shipped him back to India, in the fond hope that he would stop swearing like a sailor, as one did as a fourth-grader at the international school in Jakarta, and grow some socio-cultural roots. (The success of this idea can be measured against the fact that he bolted the minute he could and has lived in the United States for the last ten years. But that’s neither here nor there.)

Anyway, in 1986 he was enrolled at a nice middle-class school in Delhi. When the teacher was vetting students for their preferred hobbies, my brother picked singing, and after other similarly-interested little boys and girls had sung the national anthem and gentle Hindi ballads, he auditioned with a pre-pubertal rendition of Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing. “I want my MTVeeee…money for nothing/and your chicks for free”, he squeaked, unable to understand why people were clutching their bosoms and dropping to the floor in a dead faint. Family lore has it that he was swiftly reassigned to pottery.

The point is that, back then, he had that regular twelve-year-old boy’s squeaky voice. And he could have gotten himself some guitar lessons and a strange, forward-sweeping helmet of a haircut and rapper friends and some platinum records and one billion screaming ten-year-old female fans and more money than he knew what to do with even after giving the rest of us lots; but he didn’t. He just continued to be my kid brother, studied philosophy, got married, had two and eight-ninths children, and left us all struggling to pay our bills like everyone else. Some people have no consideration.

All this bitterness has come welling up since a few days ago, when I was driving somewhere with the radio on and listening to a very silly song called Baby. I listened to the breathy little-girl voice singing just about on key, and thought yes, my brother could have been this phenomenon known as Justin Bieber. I would at least have had a gold radio.

What do you mean, you’ve never heard of Justin Bieber? Oh, perhaps you’re over fifteen. He’s a child from Canada—discovered when he was thirteen, and now sixteen—whose voice hasn’t broken and who sings squeaky songs of love to throngs of pre-pubertal girls who hold up forests of digital cameras to record his every move while swaying and shrieking. He’s now the most searched-for celebrity on Google, has to have a bodyguard to keep his lovelorn fans at bay, and has to be coached, by men whose voices have broken, on how to deal with outrageous fame attained before your own pair have dropped.

Bieber’s mother raised him by herself in Ontario. She put up a YouTube video of him singing in a local competition, followed up with more videos that swept various tiny, wired children off their feet, and pretty soon there the two of them were, drowning in cash up to his really very weird forward-sweeping haircut. A google search for the little whipper-snapper yields 110 million results, So what if a bunch of people hate him and his music and want him to disappear into the black hole known as North Korea? At least his family will never have to work again.

So If I’m sitting here having to earn my keep, it’s all my brother’s fault. I hope he’s sorry.

Here comes the sun

2010-07-19T19:52:00.000+05:30

These days, when the Deepwater Horizon fiasco has the Gulf of Mexico looking almost as oily as the officials from BP, Transocean and Halliburton, it’s heartening to read about a Swiss gentleman by the name of Bertrand Piccard. Monsieur Piccard and his team of scientists and engineers spent six years building a solar-powered microlight plane, and last week this plane undertook its maiden all-night flight.

That’s right, a solar-powered plane, with a pilot—CEO Andre Borschberg—at the controls. A friend of mine actually asked how the damn thing can fly at night when the sun isn’t out, so let me just lay it out at the start: the solar power is stored in batteries. The kind of batteries you keep a sharp eye on, unlike at BP.

Piccard is a hypnotherapist and a balloonist who, in 1999, was first to circumnavigate the globe non-stop in a gas balloon. He’s descended from a family of balloonists and inventors, and sounds, from his name, as if he should have big curly moustaches, jowls and a potbelly, and a retinue of manservants; but in fact he’s a very good-looking man with a wonderful smile. (His hotness is not relevant, but studies have shown that it helps.)

On his “patronage committee” are a number of famous people including Buzz Aldrin and Al Gore (also Paulo Coelho, but no committee is perfect); and descendents of famous explorers—Jean Verne, Jules Verne’s great grandson, and Erik Lindbergh, grandson of Charles. That’s fitting, because this little project could out-famous them all.

Piccard’s dream, called Solar Impulse, was announced six years ago; and on July 7 2010, after four years of design and modelling, simulations and test flights, the rather beautiful, dragonfly-shaped single-seater aircraft took to the skies for its first night flight. Its goal was to take off and attain maximum height as night fell, and fly until the next sunrise. Which, before that same friend asks, it did successfully, landing after 26 hours and 9 minutes, with power left over in the batteries.

Speaking at the TED conference last year, Piccard said that, just as in ballooning one has to toss ballast overboard to control trajectory by changing altitude, so in life one has to toss overboard the ballast of habit, certainties, convictions and dogmas in order to head in the right direction by changing paradigms. He talked about how his balloon had risen from Switzerland with 3.7 tons of liquid propane and landed in Egypt 20 days later with 40kgs; and when he saw that, he promised himself that the next time he flew around the world it would be with no fossil fuel, in order “not to be threatened by the fuel gauge”.
He saw his balloon capsule in the Air and Space Museum in Washington alongside other iconic flight vehicles such as Lindbergh’s and the Wright Brothers’ aircraft and Apollo 11, and realised that the lovely 20th century project of human flight is doomed if we stick with fossil fuel. How to perpetuate that pioneering spirit?

On July 8 2010, the Solar Impulse project celebrated its first truly exciting achievement. “The most renewable energy we have,” Piccard has said in his fabulously charming Swiss accent, “is our own potential and our own passion.” (His accent is not relevant, but studies have shown that it helps.)

Piccard and his project represent not just eco-warrior rhetoric, but an exciting first step towards making a real and significant departure from old dependencies. You can laugh at him, but only if you like sludgy pelicans, doomed fisheries, and the thought of having life come to a grinding halt when the fossil fuels run out.

The unfairer sex

2010-07-10T11:51:00.000+05:30

Many years ago, in our youth, my sister and I spent some time moaning to my mother about man trouble. We enumerated the several flaws of the respective subjects with gathering speed and animation, growing increasingly purple-faced and sweaty. She listened with what I thought was an inexcusable degree of calm, until we ran out of steam and just sat like small wild-eyed dogs, tongues lolling with confusion and exhaustion.

She took a long, slow, deep breath. “You have to understand, my sweethearts,” she said kindly, “that men are retarded.”

We nodded expectantly, ready to be enlightened. But it turned out that that was it. She was done.

Now, I detest gender stereotypes. I have no problem with a man who loves building things out of wood, or a woman who loves to sew, but I thought it was truly obnoxious that, in second grade, as part of extra-curricular activities, all the boys had to go to woodshop and all the girls had to go to needlework. At the time I owned a small wooden toy loom, upon which I spent countless blissful hours weaving the most horrible little bits of misshapen cloth, but I did that because I liked it, not because I was expected to.

I also detest people who are impressed by behaviour that lies outside gender stereotypes. It makes my skin crawl when women gush about a man doing the dishes, as if this is kindness beyond the call of duty, or when men are awed by a woman who drives well, as if she has to overcome some awful mental health issue to do so.

At the same time I can’t stand the knee jerk rejection of any behaviour that happens to overlap with a gender stereotype, as when a woman will never ever allows somebody to buy her a meal, as if her very sense of self would be destroyed by it; or when a man won’t allow a woman to cook him a meal even though she wants to.

In other words, I’m not hugely keen on rote behaviour of any sort, or blanket statements that purport to apply to fifty percent of the world’s population. Plus, most of my best friends are men.

So, after a fair amount of living, I think back to what my mother said all those years ago, and, much as it pains me to have to correct an elder, I must disagree. And because I know how much I appreciated her bothering to share her pithy wisdom, I like to think that other people might benefit from my humble experience too. So hear this, all you exasperated, hurting women out there, but more particularly all you starry-eyed fillies in love: It’s not entirely true that men are retarded.

Oh, they’re infantile, intemperate, blind, have double standards, look for instant gratification and scapegoats, lack the ability to parse their emotions, have the most blatant double standards, are consumed by their own sense of injury, can’t get any perspective, sulk, throw tantrums, have double standards, suffer delusions of grandeur and several other sorts of delusion, don’t know how to listen, are smug know-it-alls, make kitchen tables look intuitive, have double standards, storm around like titans with egos as fragile as eggshells, are inconsistent, don’t know the value of friendship, have double standards, are weak, are terrified of what people will think, and haven’t the faintest idea what they themselves think. Oh, and they have double standards.

But no, men are not retarded; it would be more accurate to say that they are really, really retarded. I don’t know whether they’re from Mars or from Venus, but I wish they’d go home.

Voila! Forewarned is forearmed.

December 13, 2006

2010-07-10T11:50:00.000+05:30

A black, black day.

Before that, my life was puttering along fairly smoothly. I had enough work, the house looked all right as long as your standards were flexible, and I read a fair number of books. I was happy.

Oh, I had my share of troubles—limited finances, doomed relationships, personal loss, a frustrating inability to smoke marijuana because it gives me panic attacks. But on balance I was doing all right, thanks to the wonderful people in my life who have stuck with me through thick and thin, because when they try to run I hunt them down and smoke ’em out. Field note: they stop screaming in your face when fatigue sets in, especially if you threaten their children.

Everything was just fine until that chilly winter day when I signed up on Facebook.

Today, pale and wan from lack of exposure to sunlight, obese from lack of movement, tissues wasted away except for remarkably muscular fingers, eyes evolved to lemur-like proportions, brain that on an MRI looks like a familiar blue toolbar, I am a mere shell of the woman I used to be and, frankly desperate. If this is life, I don’t want it.

My email records show that my descent into the agonies of addiction began when I got an invitation from a friend. (It later turned out that he had no idea that his profile was stepping out at night wearing a catsuit and a balaclava and inviting everyone in his address book.) I signed up but more or less ignored Facebook—oh, that innocent time!—until June 2007, when a trickle of friends and messages suddenly turned into a flood.

There were messages. There were photographs. There were minute-by-minute updates. There was Scrabble, and Scramble, and Lexulous. There was Honesty Box. There was voyeurism. Shallow intimacies—with people one didn’t necessarily even like—sprang up like weeds. Real-world ceased because everyone was staying home, logging onto Facebook to make sure they stayed in touch. What warm-blooded mammal could resist all this?

But then it became a problem. I thought I could control it; but soon enough, it had robbed me of my basic human rights, like the freedom to move beyond internet access, the freedom to not play my Scramble turn immediately just because someone nudged me electronically, the freedom to break for meals and, sometimes, a shower. It’s the nature of addiction.

I’m tired of meeting actual flesh-and-blood people and looking beside their face to find the button that will take me to their wall. More and more, these days, in the lonely darkness of 3am, wracked by repetitive stress injury and carpal tunnel syndrome and the unbearable agony of a) not knowing what my friends are doing at that exact moment, and b) knowing what perfect strangers look like and do and talk about, I contemplate taking what our newspapers call “the extreme step”.

I even put it up on my Facebook status a couple of times, the fact that I am sick of it all and sometimes—yes, it’s true—have thoughts of deleting my profile. But, instead of fearing the worst, people thought it was funny. This is how tragedies happen: people cry out for help, and other people just ‘like’ it.

I yearn for that sweet release. It would be for the best. But then I think of all the people I’d leave behind, reeling in shock and disbelief, clutching at each other’s pixels and trying to understand, to make sense of it all; and I bow my head, and I steel myself, and I carry on for their sake.

That’s what it means to be responsible.

Wet blankets

2010-07-10T11:48:00.000+05:30

You know those people who walk around in 30-40°C temperatures with 80 percent humidity and never seem to perspire? The ones who live in Kolkata, or Kerala, or Jakarta, or Singapore or Mumbai and spend the day tramping around the streets but never have their shirts stick to their backs, or a single dainty droplet trickle from their temples? The ones who look fresh as a daisy no matter how long they’ve been in the sun? I hate those people. It’s people like me, who sweat like a tap at the slightest hint of heat, or humidity, or deadline, that take up the slack for people like them who don’t pull their weight in the sweat gland department.

Living in Delhi is an exercise in chronic urban misery at the best of times, with additional annoyances in the form of extremely hot and extremely cold temperatures, but in the last few days the weather has been, well, there’s no gentle way to spin it, unbelievably disgusting. A couple of weeks ago we had a day that was like Northern Europe in late spring—cloudy, cool, with a nippy breeze. Just when we’d been lulled into complacency, it has soared to 44°C, with humidity levels that feel as if you’re walking around with a freshly boiled towel wrapped around you, and wet-footed ants running around inside it.

I’ve finally understood something I grew up not understanding: the English propensity to talk about the weather all the time. In a website on learning English that teaches you how to speak about the weather, the first sample conversational exchange is:

Q: “What’s it like out?”

A: “It’s miserable out.”

This is a very useful sample sentence both in England and in Delhi in terms of accuracy, even though “out” is a dodgy Americanism, in the same way that “I just paid my electric” is. But it’s not really that English, because being English involves a natural propensity for staggering understatement. My roommate in college, who was half-English, nevertheless displayed this talent as if she were fully English. We would wake up to black skies and shrieking winds, driving snow and temperatures that would freeze your tongue to your palate, and when we stepped out, me bundled up like a polar bear and she in dazzlingly short skirts and stockings, the conversation went more like this:

Me: $%^&* [freezes and falls over, dead as a doorknob]

She: “Fresh, isn’t it?”

Anyway, when you’re young you don’t notice things like the weather, or food, or sleep, or anything much besides the fact that your parents are always wrong. As your body soldiers on through season after season, though, and you look about you for a place to rest your tiring bones, weather elbows its way up the priority list and ends up right up there beside decent bars and good quality health insurance.

The best place to live, weather-wise, is without a doubt in the Seychelles, where the temperature almost never goes below 21° or above 30°C all year long. This is the zone in which I do my best thinking about decent bars and good quality health insurance. A friend of mine who lived in this sort of constant (though more humid) weather in Southeast Asia moved countries in search of a place with four distinct seasons, but I think this is a mistake.

At any rate, I’m doing my damnest to organise things such that I can spend December through February, which are the nicest months in Delhi, in the Sahara desert instead. If it works out, I’ll have proven my hunch that while human beings have a strong sense of what’s best for their bodies, their brains remain weak.

The drink that cheers

2010-07-10T11:45:00.001+05:30

I like playing football. I last played in middle school, when our physical education classes required us to have a stab at every kind of sport, and football was my favourite. I offered to play attacker (we called it centre forward), but the coach seemed to think of me as more of a defender; it isn’t perfectly clear to me why, but I’m nothing if not a cooperative team player type. And indeed, I remember getting some of my best thinking done next to the goalpost, possibly leaning on it, while some people ran around on the other end of the field, shouting.

No wonder, then, that every four years I wait with feverish devotion for the World Cup, which I believe is some kind of big tournament. Because the fact is, there is no better globally accepted justification for breaking out enormous quantities of beer. Four years ago, when Germany hosted the World Cup, I was backpacking around Europe and found myself in Sorrento, Italy on the night that the Italian team won the final. My ears are still ringing from that night, and my liver and I didn’t talk for a while.
But the excellent thing about football is that there’s so much goodwill and good cheer floating around that you can break out the beer at the drop of a hat, for just anything, at any time, without inviting censure. You could be drinking at breakfast, or while walking in a forest, and nobody would bat an eyelid—and you can blame it on football.

So this is what I did last weekend. Some friends and I drove up to Shimla after a long and intricately plotted night of defiance, recklessness, intrigue, violence, loss and suspense, the details of which I am not at liberty to share, but let’s just say that they make Stieg Larsson look like a little old lady. The car had seen better days—two windows were inoperable, the wipers were trailing rubbery ribbons, the stereo volume bore no relation to the direction in which one turned the knob, and every time we hit a bump the face of the stereo fell off—but we got there in time to watch South Africa vs. Mexico.

Pretty much everything from that point on involved some sort of alcohol, which, for any children who are reading this, is very bad for you but does help mitigate the maddening buzz of vuvuzelas. It’s true that we had beer with our breakfast eggs and slipped some whiskey into our breakfast coffee, but we weren’t completely off our faces, and still deeply connected to the spirit of sport: we fought like wildcats over the last half-bottle of wine, resorting to dealmaking and horsetrading like the most successful teams; and we played a sweaty, screaming, occasionally violent game of pitthu in the middle of a forest, with a rolled-up pair of socks for a ball, and a tiny patch of nettled slope for a field. My team came very close to winning, given my skills as a defender, but I had to send an sms just as something exciting happened on the field and the rules of pitthu weren’t that clear to me anyway. What are you supposed to do with two balls and two piles of stone anyway?

Now I’m back, more or less detoxed enough to start all over again, and fully into the swing of football. I’ve been reading carefully about the players, the history of the teams, the statistics and the cool side stories about ball technology, and have come to my own decision about whom to support. May the team with the best socks win.

Pass the methyl isocyanate, please

2010-06-15T14:27:00.000+05:30

We’re no banana republic, okay? We’re the world’s largest democracy and we have robust democratic institutions. Take the recently concluded case of the Really Trying, Whiny People of Bhopal vs. The Chaps Who Were Just Making Some Damn Pesticide. India should thank the district court in Bhopal for winding things up in a lightning twenty-six years, because frankly, nobody wants to go on listening to aforesaid really trying, whiny people say the same things witness after witness, year after year. Untold suffering is so out.

Hear ye, o people of India: don’t think you can get away with really bad stuff, because the long arm of the law will reach out and bring you to trial and give you what you deserve. In Bhopal the law heard 178 prosecution witnesses on the stand talk about the estimated 25,000 people who have died or suffered from methyl isocyanate poisoning and its after-effects since 1984; it heard eight defence witnesses mutter darkly about sabotage; it examined 3,000-odd documents; it fast-tracked the whole thing so that only one of the accused died in the process. The law weighed up the evidence, decided the accused were guilty, and then fearlessly sentenced them to the legal equivalent of a wedgie.

Do you really want a wedgie, o people of India?

Didn’t think so. Better wise up and keep your misdeeds on this side of horrific, else you may be asked to sit in prison for two years and pay a lakh of rupees. You’ll get bail in the evening, but the whole thing is an avoidable spot of bother. Do you really want inconvenience and fines to pay, o people of India? Didn’t think so.

The judge, Mohan P. Tiwari, summed up the Bhopal verdict by saying: “Surely justice has been done.” If this sounds strangely like a question to himself, it’s probably just the inherent ambiguity of language at work. Some people said things like “travesty of justice” and “too little, too late” but we must remember that they are not judges with a mandate to retain a sense of proportion and fairness, and dole out punishment commensurate with the goof-up. It’s as if, after twenty-six years of the court trying this case, people expected it to try harder.

Some of these tiresome people also wanted to know why Warren Anderson, big cheese of the Union Carbide Corporation, was arrested at the time of the disaster and then allowed to leave the country. The former Joint Director of the CBI, who on TV looked as if he hadn’t slept for twenty-six years, revealed that the Ministry of External Affairs directed that extradition attempts be dropped. He also said that asking for an extradition now simply “exposes us that why did we drop it?” Well said. Had everyone forgotten about our National Image?

I wish all these carping critics would focus on the good bits, the way that US Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake did when he said, “We hope that this is going to help to bring closure to the victims and their families.” Positive thinking can change your life, you know.

Now that we have a benchmark, though, I really think it’s time for the judiciary to be similarly fair with Ajmal Kasab. He may be halfwit with a rage problem who waged war on India, but I mean, the guy only killed seven people and didn’t have a visa to enter India and that sort of thing. It seems awfully extreme to be talking about the death penalty when he’s so young and full of promise. I say let’s just wash his mouth out with soap and fly him home. For free.

Jailbird

2010-06-15T14:26:00.000+05:30

The world responded with a single voice to Israel’s autistic behaviour earlier this week, when it applied the Bush Doctrine to a flotilla of Gaza-bound relief ships put together by its own allies and still sailing in international waters. “We have a right to defend ourselves,” said Israel. “Are you out of your paranoid minds?” yelled the world, outraged.

Totally understandable. But how come nobody in India was outraged by the insult to our own national pride, delivered a few days before that? I mean, it usually takes very little for people to start frothing at the mouth at the slightest slight—perceived, planted, or made up when none can be perceived or planted. But this time the whole country seemed to be blind, deaf and dumb to the facts. And the facts are that Pakistan just gave us the bird.

Did you follow that story? Of course not, you were too busy being outraged about Israel to notice the filthy treachery in your own backyard. About a week ago AFP reported that an alert Punjabi farmer in our border regions with You-Know-Who, found a white pigeon on his roof. It had a ring around its foot and a Pakistani phone number and address stamped in red ink on its body. The farmer’s antennae immediately sprang out from under his turban and he grabbed the bird and delivered it unto a police station near Amritsar.

Now there’s a real patriot. Because of him, and because some people are still bothered about national security while the rest of you are busy joining flotilla protest groups on Facebook, this feathery slur/threat to our national something or other was immediately put under armed guard. The law suspects it of being here on “a special mission of spying”. The note that they speculate was attached to the ring on its foot is gone, and the pigeon is not talking. Nor is it saying why exactly it allowed a large farmer to lumber up and grab it when, after all, it has wings, but we can probably just put that down to widely documented pigeon stupidity.

International conventions on animal cruelty forbid us from openly torturing the creature, but we have no lack of maverick Jack Bauer type operatives amongst our defence forces. These brave men and women, who take the rap so that you can sleep with a clear conscience, cleverly placed it in an air conditioned room, I’m guessing because a suddenly comfortable temperature will shock it into singing like a canary. It is not allowed to receive visitors—a cruel but legal tactic that has been known to break down the most hardened criminals.

PTI reports that senior officers are being updated on the situation three times a day. I was able to get copies of sixteen such reports, which are meticulously documented; when collated they provide a pretty good slice of jailbird life. “6am: Suspect woke up and strutted around arrogantly, showing no signs of fear. 6.01am: Suspect pooped. 10am: Suspect emitted message encrypted to sound like a pigeon coo. 10.41am: Suspect pooped. 2.55pm: Suspect pecked at one-way glass as if to defy captors. 2.56pm: Suspect pooped. 7.48pm: Suspect looked around suspiciously. 10pm: Suspect pooped.”

After a stipulated detention time, the bird—which, on the basis of behavioural trend analyses, is now being viewed as more of a stool pigeon—was, according to DNA newspaper, handed over to the Wildlife Department for further studies. That’s what our vigilant forces do for us while you’re busy being incensed about Israel.

Bet you won’t find any bleeding heart lefties putting together protest marches to free the bird. Nobody has any perspective.

The worm turns

2010-05-31T13:04:00.001+05:30

When I’m being rational I know that just exceptionally bad luck. But really, it’s hard not to take it personally.

Last week was my second visit to Bhutan in six months. I was attending this three-day literary festival—on someone else’s dime, which always contributes a certain frisson to travel—and then I was going to do a week of travelling on my own. This was going to make up for the last time when, regular readers of this column may remember, I fell sick on my first night, coughed my lungs out all over Bumthang and Thimphu, and ended up being ordered back home by the Indian military hospital doctor. This time I was hale and hearty and raring to see everything I’d missed.

We took off from Delhi in 41°C heading up to 44°, and landed at the international airport in Paro at 22° in a blessed drizzle. We climbed into the bus and started the forty-five minute journey to Thimphu. I couldn’t stop smiling. There it was all around us, Bhutan, unspeakably lovely Bhutan: ethereal green clefts, scudding iron-grey clouds, pristine air, breezes that you’d sell your mother for. Everything was perfect.

About fifteen minutes into the bus ride I felt the first twinge, a painful spasm in the upper abdomen. Twenty minutes later it happened again, like a fist grabbing my insides and squeezing hard. My belly began to gurgle and twist in a dangerous sort of way. At the hotel I lunged into the bathroom expectantly but nothing happened. We had a bunch of speeches to sit through, so I popped a Digene. Things settled down, but the pain returned soon enough with such intensity that I found myself sweating in a cold evening.

I dragged myself through the festival with frequent doses of Digene, and two doses of antibiotics. On Thursday evening the worky part of the trip was over, the antibiotics seemed to be holding the fort, and I was looking forward to a week of skipping up and down mountainsides with an imaginary scarf billowing prettily in the wind. Everyone else was flying out early the next morning.

That’s when the pain got so bad that I began to beg for a doctor. I was hustled into my jacket and driven to the local hospital through the rain at 10pm with a hot water bottle pressed to my middle. I think I was walked from room to room in search of a bed and a doctor, and am dimly aware that someone had a minor altercation with a doctor who resented being pulled from a critically ill patient to tend to someone who seemed to have a mysterious case of cooped-up gas.

I do clearly remember ending up on an antibiotic drip and two injected painkillers. I reacted to this by involuntarily leaping around on my bed (convulsions, someone said), speaking in sentences that came out as ‘gaaah’ and ‘bleugh’ (incoherence, someone said) and throwing up at regular intervals (gross, someone said). I think my doctor cousin in Delhi was on the phone with various people all night, and I know that it was he who, discovering that a CT scan couldn’t be had where I was, ordered me back home, on an airplane seat that the Indian embassy was kind enough to arrange at the crack of dawn.

The CT scan in Delhi showed that I had—get this—roundworm. After five days of deworming meds and unusually ablutionary vigilance I haven’t yet had the pleasure of spotting the little creep, but the doctor assures me it’s dead as a doorknob, and I’m right as rain.

So, Bhutan. Feels like déjà vu all over again. I know it’s just bad luck, but it’s hard not to take it personally. Take your deworming tablets regularly, children.

The difficulty of being good

2010-05-26T11:25:00.001+05:30

The other night I awoke in a cold sweat, clutching my copies of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, and 101 Ways to Make Every Second Count: Time Management Tips and Techniques for More Success With Less Stress. Then I realised that the waking up must have been part of the dream, since I don’t own copies of these books.

That’s when I woke up for real, and the sweating began in earnest. With the shriek dying on my lips, I looked out at the 4am darkness and asked the large, empty space where God should have been: Why? Why didn’t I buy those books? Why didn’t I read them? Why do I for the millionth time in my life find myself in a situation where I have ten days’ worth of things to do and one day in which to do them?

In a low grumble the large empty space replied: Because you didn’t do the ten days’ worth of stuff when you had the ten days. Burn, sucker.

There are people who grow and change and develop themselves throughout their lives with the help of other people, books, maybe some after-work classes in pottery or krav maga. They try to make up for what they perceive as their deficiencies, attempt to rein in their baser natures, work on improving imperfect relationships, put sweat, blood and tears into providing the best possible future for their (typically ungrateful) children, strive to narrow the gap between who they are and who they’d like to be, struggle to become better human beings.

Then there are the rest of us, who remain thoroughly unreconstructed. We’re still stubborn, still lazy, still prefer to lie on the sofa bed rather than smite the day with vigour. We would rather, in times of trouble, give up immediately and reach for the jar of Nutella or the carton of Cerelac (wheat flavour—the others are rubbish); and we’d certainly rather set ourselves on fire than take on any kind of responsibility. Simply put, we are constitutionally and chronically averse to putting up with that with which we would rather not put.

Happily, these failings come with a preternatural capacity to rationalise them away. Some people would call that another failing. I call it an indispensible life jacket in the boiling rapids of life. So I can say, without the slightest sense of dissimulation or sheepishness, that the reason I had that nightmare is that I am stressed by too much work and too little time. Baaaa.

The reason I’m overworked is that I’m off to Thimphu, Bhutan for the first edition of what is envisioned as an annual literary festival, and am therefore writing this column, inter alia in advance. Luckily, Bhutan is one of the happiest countries in the world, not to mention one of the prettiest. It and I have a short and stormy history dating from last October, when I drove in for what was supposed to be a three-week driving trip, and it drove me out prematurely with a hideous chest infection, but this time I come in peace with no plans of any sort except to take in great lungfuls of clean air.

The weather people have promised a rainy, windy few days. But since I’m from Delhi where the mercury, at 44C, is currently twice as high as in Thimpu, rain and wind are perfectly welcome. The delight of cool weather and green mountains and meals made entirely of chilli and cheese should more than make up for the stress and overwork of the festival. Baaaa.

Too close to home

2010-05-26T11:22:00.001+05:30

Among the many questions that overhang married life in India, the one that most intrigued me for a while was on a government document. It asked whether my husband and I were “spindas” (sic). Being of the rootless heathen persuasion, we had no idea what the word meant but decided that it had what can only be called a droll ring. Why look it up and leach all the fun from it? So we closed our eyes, pinned the donkey’s tail on the answer ‘No’, and kept the word. We got a kick out of ambushing each other around a corner and hissing: “Are you or are you not my spindas?” so the other person could reply, for instance, “On Tuesday if it’s raining”; or we might say, as we left the house, “Keys, wallet, phone…oh hang on, I forgot to turn off the spindas.”

Well, perhaps you had to be there.

Anyway, over time I forgot about the spindas, until I came upon it the other day in a newspaper article related to the recent spate of reported honour killings in Haryana and elsewhere. Turns out that “sapinda” (‘spinda’ being, I assume, the pronunciation of whichever Punjabi wrote the form) is a blood relationship of a certain order: five generations of ascent on the paternal side, three on the maternal side. Turns out they were asking, on that government form, whether ours was an incestuous relationship, as defined by a very complicated set of Hindu social rules. It’s a good thing we ticked ‘No’, though until we start having Incest Pride parades I imagine that honest-to-goodness incestuous couples will also tick ‘No’, as will most people at airports when they’re asked if they are vicious international terrorists armed to the teeth and wanted by Interpol—but that’s government bureaucracy for you, imaginative as sofa stuffing.

The other word that popped up from time to time was “gotra”. The priest at our wedding asked us what our gotras were; neither of us knew, though I assume someone older and wiser on both sides dealt with that one. Some years later, when some maintenance men came to fix our inverter while I was alone at home in shorts, they asked me my gotra. I said it was none of their business but that as it happened I had no idea, which they clearly didn’t believe.

But that’s me, the rootless heathen who has done an abysmal job of integrating into India. If I were more in sync with our incomparable 5,000-year-old traditions, I’d know that not being my spouse’s sapinda, and being of compatible gotra, has kept the blood coursing through my veins as opposed to spouting across the floor. Thank you, khap panchayats.

A khap panchayat, for those of you other rootless heathens who may have been living under a rock, is a council of clan elders that governs the affairs of a group of several dozen villages. Among other things, they subtly or unsubtly encourage families to hack to death any of their offspring who might go and marry a gotra or sapinda non-compliant person. They also make life hell for any family that refuses to snuff the life out of their children. The khap panchayats submit that we have them to thank for the fact that we aren’t a nation of cross-eyed, drooling retards with terrible immunity (although a few here and there got away and now work in telemarketing). And some of our young parliamentarians agree.

MP Naveen Jindal is either a snivelling suck-up to his constituents, or a truly principled guy who would uncomplainingly submit his own children to this form of justice—who knows? What I do know is that when he tells them “You deserve praise for promoting Hindu values, culture, tradition and beliefs”, it makes me feel like emigrating instantly. Because those khap panchayats really get my gotra.

Underexposure

2010-05-26T11:20:00.001+05:30

Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi should take responsibility for the 6.5-magnitude earthquake that hit Taiwan recently. Sedighi said that immodestly-dressed women set off men, who set off extramarital affairs, which set off earthquakes. This statement set off a young blogger in Indiana named Jennifer McCreight, who set off over 50,000 cleavages around the world in a mock-experiment called ‘Boobquake’ on April 26, which set off the Taiwanese earthquake that very day.

No, of course it didn’t. The Taiwanese earthquake was simply a cosmic reminder that no matter how good your joke is, there’s always a better one out there, the butt of which is you. But Sedighi believes it could have, so why shouldn’t Taiwan leverage his imbecility to pass on the bill for re-plastering their cracked walls?

Boobquake reminded me that time and again, around the world, people have partially or fully disrobed in protest. Lady Godiva is an early historical example, who rode naked through Coventry to protest against the excessive taxes her husband levied. Being an 11th-century aristocrat she ordered everyone to stay at home and shutter their windows while she did this, but she did it. (One unfortunate fellow who watched through a hole and was struck with blindness remains with us as ‘peeping Tom’.)

There’s something about a bit of skin that concentrates the human mind wonderfully on things it would rather ignore. Stripping is often a last-resort tactic to embarrass and shame the target into paying attention, and in recent times it has featured on a regular basis. There’s the Bare Witness movement, which began in the UK in 2003 with naked people spelling ‘peace’ with their naked bodies in freezing weather. Three years ago, 600 people without a stitch of clothing got together on the Aletsch glacier in the Swiss Alps to pose for a human art installation calling attention to global warming.

In 2007 an underground Burmese women’s organisation urged women to “post, deliver or fling your panties at the closest Burmese Embassy any day from today. Send early, send often!” to protest the junta’s repression and crimes against women. The so-called Panties for Peace movement encouraged soiled underwear since, culturally speaking, contact with such an item is about the most strength-sapping trauma a man can undergo.

Last year women wearing blood-soiled underwear marched through Johannesburg to protest the privatisation of water, which would limit access to a basic need. In Tel Aviv bicyclists and roller bladers wore next to nothing to demand safe bicycle lanes and protest a bicycle helmet law; semi-naked English pensioners demonstrated against their collapsed pension schemes (‘2009 and still stripped of our pensions’); activists from the Ukrainian women's movement FEMEN wore underwear made from hygienic masks to protest against the government’s manipulation of H1N1 fears ahead of the presidential election.

This year a bunch of flesh-baring Germans invaded Berlin-Tegel airport to protest calls for full-body scanners following the, er, Underwear Bomber’s Christmas Day attack. The Maldivian feminist movement Rehendhi sent panties to Sheikh Ibrahim Fareed on Valentine’s day with messages like ‘Undies for Fundies’, to protest a rather misogynistic speech he’d given. And every year PETA runs starkers through Pamplona to protest the famous bull run, under the slogan ‘Join the human race’.

In India we’ve had our own share of drama: the famous nude protest by Manipuri women in 2004 against alleged rape by the army; courageous Pooja Chauhan, who marched down the streets of Rajkot in 2007 in her bra and panties to protest ill-treatment in her marital home, and of course, the Consortiumn of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women who sent their frilliest knickers to Sri Ram Sena chief Pramod Mutalik to protest the beating up of women in a pub in Mangalore.

Who can blame anyone—there’s just so much in the world that will get your knickers in a twist.

Blood on the House floor

2010-05-04T09:33:00.000+05:30

Earlier this week the Speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Volodymyr Lytvyn, conducted the day’s voting from behind two or three ordinary large black umbrellas held open before him by his security. This was to prevent any further eggs from hitting him, though at least one of the many hurled by members of the house was in yellow bloom upon his quite sharp suit.

This was the genteel part of the episode, though it was somewhat incongruous. I mean, what kind of guard carries a big black umbrella inside a building? For that matter, what kind of parliamentarian brings eggs along to work in the morning? Then it all went to hell. The opposition accused the President of betraying the country’s interests, and an all-out brawl erupted. Honourable fists laid into honourable noses; someone threw a smoke bomb that all but obscured the voting board tally; lots of people bled profusely.

I almost wept with relief.

Then I went online and looked up more reassuring photos—of that time in July 2009, when the honourable members of the parliament of South Korea leapt upon the dais to prevent the passing of a controversial media bill, and attacked each other with screams of abuse, hair streaming with sweat in their efforts to deck rivals and almost tear off their clothes. It is something to watch a delicate, business-suited Korean woman emitting blood-curdling screams as she falls upon/is fallen upon by another with the aspect of a rogue pterodactyl. I checked out Taiwan’s legislators honouring a longstanding tradition of brawling like schoolchildren.

In other words, our elected representatives don’t make the only ugly scenes in the world—though, as a patriotic Indian, I root for ours being the ugliest. Remember the Uttar Pradesh Assembly back in 2006? MLAs stormed the well of the house and then, deciding that this kind of thing was for wallflowers, began to rip out microphones and either club their colleagues over the head or launch them at each other like javelins; they sent furniture flying through the august hall; and they candidly just beat each other to pulp with their bare fists.

Remember the cash-for-votes scandal of July 2008, when BJP MPs ran down to the well and began to throw wads of money around which they alleged served to buy the government votes to survive the no-confidence motion after the Left withdrew support over the Indo-US nuclear deal?

Of course, everyone knows that in that instance, while every party had issued a clarion call to all its MPs, appealing to them to come forth from their hospitals and prison cells, to vote, the man who really swung it for the UPA was the Samajwadi Party’s Kishore Samrite. This guy spent Rs 17 lakhs sacrificing over three hundred animals in a ten-day yagna at the Kamakhya temple in Guwahati. Animal rights activists led a delegation of outraged animals to the Speaker of the house in protest, but I’m not sure that that got anywhere.

Then there was the Maharashtra state Assembly that dissolved into fistfights and hardbound book-throwing in April 2008, apparently because of poor time management that left some people without the time to speak. It ended with cut and bleeding noses and six MLAs being suspended for a year.

There are endless examples, across our great land, of unparliamentary behaviour. All in all, the Ukrainians can keep their silly umbrellas. I’m reassured that if we’re not the only ones, at least we’re the worst. However, while I don’t really mind if our representatives knock each other’s brains out, I just wish they’d leave the furniture alone. We pay for that.

Keep your lid on

2010-04-24T08:06:00.002+05:30

Let’s say it all together now: Eyjafjallajökull! Oh, do you not know how?

The volcano under the eponymous Icelandic glacier began to erupt at about the same time as the whole Shashi Tharoon-Lalit Modi-IPL thing, though with less intensity. From India, the 15,000ft-33,000ft ash plume was almost totally eclipsed by our own cash plume. But those of us who view the IPL as any other crooked business venture, and Shashi Tharoor as any other slippery politician, have been much more interested in the volcano.

And for us, the big question of the last many days has been: How do you even say that word? Eyjafjallajökull, which in the local language means “A hundred thousand cancelled flights later you still won’t be able to pronounce this”, is wreaking havoc with the aviation industry, and with newscasters around the world whose tongues now loll, limp and useless, from the effort of trying to say it several times a day. This greatly amuses Icelanders, who themselves breezily ignore half the letters, stick in some unscheduled ‘t’s, and then pronounce them ‘d’. You can listen to them say it right here; as far as I can make out, it’s Ay-a-fadla-yo-kudl. The rest of the clip is devoted to making fun of how everyone else says it.

I can’t begrudge them a few giggles, though. They haven’t had the best couple of years, what with everyone looking crossly at them because of how much they owe the world, and now for busting up travel plans and bankrupting airlines, as if they’re responsible for the behaviour of their volcanoes. (It doesn’t, however, look good that Reykjavik has sunny skies and that all flights between Iceland and the non-European world are right on schedule.)

Things could get worse: scientists say that not only could this volcano keep burping fire for weeks or months, but apparently Eyjafjallajökull’s explosions tend to trigger the neighbouring, much fiercer Katla volcano. Connected to the same magma chain is Laki—and the last eruption of that one, in 1783, has been blamed for effects as far-reaching as the French Revolution (volcanic gases change patterns, crop production falls in Europe, peasants run amok). Global warming is likely to increase both volcanic eruptions and their intensity. But figuring all this out is not going to be easy; GNS Science, a New Zealand research organisation, wanted to send a scientist to study Eyjafjallajökull, but he couldn’t get a flight to Europe.

But really, everyone should just suck it up. I don’t care if I never go to Europe again, as long as they wait for it to be safe to fly. All the people yelling about the lack of crisis coordination and demanding their high-tech, high-speed lives back should take a quick refresher on the ‘Jakarta incident’ of 1982, when a British Airways Boeing flew into the ash plume of Mt Galunggung near the Indonesian capital and lost all four of its engines. The crew took the plane into a nosedive to prevent oxygen-starvation, and upon exiting the ash cloud were able to restart their engines, but had to land without their instruments and more or less blind. The whole thing was, as the captain memorably described it, “a bit like negotiating one’s way up a badger’s arse.”

If that sounds like fun, go ahead and blow your top agitating for flights to resume asap. But it might be much more fun to sit around on a boat, or in a train or car, and use the time to look at photographs or film clips of volcanic eruptions, because they’re truly spectacular events.

And maybe practice how to say Eyjafjallajökull.

And the winner is...

2010-04-24T08:02:00.002+05:30

There I was, a complete wreck, heart sprinting, palms slightly clammy, stomach somersaulting, trying not to let it show as the moderator invited the guest of honour up to the podium to announce the winner. Television cameras panned the hall, and everyone was dressed to the nines. I can’t remember the last time I was that nervous. Who would it be?

I think my stomach actually climbed out of my mouth and tried to make its way down my chin when the minister opened the envelope. And when he leaned into the mike, and declared the name of the winner, my heart jolted painfully—in empathy for the winner and for all the candidates who didn’t make it.

If, like me, you had attended a fair number of the panel discussions and book readings that preceded the announcement of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in Delhi on April 12, you may well have been in the same state of nerves as I was. If there’s anyone more opinionated than a writer, it is a reader, each of us constituting little juries of one, handing down kangaroo court-style verdicts. But attending these sessions, talking to the authors and getting a sense of their books served only to interest me in all of them, and thoroughly confuse me.

I knew Rana Dasgupta’s Solo (eventual winner of the Best Book award), to be fully deserving of a prize because I’d read it; but then I began to think that so, for instance, might Michael Crummey’s Galore, which draws on the rich folklore of his native Newfoundland—a place that was largely illiterate until a generation ago, when the island joined Canada. Newfoundlanders still speak the medieval settlers’ English that has long died out in Europe.

I was equally drawn to The Adventures of Vela by the Samoan writer Albert Wendt, who also uses the ancient mythology of his country. His 280-page book, about a long-lived character who tells his story to a younger Samoan, is written entirely in verse. “I started this book in the 1970s,” Wendt said, “I’ve spent most of my life writing it.” Then there’s The Double Crown, by the South African writer Marie Heese, about the extraordinary Hatshepsut of ancient Egypt, who proclaimed herself Pharaoh and ruled for twenty years, fending off all contenders to the throne. What’s not to love about that?

I knew Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders to be prize-worthy because I’ve read it, but it’s quite possible that I would have awarded it to Siddon Rock by Australian Glenda Guest, which eventually won the Best First Book award, or to the Under This Unbroken Sky by Canadian writer and filmmaker Shandi Mitchell, who is the first person in her blue-collar family to have gone to college. I know I’m dying to read I Do Not Come to You By Chance by the young Nigerian writer Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, about the well-established tradition of 419 email scams originating from that country.

The judges, at one of the panel discussions, had talked passionately about how hard it is to award consensus-based prizes from a cache of excellent books. I don’t envy them their job; and some of their faces, after the award ceremony, reflected an agonised sympathy for the authors who did not walk away with the big cheque.

The debate over whether the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize is an antiquated concept with insidious political undertones leaves me about as cold as the idea of having tea with the Queen, which is what the winner traditionally does. We’re all aware that the sun set on a certain nameless Empire some time ago, so I’m over the politics of it. As long as we keep being introduced to the writers of good books, I’m all for some of them also getting large cheques.

Red, red whine

2010-04-10T09:07:00.001+05:30

When the revolution comes, you’ll be first against the wall. Yes, you. You with this newspaper in your grubby capitalist hands, or this article scrolling down a screen made entirely from the underpaid sweat of the masses, I’m talking to you. You’ll be standing against the wall with an array of very unfriendly bits of technology aimed at your exploitative head. And I’m afraid that all I have to say to you is: See you there! I’ll be the one standing right next to you, wishing that I’d spent my tragically curtailed life eating more Nutella, and not even bothered with this running regimen because I swear the shin splints are killing me.

I’m not saying this just because certain people who would kill me at the next family tea party if I named them, spent their twenties clutching Mao’s little red book and attending Marxist-Leninist study circles. I’m saying it because these same people ran into the phone booth of their thirties and came out miraculously transformed into the pillars of bourgeois society they had until recently so deeply reviled, so I think they deserve to be reminded that they’ll be first against the wall too. Maybe they could ask to have a last brief study circle before the shots ring out.

The other day, as I lolled about disgustingly in my greed-soaked private property, a news channel that you could barely see for all the grossly consumerist advertisements broadcast a graphic of Maoist-controlled India. This so-called ‘Red Corridor’ is currently the epicentre of a deadly conflict between Arundhati ‘Silver Doll’ Roy and people who don’t like her writing, and apparently also the site of some kind of to-do between the Maoists and the Indian security forces.

See, this is exactly the kind of crass elitist flippancy that will get me shot first. But perhaps they’ll aim to miss if I point out that I don’t actually own the title deed to this intolerable slap in the face of the proletariat of a house. Not that I would ever reveal to them who does own it, since even in the face of a hideous death I am nothing if not principled—but it doesn’t look good for her that she’s currently on a cruise vacation.

Anyway, I peered at this graphic as the news anchor spoke about the anti-Maoist Operation Green Hunt with an animation that suggests he knows he’ll be up there with you and me against the wall when the revolution comes. I peered at the graphic, and looked hard for the bits of India that aren’t Maoist-controlled. India, in this graphic, looks like a fat lady with a red sari sweeping up her body, leaving her head and shoulders, and the tips of her toes, showing. Well, that’s not good, I thought, having only recently emerged from the phone booth myself. If half the country is in armed revolt, we must be doing something wrong.

It must be admitted that the only real mystery left in India is, why hasn’t the revolution come yet? Well, here it is, maybe. I don’t envy those poor security personnel whom our oppressive state structures have sent into the forest without much training, to fight the righteous. And I can hardly breathe for all the rarified capital-intensive feudal air up here, but I imagine that life isn’t all rosy for the unwashed masses. and the chasms must be galling. I’m not at all certain that I approve of Maoist-Naxal violence, but it’s almost certain that the likes of us, in similar discomfort, would organise some pretty militant Facebook groups.

Chances are that the state will prevail. But I’m off to eat a slice of bread with Nutella, just in case.

Left brain-right brain

2010-04-03T11:16:00.002+05:30

The other night I had a tiny little insight into how difficult the Middle East peace process must be when I had the following exchange with a friend in the car on the way to dinner. I’m paraphrasing, which should not in any way obscure the fact that I’m right and he’s wrong.

Me: I went to listen to [Egyptian writers] Ahdaf Soueif and Radwa Ashour speak about their books at the Habitat Centre the other day. Have you read Soueif’s Mezzaterra? It’s a collection of her journalism, which is largely focussed on Palestine and the Arab world. It’s not particularly non-partisan, but it’s got some interesting reporting.

Him: I have no wish to read another whining account of the poor Palestinians’ plight.

Me: Did you say whining?

Him: Israel has every right to defend themselves against those Hamas lunatics and their rockets. I’d like to see a little more media space given to their version of events.

Me: More media space to the oppressed, muzzled Jewish state? You must be joking. Besides, nobody is claiming that this book will change your mind, just that it’s interesting reading. And, by the way, the Palestinians are oppressed.

Him: The world is always willing to say that, but very few people will look at the other side of things. Israel can be a little rough, but there aren’t that many fatalities.

Me: That’s right. They considerately keep the Palestinians alive in a state of humiliation, intimidation, and dispossession.

Him: The Palestinians had a perfectly legitimate cause but they lost my respect when they elected Hamas, which won’t even recognise Israel’s right to exist.

Me: They’re willing to talk, plus, how about Palestine’s right to exist? Is it remotely possible, do you think, that Palestinians felt that Hamas was the only option left to them?

Him: You aren’t even open to the possibility that Israel may have a point. All you leftist liberal morons just grow up with one unchallenged point of view. You probably had the same view twenty years ago.

Me: Is it possible, you imbecile, that large parts of the world might sympathise with the Palestinians because they have considered the situation and reached that conclusion, rather than because they were force-fed that view along with their mother’s milk?

Him: You’re bone-headedly bringing up this book as if it’s going to change my mind. At the end of the day, it’s a belief gap.

Me: I have no interest in influencing your bird brain in any way. It just happens to be a good book. If you don’t want to read it, don’t. No skin off my nose.

Him: Oh the poor oppressed Palestinians! They have eighteen checkpoints!

Me: Oh the poor insecure Israelis! They’re armed to the teeth with the world’s superpower at their back!

Him: Whiner.

Me: Fascist.

Him: Okay, we can’t talk about this.

Me: No, because you’re not willing to listen.

Him: You’re the one who won’t listen because you’re too busy parroting the leftist view.

Me: All right, let’s not talk about this. I can’t bear it.

Him: Fine.

Me: Fine.

[Long pause.]

Him: Ninny.

Me: Nitwit.

And we actually like to talk to each other.

Earth Hour 2010

2010-03-31T12:53:00.000+05:30

Green living is all about the little stuff, at the end of the day.

When my father started work in Calcutta at the age of 22, living in his landlady’s windowless box room, he used to boil his breakfast egg and use the same hot water to shave, manfully ignoring its egginess. He may have done it for the wrong reasons—he was a bachelor and couldn’t be bothered to boil a whole other pan—but it was still eco-friendly. An aunt of mine washes clothes in water that she then uses in the garden; though she also washes her hair in four separate steps over three hours, so I’d be careful about her in general. My mother preserves every piece of mail that comes through the door to use as scrap paper, which she can use to write lists on and immediately lose, thereby actually wasting the paper. One of my exes always turned off the tap while he brushed his teeth, a habit that annoyed me less than all the other ones.

It’s no surprise, then, that I am a paragon of green living.

For instance, I’m quite small, so I don’t really need much bathwater. I would gladly use the runoff to water my plants, but I have the sort of nurturing personality that kills living things at fifty paces, so I don’t own any. I don’t roam the world on carbon-spouting business trips except for travel writing assignments, partly because there’s such a thing as Skype and teleconferencing, and partly because nobody invites me to business meetings other than travel writing assignments, seeing as I don’t have a job.

In consequence of this last fact, many of the other green living problems that plague the three hundred people who think about these things, more or less sort themselves out. No expensive toys with disposal-unfriendly batteries, though I do own a laptop, digital camera and iPod. No enormous fuel-guzzling SUV. No fancy wardrobe that changes with the seasons—there’s nothing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt won’t drape over quite adequately, especially if the holes are not embarrassingly placed. No title to any house to clean with planet-hating bleach.

Since I’m mostly at home, pretending to be a freelance writer, I can also throw out the most egregiously unnecessary parts of grooming. Why dye the only evidence that wisdom is accruing to me strand by grey strand? Why use nail polish, which contains carcinogens and dibutyl phthalate, which is not only “a suspected gender-bender” but also causes untold damage to any tongue that attempts to pronounce it? Why pour more detergent than strictly necessary into our choked river systems, when not washing jeans actually makes them last longer?

Food and drink can also be terribly carbon-emitting in terms of all the energy spent growing, processing and transporting steak and wine and so on, so it is with guilt that I continue to consume vast quantities of these items—but what’s the point of living if not to eat, drink and make merry with the few friends I have left who don’t mind my planet-friendly appearance and smell?

I’m only banging on about this because this Saturday, March 27 is Earth Hour. This is the annual event during which everyone, everywhere in the world is supposed to turn off their lights for one hour at 8.30pm local time, in a fabulous display of selflessness, and the planet is supposed to forgive us our trespasses for all the other 8,766 hours in the year (8,784 in a leap year).

I’m no environmental slouch, so I’m going to participate with enthusiasm. It’s my chance, after all, to make up for the fact that I refuse to use CFL bulbs because I prefer the warm yellow light of a regular bulb.

An Apple a day

2010-03-23T16:09:00.001+05:30

I have almost had several coronaries watching my mother use her laptop.

For one thing, her fingers continue to behave as if she’s working on a typewriter—they hit hard and recoil hard, which, given the shallowness of computer keys, is a waste of effort on the downswing and a waste of time on the upswing. I’m no stranger to inefficiency, but this makes me grit my teeth.

Secondly, she hasn’t cottoned on to the fact that her thumb can be used to speed up the trackball-and-click moves. She will move the trackball with her index finger, and then move the same index finger down to the clickpad. However, since the trackball is old and useless it tends to drift, so by the time she’s ready to click she usually has to return her index to the task of correcting course. By the time the digit has begun its stately swing back to the clickpad, the trackball is veering wildly again, and so are my eyes.

Thirdly, her computer is a wonderfully portable piece of junk, which means that she can carry her troubles everywhere. A couple of keys have come off completely from the keyboard, but that’s the least of it. I have frequently found her hunched over her screen with her eyes completely glazed over, sometimes looking in slightly different directions, because the pixelation is so horrible that she has to try to connect the dots. She has done much of her ageing waiting for a document to open. If you’re opening a webpage, you have time for a small snack. And if you should get impatient and click on anything again, the whole system grinds to a horrified halt, and you may as well push off on a short vacation.

She says things like: “I went into the net but it’s not coming down.” She calls documents articles, folders documents, and drives folders. Her telephone book habits—the plumber’s number under ‘T’ for ‘That chap recommended by Gita’—have migrated to her laptop filing system, with the result that she has no idea where she can find anything, or which of six file versions might be the most recent. Her desktop display is reminiscent of the professor’s room in the movie A Beautiful Mind. She’s been using computers for at least ten years but did not know, until two days ago, that sometimes just restarting your machine will persuade it that there really isn’t a paper jam in the printer.

I’ve spent a vast amount of time arguing that swapping this beastly machine for an Apple laptop would be beneficial because a laptop is supposed to help, not hinder work, and because Apple’s machines are built for technophobes. My brother tried to help by loading Ubuntu onto her machine, which only unleashed a new tidal wave of confusion.

This week, after struggling for months to write an article and work with the editor on Google Docs to no avail, she finally caved in. We’re supposed to go off to the Apple store one of these days and return with something she can actually use, but she’s terrified of the process of watching a professional technician transfer her data, so I’m not holding my breath.

There’s a video being passed around on Facebook, of a woman back at work after thirty years. It’s four seconds long: she’s sitting at a computer terminal, typing. She gets to the end of her line, automatically reaches out with her left hand, and sweeps the monitor right off the desk. It makes you laugh until you cry, but that’s better than starting off in tears.

The great depression

2010-03-15T14:52:00.001+05:30

My friends and family know me to be an accomplished depressive, but a few days ago I hit a new low. I was so fantastically low that you could not possibly, on this whole benighted planet, be lower. And I had a big fat smile on my face.

This was because I was floating in the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is so much more depressed than me, on account of being 422 metres below sea level, and also perhaps on account of instantly killing all living things and getting called ‘Killer Sea’ and ‘Devil’s Sea’ and ‘Stinking Lake’, that I felt duty-bound to try and cheer it up.

But mostly I was smiling because it’s just so much fun. The water’s deadly salt content may mean curtains for fish, but its unusual buoyancy means that you simply bob about on the surface like a cork. You’d have to be a gene pool-purifying, Darwin Award winner to drown.

Google some images of people floating in the Dead Sea. You’ll see them reading newspapers, with their drinks obligingly standing on the surface next to them. I yearn to be this cool but I’m really not, plus I didn’t have a newspaper or a drink, so I just linked my hands behind my head, shoulders clear of the water, and lay back, trying to look as if I did this all the time instead of like some thrilled hypersalinity virgin.

It was exactly like reclining in a deck chair positioned just under the surface—I actually crossed my legs. I tried a tiny little swim, but just ended up flapping at the surface of the water like a bedraggled bird, which is even less cool. The idea is not to swim. The idea is to hang out and converse with other half-naked floaters as if you’re having a chat on the beach.

I couldn’t really do that either because the people I was travelling with actually were having a chat on the beach, so I just floated, smiling like a lunatic, with the Holiday Inn beach in Jordan a few metres to my right, and to my left, across several kilometres of water, Palestine.

Getting into the water means negotiating the famously therapeutic mud at the bottom of the Dead Sea, which is squelchy, foot-sucky stuff that you sink into with each step. I took my time and was extremely careful not to splash, not then and not when I was trying to force my legs down from float to stand. The Holy Land is forever ringing with the screams of people who weren’t extremely careful not to get extremely salty water in their eyes.

Floating, screaming people are the only kind of life form in the water, if you don’t count bacteria and algae. Any fish that foolishly chokes up from the Jordan River inflow or one of the freshwater feeders instantly expires and wash up on the shores coated in salt. But humans get all sorts of bonus points for being there: fewer UV rays, more oxygen, and mineral-rich mud wraps.

This last involves being smeared from head to toe with clingy black mud until you look like a monster, and letting it dry out before hosing the stuff off. Hey presto: the new you, mineralised, tightened, psoriasis-less, endlessly youthful. King David, Herod the Great and Cleopatra all knew this, and now so do I.

The Dead Sea is only going to get more depressed. Not only is it sinking by a further metre a year due to evaporation and weakened inflow from the Jordan river; but it isn’t even the saltiest water on earth (drumroll for Lake Assal in Djibouti, apparently). But being there is guaranteed to cheer you up no end. If only by comparison.

Earworm

2010-03-15T14:49:00.001+05:30

For all its mayhem and terror, the unpromising twenty-first century has also given us one of the best, most satisfying neologisms in the English language.

The last couple of decades have seen a surfeit of words mothered by technological necessity. They’re often innovative, but they don’t wear all that well; either they’re cute in the same way that vomit is cute (‘tweeting’) or plain inelegant (‘Facebooking’ or ‘friending’). Either way they seem to be afflicted with a tiresome wink-wink, nudge-nudge quality.

This word so beautifully captures a universal human experience that there’s really nothing to do but sit back and admire it.

This word is ‘earworm’.

An earworm is a song, or a fragment of music, that gets stuck in your head and plays incessantly. It could be a whole song, or a verse. It could be a set of lyrics, or instrumental. It could be just one musical bar. It will attach itself to your auditory cortex, which is apparently active not just when you’re actually listening to a song but also when you imagine listening to that song; it will stay there; and it will, sooner rather than later, drive you around the bend.

The word ‘earworm’ (from the German ‘Ohrwurm’) has been around for a while, but I suspect that it hasn’t gotten the play, so to speak, that it deserves. Fewer people seem aware of its existence than should be, considering how wonderfully cathartic it is to be able to exactly describe a very specific form of psychic torture—particularly vicious because it’s both self-inflicted and completely out of your control.

Earworms begin by being just dandy. After all it’s the catchiness of the melody or the bar that insinuated it into your head in the first place. All is happiness. But pretty soon things begin to unravel. First it’s merely uncomfortable when the drone takes the shine off the happiness. Then, when you find yourself unable to think of anything else, it’s annoying. Things shade into frustration when you realise with a sinking feeling that you cannot get rid of it. Pretty soon you’re beating your cranium repeatedly against the wall trying to concuss the damn thing out of your system, until finally you end up in the emergency room shouting “Got this feeling! That tonight’s gonna be a good night! That tonight’s gonna be a good, good ni-i-ght!” over and over again, while the doctors back away slowly.

The genius of the word lies in the multiple connotations of the word ‘worm’. The experience is indeed quite a lot like having a maggot kind of worm crawling around making your head itch. It’s quite a lot like having a computer virus kind of worm reduce the hard drive of your auditory memory to jelly. It’s quite a lot like getting sucked through a cosmic kind of wormhole into a universe where you’ll be stuck for eternity without a sandwich in sight.

I haven’t been afflicted by the worst earworm you can get (anything by Celine Dionne or Whitney Houston) but I’ve had Joan Baez, which is pretty rough. Sadly, my chances of being plagued by these things is doubly high because I not only have a neurotic obsessive-compulsive nature, but am also female, both of which raise my predisposition. At the moment I have John Mayer’s Who Says I Can’t Get Stoned, but I’m still enjoying it because it’s newish.

They say that the only weapon against an earworm is an ‘eraser tune’ which might help displace it. But there’s little hope that the eraser tune won’t get bitten in the neck by the earworm and simply replace it. On the other hand, who says I can’t just get stoned?

Light ’em up

2010-02-20T09:58:00.002+05:30

These days I’m reading Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. He wrote it for impecunious retards like myself who read little more than the Calvin & Hobbes strip in the papers and consequently don’t understand the world of money—either how to make it or where to put it. I want this book. I need this book.

I’m only halfway through, but have already learned much from it: It’s a thorough exposé of the awesome intelligence of the super-talented Niall Ferguson who also, annoyingly enough, happens to be quite hot. And it is filled with stunning insights like the fact that you can only hope to write ten heavily researched brick-like books by the time you’re forty-six, in between teaching at Harvard and doing television programmes and flying around the world being dazzling, if you don’t sleep and stare into space quite as much as I do.

Books like this are completely life-changing. This one caused me to stare into space furiously pondering the whole idea of productivity, which according to the book is somehow related to the making of money, until it was time to take a nap; and when I woke up I went right back to staring into space and pondering productivity, while smoking.

Speaking of which, while a couple of things remain fuzzy to me—banking, the bond market, the whole company thing—I, too, had a college education, and there are some things I’m quick to understand. One of them is that a lot of the money that I could be doing clever, historically informed things with, I spend on cigarettes instead. I sit there, hour after hour, diligently sending my money up in smoke. And just to make things worse, the price just went up.

I also get the fact that cigarettes are bad for you. I don’t totally get it, else I wouldn’t be smoking, but there’s plenty of ambient reinforcement for me to lean on. My five-year-old niece happened upon me smoking the other day and said crabbily, “Why do you want to make yourself DIE.” I could only hang my head and mutter something about a bad habit and how she should never do it. Not that the words needed speaking: she is as determined never to smoke as I was at her age, when I used to hunt out my parents’ cigarettes and shred them in the wastepaper basket as ostentatiously as possible.

I get that smoking grays your hair, wrinkles your skin, enlarges your pores, blackens your lips and yellows your fingnails. I get that it smells really bad. I get that it makes your throat raw and your sinusus jam up like peak hour traffic. I get that it abets macular degeneration and robs your sense of smell. I get that it promises a range of unpleasant cancers, stomach ailments, respiratory trouble, and cardiac problems.

But while all this information has penetrated my rock-plated skull, it appears to just be floating around in the cranial fluid and biding its time, because it certainly hasn’t yet percolated down to my brain. My brain is still hung up on the pleasures of the post-prandial smoke, the reading smoke, the sudden spring shower smoke, the glass of wine smoke, the great song smoke, the hanging around waiting for something smoke, the column-writing smoke, the morning tea smoke, and the post-[censored] smoke.

But I have great, totally baseless hopes for my own development. I figure I’ll quit at some point, because that’s what educated, intelligent, middle-aged people with a looming sense of mortality do. On the other hand, the same people apparently also understand what a discounted bill of exchange is. I’m still working on that.

House of horrors

2010-02-14T10:38:00.002+05:30

One look at the way lichen can thrive on a frozen expanse of tundra should tell you how tenacious life is. But then, one look at the way some innocent office-goer can get mulched by a piano tumbling from an upper storey should tell you that it’s also tricky business.

You might suspect, and rightly so, that airborne pianos probably don’t deserve top billing on the long list of things that working stiffs have to fear. Frankly, I’m a case of what they call damaged goods, but even I walk past tall buildings with my head held high, thoughts of deadly pianos even further from my mind than thoughts of making some kind of financial provision for my rapidly approaching dotage. But I can think of lots of things that do belong high up on a list of justifiable phobias, and many of them are not only not random, but downright clear and present dangers right in your home.

For instance: Pressure cookers. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather use a regular pan and spend an hour stirring and sweating into my mutton curry than put a pressure cooker on the flame for twenty minutes. This is because it’s a widely established fact that pressure cookers are made to lull you into a false sense of security before one day exploding in a way that leaves you unsure which bit is mutton curry and which bit cook’s face. My grandmother’s pressure cooker exploded one day while she was cooking lunch, and not only was I a wreck when I heard about it, but she was really mad about having to scrape daal off the ceiling.

For instance: Elevators. Examine your heart and tell me if you can really ever step into an elevator in the upper storeys of your building without wondering, just as it begins to move, whether the cable will hold all the way until your floor, or whether it will snap and send you plummeting to the bottom of the shaft in a twisted wreckage of metal. One retarded school of thought holds that the way to save your skin is to jump into the air at the moment of impact. Hopefully, over time, falling elevators will weed these people out of the gene pool.

For instance: Ceiling fans. We’re talking about a bunch of metal blades spinning at high speed, and if they’re doing this in my house, they’re doing so with a creaky rocking motion. It’s perfectly clear to me that a fan turned on is just a fan waiting for you to take your eyes off it or fall asleep, so that it can fly right off its ceiling mount and either impale your chest or perform a clean decapitation.

For instance: Open cupboard doors. I was brought up on a steady stream of Enid Blyton’s stories about dolls that make Chucky from Child’s Play look good. Before I go to bed I make sure my cupboards are securely closed because, even though I haven’t owned dolls for thirty years, there’s no need to risk getting up to use the bathroom and having some cold little plastic hand shoot out from under my bed and grab my ankle with a tinny mechanical laugh.

For instance: Geysers. These, in my head, are very like pressure cookers. We have experienced a geyser sparking and setting the nearby shower curtain on fire; and I once came home to find a geyser more or less exploded and behaving like the Trevi Fountain. It’s plain stupid to ignore the dangers of being summarily poached in one’s own bathroom.

With houses like deathtraps, who needs falling pianos?

I have a dream

2010-02-07T11:08:00.000+05:30

I know—so did Martin Luther King, and so did Abba. But my dream is neither about the state of Mississippi being transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice, nor about having a song to sing to help me cope with everything. Mine is possibly harder to turn into reality.

The dream is that one day, we in India will be able to deal in the currency of ideas and opinion without letting our giant mutant egos get in the way. In this la-la land that I inhabit, Shah Rukh Khan would be able to pick Pakistani players for his cricket team and the Shiv Sena could froth at the mouth like a rabid dog but not be able to shut down his upcoming movie (My Name is Khan). A woman’s dress might provoke catcalls or comment, but not molestation or sexual assault. And book reviews would be both written and read professionally—that is to say, as subjective opinion, formed as objectively as possible.

That’s what it would mean to have a real critical culture, rather than one of either mutual admiration or personal vendetta. I should say upfront that this is old whine in an old bottle. But if this is the third time I’m writing about book reviewing, it’s only because it happens to be the closest tip of the closest anti-intellectual iceberg in a sea filled with such icebergs specializing in sinking critical debate about everything from leisure to religion.

My dream is that we could attempt to melt those icebergs, and create a real critical culture. Possibly the single most important ingredient in this (completely fanciful) idea is good faith: to speak in good faith, and to listen in good faith. In my dream, a reviewer would say, “I read this book and my honest opinion is that it sucks/is brilliant/is mediocre. In the same dream the author, reading this review, would say, “Oh look, someone’s honest opinion. I agree/disagree.”

That’s my dream. But I know I’m awake, because what I see is intimidation, bullying, tantrum-throwing and serious cases of egoitis. The din of clashing ideas is the stuff and marrow of democratic debate, but whether this ends up being an enriching rather than irritating and pointless sound depends on how the conversation is conducted. The first pitfall of any debate is when, due to aforesaid giant mutant egos, people swerve away from the issue at hand, into blizzards of personal invective. It’s irrelevant, and adds exactly nothing to the discussion. You might as well respond to a statement like ‘I love brownies’ with ‘You would—your eyes are blue and your grandmother was Yemeni.’

People assume that if reviewers are nice about someone’s work it’s because they are friends with the author and can’t bring themselves to be honest; if they’re not nice, it’s because for reasons of [insert gratuitous psychoanalytical and sexual speculation] they’re out to get the poor geniuses who poured blood, sweat and tears into their book for years.

I’d hate to, but I’m forced to admit the possibility that this is in fact the prevailing reality—that reviewers really are motivated by either deference or malice. I’d hate to think that, but it would at least explain why authors often seem incapable of reading reviews of their work without assuming such motivations. The other explanation, of course, is that they’re simply whiny, self-pitying megalomaniacs with blue eyes and Yemeni grandmothers.

In my dream everyone has gotten over themselves and accepts that when you put something into the public domain for public consumption, you will get public opinion, on message, to which you can respond, on message. And then, honeychile, live with it.

Jaipur smorgasbord

2010-02-05T11:55:00.001+05:30

Like pretty much nobody else I know, I spent January 2006 through January 2009 not going to the Jaipur Literature Festival. Only expert idiots do this; the rest of you should not try it at home. This year I redeemed myself by spending the whole week there, and I’m here to tell you that the collective intelligence and creativity on display in Jaipur is second only to my regret at having denied myself the pleasure for four years.

The great strength of the festival, besides its ability to pull in over 140 authors and an estimated 27,000 audience members this year, is its democratic attitude. It may be the case that not everyone deserving can be put onstage or invited to moderate, but if you choke up either as a participant or as a delegate or as someone who walked in off the street (because you can, it’s free), you’ll be treated exactly like the world-famous author next to you. You might stand in line for lunch ahead of Tina Brown, or share a table with Wole Soyinka, or find Roberto Calasso sitting on the floor at your feet at some session because all the chairs are taken. It is truly informal.

Its other great strength is the ability to stitch up unraveling hems. When speakers can’t make their sessions on time, or at all—because their flight got cancelled, or fog hindered their car journey or the Government of India wouldn’t give them a visa without a school-leaving certificate—other people pitch in and throw a pretty good panel together. The session-goer will still get something fun in the end.

If there’s a problem, it is that of surfeit. When you’ve got top calibre people from the polymath Niall Ferguson to the razor-sharp Anne Enright to the incredibly funny Geoff Dyer and Alexander McCall Smith, and when every time slot is running three or four simultaneous events, you have to make unhappy choices, but often it is better than having no choice, because if a session turns out not to be your thing, you can just wander off to another one.

If there’s anything better than putting a face to someone whose books you’ve loved for years, it must be being introduced to the work of people you’ve never read, or never even heard of. The secret weapon of the programme this year, an absolute coup, was the security-veiled appearance Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the bête noire of Islamism, whose explosive session reinforced a much-needed defence of dissent and criticism in India.

If there is delight, it is listening to Calasso divide people into “those for whom the gods happen and those for whom they don’t”; hearing Claire Tomalin describe the art of biography as “like lace-making, creating a narrative around the holes”; watching Andrew O’Hagan say that “it is not the unexamined life that is not worth living, it is the unimagined one”.

And if there is a delight after that it is the drinks and musical entertainment of the evening in the lawns—because if there’s a cost, it is exhaustion. Six hours of food for thought every day leaves your head pooped to say the least; at the end of five such days my emaciated brain synapses were crawling to the edges of my ears with their tiny tongues lolling, croaking “Water… water…” (though they seemed quite satisfied with a bit of booze).

On top of all that we now have a new literary prize—the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, a US$50,000 incentive to uncap your pen.

All in all the Jaipur Literature Festival is a wild ride because, as Man Booker-winner Anne Enright said, “Writers are not tame creatures.” At least I know what I’m doing next January.

Wardrobe malfunction

2010-01-29T11:00:00.001+05:30

You know those mothers who say, “You look lovely in anything you wear. Please don’t do a thing differently”? My mother wasn’t one of those. My mother’s greatest regret is that her daughters never really got into the whole pretty frocks thing. I think that she, who was a bit of a clotheshorse, would dearly have liked to have fashion-forward offspring; but very early on, I took my clothing into my own decidedly fashion-backward hands. After many successive awkward moments during which she suggested some pretty skirt and I silently laid out, every day, the same jeans and red sweater to wear to school the next morning, she shifted to a more subtle tactic, which was to gift me things in the hope that sentiment or guilt might overcome my natural tendency to keep it simple. I grimly cut the necks and bottoms off.

What she didn’t know was that the boys in the little Swiss village school I attended made a practice of running around lifting the girls’ skirts and hooting with derision at their knickers. This pastime filled me with dread, and I vowed never to aid or abet it, thereby cementing a lifelong aversion to skirts. Also, Swiss schoolteachers distinguished soccer teams in the playground by shirt on versus shirt off, thereby cementing my lifelong aversion to soccer and Swiss schoolteachers. The clincher was the moment when a friend of mine, reduced to tears by a mob of leering little nine-year-olds, pulled off all her fig leaves in front of the school building and screeched, “You want to see? Look! Look, you little bastards!” She’s now a pastor, and I hope some of her tormenters sit in her congregation with their heads hanging.

I hope my mother drew some comfort from the fact that at least my brother was quite skirt-friendly in the days when the register of his voice was higher than than a kite. Skirt-friendly—and quite amenable to having us adorn him with lipstick and clips. When this lamentable phase passed, he turned into my mother’s dream son, dandily turned out and always appreciative of any labels on his clothing. My sister, too, started her working life in attire that was at least hip if not completely fabulous.

That left me. Apart from a short and inexplicable phase in which I wore shorts with sari blouses and long earrings and a bindi, I went through life wearing hand-me-downs—I’m still wearing, this winter, the sweater my sister wore through her college years and left for me in a box when I went to college in 1991—and gifts because I refused to go clothes shopping. My closet was always a bit of a happy mystery to me, filled with socks I had never seen before, some comfortable old skivvy of my mother’s and shirts that smacked of some older cousin. I didn’t mind, so it all came home to roost in my cupboard. not that I ever wore anything other than jeans and a set of five t-shirts in strict rotation with all the necks carefully lopped off with scissors because I don’t like necklines too close to my windpipe.

“You look like an orphan,” my mother still moans. “As if you have nobody to care for you.” When my brother is feeling complimentary he’s likely to ask, “How come you’re not looking like a Bosnian refugee today?” To be fair, anything presentable I have today I probably owe to my mother.

On the upside, for her, I hope she can remember that all in all I was a cheap child to raise.

Acne what?

2010-01-17T20:17:00.002+05:30

Too many world problems get too little press. Since other people seem to have taken charge of climate change and hunger and world peace, I’m going to take this opportunity to raise my voice for acne rosacea, the plague of people-who-flush-easily everywhere. Also I have it, and everyone keeps asking me about it.

No, it’s not pimples—that’s acne vulgaris. Rosacea is a condition in which your natural blush areas—cheeks and nose, and eventually chin and forehead—suffer constant or sporadic inflammation, so that you wander the world looking as if you’ve drunk too much, though in some cases having rosacea is a good cover story. You might develop rashes, or splotches, or pestilential red bumps. In its most benign form it can pass off as a healthy post-exercise pink glow, but when it’s acting up you can look like a lumpy beetroot. If I had a buck for every time someone has said, ‘That’s quite a sunburn’, or ‘Are you embarrassed or something?’ or ‘Hey, your skin is red and rashy!’ I wouldn’t have to write this column.

Women develop rosacea more frequently than men, but on the upside (from my perspective) it’s the men who develop the more virulent cases, like rhinophyma, in which the nose becomes bulbous, like that of sufferer WC Fields.

Nobody knows what triggers it. It could be your genes, or overexposure to the sun, or a critter that lives in hair follicles, or another critter associated with ulcers, or emotional stress. What we do know is that once you have it, you’re stuck with it. Furthermore, it will flare up if you do pretty much anything remotely joyous—smoke, drink, hang out in the sun, exercise, or eat spicy food.

When I first got a diagnosis, I asked what I could do about it. “Nothing. Relax?” said the doctor weakly. Other people will prescribe topical ointments, tetracycline, or laser treatment. But if you do all that, you give up the kind of conversation I had at a restaurant the other day.

There I was, stuffing my face with mutton curry and wine preparatory to a smoke, when a slightly batty old lady stopped by the table.

“I was admiring your complexion,” she quavered. “Is it natural or did you get it at the chemist’s?”

“Well,” I said wearily, “actually—”

“Let me tell you, you’ve got to use Johnson’s Baby Soap,” she barreled on, turning on a dime. “I’m much older than you, but what would you say about the state of my skin?”

“Pretty good,” I said dutifully. (It was, too.)

“Johnson’s Baby Soap!” she trilled. “I make all my servants wash their hands with liquid Dettol soap when they walk into the house, and then with Lifebuoy before they touch anything. But on my face, only Johnson’s Baby Soap.”

Right. Thanks.

In the grand scheme of things, of course, rosacea is just wonderful. I could have been that poor 19-year-old woman who had an allergic reaction that, and I quote, “gripped her entire body, causing her skin to burn up and scab over before falling off.” (PTI) You’d think it would take some vile biochemical weapon to cause this, but no: what made Eva’s skin burn up and scab over and fall the hell off was a paracetamol tablet she took for a fever. Yes, paracetamol. The plucky girl grew her whole skin back—a pretty hard act to follow however you slice it—but 40 percent of the one in a million people who suffer this reaction do not survive (the scientific term for ‘die’).

I’m happy to say that paracetamol isn’t on the long list of (completely futile) treatments prescribed for acne rosacea. Every cloud has an inflamed, bumpy lining.

You go, boss

2010-01-03T18:01:00.001+05:30

I began my working life by gathering information about potential freelance assignments during the year that I intended to be in Delhi before going to graduate school. I decided that I would make lists of publications, hunt down phone numbers, and pay my way through the year by writing.

Having these worthy intentions left me free to in fact spend my time painting grotesque self-portraits in watercolours, writing very bad short poems and short stories and staring at the phone with open fear. I did do a few assignments and projects, but essentially two years of my life and the idea of grad school ended up in the same toilet as the world’s hopes for Copenhagen.

Then one day a friend called, saying that somebody at Business Standard was looking for an article on Southeast Asia. I called the number and spoke to one Kishore Singh. I didn’t have an article on KL specifically, but perhaps I could write something else? He told me to bring whatever I had to his office.

He turned out to be a tall fellow in a long kurta with a head of greying curls, warm and polite, but with an undeniable beadiness of eye. He read through a couple of my published articles in heart-stopping silence, commented on the extreme thinness of what I was pleased to call my resumé, and then, quite seamlessly, asked if I wanted a job. All the career counselling sessions I had not attended in college swarmed into my head and I said something devastatingly sharp like, “Uh, okay, sure.” The beadiness kicked up a notch and he named a tiny little figure, which from my perspective looked good since it was a tiny little figure more than I had.

So I started working for Kishore’s Special Projects team, which turned out to have a lot to do with knowing about brands and stores and celebrities and the odd trade fair. It quickly became apparent to both him and me that I was all wrong for it, but he was unfailingly tolerant. (‘Let’s do an issue on UFOs!” I said. “Get me the advertising and you’re on,” he said.)

For my part I worked diligently if not enthusiastically, and in return he encouraged me to do book reviews and other stories I enjoyed on the side; encouraged me to go home at a civilized hour; encouraged me to not be a wimp; and taught me a huge amount without ever seeming to, including that it’s best not to open your cocky mouth too much or too loud. (I didn’t say I always followed his advice). He was funny, generous, sophisticated, smart as a whip, and the best, gentlest manager and editor you could hope to have. When I finally left he threw me a party to which I was two hours late (because I’d suddenly decided to write farewell limericks for the team) and he still smiled at me, possibly because he was so relieved that I was leaving.

Kishore commissioned Stet, and has uncomplainingly printed every word of it week after week for nearly three and a half years now. I can think of few other people who would have given me such free rein, or who wouldn’t at least have complained a little. For that, and for everything else he has ever done for me, he has my everlasting appreciation and affection.

This week was Kishore’s last week at Business Standard—for the third time. He has left twice before, but always been lured back; this time he claims it’s for real. He may be right, but it’s so hard to imagine the place without him that, even as I wish him the best, it seems appropriate to reprise one of his signature phrases: Whatever-whatever-whatever.

Glass half full

2009-12-26T12:49:00.001+05:30

There’s some confusion about whether to treat this December 31 as the end of the naughties decade or whether it should properly be next year. Most people seem to be treating this one as the end of the decade, but there’s enough sense in the argument that 01 is the first year of a decade and 10 the last, to dilute their confidence. The result is that there don’t seem to be that many wild and decadent party plans. Many seem to revolve around heaters and blankets and hot chocolate or wine.

Either way, 2009 hasn’t been good to many people I know. They’ve lost parents, significant others, jobs, and—since my cohort is now at the stage of life where catching up is increasing a matter of exchanging lists of current and incipient ailments—health. I don’t see why I should have to listen to this litany of complaints and not you, so here’s an example.

A friend of mine had a pinched nerve in his elbow; three weeks before his scheduled surgery he twisted his ankle and had to wait to recover; not only has his elbow trouble left two fingers in his hand numb, but he also has pain in six joints which may well be a vitamin D deficiency resulting from his incomprehensible decision to live in sunless London, and he now has to take supplementary pills because, being a typical male, he’s frightened of the injections; and so, while in Delhi for his year-end vacation, he has doctor’s orders to sit in the sun for at least an hour a day without sunscreen.

And he’s younger than I am.

At least we’re still able to laugh sheepishly about all this oncoming debility. The day is not far when we’ll be having these conversations with deadly seriousness, incontinent and dribbling in our wheelchairs; but by then I hope to have wheedled, bribed and manipulated my niece and nephew into thinking it’s their duty to change my diapers and wipe the drool from my trembling lips and turn up my hearing aid before playing Leonard Cohen’s sunnier tunes—all two of them—for me.

No, that’s a lie, not to mention impractical, because my woefully inadequate capacity to bribe has been further eroded by the global meltdown and my niece and nephew can sidle out of it on grounds of plausible deniability because I will have no idea who they are.

What I actually intend to do is entrust a friend to shoot me between the eyes the moment I’m incapacitated. (The person I entrusted wanted to know whether he could toy with the moment, like get ready to shoot but then suddenly put it off by five or ten minutes. With friends like these who needs Doctor Death?)

But why be morbid? For my part, I’ve had a good year, despite breaking my ankle in July. I travelled a bit—including, most recently, to the Maldives, which I’m glad I saw before the islands go glug glug, met nice people, and read some excellent books. But the crowning achievement of 2009 has been to return to myself, centred, peaceful and, if I may be allowed to stick my neck out a little while knocking furiously on wood, happy.

Life being what it is, that’s probably a sign that I should brace for a good sock in the jaw in 2010, but, since I’m relaxed and softened up, I’m more likely to just roll with the punches with a retarded grin on my face. Who knows, it might even prove to be a perfectly nice year.

Happy 2010.

New leaves

2009-12-26T12:46:00.002+05:30

Well, we’ve hit what Americans call ‘the holiday season’. It’s a time for conviviality and cheer as people bid good riddance to what they almost invariably feel was the worst year of their lives and trustingly welcome what they almost invariably think is going to be a better year. (This is what literary critics call ‘dramatic irony’, but let us not dwell on sorrowful things.)

There are upsides to the holiday season. One of them is that I get to look back at the year and make lists and don’t need to cross anything off any of them, which feels normal and right because it ends up looking just like all the other lists I would make if I were organised enough to make lists.

One of the obvious lists you’d expect from someone who pretends to read books is a list of the books she pretended to have read during the year. But even if I were someone who made lists, mine would be very short, because years of hard relaxing have whittled my attention span down to next to nothing. There was a time when I could spend twelve hours a day reading without superfluous interruptions like eating or breathing; but now, reading a whole book over four months feels like a heroic accomplishment. Just to be perfectly upfront, this is not due to lack of time, but because of aforesaid gnat-like attention span.

By the way, speaking of reading and deficient attention, have you held a Kindle in your hands? I’m not embarrassed to say I’m sorry, I was wrong, the Kindle is a fine invention. Clear screen, easy navigation, beautiful size, and a hell of a lot more wieldy than carrying thousands of books in your knapsack. The fact that you aren’t actually holding a binding with fragrant pages is a small price to pay for the convenience of it.

But just for the hell of it, let me make a list anyway, of books that I have any reason at all to mention. Among the most overlooked books of the year, in my humble opinion, is Amrita Kumar’s Damage, a wonderful portrayal of a pretty twisted mother-daughter relationship. But probably the most overlooked—and I don’t understand why everyone isn’t screaming about it from the rooftops—is Summertime, the third fictionalised autobiography, after Boyhood and Youth, by JM Coetzee (pronounced Kuut-see-uh or Kuut-see, but definitely not Kwetsy). Coetzee has always been one of my favourite writers—bleak as bones and about as sunny as pitch. But Summertime features some of the best writing on love that I’ve ever read, as well as just some of the best writing.

Then there were books that were written by people I know—four such books, which I’m happy to say I loyally read from cover to cover but won’t talk about any more than that, other than to say you should rush out and buy them all.

I loved Solo. I’m not sure how it’s doing, but it deserves to be read and read again. I didn’t like Chai, Chai very much at all. I liked Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Worlds, Other Wonders immensely, and am still dipping into Mridula Koshy’s If it is Sweet.

The longest list is, as ever, made up of those books I haven’t yet gotten around to reading: Leaving India by Minal Hajratwala, Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus, William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives, Aatish Taseer’s Stranger to History.

I’ve got to have something left over to read in the new year before the next crop comes out, after all, and—this is my New Year’s resolution—I intend to catch up on everything pretty soon. Right after I play my turn at Scrabble.

Solitaire

2009-12-05T15:13:00.001+05:30

The little old lady at the café had typical little old lady hair, scraggly but dignified, and little old lady eyes—at once beady and gentle. She was wearing a skirt and a puffy coat and shiny black little old lady shoes. She had a little old lady bag from which she periodically pulled out various little old lady pouches full of little old lady stuff (glasses, tissues, bright blue cell phone, assorted unidentifiables). Her collapsed little old lady mouth shone with a quite classy shade of pearly pink, and her general care over her appearance was of the kind that little old ladies take who might have been head-turners in their day.

She was sitting in weak winter sunlight at a window in a café, and quietly having herself a nice cup of coffee. I waited for her coffee companion to show up. Nobody showed up. She just sat, and sipped, and sometimes looked at other people, but mostly out of the window. She wasn’t expecting anyone, and she was in no hurry. After she was done with her coffee and done looking at the afternoon, she discreetly flashed her pearly pink nail varnish at the staff to ask for the bill; paid it; put all her pouches back in her roomy handbag; said thank you nicely to the waitress; and tottered off to get on with her day.

That’s how I want to be when I grow old, I thought to myself: the sort of little old lady who can take herself out on a lovely winter afternoon and have a leisurely cup of coffee at a café, just because that’s the kind of day it is, and she feels like a bit of a daydream and a bit of a gander at the world. It’s quite likely that I’ll be in little old lady jeans, and I’m very unlikely to have my nails varnished, but essentially she seemed like a good example of the direction I want to take.

Beating the odds in this nasty, brutish and short business of life requires a few indispensible skill sets. People will tell you about some of the important ones—eat healthy, exercise, minimise stress, never leave your ATM card in the machine—but they rarely mention the big one: learning to be alone with yourself. That’s the one people tend to find out about the hard way, when life foists it upon them by killing off a parent, or sending their lover off into someone else’s arms, or giving them a new designation and putting them on a plane to a new job in a new country.

I have no idea whether my little old lady was by herself because she wanted to be or because she had no choice, but either way, she was doing just fine in that textured place we call ‘alone’. She knew how to be there. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about loneliness—the ache that pops your eyes open at 3am and that nobody can like very much but is more or less inevitable once in a while—but about solitude, which is a magical place in which all your interior spirit levels are centred.

We spend so much of our lives amid other people, however, that we don’t make any time to practice being alone (which is the sort of thing that needs lots of practice). Then, when suddenly we are, we fall apart. I know I need more practice; I’m going to remember that little old lady and take myself out to a solitary coffee or movie more often.

A stab at writing

2009-11-28T19:47:00.000+05:30

There’s a reason that many writers have odd personalities: writing is such a solitary exercise that you can see why they might eventually go quite postal, or at least start wearing funny hats and divorcing their spouses. I love to look at the Guardian’s online edition where they have a column called ‘Writers’ rooms’, which features a photograph of some one, well, writer’s room, and a short write-up outlining the space and how the person uses it, according to their particular routines, eccentricities and superstitions. It makes me feel very well adjusted because I don’t have, for instance, giant paper fish hanging from the ceiling, or a dessicated crocodile on the wall.

Anyway: it’s solitary, and yet people are not free of the desire for a community. You might have virtual communities like National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in the US, or Novel Race right here in Delhi, where legions of unsung aspirants to novelistic fame get together online to set writing goals and then compare progress. But I’m not sure how many have real writing communities of the flesh and blood variety. I have heard of a few writing groups, for instance, but can’t be certain that they really do exist, because I’m too solitary and weird myself to join in, even though it’s a moot point whether I qualify as ‘writer’, because I just sit at the dining table pretending to write while actually secretly checking Facebook.

One of the reasons that writers find it difficult to form communities, in my unsolicited opinion, is that when they get together they spend a lot of time trashing other writers—not their work, which is fair enough, but their personalities, lifestyles, clothing, and sexual and other peccadilloes. This is, I suppose, the way of homo sapiens in most professions, and actually forms deeply bonded ‘us and them’ groups that can be effective teams, but in the world of writing it seems particularly difficult to do because the product is so intimately tied to ego. There’s nothing a couple of writers seem to enjoy as much as to get together and character assassinate a third, but then they’re just as likely to stab each other in the back at the end of it all. Three dead people is what you’d get at the end of that.

The cutthroat competition is even more ramped up these days when suddenly every second person you meet seems to want to be a writer (just to clarify, that means the kind with a photo on Page Three cuddling up to a Bollywood celeb, not the kind with a divorce and a funny hat). I met a man the other day who, at twenty-five, is starting work on his second novel; the first was written in between graduate school classes; I half expected him to add, “at night, after writing my university papers, tilling the fields and milking the cows”. (At the same dinner were multiple Foreign Service wives writing books, and journalists halfway through theirs—really, everyone is writing a book.)

So it’s wonderful to occasionally meet a writer who not only enjoys other writers but even seems to want to help them along their way. So far I’ve met exactly two such people, and even they were full of interesting tidbits about other writers, though those tidbits stayed on the right side of the line between information and gossip. Here’s to that, because if you keep dissing everyone else who writes you’ll have nobody left to talk to, and then you’ll end up wearing a wig and furry gorilla shoes and it will be your fault.

Eating crow, part two

2009-11-25T11:52:00.001+05:30

I have a soft spot for Kumaon that I cannot really explain; these are not the highest or even the most breathtaking hills to be had in this large and lovely country, but they are far and away my favourites. It has something to do, I think, with scale—Kumaon is hardly gentle hillocks, but the Himalaya bares its really serious teeth at a comfortable distance.

Still, some bits are lovelier than others. I’ve always thought of Bhimtal as the dregs of Kumaon, a murky lake surrounded by construction, lying at the bottom of a hill-sided bowl. I’m not saying it’s completely hideous, but my favourite way to experience it has been as a blur on the right as the car drives past at high speed towards higher, prettier places. Nonetheless, this week I’m taking the opportunity to beg pardon of Bhimtal, much as I ate humble pie about Shimla this summer, and admit that it can be quite nice.

Part of why it was nice is that just getting out of Delhi is always such a relief. (There’s nothing quite like that first glimpse of the great blue shadow of the ranges above the plains; I always expect the pleasure and excitement to wear off but it never does.) But it was largely because we were staying with Bunti Bakshi and Bindu Sethi at their Fishermen’s Lodge hotel right on the lake. Frankly, when you’re sitting by a crackling fire with a nice warming beverage, good conversation and Mark Knopfler on the music system, and excellent food and drink on the large, European-style deck overlooking the lake, which is quite blue and pretty after all, it’s hard to be grumpy.

Plus, they drove us around so that we got to see a little bit of the region around Bhimtal, which I’ve never stopped to see before. Sattal is one such place—a series of seven pretty mountain lakes that reflect green trees and blue sky deep in forested hills. You can walk between the lakes through the forest, or go boating in the water that connects six of them. Much of it is on land owned by the Christian Ashram; you can walk to the ashram complex which is crowned by a strange little circular church furnished with nothing but mattresses to sit on.

We sat for a while by the edge of Panna Tal, the emerald shine that is the only self-contained water body among the seven. It’s the site of the tiniest and by far the most beautiful open-air church I’ve ever seen: a series of curved benches by the lakeshore, with a small circular platform and a tiny pulpit (submerged when we were there); the forest behind the congregation and the lake spreading in front, with a small white cross standing on the green hill across the water. There’s nothing but birdsong, breeze, and the smell of leaves and flowers. If you can’t summon up any religious enthusiasm, a cold beer and/or a book works just as well.

We also drove up behind Bhimtal to Jungalia Gaon, en route getting a bird’s eye view of pretty nine-cornered Naukuchiatal lake. From Jungalia Gaon you can fly back down the mountain road on a bicycle, assuming you’re not me. If you’re me, you roll along the downhill bits competently enough, but when the road inclines upwards by a hair, you get off the bike and push it, pretending that that was the plan all along, and that the huffing and puffing echoing through the valley is really just the breeze. Either way, it’s a particularly delicious way to get back down a mountain.

So there you are, I was wrong again. Go see for yourself.

The bane of the thane

2009-11-17T10:25:00.002+05:30

Shakespeare’s Macbeth has endured the test of time not only because it is a cautionary tale about when to ignore your spouse, but also because of its poignant lessons in the importance of sleep.

Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep', the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.

Macbeth moans these lines right after sticking a knife in Duncan, King of Scotland, his royal liege and, worse, his houseguest at the time. Macbeth’s premonition proves accurate; he spends the rest of his nights roaming his ill-gotten palace wretched with guilty, paranoid insomnia. (His wife, the one with the bad ideas, is also up after a fashion, trying to wash her blood-sodden hands, but that’s no consolation to him.)

About the only thing that Macbeth and I have in common, besides a tendency to moan, is that neither of us has been getting much sleep.

I’m a great fan of slumber. I spent most of my childhood and early adolescence snoring, sometimes from 9pm until 1pm the next afternoon, and had no trouble falling asleep. This may or may not have had to do with the fact that I often sneaked some one bottle of my mother’s inexhaustible supply of homeopathic medicines to bed with me as a light, sugary snack. If my constitution today is slightly dodgy, it’s probably because of massive overdoses of Ipecac, Rhus Tox, Nux Vomica, Causticum, Belladonna and other irresistibly named pills. The important thing, however, is that I slept the sleep of the selfish innocent.

My mother, who emerged from a convent education striving to be worthy and who therefore has great trouble sleeping, detests late sleepers. She would sweep into my room at daybreak and snap the curtains back with a noise like a thousand Mongol horsemen galloping across a tin plain, using her special insomniac’s megaphone to let me know that it was 7am and that staying in bed was now officially immoral. When you’ve been up since 3am I suppose 7am feels really late, but if you’re someone who isn’t done sleeping, 7am may as well be 3am and frankly I’m thinking of a dog, and I’m thinking of a manger.

I’ve spent the rest of my life making up for all this painful childhood business by damn well sleeping as much as I can. My friends think of me as a sort of matronly basket case who eats before 8pm to safeguard her digestion, begins to droop around 10pm and sleeps not much later than that to safeguard her energy, and goes for periodic wobbles around the park to safeguard her—oh, scratch that, that battle’s long been lost.

All this is perfectly true. So they no longer know me, because for the last several weeks I have consistently been up all night, indulging in various combinations of conversation, alcohol, Scrabble and wee hours-breakfast. By all that’s holy and right, and also according to past evidence, I should be dead, or at least very grumpy, but instead I spend the day bounding around, energetically making plans to stay out all night again. Will it last, will it not? How long can an engine run on empty? Watch for a black border around this space.

The weird thing is that my mother, who heartily disapproves of this sort of thing, has not once flared her exquisitely expressive nostrils. Part of it, I think, is because she has an anthropological interest in listening to my recap of the strange nocturnal habits of the adolescent middle-aged.

But most of it, I suspect, is because she’s just really pleased that I’m not sleeping either.

Desert draws

2009-11-13T17:44:00.001+05:30

So there we were at 4.30am, un-slept and merry, peering cross-eyed into the Rajasthani night at the hill we’d suddenly decided to climb. Atop it is the temple dedicated to Savitri, Brahma’s first wife, who stormed off there when she discovered that comely Gayatri had turned all four of His heads and become the Creator’s second wife. (There’s now a court case in which the Brahma temple priest is demanding that offerings made to Savitri should by right come to Brahma; and the Savitri temple priest says it should be the other way around since Brahma owes Savitri alimony.) Anyway, for some reason, it seemed vital to go and climb this hill. Now.

How to get there? Four kilometres to the base of the climb; no car; very merry. We figured we’d just point our noses at it and walk, but a hotel chowkidar pointed at a patch of desert that looked just like every other patch of desert and said ‘Follow that trail.’ We leered uncertainly at it for a minute, then plunged into the underbrush, armed only with some water nicked off the reception desk, and a bar of Kit Kat. Five hours later—after a forty-minute walk and a brief ride hitched on a jeep, a beautiful lung-busting hour’s climb, a hilltop sunrise, and breakfast with a slightly snappy sadhu named Alu Baba because he eats nothing but potatoes—a camel dropped our shattered corpses back to the hotel, where we crashed out with a smile, and possibly some drool, playing faintly about our lips.

Now, this is the kind of thing I just wouldn’t have been able to do had I not decided to attend the first ever Pushkar Literature Festival, a one-day event organised by Siyahi as part of the weeklong celebrations of the Pushkar Mela, which is admittedly better known for camels than letters.

The festival had little going for it. It’s the first time anyone has attempted a literary festival here. A significant portion of the audience consisted of students who shifted a lot and shared iPod music and giggled (though one girl did tear up with emotion during the poetry session, at which point all her friends lost interest in the stage and devoted themselves to a group hug). Some of the biggest draws on the programme could not turn up—Tarun Tejpal, for instance, was felled by illness.

And let’s face it, an open-air Pushkari amphitheatre is hot, even under a shamiana whose multiple poles were lifted clear off the ground when the wind swelled under the roof, so that the whole thing occasionally began to hop around like a large, nervous, many-legged animal.

And yet, it all worked nicely, with a mix of subject and medium that kept things interesting. Aman Nath gave an illustrated talk from his travels in Pushkar and Rajasthan. Namita Gokhale read from her children’s book The Puffin Mahabharata, complemented by Gafaruddin Mewati’s troupe singing the epic, and journalist and writer Sadanand Dhume reading from his book My Friend the Fanatic a section about the Mahabharat in Indonesia. Scriptwriter Anuvab Pal provided comic relief with his entertaining book, play and movie The President is Coming.

After lunch poet Sheen Kaaf Nizam recited some Urdu poetry. Sathya Saran read, along with journalist Rahul Jayaram, from her book 10 Years With Guru Dutt. Journalist and writer Kota Neelima read an extract from her new book Death of a Moneylender and discussed the politics of reportage with firebrand Aruna Roy. It was wrapped up with Veddan Sudhir telling Rajasthani folk tales to general merriment.

It may not have had the scale or celebrity of Jaipur’s literature festival, but the Pushkar lit fest felt informal, intimate and weirdly charming. That’s the kind of thing that sends you up a hill before dawn. If they had another one, I’d go.

Rolling stones

2009-11-04T10:56:00.001+05:30

My friends often accuse me of being a bit on the detached side. While I’m open to criticism, I have to say that after spending so much quality time hanging out and cooing supportively into their ears, I find it a little hurtful that they continue to see through me so easily. I suppose I should take comfort in the fact that they don’t use the phrase my family does, which begins with ‘cold-blooded’ and ends with ‘reptile’.

Detachment is one of those double-edged traits that people have trouble with because it involves a baseline failure to care overly much beyond a certain point. I should say upfront that I’m no Buddhist monk, and my detachment is not as much about spiritual evolution as it is about not giving a rat’s ass, so it’s quite likely that it is the sharper of my two edges that is better worn.

However, contrary to what you might expect, I don’t just go ahead and blame my parents—that’s not a very adult thing to do. I prefer to find a slice of peaceful time conducive to introspection, when I can examine the historical evidence of my life with a tranquil mind, and then I go ahead and blame my parents. It’s totally their fault for hauling me from country to country and school to school when I was young, setting in place both a lifelong tendency to form attachments quickly as well as a lifelong aversion to making them either too deep or too long. Or at least that’s my psychobabble, and I’m sticking to it.

The consequence is that I keep my life above-averagely light, mobile and free of investment. This is, however, a fraught enterprise, because it pokes at all the clefts in my dull little soul: I’m as inclined to nest in domestic comfort as I am to wander the Himalayas besmeared with ash; as tempted to never leave the city limits as to never get off the open road; and as desirous of love as I am averse to commitment.

I know, I know: take a token and get in line, lady. But while most people find their way around these gaps, usually by choosing one side over the other and then sucking it up like well-adjusted human beings, I seem to lack the ability. It’s my parents’ fault.

So I structure my life as sustainably as possible in the circumstances, which is to say precariously, with one foot on either side of the chasm. I shun responsibility such as owning property and taking loans (which turns out to be outrageously easy to do when you have my kind of credit rating), steer clear of fulltime work, don’t make too many plans too much in advance, and spend as much time as possible travelling, to see what it’s like to live in one place. (I never said it was clever.)

There are upsides to being messed up, though, and one of them is that you make a good traveller and passer-through-life because you’re less likely to care enough about where you come from to try to hang on to it or impose it on other people; and at the same time, you’re not likely to care enough about where they come from to want to appropriate it or hang around for too long. And while you like your pals, you won’t necessarily help them move bodies.

So there you are, coated in a slightly toxic but undeniably convenient kind of Teflon, skating along with only inertia and bankruptcy to slow you down as you wheel through the great carnival of life. Not that I care, but what’s not to love?

Truth is beauty, unless it isn’t

2009-10-28T16:18:00.001+05:30

There is at least one question that bedevils all relationships, whether they be romantic, platonic, filial or the vastly complicated one you have with yourself (for which I can’t think of an existing word but will propose the one suggested by a smarter friend, ‘autorelationship’): Is this the sort of question that takes so long to get to, what with run-ons and parenthetical clauses, that you’ve completely forgotten where it was going? The answer to which is: That’s the sort of cheap shot that’ll pad out a word count nicely and further alienate hostile readers.

Okay, here’s the question: Is it better to be truthful, or gentle? Is it better to hold up your version of the best mirror to life that you can, or is it better to minimise the pain you inflict, especially on loved ones? When honesty and compassion are mutually exclusive, which do you choose? Will what you do not know, or refuse to believe, not hurt you? And, for the cherry on top, does ‘better’ mean ‘more useful’, or does it mean ‘more meaningful’?

It’s all very confusing. To take a meek example, I’ve previously griped in this space about the problems of book reviewing. If you happened to say you like the book of someone you know, people will assume that you pulled your punches. On the other hand, if you give your writer friend some brutally honest feedback on his short story, he might never talk to you again. How much tough love can a relationship survive—and if it happens to be the autorelationship, will it just reduce you to a pile of quivering dysfunction? Though, really, would you be able to tell that anything’s changed?

Okay, that’s several questions, but I’ve done rigorous research via a Facebook status update that reads: ‘Would you prefer that your friends told you the truth, or what you want to hear?’ In response, my friends said things like, “I’d answer truth but I think that’s what you want to hear” and “Too late for philosophy, of course you don’t drink too much, have another beer!” and “What friends?” and “Truth… although, if harsh, softened with presents” and “Why do they have to tell me things? Can't they just listen adoringly?”

The answer leaps out from the data: I’ve really got to find some new friends.

The best reply, in my estimation, was: “The bare truth...and then help me deal.” People do largely seem to self-report as wanting honesty from the people in their lives, but if reality is anything to go by, their commitment to the project is dubious at best. If you actually give them the truth, they aren’t all that keen on it, or on you anymore. But at the same time, so widespread is this tenuous grip on principle that real honesty, even when it’s positive, hasn’t a chance in hell of being taken as anything but more fakery.

After years of socialisation about the merits of truth-telling, we wash up, gasping and sputtering, on the shores of the real world. In this largely overrated place, my guess is that people who actually spend most of their time being overly honest to other people’s faces are likely to be pretty lonely people, and/or people of whom other people, with fewer scruples, make rough dolls in which they stick big pokey pins. I should know.

So the next time you streak your hair or leave your spouse or proudly show off your new car/book/baby, think about what you’re really asking, and potentially getting, when you say, ‘So what do you think’?

Thimphian week

2009-10-18T15:18:00.002+05:30

So there I was stuck in Thimphu, Bhutan, so delirious with fever that I could have sworn that my friends were out bar-hopping rather than sitting by my bedside. But then these fevers make you think the darnedest things; for instance, on the way back from the Bumthang Valley we stopped in a tiny restaurant for lunch, and I’ll be buggered if I didn’t imagine that columnist Jug Suraiya was sitting at the next table. I put it down to the antibiotics and swallowed another paracetamol.

The next day, thanks to the classiness of my companions, we dined at India House with the Indian Ambassador, and not only did I notice that I was seeing Jug Suraiya again, but I also had a long and delightful chat with him. It was obviously time to ramp up the medical attention.

The next morning the doctor ordered me off the trip. I staggered off to the office of Bhutan’s national carrier Druk Air to book myself on a flight home, and, since Druk Air has a vast fleet of two aircraft, was waitlisted. We passed the time with two policemen from the Royal Bhutan Police who drove us around the sights, including a wildlife preserve that features the national animal, the takin—a cuddly cross between a goat and a cow—and fed us chow mein and beer at a restaurant called Musk. (They have a very low crime rate in Bhutan).

That’s where Yeshey Dorji came to meet us. I don’t know what I would have done without him after my friends were gone —probably wander around Thimphu’s bazaars buying the many-splendored wooden penises that the Bhutanese love to string up all over the country. Yeshey had written in response to this column a week beforehand, inviting me to get in touch when I was in Thimphu.

Over the next few days, as I waited for my flight, he took me firmly under his wing. He mysteriously ‘had’ my air ticket confirmed, took me to lunches and dinners, archery contests, and on scenic drives. He even drove me to the airport at five o’clock in the morning. It appeared that he genuinely liked nothing better than to bounce out of bed before dawn and drive around for hours, being nice to itinerant travellers.

NB: Archery. The Bhutanese take this very seriously, and can be found contesting in thick drizzling fog at 6am, each team taunting the other across the field by hopping on one leg and emitting stylised screeches of contempt. The occasional spectator hit doesn’t dampen anyone’s enthusiasm one bit.

Through Yeshey I met Kuenzang, a young newspaper reporter, who stood us some drinks at the cosy Bhutan Times café and introduced me to a bunch of other reporters and editors whose daily struggle to find stories in Bhutan amounts to epic heroism.

And then there was the friend of one of my friends—a strikingly beautiful Bhutanese princess with a razor-sharp mind and a wicked sense of humour, who took me to a great Japanese meal and told unflaggingly entertaining stories. I tried very hard to keep track of how she’s related to whom, but genealogies defeat me entirely (though I do recognise the present monarch and his father, seeing as the incidence of their picture leaves the phalluses in the dust).

When the skies finally cleared and Druk Air was able to take off from the airport in the Paro valley, I feasted simultaneously on the fantastic lunch of spiced sausage and rice and the eyeball-to-eyeball view of the highest Himalaya that drifts by the window.

I asked everyone I met what a resident of Thimphu is called: a Thimphuite? A Thimphian? Nobody knew. But that’s what I was for a week, and I loved it.

When life hands you lemons...

2009-10-10T11:33:00.002+05:30

...some people make lemonade. Me, I prefer to whine about it to anyone who'll listen.

The sad truth about travel is that you can't win 'em all. No matter how charmed a life you've led, no matter how prepared you are, every once in a while a journey will turn out to be a dud. So it was with my recent foray into Bhutan, accompanying a friend who is researching a book on this most beautiful of countries. He invited a couple of us along on his mammoth drive from the west to the wild east, scheduled over three weeks. What was to think about? I bought a train ticket to New Jalpaiguri, he picked us up at the station in the canvas-topped Mahindra Classic jeep that he had driven from UP, and off we went, with the top down, our USB drives playing good music, and lots of sunscreen rubbed into our faces.

I'm not a believer in signs, but if I were I'd have been wary: I'd busted my ankle, was fighting a cold, we ran into a storm first thing, and just before I left my horoscope told me straight up that I would be plagued by a series of unfortunate events. You can't really ask for anything more direct.

Five hours' hard driving across the last gasp of West Bengal brought us to the border town of Jaigaon, which in the local language means 'Don't ever come here unless it's really necessary'. We crossed the border into the Bhutanese border town of Phuentsholing, which in the local language means 'Jaigaon is about the only place that can make us look good', and checked into the Druk Hotel where we scarfed excellent Bhutanese dishes like ema datsi (green chillies cooked in cheese) and pork cooked with radish, along with some of Victoria's finest grapes.

They don't like to let you rattle around Bhutan unsupervised, so they make sure you're up for it by putting you through an incredible set of bureaucratic calisthenics. It took us from 9am until 4pm to get our special permits and vehicle permit to travel beyond the capital at Thimphu. Because of the Thimphu Tsechu festival there wasn't a hotel to be had for the night, so we'd have to drive straight through to Wangdue, a total of nine hours from Phuentsholing. We made one stop at Chukhu for chow mien and beer, and one stop at Thimphu to pick up our vehicle permit at the reception of the Druk Hotel, where they'd kindly also left us some club sandwiches and french fries which we ate like savages standing at the counter. We got to Wangdue at 2.30am, having driven through rain and fog and some terribly beautiful country.

The next morning we took off at noon for what was supposed to be a six hour ride to the fabled Bumthang Valley. This turned out to be more like nine and a half hours what with stops and more night driving and some blood-curdling fog on the Yotong La pass during which I promised that I'd never do a wicked thing again if only I never had to drive though this kind of mountain fog again. We arrived in the strangely wild western town of Jakhar, in Bumthang, under a beautiful moon.

The thing about the Mahindra Classic is that you can be in Bhutan, last of the pristine lands, and never once breathe a lungful of clean air. Maybe it was the diesel fumes, maybe not, but I woke up with such a high fever and such a vicious cough that I had to be taken to the local hospital, where a lad without the faintest shadow of facial hair put me on about 10,000mg of antibiotics straight away. So while the fabled loveliness of Bumthang unfolded outside my window, I lay in bed for two days, sweating and hallucinating. On the third day I was well enough to spend half an hour at the tsechu at Tamshing monastery, and to sit by the Bumthang river for a while, but the drive back to Thimphu the next day brought the fever right back.

The Indian Army doctor we consulted advised me not to carry on my journey in the open jeep unless I wanted to risk secondary infections like pneumonia. Crashing disappointment had to be weighed against the possibility of ruining the trip for everyone later. So here I am, stranded in Thimphu waiting for a flight out, while my friend is halfway to the east already. Not that it's been at all uninteresting, what with princesses, policemen, local journalists, and green plastic praying mantises. But I'll tell you about that next week.

Heaven’s choicest blessings

2009-10-10T11:31:00.000+05:30

Weddings are emotional events, and the days and months leading up to them typically times of very special family togetherness. The process of conceptualising, organising and implementing the ceremony, the fact that a son or daughter is going off to start a whole new family, the enthusiastic opinions of pretty much anyone with a mouth and tongue—all of it guarantees a precious kind of bonding and a good deal of blood on the flower arrangements.

I can’t think of many downsides to being in Bhutan this October 3, but there is at least one big one: that I could not be at the wedding of a college friend, one of the most extraordinary and incandescently bright women I’ve ever known. I’m not exaggerating. She majored in some rarefied form of biology; put on dramatic solo recitations of Longfellow to entertain us; composed and sang music; is an outstanding artist; and to this day is a superb athlete who completed a triathlon a couple of months ago.

This totally amazing woman, who is now a reverend, is getting married in upstate New York today. I’ve never met the man who will become her husband later today, but I wish I could take him out for a cup of coffee, sit him down and talk to him about what an amazing person she is, and what an honour he should think it to have her in his life. He knows, of course—everyone who knows her knows—but I’d still like to make sure he understands this well.

The closest I ever get to feeling like a parent is when my friends and relatives get married, at which time I also congratulate myself on having opted out of parenthood, because I’d be terrible at it. For one thing, whenever I stand over a newborn I feel like the Wicked Witch of the East, because right after cooing and feeling pleased about baby’s peerless cuteness, I think, Oh god, poor benighted little soul, it’s going to have to learn so many things, and wake up early to go to school for years and years, and then work all its life, and put up with lots of little cruelties, and suffer various heartbreaks, and then get old and croak. And that’s if all goes well.

Similarly, while everyone is busy beaming at the bride and groom and being thrilled about wedding food and love and other perishable items, I sit there worrying about whether they’ve examined their decision, whether they know what they’re doing, whether they’ve seen the dark side of their beloved, whether they will be treated right, and whether they understand how much sleep children deprive you of.

That makes me well up with worry, and then people misunderstand. I remember bawling years ago because my friend the groom was all grown up and embarking on the wonderful but difficult journey of his own life; but his other friends thought I was lamenting the fact that I wasn’t his bride.

It goes without saying that the urge to protect people from their (often perfectly pleasant) lives is an idiotic, fruitless project, no matter how well intentioned. The whole idea is to let go, and cheer them on from the sidelines even if the race they’re running seems perilous. That’s why the reactions we institutionalise tend to hug the safe shores of platitude. In India, that’s usually the safe shores of incredibly ungrammatical platitude.

So congratulations, Kiri and Marcus, and be happy. I may be stuck on this Bhutanese mountainside when I should have been at your wedding, but let me just say: May Heaven’s Choicest Blessing Fall Upon Happy Couple.

Don’t worry, be happy

2009-10-10T11:29:00.001+05:30

There are many things I have striven to do in my life but never managed. One is to write these columns in advance so that I can travel without my laptop. Another is to visit Bhutan, that beautiful, sensible little country snuggled into the north-eastern border of India. One of the main reasons I want to visit is that they are best known for being less concerned with GDP than with what they call GNH, or Gross National Happiness. The king of Bhutan became the first head of state to make happiness an official yardstick of his country’s well-being.

Economists, who run the world thanks to their expertise in keeping their heads mainly up their behinds, think this is laughable at best and disgraceful at worst. But their bluff is increasingly being called as the world asks itself if income, production and consumption are really the best way to measure the health of a society, and begins to consider the possibility of evaluating progress on the basis of a more holistic human experience instead. They call it happiness economics, and while it’s not likely to replace traditional economics entirely, it may well end up being seeing as a legitimate and necessary supplement to traditional measures of a country’s well-being.

We are finally asking, for instance, how much happiness we actually get out of money, and whether health care and education might have a role to play in addition to money. The answers (‘not incrementally much beyond a certain point’, and ‘what do you think, genius?’ respectively) are surprising only if you happen to be an economist. Even French President Sarkozy is introducing a Happiness Index for his country and eschewing what he calls the “cult of figures”.

The idea that happiness may be an important component of quality of life is slowly gaining traction among academics and social scientists, which means that we should soon have reams of dull literature on the subject. There is already a vast such body—a Happy Planet Index, for instance, and a Journal of Happiness Studies. We can finally sleep at night secure in the knowledge that professors at Harvard are diligently ruining happiness by studying the hell out of it.

According to a University of Leicester survey called the World Map of Happiness, Bhutan is the happiest country in Asia, and the eighth-happiest in the world, and frankly, that’s good enough for me. Wikipedia also says that in 2005 survey “45 percent of Bhutanese reported being very happy, 52 percent reported being happy and only three percent reported not being happy…the Happy Planet Index estimates that the average level of life satisfaction in Bhutan is within the top 10 percent of nations worldwide, and certainly higher than other nations with similar levels of GDP per capita.”

In his delightful book The Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner finds himself beguiled by the Bhutanese mindset, though he can’t quite wrap his American head around it. “In a wealthy, industrialised society…we are discouraged from doing anything that isn’t productive—either monetarily or in terms of immediate pleasure,” he writes. “The Bhutanese, on the other hand, will gladly spend a day playing darts or just doing nothing.”

This is obviously the place for me. By the time you read this I will just have driven into Bhutan on a three- to four-week road trip. Weiner writes: “driving in Bhutan is not for the meek. Hairpin turns, precipitous drop-offs (no guardrails), and a driver who firmly believes in reincarnation makes for a nerve-wracking experience. There are no atheists on Bhutan’s roads.” But I don’t care; I expect to be suffused with an ineffable bliss from the moment I cross the border. I’ll let you know when it wears off; watch this space.

Dancing king

2009-09-19T10:13:00.002+05:30

It’s not the grey hair and wrinkles and gravity-affected flesh. It’s not even the increasing tendency to spend a convivial evening at a bar talking about mortgages and sluggish thyroids and failed relationships with friends. Those are merely incidental. No, the sure-fire way to feel old is to have the people who were part of your youth die on you. Grandparents, parents, old friends, musicians. Movie stars.

When I first read that Patrick Swayze had cancer I simply assumed that he would beat it. Never mind that pancreatic cancer is one of the most virulent and one of the deadliest. If anyone could survive, surely it was he? He was fit, rich, and had access to the best medical care. Much more importantly, if you were a teenaged girl in the 1980s, he had crossed the line between lucky actor and myth, and myths don’t die, they just get older. When I read this week that he’d lost the fight, I went into instant denial. How could he? How could he just up and disappear, taking my teens with him? He was an icon, and icons have responsibilities. Enduring forever is one of them.

Patrick Swayze—actor, athlete, singer-songwriter and trained ballet dancer—hit the scene with the other bratpackers (including Matt Dillon and Ralph ‘Karate Kid’ Macchio) in The Outsiders, but really made his mark with the unabashed chick flick Dirty Dancing. He wasn’t just a guy with a pretty physique who generously took off his top a lot; he opened our teenaged eyes to the possibility that a fellow could be both average looking and impossibly sexy. He could have big hair and tiny deep-set eyes and an untidy mouth and twirl around on a stage on his tippy-toes and not look even vaguely like a twit.

Of course Michael Jackson, who also took some of my youth with him when he died, was a much greater, more famous, more exalted myth. He was a truly original talent, and there was a Dickensian quality to his life that you might have serialised under the title All of a Twist. There was a riveting pathos to his long fall from king of the music world to grotesque pyjama-clad medical mess who dangled babies over balconies.

But frankly, Michael Jackson existed in the stratosphere. You might have loved his music and thrilled to his innovative dance moves and loved his sparkly gloves, but it was all up there in the clouds somewhere out of reach. I, for one, could never really see myself dancing with him, and never wanted to.

On the other hand pretty much everyone wanted to dance with Patrick Swayze, with or without, but preferably without his shirt on. There’s a reason he was voted sexiest man in the world, and it wasn’t his looks; it was the way he moved and his brooding interpretation of Johnny Castle, dance instructor at summer camp. Everyone wanted him to place their hand against his heart to learn about beat, everyone wanted to look into his eyes and keep the frame, everyone wanted to leap into a pond and have him lift them over his head, everyone wanted to…well, watch the movie.

I just saw it again. Jennifer Grey is as vastly annoying now as I found her then, and not just because she played the lucky lady who actually got to dance with him. But like beloved old music—which includes the film soundtrack—the mere thought of Dirty Dancing me back to a particular, precious time of life. Patrick Swayze did what all those gawky boys in real life failed to: made us feel as if there might be some romance in the world. May he rest in peace.

Q & A

2009-09-12T16:58:00.003+05:30

Anyone who has ever attended, in any capacity, a panel discussion or a book launch or talk in Delhi has had to pay an awful price, even when the event is free, which it mostly is because we live in one of the most culturally subsidised cities in the world. (Pay attention, America, those warming strategic ties are just the thin edge of our evil Socialist wedge). It’s like rolling up at the highway toll booth: Did you think this sort of pleasant ride was for free? As illuminating as the speakers or presentation might be, you have to gird your loins for the most dreaded part of the evening: the question and answer session.

Audiences in this city, who ardently believe in free speech unless it hurts their many sentiments, take this constitutional liberty to mean: ‘I have so very much to say, and I’m going to say it whether or not it’s relevant to the stuff you’ve been saying for the last hour, which I paid close attention to except for the bits when my bootlegger/wife/long-lost classmate was on the phone’. A request from the moderator such as “Please restrict yourself to one question” is very much like the sound of one hand clapping. The first question thereafter is typically: “Madam, I will ask only three small questions.” In more acute cases, the offender bulldozes right through Madam’s protests with: “My first question has four parts.”

For a while I thought that this style was the preserve of the greybeards at the very pleasant old age home known as the India International Centre, but soon discovered that the relatively younger folks at the India Habitat Centre are no better. They spend fifteen minutes whipping their arms in the air like tarpaulins in a gale and, when finally called upon, are liable to say, “I don’t have a question. I have an observation.” The observation in question is usually a recitation of their resume, followed by a species of harangue that may or may not be identifiable as a thought, and will almost certainly not be related to whatever event was scheduled in the room.

One of the worst offenders is the motor mouth. This person will be moved to rise from his or her seat to declare, “I have a question and an observation,” before launching into their unabridged life history, and having got that off their chest, they will leave the room. Then there’s the random shouter, the splenetic chap who thinks a book launch is the best place to air some personal peeve when everyone knows the best place to do that is in a newspaper column. For example at the recent launch of a book authored by an American, a gentleman stood up and shouted, “America is not a holy cow, you know! If there was oil in Afghanistan it would be a whole different story!” Quite apart from the fact that it really was a whole different story from the one that had just unfolded, he needn’t have shouted; it was only a very little room.

Still, I suppose that if we did the sensible thing and just fitted every audience member with a remote-controlled electronic gag, everyone would start bitching and moaning about democracy and freedom of speech and how their fundamental rights were being infringed and all that liberal nonsense. What they don’t realise is that I’m not one of those tin pot dictators. I’ve thought this through. We’d only press the ‘Silence’ button (or the emergency ‘Detonate’ button) if an audience poll, by a show of hands, showed majority support.

Rest In Peace

2009-09-06T09:32:00.000+05:30

This last year, two friends of mine lost their fathers to Indian healthcare.

In the first case, my friend X’s father was taken to Safdarjung Hospital at mid-day with what they didn’t know had been a cerebral stroke during the night. The doctors yelled at X’s shocked and terrified mother for bringing him in so late, and said that it was her fault that he probably wouldn’t make it. There were no ventilator beds free, so the family was told that they would have to keep his lungs working with a manual ventilator that must deliver shots of oxygen (breaths) at precise intervals.

The family was expected to do this. They and their driver took turns pumping oxygen into X’s father’s lungs as best as they could while they made frantic phone calls searching for an affordable hospital with a working ventilator and available beds. It was not until 10pm that they were able to secure a bed at Holy Family Hospital, through the kindness of a doctor known to the friend of a friend. The doctors at Safdarjung refused to let the patient go except under Left Against Medical Advice (LAMA), and not only refused to provide a ventilator van but also demanded that their manual ventilator be returned—the equivalent of taking the patient off life support—and would not entertain the idea of letting the family pay for a replacement that the hospital could get.

As X contemplated how to acquire a new one from the market, Holy Family’s ventilator van arrived with a doctor to transfer the patient. But by then X’s father was no longer breathing and was in a semi-comatose condition; the damage had been done. A week later, despite the best attempts of the doctors at Holy Family Hospital, he died.

My other friend Y’s father, a heart patient with renal problems, was rushed to the emergency room of the private Artemis hospital in Gurgaon in the evening, with symptoms of cardiac distress. It was the closest to their home, and in the ambulance that came to fetch him the family made a phone call requesting the attention of a cardiac doctor. When they got there, however, there was only a junior resident on hand, who said they’d first have to pay the Rs 50,000 fee. Since they only had Rs 10,000 on them they asked that doctors attend to the patient while they arranged the rest of the money, but it was a couple of hours before he was taken to the ICU, suffering cardiac pain the whole time.

It wasn’t until mid-day the next day that the cardiac specialist showed up. Various procedures were carried out as they should have been, but throughout that evening Y’s mother was not allowed to visit her husband, nor would anyone tell the family what the patient’s condition was. Enquiries revealed that the doctors who were supposed to be monitoring him were eating dinner; when the family called them, they were told not to worry because the patient’s parameters were the same and he was being taken care of. Then, at 2.45am, the doctors suddenly said that the family should go into the ICU because the patient was slipping away; a few minutes later he died.

These stories show up a whole range of systemic diseases that have nothing to do patients. Both families realise that their loved ones might have died anyway, despite everyone’s best efforts. Nobody expects hospitals and doctors to be able to save every life. But we all expect them to try their damndest. We certainly don’t expect callousness and negligence and casual indifference to the family’s feelings, and we don’t expect them to put bureaucracy above life.

Pain is entirely abstract until it happens to you. From the stratospheric heights of policy-making and economic theory, these things happen; but tell that to X and Y and their families, whose worlds stopped turning.

Where’s the party?

2009-08-31T18:09:00.001+05:30

The weather is changing, and everyone these days seems to be suffering some sort of illness. The BJP, for instance, is spectacularly unwell. It has spent the last many days in a kind of terrible inner turmoil, shuffling around in mismatched socks, speaking in tongues, pulling out its own teeth one day, its fingernails the next. If an individual displayed the same systems, he or she would be escorted to the nearest psych ward and put on suicide watch. My heart almost goes out to them—almost—as they act out a horrible crisis of confidence that can be summed up by the question, What if we had a party and nobody came?

Strangely, that’s exactly what happened to me the other day. A friend and I decided for purely altruistic reasons, also known as bragging, to put our fledgling cooking skills on display at her house for a few people. I had just stepped out of the house to pick up some ingredients from the market when the skies turned black and torrents of rain drenched me from head to foot. The market roads were filled to the brim in a matter of minutes, with water sloshing around on the pavements a foot higher
.
The cloudburst lasted for less than an hour, but all hell had broken loose all over Delhi. People had abandoned their vehicles and taken to the breaststroke instead. The car made it to Nizamuddin, where my friend lives, ploughing like an ungainly steamboat through streets that had suddenly become canals. Finally it could go no further, firstly because the water was chest high, and secondly because the streets were festooned with fainting power lines and fallen trees all over the place. I tried a couple of approaches, but was thwarted on all sides by the lake that had formed outside my friend’s house. One car came gurgling through it and as it passed I asked the driver whether the water was getting inside. “Yes,” she replied calmly, and kept going with the impassive face of the seriously traumatised.

I gave up, ditched the car, and hopped onto a cycle rickshaw which was submerged up to the passenger footrest but gallantly floated its way among submerged trees and down the submerged driveway to drop me off, gondola-style, in the garden. My friend lent me some dry clothes, but with the power out and the streets impassable, we simply collapsed into chairs, opened a bottle of wine and proceeded to get hammered by candlelight. At some point it became apparent that our guests’ resolve had crumbled quicker than ours, so three hours later when the floodwaters had receded somewhat, I quietly made my way home in gridlocked traffic.

This is the sort of urban event that makes me think darkly of the revolution I wish would come, when the citizenry will finally stop accepting this sort of thing as an inevitable yearly event. I’m almost sure that there are parts of the world where sudden torrential rain simply drains from the streets into the rainwater drainage system—yes, drains away, just like that. We should make friendly overtures to these parts of the world. We should beg them to transfer this mysterious technology to us. We should put it into place all over India. We could make down payments on it with all the crores of cash recovered from income tax raids in the houses of some of our more unsavoury leaders, and possibly (who knows?) some of our savoury ones too.

At least it wouldn’t matter if the Opposition really did collapse, because our choices in this respect are six of one, or half a dozen of the other.

Slow news week

2009-08-22T10:01:00.001+05:30

Monday. Can’t believe I had to wake up again. What’s the point of living in a free country if you have to wake up every day? This is so relentless. Wake up, get tired, go to sleep, recharge, wake up, get tired, go to sleep. It’s like eating, only that’s much worse. Plan, shop, cook, eat, clean up, digest, excrete, get hungry, plan, shop, cook, eat, clean up, digest, excrete, get hungry, plan, shop, cook, eat, clean up, digest, excrete, get hungry, plan, shop, cook, eat, clean up. Oh look, Monday’s almost over. Where does the time go?

Tuesday. What’s so special about Tuesday that barbers won’t work and everyone runs off to the temple? I hate Tuesdays.

Wednesday. There’s been no rain. Drought stalks the land and people are having to sell things, plus, the humidity is awful. They’re having elections in Kabul, and apparently some bombs went off. Sad. This is what they call mid-week hump. If you can get through Wednesday, you can get through anything, that’s what’s they say.

Thursday. Jaswant Singh has written this book about Jinnah and gotten himself sacked. Who cares? Politics as usual.

Friday. Tomorrow is Independence Day. Trust Murphy’s Law to make sure that the national holidays with the most boring speeches are inevitably dry days.

Saturday. Shah Rukh Khan was stopped and questioned at Newark Airport after his name popped up on the computer! We are a-flutter and agog. Who’da thunk it? He’s our biggest star! According to him, he’s even one of their biggest stars! You have to admire the balls of that security officer. Shobhaa De thinks he should get over himself. Should he get over himself? Is he just a film star with a superiority complex, or is he a genuine Symbol for the Oppressed? Is it okay for a country to feel up our film stars in addition to our ex-Presidents, just because it’s a superpower? Whose rules are supposed to apply? Did SRK aim to create a furore, or did his overzealous friends at the Indian Consulate and in the media create one for themselves? Conspiracy theories abound, which is quite exciting. Was it a publicity stunt to remind everyone that he’s still around and that he has a film forthcoming on the theme of outrageous religious profiling? Coincidence? He says he doesn’t mind being stopped, because after all, who is he but a humble nobody, but that they asked him weird questions and he’d gladly stand in line again, and that he doesn’t want an apology. Is he man or saint (and is his hair real or not, and either way, is it dyed)? Hard to tell. The Government of India is going to formally protest the incident. Union Cabinet minister Ambika Soni says we should frisk Brad Pitt in India. We’d all like to, ho ho. Shashi Tharoor supports SRK, whatever that means. But how are we to keep the world safe if everyone keeps getting exempted from the rules? Has our national dignity been irrevocably outraged, or are we a bunch of insecure celebrity-worshipping chumps in the throes of a reality check? King Khan says he’s afraid of rules. Is it okay to worship such a wimp? Arnold Schwarzenegger has invited him to dinner in an attempt to defuse the row. Is nuclear war a possibility? Do we have enough nuclear warheads? What about that whole End User Monitoring Agreement thing? Is his new film going to be sold out?

Sunday. I hate Shah Rukh Khan. And Arnold Schwarzenegger. Plus, I don’t know what to do for lunch. It’s so pointless anyway—get hungry, plan, shop, cook, eat, digest, excrete, get hungry…

Panic room

2009-08-15T17:21:00.000+05:30

Anyone who has ever suffered anxiety attacks, or full-blown panic attacks, knows that there are few more frightening things in the world, other than Japanese horror movies and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responding to the question: “What does Bill Clinton think, through the mouth of Mrs Clinton?”

No, anxiety is just no fun. For no apparent reason at all your heart suddenly starts to beat at breakneck speed, bits of your stomach twist and fill with dread, your limbs begin to shake, there’s pain in your arm and you’re faint, the world starts to roar in your ears, a cold sweat breaks out on your brow. You might have these, or a thousand other petrifying sensations that you recognise quite clearly as the Four Horsemen of the Apocollapse. This is it. You’re dying of a heart attack, or a stroke, or something even worse, and the quack in the emergency room is sitting there blowing off his Hippocratic Oath and telling you to “Relax, it’s just anxiety.”

It’s bad enough for adults, but kids who suffer panic attacks or symptoms of anxiety before they’re old enough to know what either of those is, are more likely than others to grow into accomplished hypochondriacs. This is a fact I have researched, and while my sample size is limited (one), it’s reliable (me). And it’s hardly counterintuitive: a twelve-year-old terrified by what feels like a heart attack is very possibly going to grow up to be predisposed to big fears based on little symptoms.

I’m one of these benighted souls, and I can tell you that nothing makes a hypochondriac happier than a new illness to probably have. Terror is, after all, another form of thrill. Or if you want to get all scientific about it, they’re both powered by adrenaline. Sometimes our same old-same old repertoire gets boring, and our families are no longer so likely to look up from their knitting, or to break their empty gaze into the middle distance, when we darkly suggest that our shortness of breath could well be an impending heart attack. So from time to time we like to be able to add something new—SARS, or dengue fever, or chikungunya—to the most recent probable cause of our ongoing demise.

Swine flu, also known as the H1N1 virus though I keep calling it the H1N1 visa, has arrived just in time, because ankle cancer, based on the itchiness inside my foot cast, had long outstayed its welcome. It (swine flu, not my foot cast) is rampaging around the word, spread by a class of humans I like and admire: travellers. They’ve gone and given a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘globe-trotters’.

Based on all the screechy television coverage and the dire newspaper editorials, based on all the fatalities and the lightning geographical spread, and based most of all on my previous experience, swine flu should be scaring the IV drip out of me. But here’s the thing: I am strangely unmoved. I find myself quite calm. People are getting sick and even dying all over the place, but I can’t detect the faintest stirring of anxiety in me.

It can’t be that it’s because I don’t have it yet, because not having something yet is not really relevant to a hypochondriac’s thought process. It might be partly because when I hear the words ‘swine flu’ I imagine millions of microscopic pink pigs with wings and evil expressions buzzing around like motes of dust, and it’s hard to get upset through the giggles.

I simply can’t explain it. There’s nothing for it but to wonder whether I haven’t managed, through years of stringent disciplinary measures such as and denial and drink, to overcome the most egregious of my phobias.

Party smart

2009-08-08T09:35:00.001+05:30

A friend in school once told me that the most active thing he’d ever seen me do was sneeze. I might have spent Games periods hiding in a luggage storage area and reading, but that apart, it was a downright calumnious thing to say, and I held it against him for a couple of decades. But he would enjoy seeing me now when, thanks to a busted ankle, the most active thing I’ve done in a week and a half is wonder if I should think about sneezing, then reject thinking as too strenuous an option.

Since I’m laid up, I decided that I should have a few friends over, and that I should even cook for them. (When the cook took off on his annual summer vacation recently, my brush with starvation caused me to bestir myself to take some cooking classes with a family friend who is a goddess in the kitchen. She is so good a cook, and so good a teacher, that she had me believing that I could pull it off. However, I took no chances and got the cook to make pretty much everything serious, including dessert.)

My mother decided she would mark the event by leaving the house for more salubrious climes. She sailed out with a single, completely sincere instruction: “Have a wonderful time, and if any drunken louts spill anything on my carpets, I’ll be back at 9.30 to kill them.” I reminded her that my friends, most of whom she hasn’t met, are now aged between 30 and 40 and very unlikely to get falling-over drunk.

I said it gently, because I know that her benchmark is the permanent scar in her heart caused by the parties that my brother used to throw when he was in college, for which he would roll up the carpets, take the art off the walls, haul all the furniture upstairs or to the side, and greet his guests with “Hello, all puking outside please” or something like that. My mother would organise kebabs and brownies or whatever, and find them all untouched in the fridge the next day, because by the time dinnertime rolled around, he had deemed his guests unfit to feed. That was then, I said, and by now even his friends would have grown up.

Accordingly a few people lurched in around seven and immediately cracked open the beer and wine and proceeded to get trashed. A few of us began to make vegetarian pasta, which was the only thing I was up to making. One guest chopped what looked like fifty peppers (I was scaling the recipe up and erring on the side of caution). I cut up garlic, someone else soaked the sundried tomatoes. It was a civilised, cooperative effort, punctuated by the odd smoke and a rotating population.

My mother returned at 9.30 as promised, to find six people standing at the stove all waving their limbs, sometimes with kitchen knives attached, and shouting constructive cooking suggestions at once. Someone threw in some vodka, someone tossed in red wine, someone else an indeterminate quantity of beer.

She greeted everyone in her most charming manner, but I could see her third eye darting about here and there in its beadiest avatar, inspecting the place for vomit or boogers or whatever other emissions she suspects middle-aged people of leaving in their friends’ houses. She even sat with us for a while, which was clearly an attempt to get a closer look at the carpet.

But all in all, it was a merry old evening. The trick is to make everyone cook the food, all the while plying them with alcohol so that they don’t notice how bad it tastes. And that, my friends, is what growing up is all about.

Fractured verdict

2009-08-01T08:49:00.002+05:30

Lodhi Gardens in Delhi is a lovely place, full of trees and birds and squirrels. It’s one of Delhi’s many ‘green lungs’, and in my view one of the prettiest, which is why I stepped off the walking track the other day, trying to get a better look at the pink water lilies growing beside the fountain.

In the normal course of events, people who aren’t hung up on speed, agility and grace often mistake me for a gazelle leaping lightly through the early morning sunshine. So it was a complete surprise to me when I set my foot down, felt my ankle turn under me with an audible crack, and fell to earth with the elegance of a tranquilized buffalo.

In my defence, when you know and like a place, you do not expect it to suddenly try and execute you by opening up yawning chasms under your trusting feet. I examined it as I staggered back up, and it was at least six inches wide and a third as deep; just looking into the abyss made me dizzy.

Actually it turned out that I really was dizzy. This happened to be one of those rare occasions when my mother was with me at Lodhi Gardens. (I was, in fact, following in her footsteps towards the pink lilies, which confirmed to me some of my hunches about the whole following-in-her-footsteps thing.) I put a hand on her shoulder, noting that the world had mysteriously been translated into a set of fluttering green spots rather like the Matrix.

“I heard my ankle cracking, did you hear it cracking? I think I will lie down,” I told her in my best calm voice, to counter a loud ambient buzzing that I knew to be the sound of her panicking, and also because, damn it, it’s more dignified to appear to choose such a position. As my mother shot off to fetch the car, an itinerant lady took up self-appointed guard over me, presumably to fight off Smith and the machines. Nothing happened to me, so she’s probably The One.

By lunchtime the pain was much worse. The doctor held my x-ray against the light. “Just as I thought. See that?” he said. Mmm, I said, scanning the thing wildly. He pointed at nothing and said, “Right there. Your ligament has snapped like a rubberband and you’ve got a hairline fracture of the lateral malleolus.” He said I’d have my foot in a plaster cast for three or four weeks, during which I could not get it wet or put any weight on it, and after which I’d have to hoist myself along on crutches for another three weeks.

The fright of it made me want to pee, and he told me, in all seriousness, that I’d have to hop to the bathroom. I tried it out, and told him this seemed like a very good way to break the other ankle. He thought this was funny, but I suspect he was really laughing because he was about to go to the bank with enormous amounts of my money.

Since then I’ve been hobbling about with a cast and two elbow crutches. Bathing involves a chair, a stool, three towels, and a mighty dip in standards of cleanliness. Walking involves swinging along like an ape through lianas, occasionally stopping dead when I get mixed up about which limb or bit of equipment goes first. Stairs involve a lot of stopping dead. My palms are bruised, my muscle development is terribly skewed, and I can’t drive.

They say a little enforced inactivity is a good thing. I would really enjoy putting my feet up, doing very little, and ordering people about, if it weren’t so much like having Independence Day fall on a Sunday.

Here comes the moon

2009-07-30T10:16:00.001+05:30

The solar eclipse on July 22nd so captured everyone’s imagination this past week that the news channels actually took a couple of minutes out from yelling about the diplomatic bloopers committed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh regarding Baluchistan, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal, to yell about where one might best watch the eclipse (Taregana, Bihar), when (early in the morning) how (through pinhole glasses) and why (it would be the longest eclipse of the 21st century).

I always wanted to be an astronaut, because I’ve always wanted to meet some aliens outside of my family; but just because I was better at punctuation than at math, they wouldn’t let me into ISRO or NASA. This blow and the subsequent course-correction to my career that became necessary did not completely kill my interest, and I remain eager to know about stuff that happens in space. Whether it’s Jupiter suddenly developing a hole the size of the Earth, or the toilets on the International Space Station getting clogged, I’m watching and listening.

So I was extremely excited about the total solar eclipse on Wednesday. It would be thrilling to watch this rare and utterly beautiful phenomenon, especially since the next one this long one is scheduled for 123 years from now, by which time I might well be busy and forget. The band of totality, which is what they call the area on earth that will experience the full eclipse, didn’t include Delhi, but we’d get a partial eclipse. It was all going to start at the crack of dawn. It was important to get some sleep.

So on the evening of the 21st, I made sure to have an early vegetarian dinner while watching The Matrix, which I never seem to tire of; I read in bed only for an hour, which is all I can take at a time of Ahmed Rashid’s Descent Into Chaos anyway, because after every paragraph or so my eyeballs start skidding around over the names of various Afghan warlords and the titles of various politicians and officers; then I turned out the light.

And it was worth all the preparation. In the morning I woke up, shambled out of bed, had an excellent plate of fruit for breakfast, read the newspapers, and then headed for the optimal position from which to view the eclipse: in front of the television. That’s where they always have the best view and the best pictures, best of all at the best time (i.e. throughout the day). Some of the pictures were taken by people on a Rs 80,000-a-seat flight specially chartered to follow the eclipse. I love those people!

Part of the reason I didn’t make more of an effort is that I doubted that a partial eclipse in cloudy skies over Delhi would match up to my last experience, which was a total solar eclipse on a completely clear day over the silhouette of the mighty Borobudur stupa in Central Java. Okay, that was in 1983, but I remember it as if it was yesterday. Who could forget—we drove from Jakarta to Borobudur, got those silly glasses, watched the moon pass slowly over the face of the sun, watched Bailey’s Beads and the corona explode behind that dark circle, saw and heard the birds and other animals get terribly confused and head to bed as night fell in the morning, felt primal restylings of our body hair, and got the t-shirt (which I hung on to for a good twenty years until it was in shreds).

Now that I’m talking about it, I’m sad to have missed the real thing. I must find a calendar that goes up to 2132c.e.

The perfect storm

2009-07-18T16:15:00.000+05:30

One of my early defining experiences was a night in Delhi back in 1975 or ’76 when an enormous monsoon storm blew the door to the terrace plumb off its hinges, with the sort of demonic roar and attendant terror you’d expect if your airplane suddenly developed a hole in the fuselage midflight. I was three or four years old, and my parents were out doing whatever parents did in the 1970s—wearing flared pants, I imagine, and clinging to lampposts to counter the lift generated by air blowing through their bouffant hairstyles. Anyway they were out, and they didn’t come back for a long, long time. I developed the certain conviction that they were dead, and spent my time squeaking ‘Ram, Ram, Ram’ like a ferret on amphetamines—a rather opportunistic thing to chant given that I was not a believer. Nor, just to clarify, on amphetamines.

The next morning, and ever after, they claimed that they’d merely been delayed by monstrous traffic snarls caused by the rain. I lived in terrified anticipation of the next maelstrom, even though they tried to explain to me the difference between the very rare gale-force wind that had deep-sixed the door, and the common pleasant breeze that might blow at any time. For years thereafter the slightest movement of air sent me rushing to them to ask tremblingly, “Is it a wind or a breeze?”

How I got from this phobic state to all-out adoration of storms is completely beyond me, but I did. Black skies, howling winds, cracking lightning and sheets of rain, trees stripped bare of their leaves, kids flying off their leashes, all this delights me beyond words, especially if I’m indoors, sipping on tea or wine.

I was happy as a pig in muck one evening in the Philippines when a typhoon blew up out of nowhere. Rain like gunfire drowned the city in minutes. The wind whipped the papaya trees to the ground like so many noodles, and threatened to lift the roof off and fly it to Malaysia—a wind so loud that when you stood next to someone and screamed something right into their ear (typically: “Wow, this is really loud”), all they experienced was you getting into their personal space and moving your lips soundlessly.

These days I’m thinking longingly of storms, seeing as how the monsoon is almost over and simultaneously hasn’t yet begun, at least here in Delhi. While Mumbai drowns and Assam declares drought, Delhi has been malingering in a purgatory of insufferable heat and humidity that regularly makes me want to beat myself to death with a straining air conditioner.

Every day for the last two weeks has been a tease—a few more clouds, a bit more wind, a louder grumble in the sky, for just a little longer every day before the sun comes bursting back out and turns up the humidity. Every time I think I’ve caught a glimpse of lightning out of the corner of my eye, it turns out to be just the neighbours, who have been performing mysterious acts of welding on their lawn since the last Ice Age. (I have watched their contractor evolve from Neanderthal to… well, maybe ‘evolve’ is a strong word.)

As I write this, on Wednesday, the sky has finally offered up a tiny little leak, an apology of a rain shower. If by the time this comes out in print this monsoon has regained a bit of lead in its pencil, then bully for us. If not, I’ll keep hoping. As far as I’m concerned, the perfect storm is one that happens.

Gross domestic product

2009-07-11T09:33:00.001+05:30

I’ve had the house to myself for weeks now, as all other inhabitants and regular visitors are summering somewhere cooler than Delhi. I didn’t accompany them because, I declared optimistically, I was Leading My Own Life. It would have been perfect except that the general exodus from Delhi took with it the cook, which means that I have had to shift for myself in the feeding department.

Now, I may be a worthless layabout in general, but I’m no slouch when it comes to surviving. I like to mix it up to keep things fresh and interesting. Not for me the rut of daily routine. Over the past many weeks I have not only dragged every friend I have to some restaurant or the other for lunch or dinner, but have also made those of them who still let me in, cook for me at their homes. I have occasionally ordered in from fine-dining establishments such as that place with the golden arches. When none of those options is available (lately everyone’s phone always seems to be switched off or they’re having to travel out of town on short notice, or my wallet looks shell-shocked) I have fallen back on good old self-reliance.

When I head to the kitchen my being is bent on creating not just gustatory art, but also the cleanest, best fuel for the body. I find cooking both enjoyable and therapeutic, especially when my favourite music is playing in the living room and my favourite wine is slopping about in a well-cut wineglass. Plus, it’s cheaper than going out. And I don’t believe in compromising on health, either.

And so, over the weeks I have spent enjoyable, therapeutic time in the kitchen concocting a variety of healthful, tasty meals. High-fibre cereal with a dash of low-fat milk; Nestle Fitnesse with Nestle Skimmed Milk; multinational breakfast food with multinational dairy product; multigrain with protein and calcium, to name a few. And that’s just the basic stuff; I’m leaving out the exquisite nuances one can give each meal by varying the amount and/or temperature of each ingredient (a little more cereal, a little less milk; a little less cereal and a little more milk; the same amount of cereal with a bit less milk… I could go on, but the cool tips and surprises will keep until my cookbook comes out).

Even the finest cook can, however, tire of her own best and safest dish, and decide to take off on the wings of fancy. Thus it was that I decided to make pasta and salad a couple of times. The first time, I threw a bunch of tomatoes in boiling water, flayed them, beat them to a pulp, burned them, and slapped them on top of slightly overdone fusilli—and voila, Pasta a la Emergency. The salad on the side was quite good, except that I think I may have left a couple of worms in the leaves when I washed them by swiping them half-heartedly under the tap, because my stomach hasn’t been the same since.

The second time was much better. I sort of forgot to shop for any stuff to put in the pasta or indeed the salad, but it was fine: I boiled pasta, scraped some butter from the fridge and bunged that in with salt, tipped some oregano flakes on top, and then hosed the bugger down with Tabasco. Yum! I’m thinking of recreating this one when I have people over to repay their hospitality, if they take my calls. They should really come over and see how little domestic support a person can get by with.

They don’t call me Renaissance Woman for nothing.

It’s the stupid, economy

2009-07-04T17:40:00.000+05:30

Just to let all you corporate types know: I don’t understand the economy. Before you go feeling all superior and contemptuous, let me state that I bet I’m not the only one. Recognising that a business paper is probably not the most sympathetic forum in which to complain about this, but pressing on regardless, here’s my confusion. (I’m going to go very tentatively here, making only sweeping generalisations and uninformed pronouncements.)

My tiny little liberal artsy brain understands it thus. The big idea is that we must have ever-burgeoning demand in order to have ever-burgeoning economic growth, on the assumption that growth is the measure of an economy’s, and therefore a nation’s, health. This means we want various sectors of the economy to grow, so that all the people employed in those sectors will get paid more, so that they can buy more, so that we can increase industry to produce more goods and services that people can buy, so that we have ever more sectors on which ever more people are ever more precariously dependent.

Baffling, but okay. The problem is, is anyone coordinating all these sectors in all these countries so that we keep the global health of the planet intact? Doesn’t the present model run out of steam at the point where not only are resources scarce but the planet is also becoming disinclined to support life as we know it, furnished with amenities like drinking water and big blingy handbags?

Say we want cars because auto-making generates lots of jobs, by which people get paid and can buy things. The fact that cars require lots of infrastructure by way of roads and fuel stations and parking and walkways to the parking etc doesn’t enter the calculation. Auto makers simply knuckle down and go hell-for-leather producing as many cars as they possibly can, to make sure that at the end of the year they can show growth in their industry. To a numbskull such as myself, untrammelled growth in the car industry improves our lives in the following way: choked roads, parking hassles, pollution and spiralling health care costs. Doesn’t that sound wrong?

By the same token, the world’s losses are measured in dollar terms. A colossal storm devastates New Orleans or coastal Orissa or Bangladesh, and we shake our heads over the multimillion dollars’ worth of damage that was done. Amitabh Bachchan gets injured in a film shoot and we talk about the crores of advertising he represents. Michael Jackson dies and media goes insane. No, wait, that’s different: the media are insane.

How come money always comes first, before the health, safety and peace of citizens? How come we live in a cesspit like Delhi, where effluent-poisoned water and air ensures that we eat poisonous vegetables, and feel thrilled by the economic growth represented by the newest gadget we’ve got? I suppose it’s a good distraction from the possibility of three-eyed, six-horned babies becoming a common feature of the population.

I’m all for research and innovation which can be put to good use to better people’s lives, but by better life I mean greener grass, purer water, more nutritious and better distributed food, clean air and fuel. I’d be happy to pay the price by wearing the same clothes for longer, keeping my basic phone until it really dies, and taking public transport. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing to live with a little bit less.

I can just hear the sound of a thousand eyeballs rolling. What do I know? Mercifully, the only thing I’m expected to get right is grammar and punctuation. Feel free to send me irritated mail about it. I’ll correct it and send it back.

Ode to dawn

2009-06-27T12:20:00.000+05:30

…Or, How I woke up much too early but didn’t mind a bit.

At 4.37am the first bird calls, a sweet, melodious tweeting that I find hard to resent just because it’s an ungodly hour. About a minute and a half later another call starts up, and then very quickly the valley is echoing with birdcalls, each with its own pace and rhythm and tune, the whole glorious symphony loud enough to wake the dead.

I should want to wring each one of their little tweeting necks, because I’ve only slept four and a half hours. At home in Delhi, a similar but less melodious solo followed by an ear-splitting chorus often wakes me, and even though it’s typically later, I lie in bed thinking purely murderous thoughts about our little feathered friends. Here, instead, I jump out of bed with a smile on my face and turn on the electric kettle to make a cup of tea.

At 4.45am I’m outside, appalled by how much dawn I’ve already missed. There’s a violet flush over the hillsides. The summer solstice is just passed; these days are long and hot even at seven thousand feet, but at the moment it’s cool enough for a shawl. The world looks newly made, and not just because you’ve processed most of last night’s wine. It’s mysterious and cool and a little damp, shrouded in pre-sunrise pearl. The forest is curled up and asleep, folds and ridges and spurs looking for all the world like enormous mounds of broccoli.

Except for the birds, and the rustling leaves, it’s perfectly quiet. What I keep mistaking for a car coming down the road is the sound of the wind in the deodars—a strong, rushing river-like sound. I love being wrong.

At 5.15 the mist nestled in the valleys begins to rise, and resolves itself into a single white streak at the bottom of the blue silhouettes of the Kumaon ranges. Sometime around 5.30 a tiny pomegranate bump appears, but in the wrong spot: it’s coming out of the clouds above the ranges, starting much too high. It rises and swells into a cool pink ball and rapidly becomes a hot pink ball becomes a fierce orange ball becomes the sun. It takes me a moment to remember that although it’s too cloudy to see them, the blue ranges are backed by huge Himalayan snowcaps, invisible except for the fact that the sun has to clear them.

Foliage crackles lightly on the hillside beneath the stone terrace, and I find myself looking around for the yellow spotted line of a leopard’s back until I realise that it’s just leaves crackling under the weight of bees, twigs crackling under the weight of birds. I watch one sharp-beaked, crested bird catch an insect and demolish it nervously while the poor thing kicks and flutters and, I imagine, emits little insect death rattles. Not another soul is up. It’s just me, the mountains, and the ruthless business of nature trying to find breakfast. Who needs toast when you can peck live worms to death?

A pink flush in the sky, aka rosy-fingered dawn, starts to run through a brief, enchanted palette, like an aria in the sky. I don’t blink, so that I don’t miss any of this rapid-fire action that ends much too soon. The sun breaches cloud and mist and quickly turns to white-hot and suddenly the whole thing begins to look much more like your regular sun, heat and all, and the shawl is suddenly redundant, and I’m suddenly hit by the weight of all the hours I haven’t slept.

The magical part is over; I’ve the seen the world safely on its way to today. Time to go back to sleep.

Apology to the Queen

2009-06-20T07:47:00.001+05:30

I have visited the mountains of Himachal Pradesh several times over the last few years. My destination has usually been the apple orchard country of Kotgarh district, which is tucked away behind a hairpin bend on the road to Narkanda, amid some of the most beautiful spruce forest anywhere in the world. Getting to Kotgarh involves taking the train to Kalka, the railhead at the foot of the hills, and then driving for six hours.

Shimla is at the halfway point of the car ride, and I’ve always taken a dim view of it. In the clear light of day it’s a frightful eyesore, seeping down the hillside like a concrete abscess, From afar, and from the confines of a vehicle, it looks like the sort of joint you should either bypass, or speed through as fast as its monstrous traffic jams will allow; and so all I’ve even done in the Queen of the Hills is pause to pee on it, before fleeing onward. But this fill it-flush it-forget it attitude came to an end last weekend, when I went up to visit a friend who lives there.

It’s on foot that the place comes into its own. I discovered this by virtue of not having my own car, and also by virtue of being in Chhota Shimla, which is a good fifteen- or twenty-minute walk from the shop-lined Mall where one buys groceries.
The house I stayed in was bewitching. The flooring planks filled the rooms with the smell of old wood; the kitchen had the sort of sooty corners that only tough, busy, unfussy people can create and tolerate; enormous windows framed a view of cedar forests; a fireplace had, over the years, become a storage niche.

We would leave this cosy spot to walk for hours every day, including to the Mall, where you will find everyone walking up and down of an evening, because apparently they don’t get enough walking up and down the vertiginous levels of town the rest of the day. On the Mall we browsed identical sweater shops and climbed up to the bilious yellow church at the foot of which people were dancing the nati. We ate American-sized portions of rather good lasagna and pork chops at Combemere (named after the Lord), and had excellent idlis and sambhar with the world’s worst coffee at India Coffee House, and bought hard-boiled eggs from the many, many hard-boiled egg sellers on the street. If you’re going into the hard-boiled egg selling business, Shimla is where it’s at.

Salted hard-boiled eggs, wine, bread, cheese and Nutella consumed over many games of backgammon and chess is hard to beat, especially if a light rain is falling outside. And when it’s clear, you walk out into the forests. If you get tired of the lovely shady forest road that goes up to the ridge, just dive into the trees in another direction—for instance you can take a bus or taxi up to Chharabra, and walk down through fragrant pine and spruce forest to Mashobra, grab a cup of tea at the market, and walk some more to install yourself on a soft patch of forest grass and have a picnic of paranthas, pickle and beer.

The company and the relief from scorching weather in Delhi certainly helped, but it wasn’t just that. I really find myself fond of Shimla’s streets, the phlegmatic gait of its population, and the fact that there might be what feels like a two-thousand-foot altitude difference between the bus stand and your house. Maybe I’m feeling so fond because I was only there for a brief holiday rather than a lifetime, but so what? I take back all the nasty things I’ve thought about it in the past.

The devil’s sweatshop

2009-06-16T16:46:00.001+05:30

You know that story about the fisherman and the entrepreneur? The bright young MBA comes upon a fisherman on the beach, drowsing and reading in the shade of a coconut tree, beside his rod and a catch bucket in which there are two measly fish. What a waste of time and opportunity, he thinks, and decides to help the guy out.

“You’re never going to get anywhere like that,” he says to the fisherman. “Why don’t you work harder?”

“Why?” asks the fisherman.

“If you caught more fish to sell, you could save some money,” explains the MBA.

“And then?” says the fisherman.

“Then you could buy a second boat, and hire an assistant.”

“And then?”

“Then, if you continued to work hard, you’d catch double the fish.”

“And then?”

“Then if you keep working hard, you could save more money to buy even more boats and hire even more people. It’s called growing your business.”

“And then?”

“Then you could work hard to catch even more fish to sell, so you could save even more money!” says the MBA irritably, wondering whether this guy even has a brain.

“And then?”

“And then you’d be made—you could retire, go live in some nice place and relax, eat great food, and do nothing much!”

“Isn’t that what I’m doing right now?” asks the fisherman.

Pico Iyer has a lovely essay called ‘The Joy of Less’ in the New York Times (June 10, 2009). It’s on the much-pared down life he lives in Japan following a high-octane career in journalism. “I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack”, he writes; “[…] at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did.” He concludes that “happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued” and that “If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies.”

The simple life is something that the world discovered around the time that everyone started to have to clean out their offices. Before the Great Crash of 2008 it just wasn’t done to sit around enjoying your life, choosing minimum rations of work and money for the pleasure of spending your time smelling the daisies. If you weren’t busy—really busy, so busy it gave you ulcers and left you no time to do anything other than work—then baby, you were a waste of space.

Now that things have gotten so pervasively hairy in the world of business that there are few problem-free places left to migrate to, suddenly everyone is going on about how passé all that is, and how they would really much rather have the time with their kids—though I suspect that as soon as the economy regains a bit of colour in its cheeks, everyone will dive straight back into researching which new phone they can now afford to replace their perfectly good phone that works fine.

Meanwhile, as far as I’m concerned, the more of us hanging about not consuming too much, the better for the planet—even if you don’t buy the argument that it could even be good for your soul.

Old wine, new bottle

2009-06-07T20:00:00.001+05:30

Last weekend my mother and I took my niece up to Sitla Estate in Kumaon. The overnight Ranikhet Express train to Kathgodam leaves from Old Delhi Railway Station, which, for those of you who haven’t been in a while, is still monstrously crowded and smelly. Four-year-old Tara lives in Boston, where the last germ was hacked to death in the middle of the last century (though now with swine flu all bets are off), so the station was a bit of a shock to her.

“This is not good!” she shouted as I dragged her up the stairs holding her hand in a death grip. I couldn’t actually see her in a sea of people and swinging luggage. It’s not good, I agreed, but we’ll soon be in our compartment. I thought she followed up with ‘Ooo!’ but it turned out she was yelling “My shoe!” I recovered it halfway down the staircase. Her little head was buffeted this way and that, and while she bravely soldiered on without complaint, she was pretty shell-shocked by the time we picked our way through the human wreckage on the platform to wait for our train.

“Is it morning, afternoon or night?” she asked, wiping her brow. I thought she was messing with me. I pointed at the sky and asked her what she thought. “That’s not the sky, we have to go outside to see the sky,” she said. I realised that train stations in Boston are probably enclosed. Her face was wonderstruck at the idea of an open-air station, and grew even more so when she saw the little sink and the ladder to the upper bunk in our first class coupe.

This was to be not only her first experience with Indian Railways but also her first trip without either her mother or her father, and I was worried that she might get cranky, but when I told her it was time to sleep, she ground her fists vigorously against her eyes saying that this was the way to get sleepy right away, stuck her thumb in her mouth, and immediately fell asleep.

She was delighted with the “curly streets” that wound through the mountains the next morning; with the “hairy hills”; with the bunnies in the hutch; with the pancakes and honey breakfast that our host Vikram gave her; and most of all with Vikram himself, who had an answer to anything she came up with. One evening at dinner she declared that she couldn’t eat her pasta because it was sick. Sick? we asked. It’s not feeling well at all, she said firmly. My mother and I just stared at her, but she had met her match in Vikram, who nodded gravely, marched off and returned with a plastic syringe, with which he administered a few injections to the ailing pasta. Now that it was all better could she eat, he asked? “Yeah!” she shouted, outmanoeuvred, and gobbled the lot.

She spent a lot of time on imaginary phone calls, telling imaginary people that Sitla was “the most beautifulest place in the world” with “giantic mountains”, and that she was “never ever ever leaving”. Her long-standing fear of dogs disappeared around the estate’s two beautiful German shepherds. She made fast friends with a wriggly five-year-old fellow guest, and the two of them spent hours on end discussing Sita and Ravana, and playing Ludo and Snakes & Ladders without any dice, as well as a version of chess in which you impale a hollow plastic chessman on all of your digits and then make scary claws at each other.

She was, in other words, happy as a clam. I realised that I just wanted her to love it the way I do, and was thrilled that she did. I can’t say what would have happened if it had all gone the other way.

I might have had to throw her off a giantic hillside.

Seven-year itch

2009-05-30T12:49:00.001+05:30

Halfway through the year there always comes a moment that makes me sit back in shock. Partly it’s the awful realisation that the undifferentiated hill of paper on my desk, which has developed pockets of slime and may or may not have flies buzzing around it, has to be sorted into a decipherable tax return, substantiated by more bits of paper that I will shortly have to start calling around for.

But mostly it’s because June 1 is the anniversary of my father’s death, and I’m always appalled by how much time has passed since he went permanently AWOL that beautiful sunny Saturday. Next Monday will be seven years. I’m still trying to get to grips with the fact that he has missed all the things that have happened in that time.

Two of his three children, one brother-in-law, two nieces and three nephews (at a minimum count) have gotten married; one niece, two grandchildren and three grand-nieces have entered the world, and another child is on the way. Two of his family have published books; one has held two artistic exhibitions; three have bought houses and one is fighting a legal battle to keep hers; one has lost a job; one is separated from a spouse; one has lost a companion. Two friends have had cancer. His father died, and so did his mother-in-law. His oldest friend is battling to keep a limb after a terrible motorcycle accident.

The US went to war in Iraq, Pakistan became the Taliban’s playing field, India elected two governments, there was another Isreli-Palestine war, the war in Sri Lanka ended, the Indian stock market shot up to unbelievable heights, and now the world economy is dragging itself around like a sick duck.

In other words the world has moved on, as it does. People relentlessly continue to laugh and die and be born and fight and make art and screw up the environment and buy high-tech toys, just as if nothing had happened. Wise writers sum this up beautifully by spending half a novel building up a character, killing them off in one spare sentence, and spending the next half on other people’s lives.

C’est la vie, and accepting that this is natural and inevitable is a good way to start accepting your own importance as far as the universe is concerned, which is—by a quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation—nil. The less one gets this, the more prone one is to putting up futile resistance, like building giant statues of oneself with taxpayer money (this will get the world to remember you a for a little bit longer, but not in ways you really want).

This year we’re going to mark my father’s seventh year of absence by going up to beautiful Sitla Estate in Kumaon, which is a collection of guest rooms run by a friend on an orchard on top of a ridge. Here the mountains are splashed against half the horizon, the forest is alive with birds and animals, and the night sky is ablaze with stars.

Besides the obvious joys of walking in the hills, of eating breakfast beneath a hundred-year-old plum tree and lunch amid pear trees, taking your aperitif in front of a bonfire on the verandah in the twilight, and dining in a candlelit, bukhari-warmed room, Sitla also has one especially strange and lovely attribute: time both flies as well as grinds almost to a halt there. The hours between waking and sleeping are both fleeting and stretchy, so that you can stay for three days that feel like one, but dream for weeks between lunch and dinner.

It will be the perfect place for us to linger over our memories without wallowing in them. If only I had an address, I’d send my father a postcard saying “Wish you were here.”

Belgian Conga

2009-05-23T16:17:00.000+05:30

So, after a month of notably low public discourse, it’s all over. The ink applied in nearly 835,000 polling booths is fading on something like 413,000,000 fingernails; the 4,690,575 polling personnel have gone home, and the Election Commission has gathered its well-deserved bouquets. The General Election of 2009 is over, the guys who are better than the other guys have won, the talking heads are on, and next on the schedule is the national spectator sport of government formation, in which the country watches the winning entities attempt to get over 8,000 incompatible pieces from several different political puzzles to form the administration they want.

In other words, we will soon peacefully be able to return to our national pastime of heaping abuse on the worthies we went to such pain and expense to elect.

I missed much of the initial frothing and foaming, woe is me, because I’ve spent the last few days walking around Belgium, beginning in Brussels. [Pause for inevitable remark about sprouts.] This is the city famous for the tiny fountain statue of a male child urinating, the legendary Manneken Pis, which now pees all over mugs and keychains and t-shirts. I’m told a male relative of mine once almost got arrested for climbing on random statuary in the city and attempting to replicate the Manneken Pis with real urine, while under the influence of several of Belgium’s famous Trappist beers. Lucky for him, the Belgians have a sense of humour, or perhaps they’re so (justly) proud of their beer that they’re willing to forgive all kinds of weirdness performed in its name.

Mine was a whirlwind trip through four cities in as many days, during which we walked for roughly twenty-nine hours a day. Here’s some advice for anyone thinking of walking around Belgium: Wear shoes with serious cushioning, because medieval cobblestones are as hard on the soles as they are easy on the eyes. This doesn’t, however, stop Belgian women from scaling the peaks of chic in a large variety of high-heeled boots, many with pencil heels. I asked one lady, as I careened around twisting my ankles in perfectly flat shoes, how on earth Belgian women did it. “Practice,” she said grimly.

A friend of mine who produces a long list of demands for spirits whenever I travel this time wanted only one thing: a Tintin poster. I would have bought one for him had it not cost the arm and leg that I doubt he expected (Tintin is surrounded by a barbed wire fence of copyright). Much about this trip reminded me, yet again, of how difficult life is in Europe in many ways, despite the creature comforts and the relatively clean air. Water is expensive, parking is tight, and you have to pray that you don’t break a leg, because if you’re immobile, you’re sunk. No matter how disabled-friendly a city is, there will always be those spots where the only option is the stairs.

I can’t say much about my trip until I’ve written the official feature elsewhere, but here’s a weird fact for those very specialised people who sit up at night yearning for weird facts about Belgium: Belgian workers are supposed to work for seven hours and thirty-six minutes a day. The government arrived at this figure after doing some mathematical contortions involving hours per week and lunch breaks; but the result is that if, mid-meal, your waiter suddenly rips off her uniform and pulls on her pencil heeled boots, you can be sure that she has hit her seven hours and thirty-seventh minute.

My hope is that someday I’ll be able to return to Belgium and take it in properly. Meanwhile, I’m off to hunt down a good foot massage.

Postmark: Way back when

2009-05-23T16:15:00.000+05:30

One of the great pities of the electronic age is that it has quietly marginalised, if not completely obviated, one of life’s greatest pleasures: Revisiting old letters. I’ve always been pathologically attached to every scrap of friendly writing that ever came my way. Among my most prized possessions are cartons and cartons of snail mail from the pre-internet age, as well as thousands of stored emails dating right from the early 1990s. I’m here to tell you that re-reading email, while it can jog your memory and even make you smile, is just not the same thing.

There’s something about a physical letter that is so much more than the sum of its parts. It triggers a kind of animistic awe—the notion that this paper, marked in a particular handwriting and bearing the indentations of the pressure applied on the pen, this paper that has physically made its way across the earth to reach my hands, is alive with the spirit of the writer. It’s not just an object bearing a communication but also a spiritual manifestation, a piece of that person’s soul, to be treasured and nurtured.

The result is that I have preserved, in the face of serious dust bunnies, silverfish and space constraints, every birthday card, postcard, aerogramme, post-it, fax, handwritten and even typed letter ever addressed to me. (If you think that’s weird, I should probably not mention the plastic teaspoon I keep as the memorial to a particularly fun day in 1987.)

From the vantage point of 2009 it’s amazing to see how many letters my friends and family and I exchanged before the Internet revolution hit. We wrote long letters, covering both sides of the page in a tiny hand. We put them in lovely crisp envelopes, and licked stamps, and went off to letterboxes and posted them. We waited for a reply, and when the postman handed one over, it was a shining little gift, wrapped in excitement, that you had to slope off into a corner to read and reread. Anyway: I keep them, and periodically re-read them, and this experience is a joy everyone should have.

I must get the packrat streak from my mother, whose similar but much fiercer commitment to history has packed her storeroom to the rafters with the most egregious nonsense. Over the last many days, overcome by a fit of spring-cleaning, she’s been rifling through those stored boxes with the mandate of clearing non-essential clutter.

I came upon her sitting at the dining table surrounded by a sea of paper: My math homework from the eighth grade; my brother’s baby scrawl; my sister’s school reports. I made the mistake of snorting over the math homework (on which, out of a score of 10 out of 14, an extra point had been deducted for late submission) and suggesting she toss it. “You don’t tell me what to toss, okay?” she barked in her fondest bark. Back it went into the box—and there it will no doubt stay. I completely understand; I still have my math homework from the first grade.

The downside of keeping everything, of course, is that you have to put it someplace, and since family members tend to be the most unethical members of your social circle, if they find your stuff they are unlikely to be able to keep from reading it. My sister still hasn’t forgiven my brother and me for reading—and quoting—her teenage diaries when we were kids. Yes indeed, reading other people’s old letters is a joy of its own—but that’s a different story.

Happy V-day

2009-05-09T23:43:00.000+05:30

I didn’t enjoy Rhonda Byrne’s highly popular book The Secret. It was zealous and syrupy, and it undermined its wide-eyed wonder at the simple impact of positive thinking with an off-putting tendency to want to bend this alleged power of the universe towards the goal of making ever more money.

Having said that, I have noticed the following intriguing fact on several occasions through my life: no matter how scared or stupid you’ve been, if your intentions are honourable the universe often has a way of coming through for you. I put this notion down to the near-spiritual rush delivered by the swarms of endorphins that the body releases when it’s relieved of a sticky or disappointing situation.

The day I got my driving licence, for example, I absolutely had to make my way into the bowels of Connaught Place at peak hour, for an errand that couldn’t wait. I was rigid with terror at the thought and dragged my feet around the house in the hope that my brother would return from college before I had to leave, so that I could take him along in the passenger seat for moral support.

Finally I could wait no longer. This was in the days before cell phones, so I was on my own. I walked out the door fighting with myself, sweating blood, dying to save my first solo drive for another day and a less challenging destination, forcing my feet to walk to the car even though they were trying to go in the other direction. I opened the driver’s door with my heart in my mouth, and guess what? At that precise moment my brother walked through the gate. I was so relieved I could have wept. It was hard to resist the conviction that I was being rewarded for not having given in to fear and the temptation of just jumping into an autorickshaw.

A happy version of this happened again this past week. Readers of this column will remember, possibly with a gagging sensation, two weeks of bellyaching about wanting very much to vote, putting in a reasonable amount of effort into trying to make sure I could, and being cruelly hoist by my own petard because I was told that I’d missed the deadline for the general election of 2009.

My disappointment was massive because really, although I was stupid, I’d tried hard. And lo and behold, on Monday my doorbell rang and an election officer handed me my Election Photo Identity Card, just like that, matter-of-factly, apparently unaware of the significance of this event in my life and the attendant storm of emotion gathering within me. I stared at it for so long that he had to mention that he was really only still standing there because I had to sign for it. You mean I can vote now, on May 7? I said warily. Why not, he snorted, let’s see who can stop you. And off he went, cool as a cucumber, trailing a little cloud of my blessings.

I have no idea how this happened, but as the man said, ours not to reason why. And so, on Thursday morning, I asked my way to the polling booth, hacked my way through a thicket of journalists (who were standing around waiting to take such groundbreaking pictures as of a politician casting his vote), stood in a line, found my name on the electoral roll, stepped behind a fig leaf of a privacy screen, and lost my political virginity.

As in most cases of lost virginity, better late than never. And as in most such cases, I can’t believe I haven’t done this before, and heartily look forward to doing it again.

Monster movie

2009-05-02T20:34:00.002+05:30

The other day my four-year-old niece Tara came home from a long hard day at her day care facility in Boston and announced to her parents: “I’m going to be a palaeontologist!” One of the things this statement suggests, besides a rather ambitious day care syllabus, is that fossil-hunting is not the dead profession you thought it was. Kids are of course always thrilled by the idea of digging around in mud, but it’s heartening to know that although the world spends much of its time being infatuated with new things, it retains some interest in the old things, which is important because apparently there was some useful stuff before the iPod, though nobody can seem to remember what.

Tara must be excited about the fearsome pliosaur whose discovery they recently announced, and by ‘they’ I mean a couple of lunatics who really did become palaeontologists. (Disclaimer, which I feel I had better add given the current political culture: I mean this in a jocular fashion, so please don’t firebomb my house for hurting the sentiments of palaeontologists. I admire palaeontologists. My niece is going to be a palaeontologist. The Ross Geller character from Friends is a palaeontologist, and I like him even though everyone in the show thinks he’s a snore).

A pliosaur is a prehistoric marine predator. This particular 150 million-year-old specimen was dug out of a Norwegian snowdrift, and its 20,000 bone fragments were painstakingly put together over many months. It turns out that it’s a whacking great thing, with a head the size of a crocodile; vertebrae the size of dinner plates; teeth the size of cucumbers; and jaws in which you could fit a small car, with snapping power that would make Tyrannosaurus rex look like a toothless old lady (and total the small car).

This horrible beast is called Predator X, presumably because there doesn’t exist a word mean enough to describe it and also perhaps because it will work very nice as the title for the future video game/movie. They’ve found enormous pliosaurs before in the same area (one of them was called The Monster) but this one—50 feet long and weighing 45 tonnes—takes the Jurassic cake. It roamed the oceans propelled by two powerful sets of flippers, thinking about the movie Jaws and wishing that humans would evolve, already.

Personally, I find giant, gruesome slavering monsters that try to kill and/or eat you—think Godzilla, King Kong, Jaws, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Alien or Species—much less frightening than the very small organisms that bump you off without ever being seen, like the tiny, deadly irukandji jellyfish, or any number of viruses from smallpox to the flavour of the month, swine flu. What also gives me the willies are the suave, bloodless fiends whose urbanity lulls you into almost ignoring the fact that they’re looking forward to flaying the skin off you even as they pour your wine (think Dracula, or Anthony Hopkins in—well, just Anthony Hopkins himself, really).

But by far the most frightening thing, in the world of horrible monsters, is the malignant (or soul-sapped) child. Remember the two little girls in The Shining? Regan in The Exorcist? The girl in The Ring? Damien in Damien: Omen II? The many cold, evil children in that movie about a villageful of cold, evil children?

Forget Friday the Thirteenth, Independence Day, and Jurassic Park. Take it from me, there’s nothing scarier than a beautiful little child with evil intent. I’ve seen that look on Tara’s face sometimes when I’ve told her she can’t have a seventh piece of chocolate. So if she asks my view on her prospects as a palaeontologist, I’m going to say, Fantastic—knock yourself out.

Shake, rattle enroll

2009-04-25T16:03:00.002+05:30

Recently I’ve been very busy being all pompous and self-righteous about voter responsibility, even going as far as to actually register to vote. My parting shot in last week’s column was that if nobody showed up to officially verify my identity and address within two weeks, as they’re meant to do in order for me to take my rightful place on the electoral roll, I was going to raise hell.

Well, the fortnight expired this week without anyone showing up to shower hosannas on my invaluable citizenship. So, in a rare example of follow-through that also ends a long-standing perfect record of sticking to empty threats, I made my way back to the local Electoral Registration Office to find the person responsible and make them very, very sorry.

They’re only open for public dealings for the two hours before lunch, so I set off at 11am just as the April sun turned the knob to ‘Bake’. I wasn’t conscious, at the time, of a reason for deciding to go on foot, but in hindsight it must have been in order to season my irritation with discomfort and cook it up into a fearsome soufflé of indignation.

Every step along the way from my house to the ERO—Google Maps claims that the distance is less than two kilometres, but I’d estimate about ten—put me into a sweatier, fouler temper. How dare they not fulfil their obligation to me as a citizen? Did they think they could get away with ignoring me? If they thought that just because I’m me, I wouldn’t bother to stand up and demand to be counted, they had another think coming, even though it was a fair guess. I wasn’t going to allow their sloppiness to rob me of my fundamental rights, I was going to hunt down the lazy sods and shame them into doing the right thing, namely commit seppuku all over their incomplete, inconsistent electoral rolls.

I arrived to find the place locked and deserted, and a few men sitting around a table in an insultingly mellow mood. I launched into them with both guns blazing.

Why had nobody come to verify me??!

Everyone’s very busy with the election now, they said. They’ll only come after June.

Excuse me? I sputtered. The elections are now, I have to vote on May 7!

Sorry madam, that’s not possible. They shook their heads and yawned.

I began to babble with rage. I registered two weeks ago, and you’re supposed to verify me within two weeks and you haven’t verified me and…

When did you register, did you say?

Two weeks ago!! I yowled.

Oh, that’s why. Those registrations won’t be processed until after the elections, they said soothingly. You can vote in the next election; the last date to register for this one was March 18.

[Very low voice] Oh. Er.

And thus were the tables devastatingly turned. One moment there I was, red-faced and open-mouthed with righteous fury, and the next there I was, red-faced and open-mouthed with horror and embarrassment. I’d found the jerk responsible for sabotaging my vote, and that jerk was me. How stupid did I feel for having omitted to check on this all-important fact? I begged the earth to open up and swallow me but it just kept turning and smirking, so there was nothing for it but to mutter a thanks, turn around and hobble home on the stumps of my melting legs, trying to remember where I keep my ritual disembowelment knife.

India will have to get through this general election without me. But watch out, 2014. As Schwarzenegger said, I’ll be beck.

Franchise opportunity

2009-04-19T11:52:00.002+05:30

I’ve never voted. At first it was because I couldn’t understand who was who and what they planned to do when they came to power. More recently it’s been because I can’t keep up with who’s with whom and what they plan to do when they come to power, and who they’ll be with after they come to power, and what that will compel them to do. Political expedience far outweighs both manifesto and track record these days, and therefore as far as the voter is concerned, all bets are off.

But there’s no getting around the fact that the workings of democracy are divided between the voter and the voted for. At least half the responsibility is the citizen’s—not only to elect his or her representatives, but also to hold them to account by demanding the rights that the government is mandated to safeguard, and demanding that Parliamentarians debate and implement policy. In other words, voting is the equivalent of pushing the schoolyard bully back. It entitles you to make a song and dance when the political class fails you.

It may well be true that the choice before voters is between six of one and half a dozen of the other, the unifying factor being that political parties spend the vast majority of their time trying to get into power and then trying to stay there, in order to make vast amounts of money. However, in the tiny sliver of time left over from that, they do have to accomplish a few things. So I finally decided to hold up my end of the democratic bargain, even though I belong to that demographic in which politicians are least interested because it’s too small and too demanding a vote bank.

So I registered to vote. First, thanks to a television ad blitz that has been running for at least three hundred years and has therefore penetrated my anti-ad mental shield, I logged onto www.jaagore.com. It’s an excellent website and gave me all sorts of help, like telling me my Assembly Constituency number and my Parliamentary Constituency number, and the name and address and telephone number of my Block Level Officer. It even included driving directions (both written as well as marked on a map) from my house to my nearest electoral registration office. I electronically filled up Form 6, to submit to the ERO along with proof of where I live and my date of birth.

When I pressed ‘generate form’, however, it said something like, ‘this username is already taken, too bad so sad, and we’re not giving you any of our telephone numbers to clarify how and why this is so, so sucks to you, go to the ERO and get your own damn form.’

Fair enough. I went to the ERO at 1.15pm, though, which they gleefully informed me was fifteen minutes too late. They work from 10am to 6pm, they said, but deal with the public between 11am and 1pm, presumably because our low population numbers don’t warrant any extended public dealings times, especially during election season. Nevertheless, I planted myself politely in front of the grilled, glassed cage that passes for a counter and after they were done licking their fingers from lunch, while smoking a post-prandial bidi, they generously accepted my application and told me that an officer would swing by to make sure I was legit.

Since then I have been stationed by the front door, waiting for that officer to come by and verify that I live where I say I do. So far, no good. They’re supposed to send someone around within two weeks, so they have until Tuesday. It’ll be interesting to see whether I have to start making a song and dance already.

Goodbye, crool world

2009-04-13T11:57:00.000+05:30

Poor Yavuz Berke, now Adam Leon. He’s that 31-year-old Turkish-origin Canadian student pilot who wanted to end his life but couldn’t summon the courage to do it himself. Deciding to outsource the job, he stole a plane from his flight school a few days ago and flew into American airspace without authorisation, figuring that he’d be put out of his misery by their jumpy, post-9/11 air force.

He spent hours overflying several US states, desperate to be shot up. Imagine his sense of betrayal when, instead of blowing him out of the sky, the F-16 fighter jets followed him around and tried to talk to him, just like everyone else! Finally out of fuel, but self-preservation maddeningly intact, the unhappy fellow landed carefully on a highway, walked to a grocery store and sipped a cold drink while waiting for the police, which, when it arrived, was no doubt perversely understanding.

Seriously, what does a bloke have to do to check out these days? Suicidal depression is an unbearably painful state to live in. Yet choosing death, let alone by one’s own hand, takes more courage than most people have. I know I want to kill myself about twice a day but, on account of spinelessness, get only as far as a bit of black humour (it’s the really unfunny things you’d better be able to laugh at). This is either lucky or unfortunate, depending on how you feel about the sanctity of life.

I’m relieved that Leon survived to see his psychiatrist another day, but I retain a sneaking sympathy for people in the double hell of an unbearable life and an impossible death, who want to die but can’t bring themselves to actually stick in the knife/jump off the cliff/swallow the poison/pull the trigger. Their only option seems to be to try to put themselves in harm’s way and let things take their course; and clearly, the US Air Force is unreliable.

What else could you do? The classic Hollywood solution is to hire a hit man to kill you at some undisclosed time and place. This being Hollywood, you’d meanwhile fall passionately in love and spend the rest of your time on the run trying to contact the assassin and cancel the order, until you discover that your new love is the assassin’s ex, so he or she is going to kill you anyway. Melodramatic, but that’s Hollywood.

If you’re female and tired of life, you could head over to the Swat Valley and engage strange men in conversation, maybe show a bit of leg. This option might also be available in Kashmir before long, given recent reports of Taliban infiltration across the Pakistan border. The downside is that they may not kill you completely dead. But then again they might.

You could invite a few hard-up pensioners over one evening, lay on a terrific spread, talk about your flat screen television and resort holiday, and mention that you worked on Wall Street and will never have to work again because of the enormous bonus they just gave you before letting you go for gambling away everyone’s pension funds. This death may actually be more painful than anything available in Swat, but is guaranteed.

If you really are fabulously rich, you have only to exploit, insult and otherwise alienate your spouse and/or children, then just sit back and let nature take its course.

Yeah, all right, Thanatos is a tough nut to crack. But if you’re really determined, just spend the day driving around Delhi. That’s so effective that it works even for people who have no desire to die.

With a little help

2009-04-07T10:54:00.002+05:30

One of the many effective ways to fall into the generation gap and break my ankle is to mention to my mother that I’m going to hang with friends. It makes her turn all gimlet-eyed and say things like, ‘Again?’ or ‘You people have a lot of time on your hands’ or, frequently, ‘But what do you talk about?’. What she means, according to the large freezing speech bubble that helpfully erupts from her scalp at these times, is: ‘The offspring I fully intended to have would have been busy raising their own children, or holding down a real job, or reading to the blind.’ (And also, ‘Are you going dressed like that?’—that one is permanently installed over her head.)

My parents got married shortly after they learned to tie their shoelaces, so while they love their friends dearly, their primary idea of a support system is family, both nuclear and extended. Friends are people whom my mother visits once in a while for dinner parties, which are carefully planned at least a few days in advance and for which she dresses very nicely, in saris and jewellery. Everyone chats a lot and has fun but, except in rare cases, there’s a slight formality to the relationship.

On my side of the generation gap, friends are the people you relax with. I’m not talking about the dozens of people on Facebook with whom one has never exchanged, and will never exchange a word. I’m talking about people in the real world with whom I have dinner on the spur of the moment, decide to go out or stay in or both, come however we’re dressed, crash at each other’s houses for the night—sometimes in the same bed, chaste as puppies—stay up as long as we want to, and see each other eighteen times a week or once every two months as the case may be, without worrying about whether it’s too much or too little.

My mother can’t understand how we can talk to each other the way we do, swearing like sailors and discussing things she would consider too intimate for anyone but a spouse. (This is of course a matter of temperament; many people in my generation remain fairly guarded even with their closest friends.) She thinks we must surely run out of things to say. In fact she makes spending time with people sound so difficult that I decided to google ‘how to have a conversation’. It turns out that people need more basic help with this than you’d think. Here’s a distillation of the things I learned.

Decide that life is interesting. It’s the only way you’ll want to talk to anyone.

Listen to the other person. By letting them talk about themselves the whole time, you can fool them into thinking you’re one of those rare people who don’t talk about themselves the whole time.

Compliment people, it’s an ice-breaker (but you aren’t supposed to say ‘You have nice boobs’ even if you mean it).

Ask them questions, but space them out so you that don’t sound as if you’re interrogating them.

Forget yourself—if you’re busy worrying about how you look and sound, you won’t listen. But make sure you smile, nod and say ‘I see’ periodically to let the other person know you haven’t fallen asleep.

And finally, some practical tips verbatim from a website called ‘Instructibles’: “Start by saying ‘Hey’ or a similar greeting… If your conversation ends because both of you had said what you could, tell a joke! ‘I wish my grass was Emo, so it would cut itself’. You can use this one, or get another one from the web.”

Good luck!

Dog days

2009-03-28T13:42:00.000+05:30

The wonderful thing about not having children is that you don’t have children. This means that you can keep your breakables where they are, swear as much as you like, and call a boiled egg and cigarette ‘lunch’. You can sleep right through the night (or day), never touch anyone’s poop but your own, and walk out of the house in the morning and decide not to come back for a month. In other words you are master of your fate, captain of your soul, rather than knee deep in tiny novices for whose adoring gaze you have to be a role model.

Dogs, on the other hand, are well worth having. They’re much more loyal, softer to the touch all through their lives, put up with your absences without holding grudges, and when a dog lies with his throat on your foot and swallows, it’s enough to make your heart explode with contentment.

My family has had three dogs. The first was a boxer puppy we got when we lived in Jakarta. Kipo was the sprightliest three-month-old in his litter. He was fawn coloured with a black snout and a white streak up his forehead and white socks up his paws; his tail was docked but his ears were not, and they always emerged with a milk moustache when he drank milk out of his bowl. He was smart as a whip, always up for a wriggly romp, enormously loving, and slept with all his paws in the air and just the tip of his tongue sticking out of his mouth.

The people we got him from said he’d had all his shots, but apparently they’d lied; Kipo died of hepatitis four months later, and we buried him in the garden. For weeks afterwards I’d reflexively rise from the table to open the screen door to the garden because I heard him scratching to be let in.

A while later, our doorbell rang and we found an incredibly tiny Dachshund puppy with an enormous pink bow around his neck, blinking at us from the porch. Friends of ours had gifted us one of their dog’s offspring. Toffee was so little that when he ran he floated back to earth like a leaf. He was bright, tender, well behaved, and filled the void left by Kipo for a little while, until the next summer when, while we were on vacation in India, we got a call from Jakarta saying that he had disappeared. Perhaps he’d run out of the gate, and either perished in traffic, or been stolen.

It was a good ten years before that we were ready for another dog. I spotted Simba in a photograph at a supermarket checkout counter in Manila, where my parents lived at the time. “Absolutely not,” said my mother firmly. In the car, she said, “Do you remember the phone number on the paper?” I reeled it off, we called, and a few days later Simba was tottering around our house.

He was a beloved but difficult family member. He was very loving, but also bit every one of us at least once (I have a crescent-shaped scar on my palm to remember him by). Even as a puppy he would crawl off into the bushes, out of reach, and lie there glaring balefully at the world. He was no furry plaything; he was a character, and if you didn’t respect him, you were liable to run into his dark side. He moved with my parents from Manila to Kuala Lumpur, then to Switzerland, and finally back to India, where he died aged ten and a half. I think that if he’d been human, he would have been an alcoholic and written quite good poetry.

I miss them all very much.

Truth is beauty

2009-03-26T19:30:00.000+05:30

If there’s one thing in the world that doesn’t seem affected by clogged credit lines, it’s the global overabundance of opinions. Everyone seems to have at least one, if not several, on just about everything under the sun, and the less an opinion is solicited, the more it tends to be forthcoming. So far, so good; opinions are fruitful, helpful, and sometimes even necessary. But have you noticed how market demand has become skewed in favour of strong, rather than considered, opinion?

You can see it on talk shows, where anchors summarise an intelligent paragraph of speech into one black and white soundbyte and use that repeatedly, shearing it of all its original nuance. Or in ad campaigns, where the virtue of a strong personality any day trumps the virtue of an objective one.

This makes things hard, and also annoying, when you’re reviewing books. My reviews tend to fall into four general categories: strong admiration, strong distaste, politely expressed mixed feelings, and mixed feelings expressed without mincing words. In pretty much every case, I’ve said what I thought, in the way the book made me feel like saying it.

The first two kinds of review generate no reaction at all: nobody seems to care that I really liked this book, or really disliked that one. But when it comes to a mixed review, everyone has something to say about it.

One author of a book that I’d given a politely mixed review rang the publication editor and complained that the review was aimed at sabotaging her career (assuming on my part much more time and interest in the success or failure of her career than I had). When I met the author of a book that I’d given a candidly worded mixed review, she complained, “But it was mixed!” as if I had no business having mixed feelings about her book.

Friends who’d heard me complain about the book, subsequently concluded that I “don’t write negative reviews” because the review mentioned something redeeming about the book. It was no point my saying that I mentioned it because it was my considered opinion. For the rest of the conversation about other books, they skimmed over me because they’d decided I would just be “nice”, and went on to talk approvingly about people who as a policy “don’t write positive reviews”.

In my opinion (like it or not), when your review of a book serves as an extension of your crazy little personality, as opposed to a considered critique—and this is best determined by you—you might as well hang up your keyboard and go home, because it’s become all about you, and not about the book.

Now, I realise that I generally live in a cloud of idealism that doesn’t always match reality, but really, has it come to this, that you aren’t allowed to have mixed feelings without setting off accusations of dishonesty? The implication that people write—and are expected to write—from a prejudiced position in order to fit with some image they have of themselves, is disheartening to say the least.

I know—shocker! I don’t think there’s anything wrong with aspiring to objectivity, or as much objectivity as the fetters of subjectivity and grinding conditioning will allow. We seem to have reached a place in social interaction where agenda is all. It’s considered perfectly normal to cultivate friends because of what position they hold and what they may do for you in the future—what happened to hanging out with people because you like them? And it’s considered perfectly normal to slam—or not slam—a book, person, or event, because, well, that’s just how you are.

What happened to just saying it like it is?

Colour me bad

2009-03-14T12:31:00.002+05:30

Ah yes, Holi, joyous spring celebration, India’s famous Festival of Colours, a time to sing, dance and make merry with bright colours and music. I spent it the traditional way, holed up at home with a depressed friend, doors and windows shut against the sound of human joy. Just to make sure that our disagreeable mood wouldn’t be polluted by all the gaiety outside, we watched twelve straight hours of House, the television series whose protagonist, genius diagnostician Dr. Gregory House, should be canonised as the patron saint of misanthropes everywhere.

I have heard tales from my parents, whom I consider to be more or less civilised, of the Holis of their youth, when they roamed the streets fuelled by bhang and beer and walked into perfect strangers’ houses to sprinkle coloured water on them in a genial fashion, everyone good-humoured and tolerant and laughing and generally participating in a communal celebration of life, blah blah.

Apparently back then you really played with (as opposed to harassed) anyone whose path you crossed, known or unknown. (And indeed, in my view, the only thing that distinguishes Holi from any other booze-drenched pool party is the merry anonymity of playing with random people on the street. Take that away, and you might as well just have a booze-drenched pool party and save yourself the pickpockets, murderous drivers and rapists of the street.)

Those days are long gone. Now you have to play with a judicious assortment of friends in the privacy of your house or theirs, and hope like hell that nobody slips into an alcoholic coma, or loses an eye because of the chemicals in the colours, or gets non-consensually groped, and that the down on your cheeks will be purple merely for weeks rather than months.

But the larger point I’m making is: The thing about a twelve-hour marathon of House is that very early on you realise that you’re half in love with a sociopath, and just a little bit later, that there’s no doubt that he’s the only man for you. What is it about mean, rude people that is so deeply compelling (and not just Rochester and Mr Darcy), besides the fact that some of them are played onscreen by Hugh Laurie, he of the unkempt stubble and wild blue eyes?

Stupid question—everyone knows what it is. It’s that their constant and unapologetic transgression of social rules, gratuitous viciousness and insufferable arrogance, implies that they don’t give a fig for anyone’s approval, including yours. This is a double whammy to a person’s sense of romantic self-preservation because not only does it bespeak a wounded heart beneath the proud, aloof exterior, automatically triggering the beholder’s Florence Nightingale gland, but it also activates the normal hankering for approval, which most humans will immediately begin fighting to the death to to get. Since both projects are at once unpleasant and impossible to achieve, the whole thing is doomed to self-destruct.

Of course, this is only really likely to happen if the sociopath in question is also intelligent, funny, and attractive. It all results in the creation of a kind of ‘ruthless chic’ which will be horribly familiar to anybody who has ever been in school and had a crush on the bad boy or girl in class. And thus do legions of perfectly balanced, well-adjusted people lock like heat-seeking missiles onto people like House (and duly self-destruct). House’s fans are predictably overwhelmingly female, and I’d guess a fair number of men admire him terribly for that fact alone.

As far as I’m concerned, watching him abuse, manipulate and sneer at the weak, helpless and caring beats playing Holi any day.

Oh, THAT recession

2009-03-07T11:05:00.002+05:30

Times are tough all over the world, but the experts say there’s no point running around panicking like chickens with our heads cut off. I expect they mean that it’s wiser to stand still and quietly fall apart, so as I watch the unhappy tide of recession turn inexorably onto Indian shores I’ve tried to respond with the snappy moves of a deer caught in the headlights: keep turning down work, eat out a lot more than before, and put all your savings into the stock market.

Who could blame me, then, for being utterly unprepared for the phone call I fielded the other day from a publication I consult with, telling me nicely that that gig had suddenly flatlined—turned pale, lain down and died. It turned out that the publication had regretfully blah blah decided that it was going to have to streamline blah blah and stick to its in-house editorial team from now on, due to revised budget constraints blah blah.

This was, sadly, the job that really paid my bills. As it happened I was in a nursing home at the time when this phone call came through, accompanying someone who was undergoing some tests, so after the nursing staff had determined that my breathlessness and the pain in my left arm was only because I was still holding the phone to my ear and sobbing, I was able to order four cups of overpriced tea I didn’t need, and then head out to a restaurant to consume some unmemorable wine and pricey pizza with friends.

I have consistently been told that the word ‘consultant’ is more credible than ‘freelancer’. Despite the hideous self-importance of the word I’ve gotten used to it, and, as part of my ostrich strategy to deal with the global downturn, have assiduously failed to acknowledge the changing winds. Just five minutes before the grim beeper rang, the universe had sent me (and I had duly failed to recognise) a portent of things to come: I’d been snickering over a New Yorker magazine cartoon that showed a pest control chap carrying his eradication equipment, telling the office receptionist: “We got a call about a consultant.”

The New Yorker is such a great magazine. I wonder if they’re outsourcing work they could do right there in New York, to consultants in Delhi.

Now that I’ve been personally bitten in the fundamentals, I’m suddenly really upset about this whole downturn thing, and am actively wondering how to save myself from the train wreck that promises to be next month’s bank balance. If you’re one of those annoying people who divide the world into ants and grasshoppers, I fall squarely into grasshopper category: I spent this entire financial year’s earnings on airline tickets, movies, extravagant dinners, good wine, wine dinners, and more extravagant meals.

On the other hand, I can console myself with the thought that the recession happens to have wiped out the ants as well, and that if we are all destined to wind up insolvent and dribbling with fear about our old age, I may well have taken the happier road there.

I like to think that something else will come up before I have to hang myself from the fan with my shoestring budget. In the meantime, the cheapest way to generate endorphins is to put on my shoes—while I still have some—and heave my sweating bulk over a few kilometres of track. It’s a strategy that dovetails nicely with my needs in the wake of all those meals and bottles of wine.

Surf’s up

2009-03-01T11:20:00.002+05:30

I’ve spent eight hours sitting in a wifi cafe, have already consumed seven hundred recessive rupees’ worth of Lemongrass Tea, Marinated Lamb Sandwich, Bisleri and Superb Coffee Ice Cream, and am now seriously eyeing the Gooey Chocolate Cake, all in an effort to find something to say in this week’s column.

One reason is that I’ve been an accomplished wastrel of late. I have watched, in quick succession, Milk, Brick Lane, In Bruges, Burn After reading, Slumdog Millionnaire, Luck By Chance, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (the last two back-to-back at the mall, with a drink at Geoffrey’s in between and after), Doubt, Frost/Nixon, The Reader, and W..

En route I discovered that the Oscars were seriously off-track this year, no offence, and that despite being a committed reader of Maureen Dowd’s columns, my mother had actually not, in the last eight years, made the connection between ‘W.’ and ‘Dubya’. I find it strangely reassuring that hundreds of millions of people must refer to the ex-POTUS as ‘Dubya’ without having the slightest idea why. There’s something moving about a world bonding over some core issue while gamely ignoring the cultural gaps. I also now know for certain that if I had to watch movies all day, every day for the rest of my life and complain about them, I’d be ready, willing and able.

So anyway, my column-writing day has gone I don’t know where, possibly because looking at a screen that is blank and immobile has caused my brain to explode in disorientation and grief. Finally, after the sixth time that I had to ask someone to close the café’s balcony door so that their accursed, blighted, benighted second-hand smoke didn’t float in—I’ve just given up again, and am in Zealous Convert mode—I finally quit trying, opened the top button of my jeans, took my first full breath in hours, and continued to aimlessly surf the internet as I’d been doing.

Amongst many other things I learned that someone thinks that reality TV star Jane Goody has had a wicked spell put on her. The item on Goody, who has terminal cancer and has decided to live out her final weeks on television, elicited much sympathetic comment as well as a cryptic note from an anonymous reader who claimed that Goody had been cursed and that if someone would forward an email address, anonymous would fix it.

Further down the thread, someone ventured that this curse must have come from an Indian upset with Goody over the whole Shilpa Shetty affair (in which Goody said rude, allegedly racist things to Shetty during an episode of Celebrity Big Brother, and India’s Ministry of External Affairs began to shake its portly jowls in sovereign indignation). That turned the direction of the debate ever so slightly to the subject of the ever-increasing Indian immigrant community. Reading a string of stupid, mostly illiterate comments was all worth it for the following anguished comment:

“I KNEW SOMETHNG LIKE THIS WOULD HAPPEN I AM 100% SURE SHE WAS CURSED BY THE INDIANS THEY'VE SPREAD ALL OVER BRITAIN, THEY GET RID OF THEIR CO-WORKERS BY GIVING THEM SAMOSAS.” [Sic]

That’s how I feel about samosas too, in general. But more to the point, I see in this notion the seeds of a real, achievable strategy for world domination. All’s fair in love and recession: Let them tax US businesses that outsource to Haryana and Bangalore; we’ll just fry, spice, fatten and transfatten the competition into oblivion. We should up our production of rabri and kalakand while we’re at it.

Dirty talk

2009-02-25T11:24:00.001+05:30

I’m very happy about the no-plastic-bags rule that recently came into effect, because garbage makes me grouchy. The streets in our cities are strewn with filth and stinking waste. Our hillsides are blotched with discarded plastic bags and cups. One of the saddest things I’ve ever witnessed is the sight of baby elephants, in the heart of a national park, eating plastic plates thrown there by careless picnickers.

Yes, garbage makes me very grumpy, especially when it’s lying within spitting distance of a perfectly good garbage dump. I have once gone so far as to get out of my car at a traffic light and toss a banana peel back into the car it came out of, telling the lady perpetrator that the garbage bin she must have thought was outside her window was in fact not there. Her sputtering outrage was a deeply satisfying thing, and I even walked away unscathed, because this was back in the olden days before Delhi drivers carried sidearms.

The other day I was in my car with an equally grouchy friend, waiting to pick up someone. We were watching a man sitting in his parked car in the middle of a service lane, eating off a plastic plate and drinking out of a plastic cup. “Just watch,” I said, “he’s going to throw that out of the window even though there’s a garbage dump thirty paces away.” No way, said my horrified friend, who lives in Singapore and therefore spends his time here in a state of constant shock with his hair standing on end. Way, I said grimly.

And, right on cue, the man licked the last of the food off the plate, licked his fingers, rolled down his window, dropped the plate and cup out so effetely that they practically rolled down the side of his car, and fell to smacking his lips and belching. My friend climbed out of my car, walked over to the other car, and picked up the trash with admirable politeness, telling the man that if he didn’t mind, he’d just put it in the garbage bin for him.

It was as if the fellow had been punched in the face. He hopped out of the car and began to yell after my friend as he walked to the garbage dump. “What is this?” he wanted to know. “What do you mean by picking up trash? All of India is full of trash! What do you think of yourself?”

“I’m just putting trash in the trash can”, said my friend.

The man whirled around, smarting, marched up to me and shouted, “What relation of yours is he?” None of your business, I snarled, and started my engine. He put a (dirty) hand on the hood of my car and said “Halt!” which gave me the terrible giggles, which collided with my anger and very sadly short-circuited my plan to run him over.

“How dare he pick up my trash?” the man plowed on. “How dare he even ask if he can pick up my trash? I won’t stand for someone behaving badly with me! Nobody should think they can behave so badly with others!”

We drove away while he was still fulminating in the middle of the road, telling a small, poker-faced crowd about his terrible experience.

This gentleman, like most law-breakers, took about half a second to turn an incontrovertible truth into an insult to his honour. If we have a national character, this must be it: When caught out, immediately deflect the issue and shout until everyone backs down for fear of hurting your little feelings (and, unfortunately, they too often will). Do not, under any circumstance admit a mistake and change your ways. That would be too much like a civil society and nation-building.

Baby Boss

2009-02-18T16:51:00.000+05:30

Regular readers of this column may remember how my mother perfidiously sold my ancient yellow Maruti Zen, named Peeli, while I was out of the country. She claimed that Peeli was no longer roadworthy, but even though she convinced me to move on to a new vehicle, I’d refused to let her sell Peeli, for sentimental reasons like psychosis. So she waited until I was safely in Spain before throwing her to the wolves.

After I stopped mourning Peeli, I slowly found love again with my silver Maruti Zen, named Chandi. This was a cooler, more detatched love, however, so when the time inevitably came, last December, when my mother cast her cold eye upon Chandi’s bashed-up silver carapace and pronounced her to be no more than a little tin can with no safety features, I must say that I was not shattered. Chandi was at an age and stage where she still fetched a decent resale price. I yearned to trade her in for yet another Zen, but they no longer make the version I like.

So, a week or so ago, I exchanged her for a new Maruti A-Star. Buying the A-Star was a surreal experience in which the dealership kept promising to deliver a car that it turned out hadn’t even been manufactured, on a date that consequently began to slide the minute they had cashed my booking cheque, in a series of tones they seemed to be trying out for kicks.
“[Cheerily] Two more days, ma’am!”; “[Apologetic but confident] You’ll have it on Thursday—a hundred and ten percent!”; “[Sheepish and wheedling] Next week, ma’am. What to do, there aren’t any in the factory…”; “[Brazen lies] You’ll have it on the 2nd, at 11am!”; “[Triumphant] Ma’am, I’ve arranged a car for you!” “[Shameless] Ma’am, just three-four more days, ma’am.” “[Martyred and severe] Ma’am, with great difficulty I’ve gotten a car for you.”

I tell you, I don’t know how I’m ever going to repay their kindness.

Anyway, the A-Star is a weird-looking car with a dumpy snout of a fender, flared nostrils for headlights, and slinty little eyes for rear seat windows. I have no idea why anyone would purposely design these features in isolation, but the net effect is inexplicably compelling—a kind of gangster’s moll composed of Lego, or an edgy cartoon.

She was driven to my door, a bright red assault on the eyes, and when I saw her parked on the curb with her suspicious little eyes and ridiculous porcine nose, I felt immediate and great, possibly psychotic, love. She has airbags! And an anti-lock braking system, whatever that is! And a key that locks and unlocks her from quite far away! And a light that fades gently rather than snaps off! And an integrated music system! And I get the impression that I’d better not mention her silly looks, or cross her in any way, if I don’t want to end up sleeping with the fishes.

My mother tried valiantly to take her to the temple for a little ceremonial mumbo-jumbo, or at least to drive over four lemons placed in front of the wheels, but I didn’t even register her voice for all the angels and hosannas in my ears. Instead I took her straight to the petrol station and filled up her tank, which is represented in her cool digital display.

Thus I welcomed into my life the one and only Baby Boss.

I regret to report that I didn’t even give Chandi a last glance—they had to ring my doorbell to return the badminton rackets and shuttlecocks left in the back seat. Oh well; one moves on.

Sole survivor

2009-02-11T15:26:00.000+05:30

When Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi hurled his size ten shoes at President Bush during a press conference in December last year, the news went around the world at a suspiciously celebratory speed. He was still shouting imprecations with secret service people kneeling on his chest when the YouTube videos came out.

He got thrown in the clink almost as fast, but I imagine that al-Zaidi had no idea that he was starting a world trend. Just a few days later, in January 2009, a bunch of Bosnian protesters in Sarajevo got together to express their feelings about their political leaders by throwing shoes at their effigies. The organisers of the protest even provided shoes, though many people apparently felt strongly enough about it all to bring their own footwear. No doubt it doesn’t feel as good without the solid thwack of contact with real flesh, but it must be better than nothing.

Then, a few days ago in February, a student at Cambridge chucked his shoe at the visiting Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, who responded either by become infuriated or by remaining calm, depending on which country is reporting the incident. The shoe didn’t make the target, but it did apparently make the point. And now, the CPM state secretary in Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan, has had a slipper flung at him during the Nava Kerala march by a chap who, perhaps because he missed, is reported to have been drunk.

When under pressure, people make do with what they have in terms of equipment and showmanship. Al-Zaidi tossed a pair of Oxfords. The Times said the student in the UK used a “heavy grey trainer”. The Indian used a chappal. “This is a farewell kiss, you dog!” shouted al-Zaidi. “Dictator!” yelled the Cambridge student. “V S Achuthanandan zindabad!” shouted the alcoholic Indian.

But given the increasingly woeful state of the world and the increasing tendency of people to want to express their feelings about it (viz. blogs and YouTube videos and suchlike), it seems to me that shoe companies are sitting on a very large opportunity.

The resurgent place of the shoe in contemporary culture is a phenomenon worth acknowledging. Al-Zaidi’s shoemaker is already getting chest pains from the exhaustion of an increased workload because suddenly throngs of admiring wannabes want his product. It was a start to have erected the sculpture of an enormous bronze shoe in Tikrit, to honour the spirit of al-Zaidi, at the cost of five thousand dollars and the labour of a bunch of politically-aware orphans; but due to political considerations it had to be taken down almost immediately. No; individual action, however ephemeral, is the way to go, so what might work better is for established shoe companies to invest in some R&D devoted to lines of shoes designed to be thrown at people (or their effigies) for a better lifestyle experience and with better results.

A shoe meant for throwing at an object of hate could use some specialised features. Imagine the benefits of a lower strip-off time; better aerodynamics for longer and steadier flight; optimal heft for hurling; a spot designed for good handgrip; sights attached for precision aim or, in a higher-end product, heat-seeking sensors to guide the shoe; extra bounce for maximum ricocheting in the event of a miss; motion-sensitive bells and whistles to draw attention or, conversely, camouflage patterning for stealth; and maybe it could be emblazoned with a readymade catch-all protest like “Take That!”.

Of course these are recessionary times, so unless these wonderful new products are reasonably priced, we’ll all have to go back to rotten tomatoes.

Hey Ram

2009-01-31T13:53:00.000+05:30

I’ve been wondering what to do for my birthday, by which I mean that my mother suggested, by which I mean that she shouted across the dining table, that I had social obligations, by which she means that I’ve been sponging off my family and friends long enough and that I should, by which she means bloody well better, return their hospitality.

So I’ve been thinking about having a party. (To friends and family who might be reading this: If you’re not invited, it’s because I haven’t sponged off you enough just yet, but no worries—the year is young). The whole idea of having people come to my house is extremely strange and troubling to me after years of just going to their houses. But with my mother getting into the act, I’m trying to keep calm by remembering that it will be very much like going out to someone else’s house, in this case my own.

It’s not strictly true, though, that I only go to other people’s houses. I also often go out to bars and pubs and suchlike, where I have a couple of drinks, maybe smoke a couple of cigarettes, have some conversation, sometimes dance a little, and drive myself home, almost always with my garters and strength of character intact. But that’s me. I have this insane propensity—insane, I tell you—to go about behaving as if I can live my life and do my own thing even though I have ovaries and a uterus.

Some people think this is seriously off the wall. I wrote, in a previous column, about my life as a woman in urban India, to which one gentleman reader responded by email: “I think you are insane. What message do you want to convey by smoking in a third-class compartment, hobnobbing with mechanics, standing in a queue of uncouth drunkards? For God's sake, stop your corrupting writings (sic) in a responsible newspaper.”

The message I’d like to convey to this gentleman is the same message I would like to convey to the faithful workers of the Sri Ram Sena who last week thrashed women in Mangalore for drinking alcohol in a pub, and to the mighty array of other self-styled custodians of Indian morals and values—and I do hope they will take it in the right spirit: “You’re dumb as rocks, and boring to boot! Piss off immediately.”

It’s amazing the number of people—not just in India but around the world—who continue to believe that it’s women causing all the moral mayhem. Most Indian women spend their lives wishing they weren’t stuck with men whose Indian morals and values consist of staring at women with their tongues lolling. And that’s the most harmless of a vast array of lousy Indian male behaviour that includes such Indian morals and values as honour killings and bride-burnings.

Thank god we have the Constitution, even though it would really help if people read it occasionally, especially those who run the country (and, for instance, ride roughshod over every living thing to build vast malls, only to then object to ‘mall culture’, which is apparently not the habit of being a consumerist pig but the habit of walking hand in hand.)

Anyway, sod all that. I have a party to think about. I’m not sure about the food, but yesterday I went to the government liquor store, stood in a queue of uncouth drunkards, and bought quantities of moral lubricant. To the massively boring custodians of my moral fabric: if it’s any consolation, my mother was with me.

Cold comfort

2009-01-27T23:49:00.001+05:30

I’ve hacked and coughed and sniffled and snorted my way through this past week, which has made me realise that it’s been quite a while since I was last ill, which I attribute to simple living, high thinking. It has also made me realise that while I was once a fairly stoic patient, I am now an accomplished whiner, which I attribute to my personality.

My nose is blocked and I can’t breathe, my ears are blocked and I can’t hear, my throat hurts and scratches, the epicentre of the whole thing seems to have shifted to my chest, my back hurts, the edges of my nose are raw from nose-blowing, my sinus twinges all the time, and most of the time I’d rather be asleep. My eyes water, my head is woollier than usual, my feet ache, and my shoulders are stiff. My skin is warmer than usual, but the thermometer is registering lower-than-normal temperature. I feel like a giant petri dish, cultivating evil-looking bacteria even in places not normally associated with this kind of sickness, like the back of my knee.

Chronically ill people are generally excellent patients because they very quickly realise how boring it is to go on about one’s symptoms ad nauseam, and for the rest of the world to hear about them. My grandmother, who suffered from terrible arthritis for decades, never seemed to mention it much at all. My mother, who has chronic asthma and various other ailments, takes care of herself with minimum song and dance.

However, people with ox-like constitutions who aren’t used to being sick, think that the sky is falling on their heads and cannot believe that other people are carrying on with their lives. My exceedingly robust father brought the household to its knees when he had a cold once in six years; I think it was a rare chance for him to be fussed over rather than having to fuss over other people. For my part, I deeply resent the whole US presidential inauguration thing, which went ahead as if nobody there knew or cared about my condition. It’s that kind of insular and insensitive foreign policy that will cost the US valuable friends.

It’s a good thing that I’ve stayed away from the internet these last few days, because I’m a shining example of a cyberchondriac. That’s somebody who compulsively looks up their symptoms on various nuance-free medical sites and concludes, from a runny nose, that they have cancer, or a bad heart, or, in the case of the worst exaggerators, are already dead. I’m not quite that silly, though I should mention that I do feel very poorly indeed.

A rough inventory of healthful and pharmaceutical products I have consumed over the last four days, because I understand that you won’t sleep until you know: two inhalations and gargles daily; two gallons regular tea and 78,000 cups ginger tea daily; two capsules three times a day of some dodgy-looking Chinese medicine sent a while ago by my sister, and embraced without question by my mother, despite the fact that she isn’t sure how to take them and consequently invented the two-capsules-three-times-a-day dosage; one large-sized bottle of ayurvedic Joshina cough syrup; and one medium-sized bottle of ayurvedic Adusol tonic—clearly named after the weird, socially-inept guy in the college dorm who doesn’t have any close friends but lots of acquaintances who hang out in his room because the music is good and there’s always something to smoke, as in, “Let’s go freak out in Adusol’s room, yaar. Maybe he had a shower this week.”

There, I bet you enjoyed listening to me complain! I certainly did. Oooo—my ears just popped.

Chinese chukkas

2009-01-17T21:18:00.002+05:30

I finally made it to China this week, on a family holiday to visit my sister and brother-in-law in Shanghai with my brother, his wife and kids, and my mother. Here’s how six days typically pass in one of the world’s most exciting places when there are young children about.

8am: Wake up, raring to go and explore. 10am: Squabble about where to go. 11am: Drum your fingers while the laggards eat breakfast. 12pm. Froth as great activity related to dressing for sub-zero temperatures, results in zero forward momentum. 12.50pm: Finally get everyone out of the door. 12.51pm: Go back in because the baby has pooped. 1.30pm: Eat lunch, squabble. 2pm: Go home so that six exhausted adults can catch a quick nap. 5pm: Squabble about dinner. 8pm: Fall asleep (except for the kids).

Still, I did some nice things. On our first evening we went to the hot and happening M on the Bund restaurant, on the Huang Pu riverfront. I wondered if residents always went out in pink sequined bikinis, pink masks, pink feather boas, pink wigs and pink bunny ears and tails, until I was told that this was the joint’s tenth anniversary (dress code: something pink) and The Party of the Year.

The next day I went back to the restaurant’s Glamour Bar (barely recognisable sans burlesque dancers in nipple patches), to watch a documentary film about Jin Xing, who is one of China’s foremost dancers and who, before her sex change, used to be a Colonel-rank he in the People’s Liberation Army. Jin Xing was there, sharp, funny and beautiful, and talked about how she, her three adopted kids and her German husband deal with her alternative sexuality in a country which didn’t officially believe in alternative sexuality until quite recently. This was not how I imagined China at all.

I went to the Grand Hyatt hotel coffee shop, on the 54th floor of the bamboo stem-like Jin Mao Tower, for a bird’s-eye view of vaguely dystopian ranges of buildings fading into scarves of mist or smog. Shanghai is fabulous. It’s filled with sharp design, art galleries, parks, and beautiful neighbourhoods. The streets are spotless—and, importantly, peppered with cheap massage places—and the people are beautiful and dressed to kill (except for a few who still wander around in their nightclothes from the time when that was how you showed off the fact that you could afford nightclothes).

And I ate gloriously: Yunnan style, Hunan style, Szechuan style, Taiwanese style. Lily buds with celery or squash; ‘Jew’s ears’ mushrooms and fungi of every kind; the famous xiaolongbao (“little dragon pouches”—pork dumplings with soup inside); tofu topped with salmon roe; lotus stem; fish head…I could eat here all day, every day.

It’s odd that the streets of this notoriously insular 5,000-year-old civilisation are lined with Starbucks and Nike outlets, so I went to a Foreign Correspondents’ Club talk on the Chinese economy by MIT professor Yasheng Huang. A business journo handed me his card. “I’m a freelancer from Delhi and I don’t have a card,” I told him. “Oh yeah, he does some work for us—great work,” he replied, which made me wonder about his reporting.

My sister later told me that Huang had said some fascinating things about how China’s GDP figures mask the stagnation in household income growth. I spent the entire lecture wondering why the business journo drew a line down the middle of each of his notebook pages. My takeaway was: 1. Beijing-born Yasheng Huang doesn’t like Shanghai much. 2. Of approximately seven thousand journalists present, only one was wearing a red jacket. 3. Two glasses of wine are better than one. 3. I could totally live in Shanghai.

Death and the toddler

2009-01-12T13:44:00.002+05:30

Spirituality is a funny thing. When I was a teenager my great-uncle Vishnu, who doubled as a self-proclaimed palmist, read my hand, wiggled his eyebrows a lot, and foretold that I’d take a spiritual turn at the age of 28. It is indeed true that that year I spent ten days in a vipassana meditation retreat in Myanmar, but while I maintained the requisite state of silence and abstinence, the thought-bubble over my head was filled with hashes, ampersands and exclamation marks, and I spent my time trying to snack on the inside of my cheek because they didn’t feed us very much. I made, on the whole, a lousy monk.

Still, I’m not one to refuse to think about death on the grounds that it’s too morbid; in fact, I’ve been accused of a degree of over-enthusiasm about the subject, even though all my ruminations end with me sidling off into some shallower, splashier little reverie, the spiritual equivalent of lying in the grass and blowing soap bubbles.

I find baby philosophy about death very solid, and a good deal more sensible, than The Tibetan Book of the Dead. My niece Tara, who’s almost four years old, is a leading light on the subject. A few days ago she walked into my mother’s house and looked tenderly at the photographs of my late father and grandmother. “Dada died,” she announced. That’s right, said my mother. “That’s so sad. Badi dadi died too,” said Tara. Yes she did, we said. “Why?” she wanted to know. Oh, she got very old, and when people get very old, they die, my mother told her. “Yeah!” said Tara, as if my mother had just earned a gold star. She flounced up in her rainbow-striped jacket with an enormous pink flower clip in her hair and led me to the porch.

“When people get old,” she explained in a gentle, soothing voice, “they get wrinkles and their hair goes white, and then they get little and die. It’s very sad, but everyone dies. I want to tell you something,” she added, dropping her gaze delicately, “one day, maybe soon, you’ll become big and old and then, one day, you might, might, might die.”

I said that I definitely would.

“Yeah. But not now,” she said, trying to keep me calm. “First you’ll get old and you’ll have to walk with a cane and somebody will have to help you walk with the cane.”

Will you help me walk with my cane? I asked her.

“Maybe,” she said, “but maybe not.” She considered me with genuine pity and said, “I won’t die for a long time, because I’m new. But you’re not so new.”

Right again, I said grumpily. What happens, do you think, when you die?

“Your skin comes off and all the bones of your body go away,” she said. “And it’s not nice to live without your skin and your bones, so you die. Everyone has to die, yeah. But not now.” Then she picked up my mother’s phone and said she had to make a phone call to Badi dadi. “Hello?” she said, “Is that Badi dadi? I just wanted to say it’s okay.” She had a burbling conversation with her dead great-grandmother and returned with the news that all was well, and that Badi dadi had become new—and that was pretty much all anyone really wanted to know anyway.

Then she sat me down on the porch steps and draped a white handkerchief carefully over my head. “Now you look very nice,” she said. After a while I took it off and she said coolly, “I wouldn’t do that. Your hair isn’t so stylish.”

Happy New Year, world

2009-01-03T10:58:00.002+05:30

The most common New Year resolutions include: I will quit smoking; I will lose weight; I will exercise; I will quit drinking; I will stop procrastinating; I will help others; I will save money; I will get organised; I will learn something new; I will spend more time with my friends and family.

Many people foolishly decide to attempt all these reforms at once, and end up flailing around like turtles on their backs. The secret to success is smart delegation, so it might be more practical, now that it’s been established that the world is an interdependent global village in need of serious reform, for us to work on resolutions for 2009 at a global level, and divvy them up into national tasks, with local adaptations where necessary. That way each player can focus all resources on one real problem, and no one part of the world has to do too much.
Here’s a list of who might take on what.

USA will quit smoking ’em out. It’s bad for you and for everyone around you. They keep setting fire to things, the blowback is awful, and nobody has yet stumbled through the smoke spluttering, “Bring me to justice, for the love of God.”

REPUBLIC OF NAURU will lose weight. A staggering 94 percent of the 14,000 Nauruans are obese, making it the fattest nation on earth and, at 21 sq km, the one most justified in not building too many gyms or, indeed, a capital. Micronesia, second fattest at 90 percent, may have to assist on account of nobody ever having heard of Nauru.

ISRAEL will exercise restraint. These are difficult times, but enough behaving like the Hulk every time one of those Hamas popguns goes off. By the way, what are you doing in the Gaza strip in the first place?

LUXEMBOURG will quit drinking. No, it’s not fair, but somebody’s got to do it. A good way to guard against lapses is to stop hanging out with people from France, Ireland, Portugal and (just to be safe) Russia.

PAKISTAN will stop procrastinating. Seriously. Everyone is sick of hearing, year after year, how Pakistan will set its house in order, fight its own battles, tackle its own problems, and crack down on this, that and the other. There’s no time like 2009, people.

SWITZERLAND will help others. Properly this time, not in the same way as they did during World War II with all the dubious banking stuff. However, it may maintain military neutrality.

ICELAND will save money. It’s only fair to the millions of people and various British coucils, police departments and civic services that got wiped out when the Icelandic economy went poof.

INDIA will get organised. Ha ha! This is the joke one, like ‘I will spend more time with my friends and family’. No, but really, we need to get more organised. We could ask China for a little help.

BURKINA FASO will learn something new. But it just needs to take the lead; developing nations can use a little time and space to improve themselves, and they can also use all the help they can get doing it, but really, everyone will have to work on this one.

NORTH KOREA will spend more time with friends and family. Relationships are not easy, and they need a lot of work, and you have to make a real effort to communicate your feelings. Calling up people and threatening to nuke them doesn’t count.

There, see? It’s not so hard when you share the work.

Happy 2009.

Good riddance, 2008

2008-12-29T12:09:00.000+05:30

Most people I talk to seem to agree that 2008 has been a ratty, perfidious, thoroughly avoidable year, and many of them have sworn never to repeat it. It’s been particularly frustrating because much as I’d like to quietly strangle the thing, hide the body, and move on, I can’t, because some really nice things were interspersed among the many really godawful things.

Petrol breached the $100 per barrel barrier, but mobile phones got cheaper and better. Sarah Palin came perilously close to the Presidency of the United States, but Barack Obama actually got it. The Chinese government cracked down on Tibetan protesters, but democracy came to Nepal and Bhutan. Over 400 sq kms of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica melted into oblivion, but Sariska National Park’s tiger population is looking a bit better. The global economy felt a bit queasy and then suddenly had to be taken to the ER, but we all became just a little more invested in the health of the planet. I lost a grandmother, but gained a nephew, whose facial structure I look forward to discovering whenever it fights its way out of his cheeks.

So there it is: A year I’d rather forget, but must grudgingly admire.

All this wouldn’t be so aggravating if it weren’t for my mother’s voice echoing in my head, telling me how everything and everyone is a mix of good and bad, and nothing and nobody is perfect, and that I’d better learn to take the good with the bad, and not throw the baby out with the bathwater. (She doesn’t think much of my own theory, which is that if the baby’s been in there long enough it’s probably going to be wrinkly and waterlogged anyway so it’s best to throw it out too as a precautionary measure; you don’t want to risk any kind of mould.)

2008 drove me to consult a Tarot card reader for the first time in my life, at a restaurant, greatly encouraged by a glass of wine and a giddy friend. The format was to fork over Rs 200 to a mean-looking lady with green eyeshadow, who laid down the following rules of engagement: You were allowed to ask one very specific question, to which she would answer Yes, or No. I asked if a friend of mine would be all right in the coming months. She flipped a couple of cards open and, scanning the room over my shoulder for more suckers, said, No. Could you explain what the cards mean? I asked. No, she said firmly, if you want explanations, come to my studio and pay Rs 2,000. I thought the whole deal ungenerous at best, and between you and me, wouldn’t be shattered if her fortune-telling business went the way of Lehman Brothers.

All in all, it’s been a hell of a ride. My mother rolls her eyes and mutters things about the mid-thirties, and I tell myself that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, although I really believe that Martin Amis is more accurate when he writes, in a bleak little book on love and gulags called House of Meetings, that “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker and kills you later”.
Let this benighted year, declared the International Year of Planet Earth, the International Year of Languages, the International Year of the Potato, the International Year of Sanitation and the International Year of the Frog, cede to 2009, the International Year of Astronomy and the International Year of Natural Fibres.

I have big hopes for 2009. Here’s to that.

A few good yarns

2008-12-24T17:00:00.002+05:30

When I was three years old, my mother stitched me a little orange frock. It had puffed sleeves and a bow, and was possibly checked. I loved this frock with a passion, and via a strategic deployment of tantrums and sulks, contrived to wear it every single day until I grew out of it. It made me feel like the king of the world, thrillingly glamorous and powerful; and indeed, anyone looking at the photographs would agree that I looked very like a fat baby in a cake.

When I burst, Hulk-like, out of the orange frock, my interest in clothes sighed a mighty sigh and died. I climbed into jeans and a t-shirt, and have pretty much stayed that way. So I wondered, as I drove into Jaipur last weekend, whether I might not be a tiny bit bored at the ‘Mantles of Myth: The Narrative in Indian Textiles’ conference organised by Siyahi. The talks are free and open to everyone, and if you want to participate in special events, you can register for a fee.

It was nice to be at the Diggi Palace Hotel. I’m very fond of the place, partly because I threw up spectacularly all over it on my first visit and they never brought it up (so to speak) on any of my subsequent four visits. And also because when you have back-to-back speakers all day, it’s nice not to have to commute. I needn’t have worried about boredom; I was hooked right from Devdutt Patnaik’s pellucid opening talk, on the relationship between fabric and civilisation.

Some of the best speakers included the gifted writer Mamang Dai from Arunachal Pradesh, who spoke about Northeastern textiles armed with a dazzling array of stories and cloths, complemented by folklorist Desmond Kharmawphlang from Meghalaya. Kavita Singh, an academic of shining intelligence and fluency, talked about the subversive social commentary that runs through the textiles known as ‘Pabuji ki phad’, which depict the exploits of Rajasthani folk heroes and are sung about by bard couples known as the bhopu and bhopi.

Designer Wendell Rodericks presented his research of the last many years, tracing Goa’s colonial history though the Pano bhaju, a clever insinuation of banned Indian clothing into Portuguese norms. Jaya Jaitley spoke about namavalis, or Devanagri textiles, which feature verses or god’s name, and have a particular status and ritual use. Prof. BN Goswamy talked dreamily about the delicate Himachali textiles known as Chamba rumals.

There were other fascinating talks, about women’s personal histories in Phulkari embroidery from Punjab and sujni and kantha embroideries from Bihar and Bengal; the tree of life in its varied forms; the Ramayana stories in kalamkari textiles; the Vaishnavite textiles of Assam; the ceremonial pichwais of Srinathji; and Buddhist tangkhas.

The closing session, on the narratives of a nation, featured Lord Meghnad Desai, the eloquent Prof. Dipankar Gupta, and Namita Gokhale. The whole event was capped with a haunting Naga song, Aye Kuzu Le, which is sung to pass on weaving skills to other women, and was performed by a group of Naga women.

Over the course of three days I felt my mind burst, Hulk-like, out of its indifference (a process commonly known as ‘education’). Indian cloth is suddenly not just beautiful, but meaningful. I swear I feel like spinning cotton, re-reading mythology, and reacquiring the Indian textile treasures that lie in museums in Paris, London and New York. I miss the tiny toy loom I had when I was seven, on which I wove ill-fated scraps of cotton and wool. I’m turning over, in my head, notions of tradition, colonialism, citizenship, democracy, and the sacred. I can’t wait for Siyahi’s next offering.

Yes, you should have been there. Next time, sign up.

Horace and Wilfred

2008-12-16T16:37:00.001+05:30

The other day I met someone who had recently been in a car accident. She lifted her shawl casually to show me her arm, and the sight of her poor purpled, contused flesh from shoulder to elbow made my stomach turn. It’s true: the body revolts in adrenalized sympathy at the sight of violated flesh. It must be a self-preservation thing. Usually, when you’ve seen a few things like that, you go off the idea of seeing more.

So imagine my surprise when I came across a phrase in a newspaper article written by what we call a ‘senior journalist’ who, you’d think, might have seen a few stomach-turning things, even if only grinding poverty. It went something like: “I’d love for us to have a little war”, so it really stopped me in my tracks.

We’re hearing a lot of that these days in India, occasioned by our newfound passion for wounded indignation in the wake of the atrocities in Bombay. The people who say these sorts of things do so because they don’t actually have to go to war themselves, having cleverly arranged not to be in the armed forces or to live near our borders. They’ve got others to send to war while they spew fire and brimstone about The Enemy over dinner and a movie.

They must be thinking of the video game version of war, in which having opposable thumbs is the only qualification necessary to be on the battlefield. Some of them would faint at the sight of a blister; none of them is likely to ever have to get anywhere near a frontline; and pretty much the only thing they’ve ever shot is their mouth off. They’ve certainly never tried to imagine themselves in a conflict zone.

They possibly think that the clean-cut, whole, healthy young men and women in shiny uniforms look that way all through a war. It’s the same sordid disjunct between propaganda and reality in which the poet Wilfred Owen suffered and made his name. Owen, who fought in the trenches of the First World War, took the idea of the glory of war and destroyed it verse by verse, speaking as eloquently about mental as about physical trauma.

I have never been able to shake one poem of his that I read in elementary school. Speaking of a soldier who can’t put his gas mask on quickly enough, it’s a quiet little piece drenched in bitterness. An excerpt:

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The Latin line is taken from an ode by the ancient Roman poet Horace and the literal translation is, It is sweet and right to die for your country.

If you’re with Horace rather than with Owen, if you buy that line, then walk out the door, find the nearest recruitment centre, sign up, and prepare to die gloriously. Don’t send someone else instead.

TV killed the TV star

2008-12-11T13:00:00.000+05:30

You didn’t have to be in Mumbai on November 26 to be suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome today. Life offers very many good, solid reasons to wake up screaming in the middle of the night, but in case you were running out, here’s another one: the excruciating television news coverage of the initial attacks and the three day siege that followed. Everything you knew or suspected about Indian media, compressed into four hysterical days complete with promo montage and jingle.

Our news reporters and anchors provided screechy real-time accounts of exactly who and what was where, and when—terrorists, hostages, armed forces personnel, grenade launchers and helicopters—possibly because the force of repeated explosions and gunfire had knocked their brains clean out of their skulls, leaving them incapable of making the connection between giving the game away and more dead people, though I should mention that this is the charitable interpretation.

They stuck their mikes and cameras into the faces of traumatised survivors and the traumatised friends and family of survivors and non-survivors to screech, “How did you feel when you were locked in your room without food or water with the sound of gunfire and smoke billowing under the door for sixty hours/when you found out your loved one is missing/when you discovered your loved one was dead?” To be fair, that’s standard operating procedure; they always do this in any situation involving human pain, looking for that one maverick who might say, “I feel wonderful, just wonderful.”

They trampled all over the crime scene, providing screechy and wildly astute commentary on how there appeared to be broken glass on the ground. The camera zoomed in on it, presumably for the benefit of millions of viewers who wouldn’t have believed this unless they saw it with their own eyes.

They became outraged and weepy, because for the first time terrorism was targeting privilege, to which most reporters and anchors belong. It’s hard to forget the moment when one reporter came to poignantly startled self-awareness as she hesitatingly recapped an interviewee’s question about why the media were obsessing over the Taj and ignoring all the dead people at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus: You mean, she said, that we in the media tend to identify with our own class?

For that same reason there was a lot of candle lighting and pontificating in the studios about how it’s all the fault of the politicians, when the same media spends the rest of its time engineering discussions not about whether the constitution should be changed to break the politician-bureaucrat nexus that is crippling the country, but about whether A displayed a shocking lack of patriotism by calling B a dog.

They seemed to figure that right then, in the middle of the siege, was a good time to pester the NSG and the police for interviews—though if that was stupid, it was stupider still for those organisations to oblige, instead of having one spokesperson who could coordinate information from various agencies and have a single press conference instead of wasting the precious time of each agency.

We saw incessant coverage of the funerals of the men who lost their lives fighting this crime, but have heard nothing of the innocent victims who lie unclaimed in hospitals. And now we’re hearing the media increasingly cry for war, because why would we learn from the experience of the US after 9/11?

Hitting out is easier than doing the very hard work of self-examination and self-correction that is missing at every level of Indian society. from the law-maker in Parliament to the beat policeman, from the company CEO to the householder. It requires us to put intelligent systems in place, and then take individual responsibility for following them. It doesn’t make for great TRPs, but we might end up with a decent country.

Ask, and ye shall receive

2008-12-04T13:00:00.001+05:30

Elections season is back in India once more, and once again we’re going to be treated to a long series of bickering exchanges conducted via press conferences and newspaper headlines. The prospect is nothing if not starkly depressing.

In India, we have in place three ingredients vital to the democratic process: many politicians (sellers), many participating voters (buyers), and many television sets (advertising and trials). Here’s an idea: Why not put them all together in a more deliberate fashion, so that the electorate has a better opportunity to scrutinise its aspiring leaders? Don’t we deserve to examine what we’re signing up for?

At the moment, all we get is the media report of rally speeches, insults and allegations traded between political individuals and parties, and, on the occasional debate show, questions put by journalists which usually fall rather far short of tough or persistent, or are entirely irrelevant to voter concerns.

The problem with most of our existing political fora is that we, the people, don’t get to ask questions. The other problem with our existing political fora is that we, the people, are socialised to be so sickeningly deferent to power of any sort that we think it’s rude to ask questions, and that confrontational questions are beyond the pale. But if we were able to suppress centuries of politesse, it would be nice to have our own chance to ask the questions that matter to us.

Like: How come your government was able to put an Indian flag on the moon but is incapable of building a road that doesn’t melt into dust every few months? Apparently building roads is not rocket science, as they say, and many countries we count ourselves superior to seem to have no trouble with it at all. Why don’t you ask them how it’s done, maybe sign some technology transfer agreements in the road-building department?

And so forth.

At the moment, we all too often let ourselves be fobbed off by replies like “The other government did it” or “We will demand a probe into the matter” or “We are doing our best” or “These things take time” or “That’s an anti-national statement”.

For some reason, Indian voters are willing to put up with much more than they should. Urban voters in Delhi breathe deep lungfuls of foul air and drink deep draughts of poisoned water—where water is available—and don’t seem to connect these conditions to their declining health, the poor nutritional value of their food, and their quality of life. If we do make this connection, we don’t sit up and make a song and dance about it.

We don’t seem to connect the state of civic hygiene—stagnant water, festering rubbish heaps, excretion in the open—with diseases that show up every year and take lives. If we do, we don’t seem to demand that civic agencies fulfil their responsibilities.

We don’t seem to connect the state of road signage and maintenance, and the state of road usage education, with the state of gridlock traffic and accident rates. If we do, we don’t seem to demand that the government find a way to enforce the laws governing how one gets a driver’s licence, and how one drives.

We just don’t demand quality of our politicians, and perhaps if we fussed about it enough, we might get it. I realise that large numbers of people will run, squealing, from this idea, on the grounds that nobody can bear to see more footage of our politicians. But if nothing else, putting them through some quality control questions would allow us to despise them for more informed reasons.

Second childhood

2008-11-22T16:42:00.001+05:30

“So,” I’ll ask a long lost friend, “how have you been?” although, if I were a cooler person, I’d say ‘Whassuuuuuup!’ because apparently really cool people are supposed to sound like sneezing donkeys. And here’s what this typically mid-thirties, mid-career person will often reply: “Oh god, I have so much schoolwork to finish before our board exams.”

Now long, long ago, on my home planet far, far away, adults who had completed school and college simply stopped doing homework, just like that, so it always takes me a minute or two of spinning around in circles with my tongue lolling before I’m ready to ask a trenchant follow-up question like: “Did you say homework?”, though if I were cooler I’d say “Whaaaaaaa?!” because if you’re going to be cool you’d better be choking on a hairball.

As a person who has perfected the art of not having children and is therefore in a position of wonderful objectivity, I’d say: Get a grip, people, let the little blighters do their own work. Is it because you really don’t have enough problems in your thinning portfolio and thickening arteries, in your marriage and at work, that you’re dying to lie awake at night worrying about how to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit?

But no, today’s parents seem dead keen on doing homework, fretting over math problems and spending hours Photoshopping the cover of the history project, sometimes while the student in question is off relaxing over a few drinks with his or her friends. They bite their nails during their kids’ exams, wishing they could do for them, probably because they studied much harder.

I was beginning to think this parent-child joint homework thing a uniquely Indian trait, when a recent article in The New Yorker opened my eyes. The land of the free and the home of the brave, for your information, is ‘overparenting’ its children in order to—get this—compete with little kids in India and China. How’s that for an outsourcing opportunity? We could be writing college applications for millions of American kids and saving them the three to forty thousand dollars they’d pay IvyWise to do so in the US.

Anyway, I’m here to tell you that doing your children’s homework for them is overkill. My mother just let us be, so much so that I learned early on to forge her signature on the homework calendar that we had to have signed at the end of every day or week, so that I wouldn’t wake her when I left for school in the morning—and I’m doing all right, barring the bank balance and the nightmares.

She was a big fan of John Holt, the famous educator who believed that schools do more to impede than foster learning and the real stuff takes place at home; she earnestly read his books, allowed us to read our own and watch many B-grade movies, never had a clue what I was studying (or not), at wherever it was I went every morning, and sensibly settled down to writing her own book, which allowed us the freedom to grow in the way most natural to us.

That’s a total exaggeration, of course. She and my father attended every PTA meeting they had to, and they dragged my siblings and me off to every museum, gallery, theatre and volcano-top in sight. None of us failed a thing, and all of us became truly odd people. We’ve had our ups and downs, of course—but today she can look at her children in their various life situations and move her lips in a silent prayer of thanks. At least that’s what I thought it was, until I sidled up close one day and heard her muttering, “Damn that John Holt.”