One of the wonders of this planet is its astonishing variety of flora, fauna and hotels. I’m not a great lover of hotels, having been scarred for life by extended stays in them while my family looked for housing in various cities—after a couple of weeks, there’s very little to recommend being in a hotel, no matter how fancy.
But I’ve been thinking about them a bit ever since I woke up to the fact that the literary festival in Jaipur is no longer upcoming, but on-going, and every reasonable place to stay is stuffed to the gills with book lovers who are, if not more enthusiastic than me, certainly more organised. The hotel hosting the literary festival, Diggi Palace, is very nice; it’s no reflection on the place that I once threw up copiously all down the stairwell.
I’ve actually had the good fortune to experience some truly wonderful hotels, located in beautiful places and designed to let the place in, not keep it out. Topping the list is El Nido, an island resort in the Philippines where they greet your waterfront arrival by flinging food into the water to gather a multitude of brightly coloured fish, and say goodbye with a surprise [spoiler alert] candlelight dinner with exquisite silverware and glassware in a natural hidden cave to which they take you in a tiny rowboat. El Nido is in close competition with the Taj Denis Island, in Seychelles, where you have your own private stretch of beach in one of the world’s most beautiful archipelagos.
Over the course of my life I’ve also passed the night in some very weird places, such as crouching in the linen closet of an overnight train (my ticket was waitlisted, but when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go). The piles of sheets were soft enough, but there was a hole in the ceiling, through which howling February winds congealed me into a block of ice despite all the blankets.
But the worst night I’ve ever had, bar none, was in a guesthouse in the little town of Dewas, in Madhya Pradesh. Dewas is like thousands of town all over the world, in that—with apologies to its denizens—there’s no reason on earth to go there. I was on a hot air ballooning expedition, and there was a bit of a cock-up with the winds, so we had to make do with whatever accommodation was available.
This Dewas guesthouse is the one tiny spot in the earth’s biosphere that is incapable of sustaining life. The windows and the glassed upper half of my room door were well ventilated by enormous holes in the panes. There was neither electricity nor soap, so that when you tried to use the Indian-style bathroom in the middle of the night and fell in, you couldn’t really do a sterling job of cleaning up.
There was no bed linen, which must be all right in the summer, but wasn’t that great on a freezing March night. My shoes left Neil Armstrong-like prints in the dust on the floor. The other guests, and I think I saw a few walking around, were dead. The management consisted of one person who seemed to be clinging to life purely out of inertia. When spoken to he managed only a sort of yearning look, as if to say, I would love to help, but look around, my hands are tied.
The thing is, you never know where life will require you to hang up your hat for the night. Those who can’t or won’t adapt might find themselves checked into the Great Hotel in the Sky ahead of schedule—and they don’t have checkout.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Raising the bar
I don’t think of myself as a ‘feminist’ in the traditional political sense. I’m just a person who doesn’t accept certain kinds of limitations in my life, or certain sorts of treatment from other people; my femaleness is incidental. But feminist or not, I’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind to not see the patriarchy everywhere around us. It’s like The Matrix; if I close my eyes and breathe deeply, I see the world in little green falling numbers. And like Neo I can, with the sheer power of my mind, make all the little green falling numbers flex and bend to my will…
Well okay, not quite, but much like the bumblebee, which flies against all the principles of physics purely because nobody told it that it couldn’t, I’ve always refused to believe that the patriarchy will get me. As a 20-something woman living alone in Delhi I did some things that gave my parents, in faraway Malaysia and Switzerland, sleepless nights, and some other things that would have given them coronaries if I’d mentioned them.
Partly, I got away with many things because I had the element of surprise on my side. People assumed that no Indian woman would do something so outrageously immodest as smoke in the vestibule of a third class train compartment while travelling alone, so they assumed I was from abroad, and left me alone, though more than one middle-aged person on a train sternly advised me to “get married”. Mechanics at the garage assumed that only a foreigner would be so weird as to hop into the pit with them to see what they were talking about. Malodorous men in the government liquor store assumed that only a foreigner would walk in by herself and queue up along with them.
It just never crossed my mind that I couldn’t do any of these things, and so I did them, and nobody ever bothered me, and that’s still how I choose to run my life. Like Keanu Reeves, I just close my eyes and f-l-e-x the world.
No, not really. Still, the Matrix analogy is not all that far-fetched. From official forms that ask only for ‘Father’s name’ to neighbours who want to know ‘What relation is he of yours?’ to friends and family addressing you when it comes to food and your male companion when it comes to work, the patriarchy is so entrenched that women themselves, even the most liberated and educated of them, promote it enthusiastically—lately through the ‘superwoman’ avatar.
The superwoman is the one who’s been told, and believes, that it is great and glorious to earn the bread and have a career, bear the children, supervise the household, and be a sex bomb all at the same time, and if that leaves no quiet time for herself, or brings on a psychotic episode, well, that’s all right because the glory should compensate, shouldn’t it? For some reason, it’s still not a question that supervising the household will continue to be her responsibility.
There are a number of things that women, not just in India but around the world, rarely question: they must bear children and care for them; they are responsible for the kitchen and meals, if not all household functioning and chores; they must take care of family elders; they must do their best not to hurt anyone’s feelings. (Those, right there, are most of the world’s dullest chores and the most enduring forms of self-abnegation; and women are taught that refusing these assignments is ‘selfish’.) Oh, and, they’d better not “ask for trouble” by wearing anything fetching.
It’s a mystery to me why women are told to hide in their homes while the lunatics don’t seem to have a curfew.
Well okay, not quite, but much like the bumblebee, which flies against all the principles of physics purely because nobody told it that it couldn’t, I’ve always refused to believe that the patriarchy will get me. As a 20-something woman living alone in Delhi I did some things that gave my parents, in faraway Malaysia and Switzerland, sleepless nights, and some other things that would have given them coronaries if I’d mentioned them.
Partly, I got away with many things because I had the element of surprise on my side. People assumed that no Indian woman would do something so outrageously immodest as smoke in the vestibule of a third class train compartment while travelling alone, so they assumed I was from abroad, and left me alone, though more than one middle-aged person on a train sternly advised me to “get married”. Mechanics at the garage assumed that only a foreigner would be so weird as to hop into the pit with them to see what they were talking about. Malodorous men in the government liquor store assumed that only a foreigner would walk in by herself and queue up along with them.
It just never crossed my mind that I couldn’t do any of these things, and so I did them, and nobody ever bothered me, and that’s still how I choose to run my life. Like Keanu Reeves, I just close my eyes and f-l-e-x the world.
No, not really. Still, the Matrix analogy is not all that far-fetched. From official forms that ask only for ‘Father’s name’ to neighbours who want to know ‘What relation is he of yours?’ to friends and family addressing you when it comes to food and your male companion when it comes to work, the patriarchy is so entrenched that women themselves, even the most liberated and educated of them, promote it enthusiastically—lately through the ‘superwoman’ avatar.
The superwoman is the one who’s been told, and believes, that it is great and glorious to earn the bread and have a career, bear the children, supervise the household, and be a sex bomb all at the same time, and if that leaves no quiet time for herself, or brings on a psychotic episode, well, that’s all right because the glory should compensate, shouldn’t it? For some reason, it’s still not a question that supervising the household will continue to be her responsibility.
There are a number of things that women, not just in India but around the world, rarely question: they must bear children and care for them; they are responsible for the kitchen and meals, if not all household functioning and chores; they must take care of family elders; they must do their best not to hurt anyone’s feelings. (Those, right there, are most of the world’s dullest chores and the most enduring forms of self-abnegation; and women are taught that refusing these assignments is ‘selfish’.) Oh, and, they’d better not “ask for trouble” by wearing anything fetching.
It’s a mystery to me why women are told to hide in their homes while the lunatics don’t seem to have a curfew.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
The year of living dangerously
There’s something magical about January 1. It might be just the way that the human brain is wired, but the first day of the first month of the year is a gleaming tabula rasa, empowered by the future rather than weighed down by the past. It’s a moment pregnant with possibility, when you can imagine yourself replenished and forgiven in all ways, granted a fresh start, all tanked up to do things better. The word ‘magical’ here, therefore, is used in the sense of ‘inexplicably wonderful and inspirational’ in addition to the sense of ‘completely hallucinatory’.
But after all, hallucinatory is as hallucinatory does, which is to say it might be bumf, but it’s bumf that works wonders for the dim and smelly place that is my head. When I wake up/crawl out/throw up on January 1, I am always amazed at how new, hopeful and vigorous I feel. January 1! It’s not just the birthday of Paul Revere, E.M. Forster, Noor Inayat Khan and Vidya Balan; it is that we are all reborn that day. I don’t exactly make resolutions—New Year resolutions take character, commitment and discipline and, as such, are strictly for the birds—but I do feel very smug and powerful. This lasts until January 7 or so, after which everything goes back to normal.
Henry Ford would say that that’s just my bad attitude. (Warning: this column is largely comprised of other people’s words, partly because other people have said these things far better than I can, and partly because I’m still woozy from New Year celebrations.) Ford acutely summed up one’s agency in one’s own life thus: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right”, although if we’re going to get into why it helps to think positive, I tend to side with Herm Albright, who said, “A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.”
Either of those assertions, in any case, are more palatable than those in Rhonda Byrne’s dreadful little book/movie/audio, The Secret, which exhorts people to merely “ask the universe” for whatever they want, namely fame and riches, and blames natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis on the broody thoughts of negative people.
Anyway, 2008 feels like a year in which my life will get shaken up a little because, as Goethe wryly put it, “The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety.” It’s not yet a week into the year, I still feel I’m captain of my ship and master of my fate, and as William Shedd pointed out, “A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” So, like Mark Twain, I will strive to throw off the bowlines and sail away from the safe harbour, because I ask myself, as Nietzsche asked himself, “Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?” Comfort is a wonderful thing, but J.K. Galbraith dryly observed that “[F]aced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”
Maybe it’s just a boring old mid-life crisis (yawn, yawn), but it might be true that, as Karl Wallenda posited, “Life is being on the wire, everything else is just waiting.” And if it’s not, I’ll find out that “Living at risk,” by Ray Bradbury’s definition, “is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.” The possibilities—not ‘ker-splat’, the other ones—are enough to make your head swim.
Of course, I’ll re-evaluate all this on January 7.
But after all, hallucinatory is as hallucinatory does, which is to say it might be bumf, but it’s bumf that works wonders for the dim and smelly place that is my head. When I wake up/crawl out/throw up on January 1, I am always amazed at how new, hopeful and vigorous I feel. January 1! It’s not just the birthday of Paul Revere, E.M. Forster, Noor Inayat Khan and Vidya Balan; it is that we are all reborn that day. I don’t exactly make resolutions—New Year resolutions take character, commitment and discipline and, as such, are strictly for the birds—but I do feel very smug and powerful. This lasts until January 7 or so, after which everything goes back to normal.
Henry Ford would say that that’s just my bad attitude. (Warning: this column is largely comprised of other people’s words, partly because other people have said these things far better than I can, and partly because I’m still woozy from New Year celebrations.) Ford acutely summed up one’s agency in one’s own life thus: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right”, although if we’re going to get into why it helps to think positive, I tend to side with Herm Albright, who said, “A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.”
Either of those assertions, in any case, are more palatable than those in Rhonda Byrne’s dreadful little book/movie/audio, The Secret, which exhorts people to merely “ask the universe” for whatever they want, namely fame and riches, and blames natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis on the broody thoughts of negative people.
Anyway, 2008 feels like a year in which my life will get shaken up a little because, as Goethe wryly put it, “The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety.” It’s not yet a week into the year, I still feel I’m captain of my ship and master of my fate, and as William Shedd pointed out, “A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” So, like Mark Twain, I will strive to throw off the bowlines and sail away from the safe harbour, because I ask myself, as Nietzsche asked himself, “Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?” Comfort is a wonderful thing, but J.K. Galbraith dryly observed that “[F]aced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”
Maybe it’s just a boring old mid-life crisis (yawn, yawn), but it might be true that, as Karl Wallenda posited, “Life is being on the wire, everything else is just waiting.” And if it’s not, I’ll find out that “Living at risk,” by Ray Bradbury’s definition, “is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.” The possibilities—not ‘ker-splat’, the other ones—are enough to make your head swim.
Of course, I’ll re-evaluate all this on January 7.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
The ghost of columns past
The world works according to certain incontrovertible truths that you may not like, but that it is pointless, or at least exhausting, to argue with. Random examples: Four sides to a square, 100 paise to a rupee, three laws of thermodynamics, 2.2 pounds to the kilogram, one partridge in a pear tree, 21 points in blackjack, seven dwarves, a dime a dozen, 52 weekly columns in a year.
If there’s anything more certain than these universal laws, it is that the fifty-second and final instalment of the column will do a Top Ten kind of wrap-up of the year. This is partly because other columnists will be doing the same and you have to compete, and partly because it’s an obvious and easy topic, and when you’re desperately scrabbling to find a subject for what feels like the six millionth time, it’s nice to have one handed to you on a plate.
For people who regularly throw themselves out of airplanes or bring joy and succour to the underprivileged or know other people’s secrets and don’t mind telling them, finding things to write about is not a problem; but it’s less easy if you’ve spent most of your year diligently watching ants and spiders duel to the death between old bills and dead batteries on your desk.
(Watching this, by the way, is a useful insight into power dynamics, and I’m not talking just about the dead batteries. You learn about stalking; about lunging in with deadly speed to deliver a paralytic sting and retreating until it has taken effect; about backstabbing; flushing out prey without ceding your own advantage; and that while ants never give up even while proceeding down the enemy’s gullet, spiders couldn’t care less about heroics as long as their tummies are full. It’s all very reminiscent of family life.)
Either way, every year-end column is under bone-crushing pressure to look back on the year and identify its salient moments. The trouble is that in most cases, the year gone by is exactly like the year before it, and likely to be much like the year coming up. Still, after a bit of thinking, I was able to come up with a list of events and realisations that did really seem like watershed moments in 2007. That they are relevant only to me will be my USP in a welter of columns recapping things you’ve already read about.
1. I travelled to Barbados and St. Lucia in the Caribbean, Spain, France, and Scotland.
2. People you meet at dinner parties are more than willing to talk about what they do; as soon as you ask what they think, they suddenly cross the room in search of someone who will ask them what they do.
3. Siblings and old friends are wonderful things.
4. Christmas is a traditional Indian celebration, as long as it involves gifts; if we could only find a way of commercialising Thanksgiving, we’d do that one too. Maybe in 2008?
5. I rediscovered a number of people I haven’t met in twenty years or more, thanks to Facebook—which also lets you play Scrabble online.
6. More people will comment on an article about chocolate than will comment on an article about social ills.
7. I’ve entered that stage of life when you go to as many funerals as you do weddings and births.
8. A new pair of jeans can make you feel like a million bucks, should you be one of those people who do not actually have a million bucks.
9. Eat fish oil.
10. Just 52 more columns to go next year.
Happy 2008.
If there’s anything more certain than these universal laws, it is that the fifty-second and final instalment of the column will do a Top Ten kind of wrap-up of the year. This is partly because other columnists will be doing the same and you have to compete, and partly because it’s an obvious and easy topic, and when you’re desperately scrabbling to find a subject for what feels like the six millionth time, it’s nice to have one handed to you on a plate.
For people who regularly throw themselves out of airplanes or bring joy and succour to the underprivileged or know other people’s secrets and don’t mind telling them, finding things to write about is not a problem; but it’s less easy if you’ve spent most of your year diligently watching ants and spiders duel to the death between old bills and dead batteries on your desk.
(Watching this, by the way, is a useful insight into power dynamics, and I’m not talking just about the dead batteries. You learn about stalking; about lunging in with deadly speed to deliver a paralytic sting and retreating until it has taken effect; about backstabbing; flushing out prey without ceding your own advantage; and that while ants never give up even while proceeding down the enemy’s gullet, spiders couldn’t care less about heroics as long as their tummies are full. It’s all very reminiscent of family life.)
Either way, every year-end column is under bone-crushing pressure to look back on the year and identify its salient moments. The trouble is that in most cases, the year gone by is exactly like the year before it, and likely to be much like the year coming up. Still, after a bit of thinking, I was able to come up with a list of events and realisations that did really seem like watershed moments in 2007. That they are relevant only to me will be my USP in a welter of columns recapping things you’ve already read about.
1. I travelled to Barbados and St. Lucia in the Caribbean, Spain, France, and Scotland.
2. People you meet at dinner parties are more than willing to talk about what they do; as soon as you ask what they think, they suddenly cross the room in search of someone who will ask them what they do.
3. Siblings and old friends are wonderful things.
4. Christmas is a traditional Indian celebration, as long as it involves gifts; if we could only find a way of commercialising Thanksgiving, we’d do that one too. Maybe in 2008?
5. I rediscovered a number of people I haven’t met in twenty years or more, thanks to Facebook—which also lets you play Scrabble online.
6. More people will comment on an article about chocolate than will comment on an article about social ills.
7. I’ve entered that stage of life when you go to as many funerals as you do weddings and births.
8. A new pair of jeans can make you feel like a million bucks, should you be one of those people who do not actually have a million bucks.
9. Eat fish oil.
10. Just 52 more columns to go next year.
Happy 2008.
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