Love solved it for me

It’s difficult to cry inside an auto. For one, it’s open on both side and two, the moment it stops at traffic signals, there are many who would peer inside to see who’s having the ride. And if you see a grown up man sitting and sobbing, it does raise the curiosity of a few, who would then follow you for a few more traffic signals to make sure they saw a man crying. I wanted to cry out loud, at my loss, such was my state when I was coming back home, after dropping you at the airport today; but then you can’t have such privileges on the road. It was naïve of me, when I had said to you, that I would not cry. I was already in tears the moment you went inside the airport. I saw a few others in the same agony and thought it’s normal. But riding this auto back home is proving tough. I can’t feel you sitting next to me and it’s making me sad. Do you remember all those rides we took together in the small span of few weeks? I can’t hold you and pull you close to me now. Where have you gone? I keep looking at my right side, thinking this is just a dream, and I would see you smiling back at me. No luck and I start thinking that those were the dreams, the times that we had together. “And the times just went by, we never felt. The times that lay ahead, they would be difficult.”

I see a couple riding a bike, and I am sure you would have said ‘cute vava’, looking at their little baby. And I would have looked at you and smiled. But now I can only cry, for you are not with me. I miss you being next to me. I had come to accept that you will be next to me all the time and suddenly it seems not to be true. “How I got you, surely it was not easy. You are gone, and now it’s only me.”

I pass the church on the way, though it is empty at this hour, I still feel for the times we sat together inside it. It was atypical of us to sit together and not speak, but we did it in the church. I say a silent prayer to give that time back to me so that I can speak to you a little more. I say a little prayer for your safe journey. “What was spoken, what was said, they were nice. But I still long, to hear your voice.”

Ah! That’s a new restaurant there! How did we miss going there? I am sure that once you are through with what they have to offer, you would say, “I can cook better”. Yes you cook better and how I long to see you cooking at home now and taste it in between, just to tease you. I don’t miss dining at this restaurant and many others like it. All I miss now is you. “A long journey brought us together. A longer journey will keep us apart. "

The traffic is going mad even at this time of the day. And it’s getting on my nerves; I want to reach home badly. I wouldn’t mind the delay if you were with me. With you things change and become better and I only realize it now. It’s already getting difficult for me to get back to my old life and you are not even air borne. I hate it when people say that good time passes quickly. How I wish to go back in time and stop it, at a few weeks ago and spend my whole life there. “Deep within there is a sound, I can feel. It’s loud enough but I can’t hear.”

Love is a strange thing; till you don’t have it you are oblivious to it, once you have it, its bliss and when you are away from it, you are crestfallen. How ignorant are we in the matters of the heart; just consoling myself by thinking that maybe the heart has a mind of its own. But this is the first time for me so I believe I’ll have to go through the motions. But if I had known before I might have been better prepared, would have tried to stretch those weeks into months somehow, maybe years for that matter. “Keep me in your midst, I am lonely. I say this to your memories.”

I am entering our home and somewhere fiddling with the keys I feel that you will greet me as the door opens. Sadly there is no sign of you. How could life change so much in the span of one hour. My eyes become heavy again, but the only respite now is that I am away from the prying eyes of people. I close the door behind me and start to cry my heart out. “I hope this too will pass. Love will solve it for me too.”

P.S: I love you

Avatar: Let there be Earth

Watched, what everybody around is calling a revelation in movie making, ‘Avatar’ yesterday. I am not good at reviewing movies so I am just going to throw a few points that come to my mind. It definitely is a Cameron/Spielberg type of movie and that was evident in the storyline and cinematography and it also had the larger than life kind of feel to it. I am a great fan of gadgets and weaponry so could not stop my mind from racing to year 2154 and imagining what the world would be like then. Kudos to the creative team who made floating islands and luminous flowers and bugs. The animals did not attract me much because post Jurassic Park nothing makes me sit and say ‘wow’. I am a great fan of colours so could not stop admiring the shades of flowers and animals especially the mighty Pterosaur. The Na’vis looked cute and ugly at the same time and I guess they thought the same about humans too. It’s amazing how we design a new world from our imagination. The Hallelujah Island is an envious creative output and it’s amazing to recapitulate its evolution in the mind of its creator. But I was irritated, though mildly, by the preponderance of the creative world around us, that any planet however light years away from us, would have the same basic setup like ours. The Na’vi’s looked very much like humans with four limbs; the tail was a bonus, though we cannot discount the fact that our ancestors also had one. The trees, plants and grasses looked similar to ours. The flying birds looked like raptors and the heavy duty dinosaur was in the end - a dinosaur. If left to me, I would try to create a world which is completely different from ours, nothing human like, nothing plant like. That is where the challenge lies and I am sure that’s how it exists even now, light years from us, nothing like earth, not even like Pandora.

But again nothing in the island or anything picturized was purposeless and that’s what I liked about the script. It perhaps was the best lesson to us that nothing in this world living or non-living is purposeless and we all do connect. Though the synaptic connection of nerve endings seemed strange and made me wish I had a tail to plug to the grass or at least to the hostile beings around. The language of Na’ vi’s in the movie was developed by a linguist and it has 1000 words and is closely related to an Ethiopian tribal dialect. Also the plants were researched and designed by plant physiologists and it is scientifically explainable as to how they connect to humans. The movie did not fail to convey what it intended. I would not say the message was completely new. In the midst of the just concluded Copenhagen summit nothing else could have subtly touched upon the messy state of our environment and man’s apathy and callousness towards it. When on one side Pandora’s natives respected animals and trees and mourned over their loss, we were shown how callous humans were. In fact after destroying our own habitat we did not learn lessons adequate and plundered into others territory. It might sound politically incorrect, but I have a great urge here to draw parallels with what humans did in Pandora with what U. S of America did in Iraq. Just try replacing the unobtanium rock in Pandora with oil in Iraq and the similarities in the movie and what happened in Iraq is hard to miss. This by default is an exquisite human behavior. This reminds me of something I read from Erich Fromm’s “Art of destruction”. Man is the only animal who could kill or destroy without an immediate motive. Animals also kill each other but either in danger or when hungry. No animal ever remembers old vengeance and attacks; neither do they calculate the loss another species could cause to them in near future. You see zebras and lions, monkeys and flamingoes grazing around in the same territory; they do not contemplate on counter evacuation to protect resources for their next generations. Least of all lions don’t fight lions worrying some might finish the food that others can eat for generations. Sadly, man thinks differently. And as seen in the movie rocks worth 20 million dollars are more lucrative than protecting the forest which balances the whole colony of the Na’vi’s.

As I walked out of the theatre I wondered, what the audience would take away from the movie. One group would be mesmerized by the gadgets. There would soon be toy models of the tankers, helicopters, gunships and maybe aliens too. You would soon have blue coloured soft drinks and maybe burger patties shaped like the animals in the movie, alluring kids at eat out joints. And not to forget video games with a fantasy Pandora land and floating islands. To some maybe the creativity would be more appealing. There would also be philosophical discussions on the movie. I have heard there were discussions on philosophy of Matrix after the movie released. So now it could be philosophy of Avtaar for the intellectuals. I am worried if some foolish corporation would begin the hunt for some Pandora like land and exploit some peaceful planets. I hope the scientist learn their lessons from the movie and don’t fall for big bucks. As for environmentalists who have been harping on sustainability this could be a new mantra.

But I fear the most for people who would not see any of the above and would just walk out mesmerized by the 3D effect, oblivious of the world dying today. To whom mother earth is a woman who comes dressed only on earth day, on google. I am afraid many would miss out on what the movie had to really say. Somewhere in there I felt I travelled through time and saw what we would make out of our planet because of our indifference and greed and then stand at the gates of another civilization with impunity and brazenness asking for more. How lucky are we to look into the future but how shortsighted that we just see it as a movie. Avatar is not about conquering or protecting Pandora but about preserving and nurturing Earth.

My little hand

I had wanted to write on this for long but was scared to write it here, on a blog. A) Because there are people who would blame me for writing things personal just to win readership B) The person I am writing about is a part of my life and I was not confident to share about him to the world C) The most important reason is, I have never openly discussed this with him.

I had given up hopes to marry after a couple of rejections. I was told with family problems like mine no one would be interested in marrying me. It sounded fair to me because I came with a chip on my shoulder. And being the eldest also a researcher with no job, with two younger siblings who were unemployed, and a mother who was a widow, it did seem to look like a dismal proposition to many. Last thing I wanted was to be married without my family. I did not want a way out, deserting my family and my responsibilities. And I realized that was what interested many. Many offered marrying me but did not want to take care of my family.

When I first met ‘who’, online to be precise, what struck me was my guide’s words “you can read a man through his words”. I seldom saw people who valued words like gems. I missed noticing a lot of things on 'who’s profile, which did cause a lot of trouble in the journey to altar, and among all those points was the line which had in bold written– DISABLED.

When I responded to the profile, ‘who’ asked me if I saw the disability tab on his profile. It took me some time to realize my blunder; I had said yes to a guy’s proposal without reading something very important. I never missed facts but maybe we were destined to be so I missed it at that time. I felt scared to ask what disability he had but he being generous asked me to see his orkut pics carefully.

I had gone through them already but I had got transfixed at those eyes and never looked elsewhere. I was always poor at marking out people. I opened the album trembling, I had already committed before the pictures, and those ten minutes were the longest anxious minutes I ever had. I was sure if it had to be visible it had to be in the upper half of his body, but if he was deaf , dumb or blind I would never know. But since he said check the pics it should be something more visible, I told myself. I skimmed through a lot of pics with fear and in one pic I saw the baby palm for the first time. ‘Who’ was born with a missing left palm. I looked at his pic for sometime. It didn’t seem ugly but then I tried visualizing his life with one palm. What he could do and what he could not. He won’t ride a pulsar, nor a white horse, what if he could not lift me like those heroes in hindi movies? Would he be able to carry heavy stuff? Questions just ran across my mind. I felt foolish and surprised at those trivial desires I had as a girl, which I was hitherto unaware of. When one decides to marry, having two hands and doing whatever possible with it was a minimum criterion.We hardly ask "Does the guy have two hands?". Obviously , we all want perfect beings and in the bridal market this was no exception.

Often we undermine our left hand, actually a lot, but here I was looking at someone with just one plam. I had never pondered on physical handicap before. But I could feel the weight of rejection suddenly. I had experienced it many times being perfect physically and here was someone who was like me in a different way. My handicap was social , situational and his physical.

I fell in love, though I could not describe it then. I swore if mom agreed that would be god’s indication that ‘who’ was my angel.

I am married to him today. I see him tying his shoe lace, ironing clothes, repairing a tubelight, carrying a gas cylinder and to all who worried if he would tie the wedlock; it was the most memorable moment of my life. He dances with me, washes plates and wakes me up with bed tea. Sometimes it dawns to me that when I type this blog with both hands, he edits it using just one. He works for an MNC where all except him to have two hands, is that not a miracle? and should I not be proud of my little hand. I admit that I often forget about his disability and expect him to work with one arm at the pace of both but to all those anxious well wishers out there all I have to say is “it has not made me stop admiring and loving him”.

I never dreamt of marrying someone with a disability, neither am I showing sympathy or giving a chance to anyone. In fact I grabbed one from the world who failed to see through a shimmering coal. My little hand, does not make me feel ashamed, I love those hidden fingers that held my hand and said “ I do”.

I see him now dancing in the kitchen, he loves to dance and to me those steps are as graceful as anyone on stage. Love solved it all for me, mellowed me, transformed me and the individual who helped me transform had that magical little hand with button like fingers.

Racists

Kunal Basu, Kolkatta born English author, picks up a controversial topic and tries to spin an intriguing story around it. Though this book falls under the genre of science fiction, it would be apt to call it anthropological fiction. The main plot of the story is an experiment to determine which among the two human races; White or Black is the superior race. It’s difficult to establish who the protagonist of the story is, as each one tends to lead the plot in his/her own way. First, there are the two scientists; an English and the other French, who are the brain behind the racial experiment. Second, a set of children; one black and the other white, who are the subjects, a mute nurse, in charge of bringing up the kids. Then there is the scientist’s assistance, with a mind of his own. Last but not the least, a remote, desolate island which forms the backdrop of the experiment.

The story takes place in the latter half of the 19th century, when transatlantic slave trade is at its peak. The English scientist, Bates, a craniologist, believes that the white race is superior to the black and it’s the destiny of the black people to serve their white masters. He proves it by the measurements of scores of human skulls, of different races, procured from all around the world. His assistant, Quartley, is in charge of up-keep of these skulls. The French scientist, Belavoix, doesn’t agree to his English counterpart’s views and, based on his close study of the various civilizations of the world, advocates that the two races are better in their own right and that the superiority is not unidirectional. They challenge each other to an experiment, by isolating two babies, a black boy and a white girl, on a beautiful but remote island, away from human contact and ethics. They are to be brought up by a speechless nurse, who would just feed and protect them. She is instructed not to act as a mother to these children and other strict dos and don’ts. She is not to teach the kids anything and they are to grow up on their own, with the island being their school. All necessary supplies to the island are provided by the benevolence of the English society, which wants a proof of the white supremacy. The experiment is to last for 12 years and the scientists are too come to the island every six months to observe and study their subjects. Bates believes that the white girl, sooner than later, by her actions prove that she is the master to the black boy. The French on the other hand predicts that the children will become savages and one of them will murder the other.

The first half of the story grips the reader with a vivid description of the island; a small land mass in the African coast, isolated from the world, the dense forest which covers the island under a thick foliage and protects its inmates from prying eyes and how the island is only connected to the world by a ship, whose captain is a backer of the English scientist. The author beautifully sketches the personalities of the characters, with Bates being the irate and finicky one and the French being the docile and compromising type, though quiet often he picks on the nerves of his opposite number. There is constant squabbling going on between the scientists throughout. The narrative also gives details into how the children are growing, their eerie habits, their fights and how with each passing year the children are becoming more savage. Often the author is seen tilting the balance of power between the kids and this keeps the reader interested. There is mystery woven around the nurse and the assistant and it keeps the plot alive. The author indulges the reader with a hint of ‘something’ between Bates and the nurse and then switches the focus to the affection between his assistant and the nurse. Then towards the end it is revealed that the nurse is in fact not mute. The story then picks up pace where the assistant convinces Bates to return to the island, one last time and concurrently connives with the ship’s captain to help him and the nurse escape from the island. Though the author picks up a contemporary topic, it is nearly impossible for him to provide the answer to the basic premise of the story. The answer to; which is the superior race; white or black? The question might be quiet relevant today with Mr Obama becoming the first man of the white world, but that’s where the book falls short of the expectations. The reader picks up the book thinking that it’s the final frontier but gets nothing more than an average fiction story. The book starts with a big promise, then hooks you on to the lives of the characters as if trying to move you away from the big question and finally ends with a compromise of sorts. But then perhaps it’s not correct to ask such a question in the first place; at least not politically. Pick this up if you are someone who enjoys the journey and not the destination.

Back r us

And we are back with a new status. From single to committed to married. It feels a little odd at times when the wedlock pricks and ring gets smeared with atta and dust.The moment I fidget with one of the two comes the stinging stare or shrieks reminding me the eleventh commandment " Thou shall not fidget with the symbols of thy slavery( married life):", though I did find his wedding ring from the bathroom twice in this brief period of 10 days.

Partnership in blogging is quite different from partnership in life. Well the editor is as crtical about adrak ki chai and channa masala as he is about my writing. I think I am in love with this city. Mumbai has it's own charm. What fascinates me is the drive and energy in the people around which is quite different from the lethargy and apathy at my place. We are reading Breathless in Bombay by Murzban Shroff , it's a must read for the Bombay lovers. Stay with us for the upcoming reads on journey to and after the altar. Till then comment on the wedding and engagement pics.

P.S - The editor chose pics in which he looks the best this does not mean these are my best ones ;)

Wedding Pics

Engagement Pics