Monday, June 23, 2008

Mad Girl's Love Song


"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"


~Sylvia Plath

Thursday, June 19, 2008

In Gratitude

Dear Dad
Thank you for not parenting me like your parents. Thank you for the endless forgiveness and understanding. For never questioning my 'nos' and giving me the freedom to say 'yes.' Thank you for always treating me as an equal, for giving my role as an individual personality as much importance as that of daughter.
Thank you for being the person I am most brutally honest with. For letting me be a-social, sleepy and telling people who object to go to hell...just like you.
Most of all, thank you for knowing me so well and for being proud of exactly who I am.
Just as I am of you.

Love you lots and lots and lots.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Someone like you

When I was in the ninth standard many moons ago, a fellow scholar did ask of me the reason for my lack of a gentleman-friend.
'Liquifier my dear,' she said, 'it is IMPOSSIBLE that you are alone. Someone like you! '

Someone like you!

This sentiment was repeated many times through the next few years, pausing briefly during the J-months, resuming, and pausing again during S. The weird part is that nobody ever asks me my relationship-status when I'm actually in a relationship.
So anyway, the most recent 'someone like you!' sentiment came from Sameer when we met last month. And it's got me thinking. Why can't 'someone like me!' (yes it has to be italicized and exclamation-marked) not have a guy in my life?
I'd like to think that it refers to my vivacity and lusty love for life, my irreverent charm or maybe my oh-so-cuteness but well....it could just be that my biological clock has been pointing to 'TOO LATE' since ninth std.
Let's be honest. I love those relationship-status-type relationships. I love flirting and over-analyzing every word, every gesture with Weed and RS and P and M and Shibs and Boss and..well...whoever happens to be around and is nice enough not to have me committed (heh!).

I even enjoy the raw terror that springs up in my throat when the relationship status actually reads 'in a relationship.'
'Someone like me' is a lot of boogeymen. A lot of 'go away, this is my book-and chips time!'
It means you're gonna materialize in every poem I read or write. That some place on my body will remember you for a pretty long time. And it especially means that you will be deconstructed extensively by all my girlfriends and me.
It's pressure, baby!

I'm a hopeful romantic! One who's seen divorce and bitterness and the hard, hard work that goes into making relationships work. J and I had a hard-driven, almost painfully bright romance. The kind where you haven't a clue what you're doing, but just hurtling on desperately hoping it will work out. With S, it was a softening and a toughening. But neither of us were ready to give as much as was needed. If a splitting apart can be tender, ours was. I think we gave each other more during our break-up than during our romance.

Technically, I've been single for the last two years.
I have been lonely a few times, wistful a few times more. With the abysmally long time I take to get over relationships, the first year and half of the second was spent teary and obsessive. In fact, till January this year, I was in 'getting over phase.' Then the Mars Bar came along, and I woke up to the fact that there were still men out there who could make me smile by waving their hands around and telling the class that 'St. Augustine was a sensually fulfilled man.' I came back to Singletonhood with a vengeance which simply means that my battle-worn emotional self was ready to play again.
The thing is, almost all those people who asked That Significant Question knew a little bit of me. They saw the bad jokes, the good writing, the perpetual normalcy. They didn't know about the boogeymen. Didn't know how much it takes to make a tie with me. Or how much it is worth.

' Someone like me.' Are you listening, Universe?








Saturday, June 14, 2008

Rain and The Remains..



It was the perfect evening. Darkness, soft rain, no electricity. Ideal for sunggling under my quilt and read Howards End. I always choose all fiercely English writing on such days. I especially like the Brontes because their novels are all set in gloomy moors seething with a repressed wildness. I is big fan of Victorian gloom in English Literature.



I have just finished 'The Remains of the Day' and loved it. Ishiguro has carved Stevens' character with such intense perfection. From the utterly perfect language, to the stern repression of any untoward emotion, in fact any emotion at all, the psyche of the stereotypical English butler has been examined through Stevens' introspection as well as the sub-text of his narration. The author has also managed to instill the essence of a deeply-felt-but-never verbalized love story between the lines...


The novel is set over a period of approximately thirty years, spanning the two World Wars and the slow death of English aristocracy and Ishiguro has maintained a beautiful balance between defending the aristocrat and his lifestyle, and demonstrating why it had to be left behind.



So...Half of a Yellow Sun to be finished, Howards End to be snuggled up to and The Palace of Illusions to make acquaintaince with. And I definitely want to watch the movies of 'Remains...' and 'Howards End.' Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, old-style English manor-houses...my monsoon is made!

One finger to my temple

I haven't written any poetry in a while. I am in a tired place where there is no humour or poignancy. I've been trying so hard to write, and it comes out whiny, dismal, self-satisfied. Such is my non-fiction.

It is as though my writing cannot escape the issues I have buried most deep inside, things I have never ever spoken of and written about only very vaguely. Those were the days when I had journals. I still have a few...beautifully covered, blank, hand-made paper I cannot resist.

I need to soften the giant lump that settles in my chest every time I attempt to write. To step out of the petty, sordid details that crowd me, begging for expression. Or maybe I need to turn them loose on paper and be done with it. Maybe then, poetry will come to me again. I need to clear when I write poems. Clear in my pain, my joy...

I think I need to go back to my journal.

Friday, June 13, 2008

A Thousand Kisses Deep


For he's touched your perfect body with his mind....

In a world where Leonard Cohen exists, hope is not lost.


Listen to him here.

Plish to note

I am opening roll-er dokan! Apologies to all those who were sending me off to the Furren Universities, but really, roll-stalls will cause less pacing, chip-eating and screaming at my reflection.
So there!

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Letter

Dear Universe
Send me un-jadedness. Let me never become a manager-type person. Send me love that stays even after seeing all my boogeymen. Let me not ration my stubborness, my moods, my brutal honesty. May I retain my shamelessness for all time. Rejoice in being the vague, unstructured, obsessive girl I am.
Remind me that I can always stretch further. That I am responsible wholly and completely for my every move. Strengthen my belief that my joy is big and wrapped up in silence, solitude and eating chips just as much as in good conversation, books and independence. Give me the freedom to say go to hell to those who try to direct me, no matter how well-meaning they may be. Teach me to be good to myself, to take off and be carefree soon as I can afford it! Let me be as melodramatic as I wish and sucks-boo to those who can't take it. Most of all, help me to be grateful without thinking myself indebted for life, to live without compromising on what is most important to me and to imagine with a little more courage each day.
Thank you so very much.

Congratulations


My aunt started her production house in a tiny room on the mezzanine floor in our South Kolkata house. She got out of a marriage and a job, both of which were dying and struck out on her own with a five year old daughter.
This was ten years ago. Today she is happily re-married, the owner of two homes and her own company. I have seen her working. The stress, the sweat, the charm that formed strong alliances. The support of her new husband who has made refusing-to-back-down an art. Even now, when I ask her how she is, she replies with 'just breathing.'
After years of ad-films, Anuranan came into being. Low-budget, with most of the cast and crew becoming like family.
And it has culminated in a National Award for Best Regional Film. I am so proud!

Monday, June 09, 2008

Education

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination Harvard University Commencement AddressJ.K. Rowling
Copyright June 2008
As prepared for delivery


President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates,
The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.
They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.
Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International' s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.


Shibani sent me this a day after I'd been whining about how I'm still told that English Literature is not a 'career.'
Thank you Shibs, for giving my whinings such sincere importance.

Watch the video here.

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Bright as Yellow



And you live your life

with your arms stretched out.

Eye to eye when speaking.

Enter rooms with great joy shouts,

happy to be meeting.


And bright,

bright,

bright as yellow,

warm as yellow.


And I do not want to be a rose.

I do not wish to be pale pink,

but flower scarlet,

flower gold.

And have no thorns to distance me,


but be bright,

bright,

bright as yellow,

warm as yellow.


Even if I'm shouting,

even if I'm shouting here inside.

Even if I'm shouting,

do you see that I'm wanting,

that I want to be so bright,

bright,

bright as yellow,

warm as yellow.


-The Innocence Mission


Listen here.

Thanks Shibani. You brought a splash of yellow on a dark day :)

Love always.

Vague

I am frightened when I am unable to write. Not as in writer's block, but when I am disturbed so deeply that my gut is buried alive.
It's been that way for a while, hence the poems written by other people and the photographs. I have had lots to write about....new intimacies, good talks, active days, terrifying suspicions...but thw words will not come.
I am realizing that I love couching my writing in abstract, beautiful words. And a diary cannot be hemmed in by such artistic demands. I talk straight..my stammer makes it necessary to keep conversation to the point. I am even accused of being outspoken to the point of rudeness.
But in writing, I feel I must be flowing, graceful, subtle.
Disturbance, terror, shattering suspicions are alien to this mindset. It bruises me to be less than honest while writing, but...honesty is raw. Honesty is the big pimple on the cheek, the intensity that most people back away from, being moody because you feel like it, favouring silence rather than small talk...
I need this honesty. I need to write with it. I need to shed layers and move out...

Friday, June 06, 2008

chhobi

E and I. Taken especially for Dad's 50th birthday basket.



In Kamshet, two years ago.