Category: Uncategorized

Survival


The other day as I was driving down to my favourite shopping place, as is the wont in Mumbai I was stuck in the traffic at the signals. As usual there were people knocking on the window, tap tapping selling me anything from car mobile chargers to agarbatis to Alphonso mangoes! And as usual I avoided their eyes and looked down at my idle hands.

There was a water tanker ahead of my car – a derelict excuse of a truck with a huge tank filled with water behind. It had two huge taps at the bottom of the tanker.( I am sure you all know what I am talking about). I could see people sleeping in the gap in the divider with a sheet to keep out the sunlight at one place and at another I saw a mother cooking on the pavement with a baby on her lap and lots of similar pictures of poverty that dot this city of dreams. I felt sorry, sympathized and turned my thoughts elsewhere ( I consoled myself by saying what can I do????).

Suddenly I saw a young girl- must have been eighteen or nineteen- dressed in a faded yellow salwar kameez and carrying two Jerry cans come right in front of my car. she nonchalantly opened one of the taps and filled the cans and walked back on the hot pavement to wherever she had come from! The driver did not know and neither would the people who bought the tanker of water would know, so what did it matter that this young girl got her water easily. There were many who would have seen her but no one bothered to reprimand her (neither did I, though I was the closest!) But I wondered whether this street smartness would land her in a soup later. The traffic resumed its snail pace and she slowly vanished out of my sight along with the tanker.

I don’t know what she looked like. I doubt if I would recognize her if I saw her again! But what I know is She remains etched in my mind as the ultimate symbol of survival in the city!

Lure of the books

As a child I would love to be alone, play with my dolls or build mud houses, I don’t remember having played with anyone till I was eight or nine!Even then it was with my sister’s friends, but than I made my first friend,(I felt thrilled!) her name was Molly and she was one year senior to me at school. We bonded mainly because we went swimming together. I don’t remember what we talked about but I do remember that we used to hold hands and walk all over the club where both our parents were members. She was the one who egged me to develop my interest in books. She was an only child, so her bedroom was a kids delight, full of foreign toys and Enid Blyton books!She made me borrow books from the library. At first I did it to please her and to feel as grown up as my father or sister(Who always pretended to be grown up from the moment she was born!) but than slowly I got addicted to them. I went through all the Enid Blyton’s at a rapid pace varied my menu to Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Three investigators and the usual fare, children those days used to devour. We parted ways when I was in sixth and I lost touch with her, now I wonder what happened to Molly? I don’t even remember her surname!

My love affair with books continued and I went on to do literature and enjoyed every moment of my five years at the University. But those five years were serious years. I strictly forbade myself unconsciously to read any ‘non-classic’ books ( I know now, I lost out on a lot of good reading!) But this was the time I became a thinking reader rather than a pleasure loving one and the training helped me to appreciate books at another level and gave me much more satisfaction and insight than before. It made me more critical too. I realised then that I had slowly become critical of everything, not only books, I felt I had the power and the strength to criticize without doing any internal assessment of myself. Oh! well that is the pride of the youth ! I forgive myself now for it and I forgive a lot of other young people around me
.

These days I am re-reading books that I read in my youth and childhood (even the Enid Blytons) Believe me, though I finish them much faster than before, I appreciate them two folds!Thankfully I have a family of book lovers so that when we get transferred from place to place, though there is a lot of stuff thrown away, no one even suggests that the old yellowing best friends are ever given away! I hope they last till my days on earth come to an end and are cherished by others.

I haven’t been able to get certain books that I would love to get ( I dare not mention their names for the fear of being laughed at!) So I tried reading e-books….. But the pleasure of lying on your stomach with your legs bent at the knees and up, with a packet of chips or a plate of sandwich is not there. The smell of the freshly printed pages or the musty smell of old pages is not there to tantalize the nostrils! It is no fun to move the mouse when you can use your fingers to flip the next page. But life moves on and the new generation may never know the real pleasure of a paper back but they would have created their new pleasures and who knows their degree of pleasure may be more than ours!

But those who read this please take the time to give me your experiences of reading as feedback so that I believe that I am Normal and not experiencing the feelings of a loner that I was.

The Female Position

“She emerged from the centre of the creative mist, swathed in all the past experiences. The frothy sea tumbled all around her in waves yet like the birth of Venus she continued emerging and dispelling life all around her”. I wonder why I have described “Idea” as a she. Well to begin with, an idea is as turbulent as a female; as flexible too! Being a female I am very proud of this aspect of an idea.

As a child I was always aware of the fact that people felt sorry for my parents who had no sons; but never, I insist never was I or (I think) my sister made cognizant of this through our parents ideas or views. I had once written an essay on the role of the modern women where I began the essay as “In the ancient times the role of women was limited to the household and domestic arena. They played behind the scenes, they were the backbone of the society and they nurtured and cared and reared great men in their backyards. If you notice I have used “Great Men” only, this is not because I have a gender bias but it is because that was the truth.” You might wonder where I got this idea from if not from my parents; actually I got this from all the history books that we study in school. I realized that women from the 8th century started regressing into the back ground or maybe after the birth of Christ (I really haven’t done accurate research on all this). When we search for women in mythology whether its Greek or Indian, we find a powerful mind and in some cases a powerful body (Athena or Durga) and we must remember the deity of learning is Saraswati!

I have, as every woman at one time or the other in her life, felt insecure because of physical frailty. I have also taken advantage of the social bias and got out of a lot of work that I know I could have easily done!
But remember, all the women who read this, we can change the world with “ideas” and we are best equipped to deal with this. Ideas do not need strength nor are their any social bias connected with who gives the idea. It’s very heartening to see magazines doing write ups on successful women, our heart swells up with pride and the small imp called envy rear its head – worm like- to sow its seed of discontent amongst us!

I am not a “Successful woman” per se, in the sense I have no earth shaking achievement to my name, but as The Geeta has advised us, I have fulfilled (Still doing it!) my duties to the best of my ability! Women all around me are doing it all the time without any hope for recognition and that is wonderful.
A minuscule part of me is always dissatisfied with- why I didn’t do this or I could have done that- so I go on stumbling on the road to…… (You fill in the blank). Middle age has brought with a lot of wrinkles, Grey hair and fat! It has also brought with it a sense of peace and calm and an acceptance of certain truths which though unpalatable is bitter sweet and edible!

Men have an equally important role to fulfill, poor things! Most of them do great things yet no one goes gaga over these works. I will at some later date talk about “What I feel is the importance of being men” not today, as I am feeling very “feminist” but just to give an insight into it – their ancestors were responsible for the regression of women but the modern MAN is playing his part in uplifting and pushing woman to her rightful(?) position!


Love

Ultimate fulfillment

Loving life

With a lustfulness

Worthy of death

Human life and

Human emotions

Merge

And the creators create love.
I wrote this when I was in the tenth standard! I do not remember the feelings that made me write this but now it makes infinite sense and I would like to sign off with-all creations are a work of love- whether its the birth of a child or a piece of writing. Treat each with the respect it deserves and create another experience for yourself and others. Give every idea a chance and one might come up with a wonderful creation.


The hut on the mountain


I had this creative urge but unfortunately I was unable to channelize it! I tried to paint after a gap of ten years but the feed back ; it is made by my seventh standard daughter! ( personally I thought it was quite a pretty picture). It was my dream site -towering mountains, a lovely clear blue river meandering through it, with pretty rounded stones dotting the placid waters, the bank fringed with green bushes and trees. The greens, blues and oranges giving me a lot of happiness.

I had invested a lot of money buying brushes, paints and canvas to begin my artistic journey. I had purposely not put my ultimate desire in the painting- that of a hut on the mountain slope mainly because I want to journey to my beautiful hut and a journey cannot be done with one creative step, can it be? But still no appreciation by my small audience!

I think that the fact that I had not invested any emotion in the painting made it so lifeless and two dimensional. I still have another canvas and when I do paint on it, a little spirit of ‘the hut on the mountain’ will be reflected and the appreciation that we all crave for, will be mine!

It’s so ironic that I now live on the eighteenth floor in a city like Mumbai and I can see the mountains in the far horizon (I thank god for that) and instead of a river I have a large drain passing by down below- so near yet so far! For the last three years I have been staying in this city of dreams, living a nightmare! every day has been an effort to survive but at the end of the day I have learnt that there is a very thin line separating dreams and nightmares. it is how you look at the picture- the smog that fills the city every evening can be looked at as the mist on a hilly forest ( You will say ‘ha! ha! very funny!’ in a sarcastic way) but believe me all it takes to change the perspective is your thought process.

Its been very tough ( being a pessimist) to transcend these heights. so every man can reach his dreams if he dares to do so. I discovered this secret very recently hence my attempt to put thoughts on to paper with a hope that it will help me scale my heights and clear all smog that clouds our mind.

I plan to push this very stubborn mind of mine to accept certain facts and hope you can do that to yours too and get your hut on the mountain as I shall mine.