First Blah

Damn it's late...gotta wake up tomorrow but maybe I'll give in to the indulgence of slumber... Incoherent thoughts swirling in my head like a phantasmal opera with its moving, soulful beauty and its primeval agony. Words are flowing from my mind to my fingers, then to my keyboard and finally through a technological maze too complex for me to grasp to this very blog, creating shapes before my eyes...my own thoughts glaring back at me through a monitor. Trying to recall the last song that was played a while ago...but I know it's a lost cause, like trying to get back the love that's gone...How life plays out will always be a mystery people. Is randomness the ever-elusive truth, hiding right where we'd least expect it to, right in front of our faces? 

Much more than a memory

  The ancient tomb could only be aptly described with a single word - 'enigmatic'. Nothing else. Not auspicious, neither ugly nor beautiful. Just enigmatic. Sitting against ,its cold stone wall, one could distinctly feel the queer touch of enigma emanating from it. There it lay inconspicuously, discarded like a boring old toy by this crawling child of a city. The city had newer toys to play with - those tall glass things that shone like diamonds, so bright and 'endearing' that the city had no time for anything else, not the dirty, inhumane slums, not the make-shift huts of those poor workers building these fascinating 'toys', not the crumbling sidewalks, and least of all this ancient,  unattractive tomb, and those like it littered across the city's ever-expanding playpen. But strangely enough, it seemed as though the tomb did not mind the inattention. It stood there patiently like a wise old man, its weathered but still intricate sandstone facade seemed to bear the expression of a gloomy smirk. It knew the game this city played very well. It too was a favorite toy once, sheltering the earthly remains of some famous Lodi royalty, surrounded by plush gardens and admired for its stately beauty. But time has a way with things... Yet there it stood, the tomb, a symbol of ancient times gone by, seemingly more solid than those new, fragile glass toys the city is now so found of. The smirk was unmistakable...

"Hey Musa, I found that character to be plain ol' stupid! You know, the introvert brother who makes goldfish sculptures and goes on to become the famous general and then gives up everything in the end to make 'em sculptures again or somethin'..." on rambled Jha, as we sat on the stone steps of a tomb during one of those lazy Delhi dusks.
" No way man! That guy was pretty exciting. I mean the author does portray a lot of interesting thoughts through that character," I remember retorting defensively.
"Yeah but still... The father on the other hand was awesome! His innate inquisitiveness is so true for most of us, and his utter conviction to believe in possibilities..Man that guy just didn't give up! And remember that part where the travelling salesman convinces him about the magic carpet?"
"Yeah," I had recalled, smiling, "Those episodes were funny, but kinda ironical too."
"Right..ironical...hah! C'mon man, lets get a kulfi or somethin' and then a mausami juice. I found this awesome new place just around the next block...we should check it out!"
  I remember that day quite well. Jha had borrowed my paperback edition of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' and had finished reading it that morning. Neither of us had understood most parts of the novel, but the parts we thought we did fascinated us. Nevertheless, we considered it a brave effort on the part of two young men and had promised ourselves that we'd read it again in five years' time. Maybe then we would grasp it a lot better.
  The kulfi was delicious as usual and the juice exceptionally sumptuous. I remember those summer evenings when sundown ushered a new gleam of life into the city after the deafening stupor of those scorching afternoons. Very gradually, the city used to stir and wake like some carnivorous, nocturnal creature embracing itself for a night-long hunt, or another day of painful starvation. Like the city, Jha and I  used to begin our street-scavenging in the evenings. At that time, I had been in the city for almost a month, and it was Jha who had introduced me to its varying facets. I remember the relief I had felt that first day when I noticed my good old friend from school at the station waiting for me. Noticing me, he had rushed forward in his typical stumbling gait, his short, thin frame donning a t-shirt and trousers, both way too big for him, a relic Converse that belonged to a different era, a face that resembled a perky fourteen-year-old with a beaky nose and a smile that was usually visible for a mile.
"Hey buddy how you been?!! Let's hurry! I got this place for you to stay but if we don't hurry some other sorry arse is gonna take it!"
From that moment on, it was a two-month ride that I would never forget.

  I had decided, much to the anxiety of my ever-worried mother, to backpack across India straight after completing my high school, with the secondary objective of joining a college. The primary objective was to get lost, with an overpowering desire to get away from everything that I had been associated with in my life, a desire to be footloose, a desire that I presume every man experiences at least once in a lifetime. For those of you who know how it's like to leave home and embark for the unknown, the memory must be terrifying and yet surprisingly fond, the time you first realize how small a dot you really are, and how you had taken everything up until then for granted. It is a liberating feeling like no other, but not the kind that removes the shackles, but rather makes your naive mind aware that they (the shackles) are indeed there. But as it so happened, I invariably had a friend from school no matter where I went. I had spent ten years at a boarding school in a beautiful hill  station in northern India, but I had no idea that such a span of time in this country was  enough to come across people from all over the sub-continent! It was because of my school probably, where people came to  study from all over. It was indeed a delightful little world of our own, a place with too many good memories and so few bad ones...And so it was Jha's turn in Delhi...

  We lived a bum-like life for the next two months. The 'place' Jha had arranged for me was in fact a dingy, decrepit shithole where I had to share a double-bed with four other guys. Mercifully, two of them  worked night-shifts, so there were only two of for most of the night. Unmercifully, however, one of them invariably returned from work very early in the morning, usually choosing to sleep between us, emanating an odor that smelt dreadfully similar to the landlady's strong, cheap perfume (I still wonder how he got about doing what I suspected he did, considering the fact that she had three burly sons about his age sleeping in the adjacent rooms!). But Jha had given me the better place. I wouldn't have survived a day in the God-forsaken basement  where Jha used to sleep. Rumor had it that after we'd left, someone had contracted small pox in that basement (there were like four rooms there with an average of three occupants), a decade after the virus was presumed to have been eradicated!
  But we weren't ordinary bums, considering the fact that we usually had sufficient money, dressed reasonably well and were permitted to enter most shops and restaurants. Of course we didn't go in to buy stuff, rather it was the air-conditioning that attracted us during those hot summer days. The best spot to cool off was this unguarded ATM booth in one of the back-alleys in our neighborhood. The booth stayed open 24 hours, which meant the A/C stayed on the whole time, and that we were the beneficiaries of a wonderful 21st century technology. We used to wander the streets for hours, while Jha tried to scrounge something or the other from this vendor or that. He used to shop-lift occasionally, which I disapproved. However, my disapproval did not stem from any moral considerations; it was just that I never had the guts to do it, and the fact that I was positively jealous of the smooth little punk and  his work. He used to be so smooth and nonchalant, more comfortable than a person with a loaded wallet buying the damn stuff! His favorites were this Levi's store and a bookshop that had an amazing collection. Being a passive accomplice, I used to mentally acquit myself by claiming that at least we stole knowledge!
  Jha knew the city like the back of his hand. The public transport buses were a nightmare, especially for me. The destinations were usually scribbled unceremoniously on the sides, but even then they were of no use since  the bus would be long gone before I deciphered the first few letters using my dismally inadequate Hindi skills. The only eligible thing was a number, like 491 or 263, and only God knew where those were headed. Moreover, the conductor used to make it worse in the process of 'helping' me in unintelligible Hindi. It was a marvel to watch Jha though. He recognized the numbers as if he had decided them! The only being, alive,dead or supernatural, who knew where 351A went was Jha. We used to take these buses and travel to every nook and corner of the city, from the shitiest holes to the grandest toys the city had to offer. And after a long day's aimless wandering, we used to cool off on top of this flyover which had an amazing view of the main street below, and of the giant flat-screen TV at one of the adjacent gas stations. At other times we used to head for one of those tombs, and relax in its stony embrace with locally-brewed beers, listening to the unspoken words of a big city night. Life at those moments seemed to converge with everything around us - the tomb, the trees, the streets, the lights, the people, the soil, the shaggy dogs, the ambulances and their dying patients, the stones, the criminals who prowled the streets at night, the self-deceiving thugs who wore suits and drove BMWs by day, the whores, the superfluous glass buildings and the every real slums, the brand stores, the pan shops, the amputated beggar, the holy cows, their divine dungs...everything was one, and one was everything.

  The tomb stood there like a patient old man. It was going to be its last night. In the morning, it was going to be demolished by men to pave way for a residential block. Its smirky expression was still unmistakable. It had  had many visitors over the years - men, bats, ants, flies, dogs...but only men seem to have any sort of attachment to it, like the group of people from the locality who had been protesting against its demolition, or the last man to visit it, who had just left a moment ago. He had stood there, crying silently, whispering to a nonexistent person beside him. He had seemed angry with his nonexistent companion for breaking a promise they had made. Something about a novel and five years still not being over...he then asked the stone wall of the tomb if they remembered... He had probably heard a reply, for he had smiled, turned and walked away, surprisingly pleased. But this time he was not alone. His little friend was beside him again, both engaged in an animated conversation as they left the tomb. Maybe the promise wasn't broken after all...

In search of a more mundane cause for concern

It is funny how sometimes things pass by in blurry, disjointed fashion, like a motion picture in fast-forward, recorded on what is now the archaic magnetic-tapped video cassette. A letter from a dear friend's spirited father, revolutions named after a flower, spiraling food prices, a humiliating defeat for Bangladesh cricket, a restaurant with the best dumplings and the worst service, a call from a long-lost co-conspirator, piles of pages and a glaring monitor, love and other intoxicants, a song, a fierce battle in Zawiya, a toothache and a funny story, a dream and familiar faces, blur and voices, more blur... If you've ever tried looking back on an ordinary week, you probably know what I mean.

Few of these things cause concern, like rising global food prices. For developing nations such prolonged soaring of prices above levels beyond the incomes of a large section of the population can have devastating consequences. The heart-rending account of a construction worker in Dhaka says it all. His earnings of barely $2 dollars a day is woefully inadequate to feed his family of three, as price of rice has increased substantially in recent months. Three meals a day which was once a basic requirement is now a luxury, subjecting his children to chronic malnutrition. As children grow up in different parts of the Third World in such conditions, an entire generation is being raised underdeveloped, both physically and mentally,severely curbing the future prospects of a better world. Besides genuine supply-side concerns tied to nature's wrath at times, there are also issues fueling this inflation that deserve attention, like the loose monetary policies of the developed world, particularly the US where the devaluation of the greenback to reduce US trade deficit comes at the cost of increasing commodity prices, which are priced in dollars. Moreover, speculation in the commodities market, the aim of which is to profit from price fluctuations, benefit from price instability and further deteriorate the situation. Panic buying by nations in world markets add to the mess. Things are to be done and that too without delay, so that better tomorrows arrive without hesitation and my concerns remain limited to more mundane things, like hair loss and whether I would indeed be bald by the time I am thirty five.   

A curious turn, a curious observation and us

After the glasses have been refilled a healthy number of times, the conversation of curious young men invariably take a curious turn. Of course the above statement is only a generalization based on my observation alone, but I think many would identify with it. The other day, after the usual curious turn, I thought I had made a rather curious observation-ingrained in Man's innermost self are just a handful of primeval feelings, like hunger and fear, those that can be observed in any other mammal of lower intelligence, the instincts necessary for subsistence. Civilization dawns as Man uses that intelligence to put layer upon layer on these basic instincts. Our instinct of being 'social' probably goes as far as that of a pack of hyenas, a necessary condition for survival rather than a manifestation of love and care. As for the love of a mammalian parent, it ultimately boils down to the primeval instinct of survival again, the need for continuity of the progeny. I know that this line of thought is extremely grim and fearful, and that it undermines all that we have achieved in the thousands of years as the 'civilized', dominant being that held sway over the planet. Fortunately, our intelligence has been and continues to be more than capable of countering the animal in us, and add layers of probably genuine reasons for our existence.
Nevertheless, the fragility of Man's enterprise and the ease with which the 'layers' can be peeled off can be observed quite clearly in the world we live in today. We uphold the values of civilization with infallible integrity among those in our immediate social vicinity (read country; culture; religion; etc. etc.) but discard them when we encounter those with whom we can identify to a lesser degree, notwithstanding the fact that our 'civilized' mind should have been trained by now to see the things that are common amongst us rather than the things that divide us, which are by far lesser in number and to a great extent only superficial (like skin color for example). However, our antagonisms clearly  develop due to the perceived threat of competition, and therefore survival, or merely because of our belligerent, animalistic nature of dominance. From  the Egyptians to the Romans and then to the great colonial Empire where Darkness Prevailed (if the sun never set in that expansive Empire, then conversely, darkness too had prevailed. This is in fact a more befitting description when we see how the Empire had all but abandoned its 'civilized' values upheld in 'The Island' as it subjugated colonies to its will) we make this particularly displeasing observation, perhaps even with a greater degree of remorselessness and cruelty. The hegemonic 'Leader of the Free World' today operates through a world order that subjugates a significantly major section of the global population under its will via economic strangulation. The signs are even more ominous.
If the reason is survival, then it is hard not to find the argument ludicrous in a world that is still quite clearly abundant enough to provide for us all without us having to restore to cannibalism. And if the reason is dominance, and thereby our unquenchable greed and desire for more, then shouldn't our intelligent, civilized and cultured mind have doused such negative instincts by now with the 'layers' of civility that presumably separate us from animals? A friend of mine made a strong point the other day when he claimed that education doesn't make a difference, because in the end we always seek for more, and thereby have an inherent nature of conflict (because we clearly live in an environment with finite resources) and self-destruction. A more optimistic outlook would suggest that the 'layers' that make us civilized are more permanent, and thus a part of our evolution, where Man's nature is not static but subject to change, just like everything in our vast universe.
I hope for our sake that this is true.    

Ramblings on the idea of 'India', texbooks on the indian economy and the Northeast

The idea of a single, coherent India is something that does not come to one naturally. Like the ever-changing landscape that I observe through a tinted train window whenever I travel long distances and look for a common distinguishing feature in vain, the idea of 'India' remains similarly illusive like that common distinguishing feature which I have searched for several times with varying degrees of futility, a particular thing that would say, 'Hey! This is India'. I sometimes feel that maybe the idea is incomprehensible to me because I was born in a nation that has such a distinguishing feature-but then I observe that most Indians have as vague an understanding of the unifying idea behind their nation as I do! The complexity here seems unique, as no other nation with such ethnic, lingual, religious and cultural diversity have a society that is as traditional as 'Indian' society, where civilization continued unbroken for thousands of years, perhaps uniquely so, deeply rooting the contours of division, while at the same time strengthening the knots of unity. However, it is probably best not to understand it after all, as E. M. Forster warns in his novel 'A Passage to India', that a desire to understand it and impose a single idea where none exists only amount to tragedy. Perhaps this explains why sometimes one of India's greatest achievements since independence from British colonial rule, its ability thus far to have maintained national integrity, also seems to be its greatest tragedy.
This may sound strange, even outrageous to many. Seeing that the course of history had made the partition of British India inevitable, Nehru had remarked that a smaller, governable India was better than a large, unwieldy one. More than half a century and a million mutinies(as Naipaul puts it) later, it seems that the word 'smaller' should be preceded by the word 'how', and then we finally have a question that deserves attention. I raise this question because modern India, within its own territory,  are worlds apart, and with each passing day in this 'reforming', 'liberalizing', 'emerging', 'business-friendly' and 'growing' India, the distance between these worlds are increasing. It is as if India exists to serve the vested interests of a few, those who combine with ruthless efficacy the exploitative potential of the numerous divisions in its fragmented society with the idea of a single India where all are equal.
Standard textbooks prescribed for the study of the Indian economy in undergraduate courses of premier institutions like the University of Delhi rarely mention the Northeastern states of India, known as the 'Seven Sisters', in their analysis of the economy. It is as if they don't exist or that they don't matter, despite the fact a substantial portion of the 'Indian' populace resides there. The overwhelmingly singular policy objective of the center towards the northeast has been to impose at all costs the idea that they are a part of that vague, illusive 'India', and these costs are then justified to the the rest of the nation in the name of national integrity. I have often heard from friends about the dismal conditions in which most common people live there, particularly in the populous states of Manipur and Nagaland, about how law and order is almost non-existent and economic opportunities scarce. A system of patronage and corruption encouraged by the center helps to run these states, which would definitely prove to be more costly a method in the long run than the alternative method that involves a more appealing and long-lasting approach, i. e., through true economic development.
The idea of India can survive only through something that commonly acts as a distinguishing feature. There could be nothing better than this feature being economic opportunity and true development, for and of its people, whether in the northeast, south, Maoist-affected, rural or urban India, in the India of the Rich and in the India of the Poor. Otherwise, as Forster had ominously written, the only feature that would bind the idea of India would be 'the over-arching, all-encompassing sky', indifferent to the plight of men below, and Nehru's 'smaller' India would be on the next most logical path of getting even smaller.

First Bite

   The bus was chugging along lazily one fine winter morning as I sat at the window seat, staring without focus at the dusty panorama of the north Indian state of Haryana-the six-lane expressway, till recently a mule path, that still served manual vehicles drawn by bullocks simultaneously with motorized vehicles like the one I was in, malls that sprung like weed among fields  of endless greenery, liquor stores, toll booths, dirty bazaars with sleazy eateries, village hovels and their barely-clad inhabitants, BMWs, private engineering colleges, lecherous motels, overloaded trucks, herds of traffic-congesting cattle, industrial chimneys emitting smoke purposefully, offensive hoardings as well as well-meaning ones serving public interests, tractors and steamrollers and strange-looking construction machinery, family of five on a scooter, tiny islands of soon-to-be-felled trees, hustling and bustling concrete jungles with massive webs of entangled overhead wires, filthy  urchins and one-legged dogs, more fields of green crops to sooth the eye from the onslaught of vicious change, unfinished fly-overs and dug-up earth...the image seems incoherent to the point of being bizarre, but it is precisely what one sees and indeed feels when travelling through 'emerging India'...bizarre.
   I looked on at the familiarly unfolding scenery with disinterest when my wandering mind suddenly recalled the image of a delicious chocolate cake. The idea of creating a blog to share my rambling thoughts and observations had been at the back of mind that entire morning, but the image of this cake convinced me that I should set about doing it as soon as possible. I know it sounds strange, but sometimes there are moments when strange, wandering thoughts and incoherent images focus on interesting things. I remembered that as a child, I preferred the cream that coated the cake and wondered why do they bother making the other, less delicious parts. As a result of this seemingly idiosyncratic preference, I always savored the cream and grudgingly ate the remainder out of want for nothing better to eat. But with time, I figured that the cream, when eaten with the cake, doesn't taste bad at all, if not better than having the cream seperately. I don't really remember when this change took place, but I think it was when I actually ventured into taking a bite of both simultaneously and let my taste buds experience something different. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Like the progress from a tiny nibble at the cream to a wholesome bite of a cake that reveals its true taste, we understand things piece by piece, layer by layer, as time goes on. We learn when we venture a little further than we previously dared to. My reason for creating this blog is somewhat similar. A space to share what I sometimes think is worth sharing; when I feel that my fellow people can identify with some of the things I have felt or observed, and find it to be of some value.