Khadija Ejaz

You can't make this stuff up

2012-01-28T15:44:00.003-06:00

My diary entry from May 26, 1999, in Lucknow...

"This afternoon, a whole bunch of huge scary monkeys grouped into the bathroom for water and there were only us females at home. So we tried to yell and send them away. I found 3 inside and those were thrown out too. I was so scared. I had last gone to wash my face 15 minutes before. It was a dumb experience. Then all of them went to Fakhri mamoo's house and ate everything (the untouched lunch) in the kitchen. The ladies locked themselves up and sent for Baba to send the monkeys away (no males present at this time)."

Shiny happy people

2012-01-28T13:36:00.003-06:00

So many young people.

So young.

It was my first week at the NDTV broadcast training programme. I had started spending over 8 hours a day every day in a room with over 40 people in their early 20s. Most of them were 21-22, there were even a couple of 19-year-olds. I was on the other end of that bridge. In another year I would turn 30.

The last time I had been around so many young people in one room for extended periods of time was in high school. And I had been one of those young people, so it doesn't count. Life since then had been one hard impersonal knock after another. No time to enjoy being young. I was too busy dealing with deaths and almost dyings and God. The last couple of years I had almost exclusively spent in the absence of people my age or younger or even a little older. I had had some sort of inkling about things the whole time but I know it for sure now - life had done something to me. I had gone from 20 to a life-weary 60 that looked like 80. I felt so...desperately (almost gratefully) anaesthetised.

But being around so many young people so suddenly wasn't the only major change in my life. I was in India now, in New Delhi, all by myself. I was in a country I had only visited for summer holidays in childhood and barely at all in the past ten years. I was in a city I had only transitted through too many years ago to bother. My environment had changed overnight from a sanitised, controlled, elephant graveyard to an overcrowded, overstimulating, crumbly third-world capital city. I was so out of my element - and feeling so vulnerable - that for the first few weeks I would not even get out of my chair at the NDTV media institute, not even to go to the restroom or to get a drink of water. I would sit there like a rock for over 8 hours everyday with 40-something young people around me barely able to sit in one place or be silent for more than 15 minutes. I would sit so long that every day felt like a long-distance flight. I didn't speak much either. I was so disoriented by the new faces, new sounds, new smells, new lingo around me, that once back at the shabby room I was renting out, I would not even step out for a walk, even when asked. It took me over a month, 2 months even, to get comfortable enough to allow myself unplanned movement.

That first week, I spent a lot of time observing...absorbing the people in that room with me at NDTV. Collectively they were very exciteable and had very short attention spans. They talked too loud, and they laughed too loud. They seemed to jump straight from neutral to fifth. For many of them it was the first time they had been away from home. With some you could tell from the way they would interact with the opposite sex. They loved taking pictures of each other and of themselves. This was obviously the digital generation. I was raised on that precious non-renewable resource called the 35mm film. They monitored their Facebook accounts more often than they checked their email. Some even kept track of Facebook comments and would come find you the next day if you hadn't been leaving comments on their pictures. It was...overwhelming. On top of everything else for me, it was too much.

I noticed some other things though. I noticed how strange it felt for me to look around and see strong, young, healthy bodies. Strong, young men and strong, young women. Children in grown-up bodies. What a different vibe they gave off compared to the dying and the elderly. It was quite startling. Here there was noise and life and sun. I noticed the strangest of things. Did you know that a young person's hair has a certain shine and a bounce? Their skin looks thicker and shinier, as if soaked in some youth nutrient. Like a ripe golden mango. There is an eagerness in their eyes. Young people talk a lot and smile a lot. Something happens to their body language when they talk to a person of the opposite sex. They begin to smile a little differently, it's almost as if their bodies put on a performance. The boys stand taller, and the girls toss their hair more. The boys hold court with their humour, and the girls applaud them with their laughter.

I don't know why it seemed so strange to me. I thought about it some more. I think I had also started on a phase like that once, but somehow it had got cut short. I had had to grow up and forget about smiles and boys.

That week I felt a strange faraway fondness for these very young people that would be around me every day for the next 6 months. There were so many things I wanted to tell them, so many things they needed to know. About failure, about disappointments, unfair tragedies, and unanswered prayers. I wanted to tell them to channel their youth and their energies to better the world while they still believed they could. I wanted them to believe that their health was more important than money or fame or praise. I wanted the boys to know that clean speech and kindness would make them into better men. I wanted the girls to believe that real men will respect them before they love them. I wanted them to know that in each of them I saw potential, that humility and not arrogance would make that potential flourish. They needed to know that there would be times when their will, their convictions would be tested. They needed to be told that it was okay to stand for something even if it meant letting go of something else. That that's what would separate them from the rest. That it's not going to be easy. That it can tear you apart and leave you on the floor, blind and mute and stupid, wondering for years what it is that you lost.

There was so much they needed to know. These strong, young beautiful, people, each and every one of them. I feared for the realities that awaited them. I feared for the compromises they would make. I feared that they wouldn't ever realise that they always had a choice.

My salvation army

2012-01-28T11:41:00.002-06:00

I was feeling helpless and alone. The way you do when you're slumming all alone in a new city and don't yet feel confident about yourself. Especially when you're from a religious minority and it kind of shows in how you look and the way you talk.

The call had come sometime in the first few months of the NDTV broadcast training programme in New Delhi. It was from a family friend I had known for a brief period in my childhood long ago in Muscat, Oman. She was now married and settled in Lucknow but was in Delhi for her mother's cancer treatment. She had been bringing her mother, whom I had known for a longer period of time in Muscat but had not met in years, to Delhi regularly for treatment. Every week from Lucknow, which was 6 hours away by train one-way.

Aunty needed blood. In the next few hours. Her daughter wanted me to get the word out somehow about her mother's blood type. My blood wasn't the correct type, and I didn't really know anyone in Delhi. Except the young kids who were in training with me, but I didn't know them well enough to ask for their blood. How does one approach someone for blood? I didn't know what to do. I felt helpless and alone.

I've heard stories of people, particularly in India, refusing to donate blood to people they know, friends or respected elders even, just because they were of a different religion or caste. When the time came, they would draw that line. These were often-repeated urban legends from the motherland that would make their way to the diaspora overseas, particularly during times of ethnic tensions. I heard these growing up outside of India.

I was the only Muslim in training at NDTV. I felt self-conscious about it anyway. It was one of the reasons why, after the phone call, I suddenly felt helpless and alone, and why Delhi felt extra empty and foreign.

I hung up the phone. Three of my closest friends at the NDTV media institute crowded up to me and asked me what the matter was. I told them. Turned out that two of them had blood of the very type that was needed. I didn't even get to ask them to donate, they volunteered the minute they found out which blood type it was. They were ready to leave for the hospital immediately. I would've only needed one person to come along, but both my friends with the required blood type decided to go with me. The third friend wanted to come along anyway.

All three of my friends were born and raised Hindus. Bengali, Gujarati, and Rajasthani. The cancer-stricken lady I knew for a while in a past life was a Muslim. They didn't know her, yet they offered her their blood without even being asked. They offered a part of their own personal bodies. They never even let me get to asking them.

Newton's Apple: an Ode to Science

2012-01-25T08:53:00.008-06:00

"It is no more crazy than a dog finding a rainbow. Dogs are colourblind, Gretchen. They don't see colour. Just like we don't see time. We can feel it, we can feel it passing, but we can't see it. It's just like a blur. It's like we're riding in a supersonic train and the world is just blowing by, but imagine if we could stop that train, eh, Gretchen? Imagine if we could stop that train, get out, look around, and see time for what it really is? A universe, a world, a thing as unimaginable as colour to a dog, and as real, as tangible as that chair you're sitting in. Now if we could see it like that, really look at it, then maybe we could see the flaws as well as the form. And that's it; it's that simple. That's all I discovered. I'm just a...a guy who saw a crack in a chair that no one else could see. I'm that dog who saw a rainbow, only none of the other dogs believed me."

- Stuart, "Kate & Leopold"

It happened sometime during the sound class at the NDTV Media Institute. Most of the 40-something apprentices had zoned out because of the technical nature of the subject, probably PTSD-ing over memories of science classes in school. An unfortunate phenomenon because if explained properly - enthusiastically - scientific principle has the ability to suddenly click and come flinging itself at you, wrapping itself around you over and over until you feel like a mummy helplessly sealed in all the possibilities that have suddenly revealed themselves to you. But most students never get to that point. Most students are turned away from science because they were not presented the science of possibility, the science of heroic vision, the science of revolution. Unfortunate, so unfortunate. Because that click when scientific principle dawns on you, really dawns on you, feels like the moment of shock when you realise that you are in love and you can't do anything about the psychedelic colours that are rotating in your eyes. Everybody knows that falling in love, requited or not, is one of life's greatest experiences. One has not lived if one has not loved with wonder and amazement, their mouths hanging open, their sight having long set out on the journey into the far, far distance. Imagine how much a person misses when one does not fall, really helplessly head-first fall, in love. That is exactly the experience a student who is not presented the real juice of science is deprived of.

The sound engineer who had been addressing us was obviously not one of those students. He was supposed to teach us about microphones but had digressed to the aesthetic quality of sound. He had started talking faster and faster, and his eyes had started sparkling. This was a man caught in the throes of reciting poetry about his beloved.

He had already told us that the human ear could only hear a very narrow range of sound. Human beings were only able to hear sounds between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. This is not a measure of how loud the sound is. He made us listen to sounds that were close to 20 Hz and also to 20,000 Hz, and we could barely hear them because they were on the very edges of our ears' hearing abilities. He made us listen to sounds that were off our hearing scale, and we couldn't hear them at all. But the sound was there. Just because you couldn't hear it didn't mean that it didn't exist. It was propagating itself all around us, the waves were probably hitting our eardrums, but because our ears were not built to register sound waves of that frequency, we couldn't even detect its existence. That was a mildly frightening experience.

But everyone knows that dogs can hear sounds that human beings can't. But they can't
see colour like we can. Our perception of light is also determined by what our eyes have been built to detect on the electromagnetic spectrum. Along that spectrum, which to our knowledge is infinite, human eyes can only see a very narrow range, specifically 790 terahertz (blue), 400 terahertz (red), and all the colours in between. It is just EM radiation, and the part our eyes can detect we call light. The ultraviolent radiation and infrared radiation right on the edges of the visible light spectrum? It's there, but we can't see it. Because our sight, like our hearing sense, is very, very limited.

And so it happened, right in the middle of sound class. I was sitting in the front row, my eyes (unlike most of the rest of the class) glued to the sound engineer who was still caught up in the embrace of his love for sound. My mind was uncharacteristically quiet, but that often happens when I'm looking at passion playing out before my eyes.

And suddenly something exploded in my face. It had happened. Scientific principle had clicked. And shaken my insides quite violently.

I looked around. No one had noticed. The class was still slump over. The sound engineer was still going at it. But I would never be the same again.

If our senses are so limited, what makes us think that our understanding of everything isn't? What makes us think that only what we can see or touch or feel is real, and that everything else cannot be? Maybe there are more colours, maybe there are more sounds. We know for a fact that there are and that other living beings around us can sense them. Will you let a dog convince you that there is no such thing as green? Or a painting? Will you let a dog laugh at the senselessness of a Rubic's cube or deny you the rainbow you can see right in front of you? Can you even imagine what existence feels like to a dog? To a fish? To someone with a differently-abled brain and sensory organs? Some creatures can detect electric fields, tell direction based on the Earth's magnetic field (an inbuilt compass!), they can even see in what you think is the dark. Some can see UV and IR radiation the way you and I can see pink. What would you do if you could suddenly see the radio waves around you when you couldn't see them before? What if you could see them in the sky? What would they look like? A new colour? What if you could see them going right through you when you couldn't see them before? Do feelings have a colour? Do they have a sound, or even a temperature, a scent, a texture, a flavour? They say animals can smell fear. How about memories, intentions, intuition, or even sex?

Maybe there are many other ways to exist that we not only live in passive oblivion of but that we actively and sometimes violently deny. And why? Because we cannot detect them? That is like trying to measure time with a ruler. And we don't even know what time is. We don't even know if it exists. We assume it exists because we see change around us. If there is no change, then there is no time? Does change cause time? Is time merely a by-product of change? Bacteria exists not only around us but inside of us. What else may be existing, and in what form, around us? Inside us?

That's what I got from just being introduced to the audible sound spectrum. 20 Hz - 20 kHz. Just a numerical range to the eye, but all the things it could mean... Just one small fact that didn't mean anything by itself, but like a seed that's been planted invisible into fertile soil, it burst out into new life when the conditions were right. When the time was right. Just because you couldn't see it before doesn't mean it wasn't there, waiting, the whole time.

My skin colour around the world

2012-01-24T06:21:00.006-06:00

This past year in India I have been told more than once that I am 'fair'. I wouldn't have thought so much of it except that I know what 'fair' means in India. It means that it's more important than your educational or professional qualifications, more important than your ethic, more important than everytime you failed but had the inner steel to get back up for another blow. It means that you are somehow better and more deserving. Especially if you are a girl. That wouldn't be so bad except it also means that the struggles and dreams of the other darker people around you are worth less. That someone who is even lighter skinned than you is better than you just because of that. That who you are doesn't really matter. Even when you know that everyone is better than you in some way, that some people live lives that would have extinguished you a long time ago. It means that a lot of good, honest, decent people - the kind that humanity continues to survive because of - are told in so many ways that they would be better if only they were more 'fair'. That that's more important than being good, honest, and decent.

I had spent all my life hearing I was 'fair' in the Middle East and in India, and suddenly in America, I was not 'fair' anymore. America relegated me to a new position on the colour spectrum, somewhere in the middle. I was now olive-skinned. I was exotic. I was brown sugar. Brown, brown, brown. Then bronzers came into fashion. You were beautiful if you were brown. 'Fair' is losery, 'fair' is pasty. Ew. You got more sexual attention (often times unwanted) if you were brown, but that also meant that that's all you got. After ten years of Jennifer Lopez and Beyonce and Shakira, I accepted it. It took me 10 years, but now I was brown, and I was proud.

It's not like I did that all on my own. I got a lot of input over the years. It made me realise that the way I saw myself was a lot different from how other people saw me. That I couldn't do anything about it. That I was imprisoned in my skin. I specifically remember a very white coworker coming up to me at work once and telling me that the skin colour of my Yahoo! Avatar was too light. He didn't mean it in a bad way, but I was surprised. I had set it to a light brown. I thought it over and changed it to a darker brown shade, even though, all ego set aside, I was sure that's not how I looked. I didn't like how it made me feel. I felt like I was being forced to change my basic understanding of my own skin even though I was the one in control of the computer mouse.

I don't think too much of skin colour anymore. I find it irrelevant. I usually base how attractive I find another person on how healthy and open they seem. I think I am colourblind, even when it comes to myself. It took a lot for me to get to this point. Maybe that's why I react badly when I am now included in various 'Fair & Lovely' references or asked with movie star wonder and fascination if I'm Kashmiri. That kind of attention makes me cringe. This has happened too many times. And it's always unwanted. I am more than my skin colour. My beauty is because of my ferocity and my vulnerabilities. Everyone's beauty is because of that. I have lived and contributed to other people's lives. I have meant something to people along the way. Other people have meant something to me. Those people were good, honest, and decent. They were more than their skin colour. I am more than mine. And I'll be damned if I let anyone change the way I look at myself again.

We're experiencing technical difficulties

2012-01-23T16:23:00.004-06:00

I am a strong person. I believe in certain things. I have put in my time, I have paid my dues. I stand up for other people, and I stand up for myself. These are things that have rescued me from the dangers of quick-fixes and instant gratifications and superficialities. By now I have learned to rely on these things that I believe in blindly. I expect them to work the way I expect my hand to obey me when I tell it to get out whatever's fallen into my eye.

What does one do when the moral machinery of one's life fails? When something has fallen into one's eye as somethings always do, but one's hands don't obey one's commands, one's expectations anymore? Your eyes begin to water, you can't blink, you can't not blink, you feel like you have a razor blade jutting out of your eyeball, every second that it's in there feels like you are being irreparably damaged, and you can't do anything about it. You can't even breathe properly. And you're panicking. You just stand there feeling stupid and exposed, vulnerable, unable to help yourself with something so small because somewhere along the sensory and motor neural pathway something has started malfunctioning, something is preventing you from fulfilling your basic primal instinct - the ability to protect yourself, the ability to do something to minimise pain.

I don't know anymore if the things that have worked for me without fail so far and got me through times of despair work anymore. I just don't know anything anymore. It's been like this for 6 months now. I thought maybe I was exhausted and needed to get back to the things that usually recharge me, but those aren't working now. I don't really know what the point is of being born, taking all those tests through school, worrying about your face or your body, watching television, being the bigger person, pushing yourself to be the best you can be, working so hard all your life for people you don't even like, getting knocked down over and over and over again in various flavours just so you can get up everytime and get back on the hamster wheel for until the next time you fall off. One day you say, I'm tired, I don't think I want to get back up. I'll only get knocked down again anyway. Why did I have to get knocked down anyway when I was doing all the right things and putting in my time and showing up and being sincere? I must not be doing something right. Maybe it's all crap, all that stuff about teamwork and compromise and doing the right thing. At some point, when you're lying in your hamster cage with your face buried in wood shavings that smell like the litter needs to be taken out, you realise that you're tired and maybe want to keep lying in your own litter. You realise that the wheel can wait, the litter can be taken out tomorrow, that nobody was ever looking at you. You, the pathetic faceless ball of fur lying lifeless at the bottom of the cage. One day you say no, you want to be selfish, you want to say, goddammit what about me??

Then what do you do?

In the Queen's English

2012-01-23T11:06:00.002-06:00

Insight from the 50s into the colonial hangover. Helps me understand what I once heard my father say about how people used to look up to Britain as the center of all that was noble, pure, and perfect. A remnant of that phenomenon was seen in action during the wedding of Prince William. I didn't understand why the Indian media was saturated with some foreign royal wedding to the extent that it was. It's not like the concept of royalty is an exotic novelty in India. The whole thing faintly smacked of a colonial hangover, but I wasn't so sure until I read the following excerpt. What makes my inability to relate to India's fascination with Great Britain a little frightening is that I can now recognise bits of a colonial hangover in me before I actually went to live in another foreign country I also thought was my own. Change 'British' to 'American' and you have history repeating itself all over again with the American Dream.

"Belief in an ideal dies hard. I had believed in an ideal for all the twenty-eight years of my life - the ideal of the British Way of Life.

It had sustained me when as a youth in a high school of nearly all white students I had had to work harder or run faster than they needed to do in order to make the grade. It had inspired me in my College and University years when ideals were dragged in the dust of disillusionment following the Spanish Civil War. Because of it I had never sought to acquire American citizenship, and when, after graduation and two years of field work in Venezuela, I came to England for post-graduate study in 1939, I felt that at long last I was personally identified with the hub of fairness, tolerance and all the freedoms. It was therefore without any hesitation that I volunteered for service with the Royal Air Force in 1940, willing and ready to lay down my life for the preservation of the ideal which had been my lodestar. But now that self-same ideal was gall and wormwood in my mouth.

The majority of Britons at home have very little appreciation of what that intangible yet amazingly real and invaluable export - the British Way of Life - means to colonial people; and they seem to give little thought to the fantastic phenomenon of races so very different from themselves in pigmentation, and widely scattered geographically, assiduously identifying themseves with British loyalties, beliefs and traditions. This attitude can easily be observed in the way in which the coloured Colonial will quote the British systems of Law, Education and Government, and will adopt fashions in dress and social codes, even though his knowledge of these things has depended largely on secondhand information. All this is especially true of the West Indian Colonials, who are predominantly the descendants of slaves who were forever removed from the cultural influence of their forefathers, and who lived, worked, and reared their children through the rigours of slavery and the growing pains of gradual enfranchisement, according to the only example they knew - the British Way.

The ties which bind them to Britain are strong, and this is very apparent on each occasion of a Royal visit, when all of them young and old, rich and poor, join happily together in unrestrained and joyful demonstrations of welcome. Yes, it is wonderful to be British - until one comes to Britain. By dint of careful saving or through hard-won scholarships, many of them arrive in Britain to be educated in the Arts and Sciences and in the varied processes of legislative and administrative government. They come, bolstered by a firm, conditioned belief that Britain and the British stand for all that is best in both Christian and Democratic terms; in their naivete they ascribe these high principles to all Britons, without exception.

I had grown up British in every way. Myself, my parents and my parents' parents, none of us knew or could know any other way of living, of thinking, of being; we knew no other cultural pattern, and I had never heard any of my forebears complain about being British. As a boy I was taught to appreciate English literature, poetry and prose, classical and contemporary, and it was absolutely natural for me to identify myself with the British heroes of the adventure stories against the villains of the piece who were invariably non-British and so, to my boyish mind, more easily capable of villanous conduct. The more selective reading of my college and university life was marked by the same predilection for English literature, and I did not hesitate to defend my preferences to my American colleagues. In fact, all the while in America, I vigorously resisted any criticism of Britain or British policy, even when in the privacy of my own room, closer examination clearly proved the reasonableness of such criticism.

It is possible to measure with considerable accuracy the rise and fall of the tides, or the behaviour in space of objects invisible to the naked eye. But who can measure the depths of disillusionment? Within the somewhat restricted sphere of an academic institution, the Colonial student learns to heal, debate, to paint and to think; outside that sphere he has to meet the indignities and rebuffs of intolerance, prejudice and hate. After qualification and establishment in practice or position, the trials and successes of academic life are half forgotten in the hurly-burly of living, but the hurts are not so easily forgotten. Who can predict the end result of a landlady's coldness, a waiter's discourtesy, or the refusal of a young woman to dance? The student of today may be the Prime Minister of tomorrow. Might not some future important political decision be influenced by a remembered slight or festering resentment? Is it reasonable to expect that those sons of Nigeria, the Gold Coast, the West Indies, British Guiana, Honduras, Malaya, Ceylon, Hong Kong and others who are constitutionally agitating for self-government, are completely unaffected by experiences of intolerance suffered in Britain and elsewhere?"

- ER Braithwaite, "To Sir, With Love"

A Black man in Britain

2012-01-23T10:46:00.004-06:00

From the chapter where the author - a well-educated, well-dressed, well-spoken Black man - has been openly turned down for work a number of times because of the colour of his skin in the Britain of the 50s.

"I had now been jobless for nearly 18 months. Disillusionment had given place to a deepening, poisoning hatred; slowly but surely I was hating these people who could so casually, so unfeelingly deny me the right to earn a living. I was considered too well educated, too good for the lowly jobs, and too black for anything better. Now, it seemed, they even resented the fact that I looked tidy.

When my demobilisation became imminent I had written to my uncle about the problem of clothes rationing, and, over a period of months, he had sent me a supply of underwear, shirts, socks, ties and four nice looking suits which fitted me tolerably well; the clothing coupons I had received at the demob center were used in purchasing a few pairs of very serviceable shoes.

Caught like an insect in the tweezer grip of prejudice, I felt myself striking out in unreasoning retaliation. I became distrustful of every glance or gesture, seeking to probe behind them to expose the antipathy and intolerance which, I felt sure, was there. I was no longer disposed to extend to English women or elderly people on buses and trains those essential courtesies which, from childhood, I had accorded them as a rightful tribute, and even found myself glaring in undisguised hostility at small children whose innocently enquiring eyes were attracted by my unfamiliar complexion.

Fortunately for me, this cancerous condition was not allowed to establish itself firmly. Every now and then, and in spite of myself, some person or persons would say or do something so utterly unselfish and friendly that I would temporarily forget my difficulties and hurts. It was from such an unexpected quarter that I received the helpful advice which changed the whole course of my life."

- ER Braithwaite, "To Sir, With Love"

Let them have cake

2012-01-21T17:35:00.001-06:00

I wondered about a lot of things after receiving my fellow intern's text message. It had been a long physically exhausting year at NDTV. It had even been an emotionally exhausting year. I wondered about what the intern had just told me, that she'd heard that a number of NDTV's shows had ended up winning at the ATA and ENBA awards. I was at home that day, but she had a shift at work. She told me that the famous faces of NDTV were celebrating on an upper floor with cake and champagne. Some of them were a bit tipsy too. It was a big achievement, winning those awards.

Only a few weeks earlier I had been temporarily pulled off a show that I had been helping transcribe footage for and made to help the intern who had been assigned to help put together NDTV's submissions - correctly formatted showreels and application forms - for the ATA and ENBA awards. They were already past the deadline and needed all the help they could get. Every passing day was like a dragon breathing fire down our necks. These were the shows that NDTV is famous for. A lot of famous tempers would get upset if the submissions didn't make it. A lot of smaller heads would roll. Ours were the smallest, so the blade of the guillotine hung silent and sharp and extra large over us.

The intern and I worked hard on those award submissions. We managed to not get caught in the politics that was playing out between the two fulltime employees who were managing the submissions. We stayed back late, really late, like until 5 in the morning, in the edit cabins for a few nights even. Those were the nights of soggy Subway sandwiches and McDonald's deliveries. At some point we started to get the feeling that one of the two employees was starting to dump her own work on us. We started to feel taken advantage of. Sometimes she was hard to get a hold of. Sometimes she tried to psyche us - unpaid interns who were actually paying for the training - into doing more of her work, but we were told that we were already doing all the work she should've finished earlier. It was difficult managing all of it. But the intern and I finally got the bull by the horns and got the submissions ready into nice little efficient manila envelopes all by ourselves, one envelope for each show, complete with neatly filled out application forms and two copies of the showreel burned onto separate CDs. Everything clearly marked out with black markers. The whole thing had been so unmanageable and disorganised at first, it was satisfying to look at those manila envelopes, so well-behaved in their crispy bulging yellowness. The intern and I had done a great job, we were so proud of ourselves. All those late, late nights at the edit machines, all the panicky running between archives and evasive employees and half answers and uncooperative middle people and technical failures. We had taken over from a fulltime employee on a task that we had known nothing about and had executed it like professionals. Because of the two of us, NDTV would make it to the awards that year.

So that day, with my cell phone in my hand on my day off, I wondered what colour the cake was. I wondered about the feelings of exclusion and anonymity that were suddenly squatting stupidly in my stomach. I felt like I had just found out that I had been dumped because an acquaintance had seen my lover with someone else. Celebrating my insignificance with cake and champagne.

The Serious Sophomore

2012-01-19T13:36:00.003-06:00

Dated August 21, 2000, in Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA...

Cryptic

It's been 19 years since I first got here, and I have understood and realised time and time again that I have been one who has never been understood. I guess it's partly my fault since I put up a very superficial cover. In fact, I have put that cover up for so long that it's now a part of me. Who am I? I don't even know myself. Am I insane to be thinking on such lines? Or does everyone's mind work that way? I wish I could know.

The Homesick Freshman

2012-01-19T13:31:00.003-06:00

Khadija's log, stardate April 21, 2000, probably in my dorm room in Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA, age 18.

How much I miss home

Not until I saw a picture of the very place I lived in for the past decade and more did I realise how home-sick I really am. Surfing the net quite randomly, I came across a picture of Muscat in which you can almost see my house. Sigh. My head and heart could implode (or explode, as far as I care). I have some amazingly wonderful memories of home and I am very, very homesick. I wonder if I will settle down there later in life, like my family before me...?

Sleepless in Tulsa

2012-01-19T13:11:00.003-06:00

Twenty-four years old, and yet another guy had left me, this time in record time. So I continued to scribble...

Another heartbreak. I'm better now as opposed to two weeks ago, but I still have relapses. My mood swings aren't as extreme, thank goodness. I'm going to be 25 in a little over 3 months. I feel just like my teen self though. My life has changed a lot since I was 18. I could've never imagined then what'd I'd become. No way at all. My life has totally always been unexpected. It's a little frightening how some things are out of one's hands. But it's cool. I'm not complaining. Certainly my life is the scenic route. Oh but I'm still the sensitive girl. I've always been sensitive and that's made my life traumatic many times. Over the years I'd learned to portray a tough tomboyish exterior, but I know that all that's just for show. I am scared of lots of things but I try not to act on it. I make myself emotionally availabe for all external sources too many times, and that has a tendency to wrangle my nerves. Oh but my heart's still hurting, ow. I feel grief and I feel suddenly alone yet again with no equal companion to settle my soul. My heart breaks. I thought that I had found a mate to open up to. I was being myself and finally feeling fearless for the first time in my life. And now that it's gone so suddenly, my heart aches. The first day my throat was all locked and dried. My stomach sank. I felt my soul go silent. Oh why do I feel all these feelings. Why why why. Why can't I just be numbed out like the rest of the world I live with. Why am I such a misfit. Why can I not find someone to keep up with me. Why have I always felt so awkward. I never belong anywhere. I never belong. Ouch, my heart's breaking. Oh, help. Such sorrow, this is unbearable. My heart aches. Damn it, I am just a stupid girl trying to protect myself from everything by pretending to be tough. Oh, I hate pretending. I am not the same person I used to be a long time ago. Goodness gracious, my heart aches so.

Then I woke up in the middle of the night in tears and began scribbling again...

Oh, my heart. Oh, what's wrong with me. Why can I not move on. What is happening to me. I feel my soul in chains. Oh, God, please, please, help me. Help me, please, take off these chains. I feel like I cannot live. I feel like there are two people inside me. One that longs to be free, and one that just cannot be free. Oh my God, oh my God, please help me.

Note to Self

2012-01-19T12:58:00.004-06:00

An old personal note from when I was 24 and had started my first real fulltime job at the brand spankin' new Deloitte & Touche office in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. I had been living by myself in America since I was 18, and I would continue to be there for another 3 years.

Another Moment of Awkwardness

India, Oman, the USA. Where do I fit in? Am I going to live my whole life like the mockingbird that I now feel like? Where is my home? Why does it feel so far away? Is this how everyone feels like, or is it just in my destiny? When shall I develop a circle of my peers? My peers, my own peers, exchange thoughts and ideas, go to the same events? I feel quite alone, although I'm less aware of it somedays. I feel like a misfit, I have always felt awkward, but I thought that things would change once I grew up. I am consistently disappointed with quality (or lack thereof) of intellectual minds around me. Where are all of my companions? Where is it all? Shall I ever fit in, be part of a group of friends and like (or unlike) minded individuals? Why do I always feel like I am on another plane most of the time? It pains me to speak to apparent peers and feel an invisible wall separating me and them by light-years of understanding. It is frustrating to be this way. It's like being in one of those nightmares where I am screaming but no one can hear me. Ugh! I express disgust!"

Message in a Bottle

2012-01-18T09:08:00.006-06:00

I remember this page from the summer of 1999. I had finished my 12th board exams that March (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Biology - my parents' concept of 'keeping one's options open'), and like any other Indian student that year and every year until then and every year since then, I had been shoved into a volley of university entrance exams. Engineering, medical school, and architecture (a token option for me because, well, 'she always drew well'). I had been wanting to study interior design, art, literature, or mass communications, but those were not 'serious' careers, so nobody gave it a second thought. My family had shuttled me to our hometown of Lucknow which I had only ever visited over summer vacations past, and there I went over my textbooks over and over, everything that had already been memorised for all the exams I had sat through in school over the past 6 months. Summertime in India is entrance exam time. The giant cog of the giant machinery that is the Indian education system. If the education system was the pyramids, then the students would not be the building stones, they would not be the slaves pushing those stones, they would not be the slaves applying grease between the stones and the ground so that the stones could move easier. The students would be the grease.

I can remember myself very clearly that day. I was 18 years old with very long straight dark that went up to my waist which was probably tied up in a bun to give my neck and back some much needed air. I weighed 45 kilograms. That evening I was sitting in the courtyard of our crumbly ancestral home because it was too hot to sit elsewhere. I must've sat the way I'm sitting right now, cross-legged, perched on a rickety wooden chair or a rope-and-wood charpai, perched between the end of a clueless childhood and the beginning of a farce which became my life. I had my writing board, a shabby cardboard-and-metal Indian one, on my lap, the same one I still have with my favourite Urdu couplets neatly written all over with a thick blue marker. I was bored, I couldn't study any more, I didn't know where my life was going because no one would tell me. It had already been made clear that no one wanted to hear where I wanted my life to go.

I used to doodle. Everywhere. On everything. I used to draw faces and curvy paisley abstract act. That day I doodled the ancient bathroom door in front of me, the one that was crooked like the leaning tower of Pisa. I was bored, so I doodled it. I was even more bored so I drew the other biology diagrams I knew like the back of my hand around the bathroom door. I was so bored.

I found this page in my old papers today, over 10 years later. I remember doodling this page, I remember feeling bored about it. I remember no one noticing where my skills lay, and I remember many days in my 20s when I'd sit in my computer science classes or at my IT job with a green card almost under my belt and wonder why I felt like screaming, screaming, screaming. I remember being that 18-year-old who couldn't have known that she was on the edge of the greatest betrayal of her life. I wish I could race back to her in that courtyard and tell her to get up and run from the decade of meaningless life that lay ahead of her. The poor child, the poor kid. Somebody, tell her!

But no one can reach her where she sits by herself in that courtyard in summertime Lucknow in 1999. She doodles on, almost as if to say, 'Khadija was here'.

Today, I can read what she had written on the back of this page in blue ink:

"It's been 1-1/2 weeks and I am bored to death, in case you'd want to know. There's nothing to do except stare at my texts and look blankly at the walls; if I'm hungry, there's nothing constituting the term 'snacks' and I haven't left the place for all this time except once. I feel absolutely drowsy for some strange biogeophysical reason, and so all I do (other than the above mentioned energetic activities) is sleep. I wake up late, have lunch, strive not to sleep in the afternoon (after failing at the monstrous task), have dinner and sleep. Not to mention the extreme lack of light and water and the abundance of dust and mosquitoes (quite enough to trigger my inhalatory problems concerning the former). No faces to see, just the walls (oops! How could I forget the ceiling), no walking any place and of course, monkeys. Ok, so I'm spoilt. So I'm a brat, but I am shit bored flat. In short, I can't imagine how I'd ever live in this country permanently and feel at a loss of nationality. Painfully bored, and that's not the first time. Personally, I call it a waste of my time. I could've done plenty in all the days I've lost.

PS - Oh, did I mention the tape recorder's not working?"

No more. No more days shall be lost now. That day a child doodled simply because it's who she was. But today, more than a decade later, I have noticed her, I have found her note, even though that's all that is left of her. I will go and find her. I will go and tell her that on the other side of what were supposed to be the best years of her young life is me, and that I see her even if no one else ever did. I will not let her be betrayed again.

Shedding my skin

2012-01-15T17:21:00.003-06:00

Today I am 30 years old. My face has suddenly started looking harder, I've lost a lot of the puppy fat that used to pad the hard edges of my face. Today I am also letting go.

This is a t-shirt I have had for over 10 years. I was 18 years old when it was given to me where I worked (and thoroughly enjoyed my time) as a desk clerk at Wentz Hall at the Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. I had held a job before, but only for a short time, and I had disliked the negative atmosphere there. The desk clerk position which I ended up holding for a year was the first time I was getting paid for being part of a team that was happy and where the dynamics were constructive and cooperative. And I got to smile at boys who'd stop by the desk and talk to me.

I remember the day I got this t-shirt. I hadn't even started working yet, I had just been hired. I had wanted this job for a very long time, it had just seemed like something I would be so good at. It was December, I was going to start working in January. I had attended my first all-team meeting and was riding high. That's where we were all given these t-shirts for free. It had the names of all the residence halls - Wentz, Stout, Iba, Parker - on it in sign language on the front, and on the back it had the categories of the community programmes every floor was expected to organise throughout the year, like health, sexual, social, etc.

I was 18 years old, and the Fruit of the Loom t-shirt was too big for me. I remember that day. I had recently started wearing my long, straight, dark brown hair loose and had even more recently bought my first very own shade of dark brown lipstick. It was the late 90s, makeup was brown back then. I wore the t-shirt immediately after the meeting on top of what I was already wearing and loved the way it fell on my little body. The team teased me for the way the t-shirt fitted me. I was laughing a lot that day, it was a happy day. I remember how on my way back to my residence hall, two Arab guys who also worked at the desk - we called them Omar A and Omar G - laughed and said, "hey Khadija, nice dress!" I was wearing the t-shirt over jeans but it could have sufficed on its own as a short dress, Spice Girls style.

The t-shirt never lost its shape or texture for many years. At first I used to wear it proudly around the university campus. Then it got demoted to being worn under sweatshirts and then with pajamas. It was a nice soft shade of grey, and everytime I wore it, no matter if I was an struggling 22, a disillusioned 25, a worn out 29, I knew I always had that happy day when I was 18, when I really, really felt part of something.

Today I am 30 years old. Today I am in Oman where my parents still live. Today I walked up to my closet and noticed that I had 3 separate sets of clothing. Three separate sets of clothing for 3 separate Khadijas I had been. One was the remnants of my wardrobe from my 10 years in America. This included some work shirts, particularly one orange one I used to wear with my black suit for recruiting events at my university whenever I'd go back as an alumnus from my company. And a Queen t-shirt because I used to believe in their music when no one used to believe in me. Another set of clothing was all the rich satin and silk Indian party clothes my mother would keep getting made for me compulsively in Oman in my absence when I was in America. Most of them I've never worn. They've just hung there, the collection growing over the years, desperate evidence of a panicky mother who wanted to convince herself that her daughter was still with them and that things would never change from when they all used to go to parties together in happier days. The most recent wardrobe I have now is of the cheap off-the-street clothing I had hand-washed and worn to death living by myself, as purification or penitence, in Delhi. Three different wardrobes for 3 different Khadijas, and she couldn't remember being any of them, even the most recent one. It was time to let them all go.

I sorted through all 3 sets of clothing. I sorted through every item, acknowledged the memory of it, the times we had been through together. The Khadija of that wardrobe peered over my shoulder every time. I put aside a lot of items for donation, but for the first time, I decided to let go of the t-shirt I had got the day I had worn my hair long and loose with brown lipstick at 18. For the first time, I didn't feel the need for its armour anymore. So I decided to let go of the girl I used to be because today she is 30, she has lived in 4 countries, worked many jobs and volunteered many places, written poems in secret for men she's fallen in love with along the way, and her body has finally stopped changing. She has figured out how to make make-up work for her. Brown lipstick is even making a comeback. Life has finally come full circle, and another lap now begins.

A story I was told

2012-01-15T15:52:00.001-06:00

I once had a supervisor for a short while at this job I worked at in America. He was Asian, originally from Cambodia, and extremely handsome, classy, polite, and humble. Everybody thought he was so charming, like a movie actor or a model. He was soft-spoken yet articulate. He dressed well too. He was young, probably in his 30s, and married with children. College-educated with a well-paying job, he had done everything right. He always had a very soothing sort of quiet energy to him, he never talked more than necessary. Turns out though that he had come over to the United States as a refugee when he was very young. His father had been killed by the Khmer Rouge, and his mother had migrated to the US with all her children. They all used to live in a small house in shady North Tulsa, and they kept getting evicted because there were too many of them living in it. They didn't have a lot of money and the mother couldn't speak English; all the children grew up working jobs to keep the family going. So many years later, my supervisor and his family had moved out of that small home he grew up in and was now living the American Dream, but he occassionally went back to that broken-down house in that bad part of town to quietly look upon it from the outside. He didn't remember his father at all, he had been too young.

Living Fast

2012-01-07T05:12:00.003-06:00

"I live with a constant sense of being pressed for time. I have to do everything now - get married, have children, win races, make money, ride motorcycles, jump off cliffs - because I might not have the chance later. It's an odd gift, that sort of concentrated living, and perhaps I don't always apply it to the right things. I'm either going at 150 percent, or I'm asleep."

- Lance Armstrong, "Every Second Counts"

L is for Lance

2012-01-07T04:58:00.003-06:00

"She was right, and I knew it. I apologised, and gave some thought to winning and losing, and how to handle each. When you win, you don't examine it very much, except to congratulate yourself. You can easily, and wrongly, assume it has something to do with your rare qualities as a person. But winning only measures how hard you've worked and how physically talented you are; it doesn't particularly define you beyond those characteristics.

Losing, on the other hand, really does say something about who you are. Among the things it measures are: do you blame othrs, or do you own the loss? Do you analyse your failure, or just complain about bad luck?

If you're willing to examine failure, and to look not just at your outward physical performance, but your internal workings, too, losing can be valuable. How you behave in those moments can perhaps be more self-defining than winning could ever be. Sometimes losing shows you for who you really are."

- Lance Armstrong, "Every Second Counts"

Cancerians

2012-01-03T17:34:00.003-06:00

"I was a success story - for the moment. But if I got sick again, I would no longer be a success story, and the truth was, at times I was still as scared and anxious as a patient. What if the cancer came back? Each time I visited a hospital I had an uneasy reaction. The first thing that struck me was the smell. If I did a smell test I could find a hospital with my eyes closed: disinfectant, medicine, bad cafeteria food, and recycled air through old vents, stale and artificial. And the lighting: a leaky radiant, it made everyone look pale, like they didn't have quite enough blood in their bodies. The sounds were artificial and grating: the squeak of the nurses' rubber-soled shoes, the sound of the hospital mattresses. A hospital mattress is covered with plastic, and I remembered how it felt and sounded as I shifted in the bed, the crackle of the covering beneath me, every time I moved, crackle, crackle, wrinkle, wrinkle.

These are the odors and sensations and images that all cancer patients carry with them no matter how far removed they are from the disease, and they are so traumatic, so concentrated, that they can bring about reactions years afterward.

Some people even get physically ill when they encounter sights or smells that remind them of illness. There was a story in the New England Journal of Medicine: a woman was treated for breast cancer with very arduous chemo, and she suffered violent bouts of nausea. Five years later, she was walking in a mall when she ran into her oncologist, the doctor who had treated her. She threw up. So that's how cancer stays with you. And it has stayed with me."

- Lance Armstrong, "Every Second Counts"

The Solitary Reaper

2012-01-02T06:39:00.002-06:00

"The fun was over. I was no longer a part of them. I watched them dance and that terrible emotion, which I rarely allow to surface began to assail me. I wondered if there would ever be a man in my life. Would a man see beyond my body? Would anyone put their arms around me and dance wth me? Would anyone kiss me passionately? Would I ever be needed by a man emotionally or would I always be regarded as a burden for someone to take care of? A silent tear unseen by any human eye trickled down my face as Lionel Richie's 'Hello' blared in the background, the dancer's put their arms around each other and were lost in discovering each other's world.

I was left alone with my thoughts. The realisation that I would be disabled all my life dawned upon me. I had always imagined that when I grew up, I would be normal."

- Malini Chib, "One Little Finger"

First day at school

2012-01-01T09:32:00.003-06:00

"It was my first day at Xavier's, and I did not know how others were going to react to my disability. I entered the classroom. There was a stunned silence. The silence was interrupted by the irritating, incessant noise of the motor of my electric wheelchair. There were whispers and unsure shuffles. The professor himself looked most scared and apprehensive.

They must have wondered who this heap of undulating mass in an electric wheelchair was. Has she entered the wrong class? I parked myself in the front row. The class began. At least the entrance was over with.

'Your names please', said the professor, turning to the person next to me.

'Malini Chib', I said my name, which I know sounded completely garbled to all around me. No one understood. The professor looked perplexed. He asked again. I spoke again. He thought I had not understood the question. He was irritated, so were 88 other students. I tried spelling my name. He did not get me. I began to panic. I tried again. My speech was getting worse and worse. He looked away impatiently, He had not understood. I heard a cry from a student from behind. 'She said "Malini"'. Eureka! She had understood at last. I had held up the class for 15 minutes. The professor smiled reluctantly but I did not care. At least I had overcome the first hurdle. Now, 88 of my clasmates knew my name. They also knew I had a speech problem. Although it was awful to have all those piercing eyes staring at me, I was happier than before I came in. Now I had some identity. I was not just a lump of flesh on a wheelchair."

- Malini Chib, "One Little Finger"

Naam chhote, darshan bare

2011-12-31T10:52:00.004-06:00

Once upon a time there was a slum in New Delhi near the tomb of Humayun, the mild-mannered Mughal emperor who fell to his death from a ladder in his library. A few centuries after his death, a young woman walked into that slum with a camera and tripod slung all over herself to conduct an interview and take some shots for the NGO she was volunteering with. She was accompanied by another young volunteer. He was a college student, a Youth Congress leader, who visited that slum often as part of the NGO's Right to Information programme. He and his team helped make the people who lived in that slum aware of their rights as the citizens of India because those rights were often denied to them.

The young woman and the young man couldn't have been more different. She had an Indian passport but had never lived in India. He probably didn't have a passport because he had never travelled outside of India. She had travelled east from the Western hemisphere to be there. He had travelled north from Rajasthan. A decade yawned between the two of them. But he was her guide that winter afternoon in one of the most densely populated parts of the world. She had been asking him a lot of questions about himself, his work, and the people he had met at the slum. She had never been to a slum before and didn't know what to expect. They had taken an autorickshaw to Humayun's Tomb and had then started walking down a dust path right around the corner.

And then it happened.

A handful of scrawny brown children came tumbling down the path and called out to the young woman. "Hiiiii, Didiiiiii!"

They were gone as fast as they had appeared. The young woman and the young man kept walking. She didn't pay any attention to the children, they had probably mistaken her for one of the other volunteers they had met before. A thin man passed them by on a rickety cycle that was hitched to a wooden cart. Both he and his vehicle creaked and shook over the broken stones that stuck out from the ground as if they were growing out from it. The young woman remembered something her father had once said about the fertile soil of that part of India. "Something will start growing even if you spit on the ground." Magic soil. She remembered Stephen King's 'Pet Sematary'. The soil of life? What kind of life?

Some more children bounced past them. "Didiiiiiii!"

They're talking to me, she realised. She didn't know how to feel about it. Delhi was not a city where strangers almost fell over with excitement upon meeting you. She had spent a year around the smooth-talking, educated, rich, famous, sometimes good-looking segment of the Indian population. The elite. She was used to the people she worked for not knowing her name and not caring about if she lived or died. As long as she got the work done, as long as she made them look good. She was used to hard eyes and snarls and bad behaviour. Then what was this?

They had followed the path to its end into the heart of the slum. They had passed thin children hopping around chained puppies, they had passed an immobile old man exhaling smoke outside his shanty on a charpai he shared with an equally immobile white dog. An outdoor tap dripped Chinese torture onto a pile of steel pots and pans. Shanties lined both sides of the path until where it ended into a dusty open area. That is where the piles and possibly miles of garbage began. A couple of older women in saris and a baby sat on a charpai near the hill of garbage. There was a tall green gate nearby, some Muslim organisation. A clothesline with ratty colourful clothing hung along its wall.

The young man set out to find the woman they needed to speak to. The young woman surveyed the scene for a good interview location. She settled on a pink and blue wall that tapered off into the background to a line of shanties. She pulled the tripod out of its cardboard box and set it up on the ground. She screwed her camera on top of the tripod and peered through the viewfinder. Someone tugged at the bag she kept slung on her hips.

"Didi, meri photo khheencho na." She turned to a girl with messy short hair and dirty clothes. And missing teeth on a happy smile. A disarming smile meant for the young woman. It almost frightened her, she hadn't seen a selfless smile in a long time. A number of children suddenly surrounded the serious young woman and her equipment. They clung to the bottom of her shirt, to her bag. Someone reached for her arm, another grabbed her fingers. The young woman from another world could feel the warmth of their hands burning through her clothes onto her skin. A couple of them began to dance in front of the camera. They began to chant, "Didi, didi, didi, didi!" They were excited to see her. Their faces were glowing, they could not contain their joy. It made her feel unsteady, unsure how to react. She had learned how to react to hostility and condescension, she knew how to handle those things, but what was this?

A smile that almost broke into a laugh awkwardly began writing itself on her mouth.

The young man returned with the woman they were meant to interview. The young woman shushed the children, "shhhhhhh!" The woman seated herself in front of the camera and the interview began. The young woman kept a close watch on the camera's viewfinder and an even closer eye on the children who had crowded around her. She shushed them whenever they squealed, she tapped their little fingers whenever they couldn't bear to not touch the tripod. She even took one little girl aside and asked her to tell one of the shanties nearby to turn down their TV set which was playing old Mohammed Aziz songs.

After the interview, the young woman spent the rest of her time taking shots of the slum. The children followed her wherever she went. She was the pied piper, and she made them dance. She made some young boys on bicycles race past her, and they did. One of the boys yelled in triumph as he sped past her - "yeahhhhhhhh, Didi!!" Some of the children were dangling off of an abandoned autorickshaw near the garbage pile. One of the little girls with the uneven pigtails and the very high-pitched voice grabbed another girl by the hair and shook her head in play and laughed. They all laughed. They were all so poor and they lived in slums, and they treated the young woman as if she was the most important person in the world. The young woman looked around for the young man she had come with. She saw him being lead a way off by a little boy. "Hey, where are you going??" she called out to him. He turned to look at her with a smile and shrugged. The little boy obviously wanted to show his big tough friend something interesting in his life.

At the end of their visit, the young man and the young woman were saying their goodbyes to the woman they had interviewed and her family. "Thank you," the young woman said, the camera and tripod once again slung across her body. They were on their way out. The woman from the slum replied to her. She told her that they should be the ones doing the thanking, that if it weren't for the young man, the young woman, and their NGO, that they would not be able to put their children in school or even acquire their basic forms of identification from the government. They would never know their rights if it had not been for them.

The young woman stood there, half her body wanting to leave, the other half wanting to move in the other direction. She realised that she had suddenly stopped looking at the woman from the slum in the eye. She felt small. It had all been too much. First the children who had flung themselves at her out of affection and trust when they didn't have to, now this woman who spoke so directly that it made the young woman from the outside world feel like everything she had gone through to get to this moment had been worth it. All the good things, especially the bad things, it was alright because it had brought her here, to a woman who said thank you.

She wondered about the rich and beautiful and famous people she had been around the whole year. She remembered the big talk and the small actions. She remembered how after a while the most beautiful and powerful people had started looking unbearably ugly to her. So, so ugly. They were ugly in their behaviour, they were ugly in their words, they were ugly in how they treated the world around them. They were ugly in how they were competitive and not cooperative, ugly in how they wanted to tear down but not build up. The things people do to get on television can anger you. You know what they say about how power and money show the true character of a person? Add putting them on camera to that list. Many times it's not even about the message but about seeing themselves on screen. Many of them are people you wouldn't speak with if you met them elsewhere. But the young woman had seen people at the NGO cringing at seeing themselves in one of their own videos and insisting ad nauseum that the video be edited to put focus on the people, the people, the people. The people they are trying to empower.

The young man stopped by a small shop on their way out. He asked the young woman if she wanted him to buy her some gum. She did, so he bought some for her and for himself. The sun was beginning to set, the smog was beginning to darken. They continued on their way out to the main road. The young woman suddenly realised that the young man had not given her the gum he had promised her himself. She asked him for it, and he then fished it out of his pocket and handed it to her. She had a good laugh over it. "Such a typical politician," she said to him. "You offer me something on your own, then you pretend as if you never did. You make me go out of my way to demand something that I had never wanted in the first place!"

Sometime later, the young woman remembered a time when she was looking for a place to volunteer. She had spoken to a women's organisation over the phone who had turned her down because of the television news channel she had worked at. They had told her that they knew of others from that channel and that, if the young woman was anything like them, then they didn't think that she would be able to handle working with people from the slums.

But I can. I am not like the others.

India: poverty, apathy, the mad drive to oppress

2011-12-29T05:23:00.003-06:00

There's so much I have to say about what I saw in India, but I've been having trouble listing things out because I'm so overwhelmed by all the things I've seen and felt there. It's like this huge furball that's stuck in my throat, I need to hack it up, hack it up. I'm just going to start talking without worrying about the science and art of communication because I really need to get all of it out of my system, or I'll never be able to move on.

I recently returned from spending almost a year-and-a-half in New Delhi, where I interned for a year at NDTV and then volunteered at an NGO called The Youth Parliament Foundation. I had been living as a paying guest in a double room in a 4-storey residential building in 'posh' Greater Kailash 1, and I shall only remember my lodgings for the exposure I received there to menstrual blood, mud, vomit, garbage, hair clumps, human and animal urine and shit. The particular colony I lived in - one of the best I'm told - was known for the stray dogs that, at night, liked to look down upon you from where they'd perch on top of the expensive foreign cars that crammed its lanes. Toyotas, Hondas, even the occassional BMW. Some that looked too big to even turn those congested corners. Some rickshaw pullers refused to go into the colony because of the dogs. One McDonald's delivery man (McD's delivers in India) had been bitten once. The trees of the colony were very overgrown and depressing, the buildings were long and smashed into one another, almost falling over each other, not quite unlike the people in this overcrowded country. Nouveau riche Hemkunt colony, home to a number of judges and doctors, was a strange place.

For almost a year-and-a-half, I shared my room with rats, lizards, spiders, ants (on my bed with me), mosquitoes, and flies. The mosquito bite scars on my feet have only now faded away after half a year. People would keep forgetting to flush, and sometimes they'd flush so hard that they'd knock the knob right off, which would keep the flush running and empty out the water tank, leaving none for the rest of us girls, a real nightmare if you're having your period or if it's summer or if you have food poisoning, or all three. Nowhere in India does the water run 24/7. The water usually comes in for a couple of hours in the early morning or evening, which is when people fill their buckets or tanks and use this supply economically. Someone kept breaking the toilet seats so the landlord eventually stopped replacing them. That made things very difficult during the near-freezing winters because porcelain gets very cold very fast. The building was not heated for the spirit-breaking winters or cooled for the morale-shattering summers, all we had was a rickety ceiling fan and a cooler that was propped up through our only window. Because that window had to be kept open for the cooler to send air through, rats would make their way into our room from the outside. We could see them dropping in from the window to the ground, like miniature commandos on a secret mission. We could even hear them squeaking in the dark at night.

I was hungry and thirsty in Delhi most of the time. The shared refrigerator in the common area was forever leaking water that would stagnate into a small pool at my door. I never really bought anything to eat that needed to be refrigerated because someone was always stealing food from the fridge. Delhi water often mixes up with sewage, so no one really drinks from the tap. It has to be filtered first, and even then it tastes strange and...salty? I can't really remember the number of times my stomach would be gnawing at itself, bile ready to flow out of my eyes because tears were an effort, and there was nothing to eat. I would be thirsty, very thirsty, and would have run out of drinking water. I really hit rock-bottom my last 4 months there. I probably averaged a half bottle of water and 1 meal a day everyday. I ran out of money and worse, tanked out on faith. My time in Delhi was a time of extreme highs and lows, and like the work-hard, party-hard way of life, it burns you out really fast.

I tried very hard to see India for its grand history and its economy, all the things non-resident Indians are emotionally blackmailed into tearing up over patriotic sings about, but all it really reminded me of was what I've read of London during the industrial revolution. Filth, pettiness, an onslaught of stimuli. Oliver Twist on steriods. It's hard to focus on anything else, really, when you realise in horror that the only difference between you and the snot-faced child on the street who lives (and will most probably die) like an animal is not your intelligence, your professional dedication, your sex appeal, your god, but just chance. That given the same circumstances, you, with the American accent and the light brown skin and clever sense of humour, are not only not special but in fact always just one step away from joining that shrunken mummy on the street. Yes, your precious dignity will be taken from you, you will trade it for food, for medicine, for clothing. India is slumdog millionaire, not Bollywood. India is starvation, premature aging, unfairness, and death, a lot of death, a lot of different kinds of death. India is about crushing innovative thinking, India is about punishing excellence, India is about learning to expect less, less, less, until you learn to be grateful for the 'paid' in 'underpaid'.

Backwards/forwards

2011-11-27T09:30:00.004-06:00

Oh, what can I tell you about why I'm in India? That answer has so many parts, I'm tired of listing it out for everyone who asks me why I came back here. Most of all, I'm tired of going over it for my own self when I need reminding. They've told me that most people move forward but that I've chosen to move backwards. I've been here so long, away from the world that I came from. I am beginning to forget...

* * *

I've started volunteering as a Film Editor for the Youth Parliament Foundation. This past week they'd been hosting the 'Know Your Body, Know Your Rights' national consultation in New Delhi. A bunch of young folks from various states - Gujarat, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Uttarakhand, and others - landed up in the capital to talk about sexual health awareness for 4 days. I had been asked to help shoot the event for a video we'd need to edit and send to the sponsors, the MacArthur Foundation and UNESCO. I was grateful for the opportunity to hide behind the lens. As a videographer, one's goal is to capture an event without interfering with the subject or affecting the environment. It was only my second week with the organisation, and I was still getting used to its social dynamics. I didn't have any work friends as yet, I wasn't in on the inside jokes, and I couldn't imagine surviving on smalltalk and shooting out clever one-liners on the field all week. Thank God for the job description - shoot, be invisible, go home.

We were packing up by the end of the 4th and final day of the consultation. I had played the part of the mute camerawoman perfectly - I hadn't bonded with any of the attendees and had sat down for meals with the organisation staff without contributing much to the conversation. I hadn't had the energy for anything more than work anyway. Cameras get heavy hanging from one's neck after 8-10 hours. They give one achy shoulders, cramped thighs, and burning shoulder joints. That and keeping an eagle-eye out for good shots hour after hour after hour consumes any leftover desire to cross over and reach out to the subject. I don't mind though. The world often seems a lot more beautiful through a camera. I don't mind spending as much time there as possible. I don't mind not being noticed.

"Didi." Sister.

I turned to face a young rural boy, not more than 18. Like most people from the rural parts, this one was skinny with not an ounce of fat on him anywhere. Not even on his face. His skin stuck to his smiling skull like a thick layer of paint. Oil kept his side-parted hair in place. He wore a generic button-down shirt and generic pair of trousers. A generic Indian rural person holding out a generic Indian notebook to me. Made of recycled paper.

He was smiling at me, shyly, possibly even admiringly.

"Didi, autograph."

Four days of silence behind a camera, and I'd forgotten how to speak. My voice came out with a crack, as if I'd been asleep. "Me?" My autograph? What had I ever done for him? I'd never even spoken to anyone during the consultation. What reason would he have to smile at me?

But he kept smiling anyway. "Accha, theek hai," I said - right, okay - and I slowly took his notebook and pen and smiled, still in a haze after being woken from my cameraperson stupor. Life behind the camera dulls one's social instincts sometimes.

"Main kya likhhoon?" I asked him gently. What do I write?

"Naam, email address, aap kahaan ki hain, aur aap kya kaam karti hain." Your name, email address, where you're from, and what you do.

Oh, boy.

I started writing my name in English. K-H-A-D-I-J-A. In uppercase because it's easier to read. He looked at what I was writing and told me that he couldn't read English. So I wrote my name and email address in English, and then began to write in Hindi.

I wrote my name.

I skipped the email address. I didn't know how to translate it into Hindi.

Of the remaining two questions, I tackled the easier one first. What did I do for a living? I was a trained IT professional. I had recently trained at NDTV in broadcast journalism. I was a published book author. At that moment, I was a film editor. Media, I wrote.

I wondered what to write about where I was from. I was born in Lucknow, but I had never lived there. I never felt Lucknawi, more so after my latest trip early this year. That had snapped any emotional ties I had to that place. I just did not recognise it anymore. Most of the people I knew there who had remembered me from my childhood had died, their name plates still on their ancient wooden doors, their houses abandoned by their children who'd moved out to the newer parts of Lucknow, to other parts of India, to other parts of the world. Greener pastures. They hadn't even bothered to take down the old nameplates. Like Scrooge who had been too miserly to remove his dead partner's name from their office signboard, 'Scrooge & Marley'. Old Lucknow was a ghost ghetto, a grinning skeleton. Like this rural boy here, wanting to know where I was from.

Maybe I was from Delhi? It was the only place in India where I had actually lived, for over a year, working, not on a holiday. I could recognise landmarks and the 'India Today' office in the latest movie 'Rockstar'. And the 'India Today' signboard had been extremely blurry and in the background. You couldn't even see any text, just red and white squares. But I had recognised it. I had even shouted the block out at the theater - F-14/15 Connaught Place! I get excited whenever I can recognise landmarks in any city I'm in. It makes me feel that maybe, just maybe, this is what home feels like. There once was a time in my life when I had started recognising landmarks at airports. The restaurant where the chicken nuggets and fries were good at Zurich. The worship room in Amsterdam. I like the food court at Terminal 3 at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi. The smell of cinnamon and the sound of jazz at Chicago's O'Hare. The casino posters near the baggage claim area in Tulsa. I remember the woman's face. She was a white brunette in her late 30s and was ecstatically clapping about winning something.

But my Facebook account says that my hometown is Muscat, Oman. I spent 18 years straight there after all. That's the most amount of time I have lived anywhere. A close second is America with my 10 years. Canada was only for 4 months in total, but I am a resident there. I did feel a sense of belonging there for a while because of my immigration status. It made the immigration officer smile at me and say "welcome home". I've even got used to Tim Horton's and the Rogers monopoly. I even know some intersections and Go Train stops in Toronto. I know Dundas Square. I had attended a music fest there for Michael Jackson when he had died. It hadn't felt like he had died then.

The rural boy with the long eyelashes was still looking at his notebook, waiting to see what I wrote, wondering about the long pause before I wrote the name of my hometown. I wrote them all. Lucknow/Delhi/Oman/America/Canada.

"Yeh kya hai?" he asked. What is this?

I told him that I was from all those places. I read out the names even though he could read Hindi. His eyes widened, and he looked at me with new respect. This was probably the first time he'd left his town somewhere in Jharkhand, Uttrakhand, wherever he was from. India's soul is in its villages, Gandhi had said. This was probably the first time he'd visited Delhi. Reaching Delhi had been a miracle for him. Like a trip to Rome for the ancients. Babylon, Cairo, Persepolis. It was what Hollywood had been for me. Staying in Beverly Hills, coming on TV on Jay Leno from Burbank. Having my picture taken on the bridge of the Enterprise-D at the Star Trek museum at the Las Vegas Hilton.

We had both come a long way. Such a long journey it has been.

Voodoo Man

2011-10-24T07:45:00.000-05:00

voodoo man
magic man
cast a wicked spell on me
hooked me in my gut like a fish
and tugs at me when he's bored
blew black magic dust in my lungs
without laying a finger on me
just with the way he moved
spanish dancer prowl
he knew i was watching
he did it with the way he looked at me
he knew
he knew
i knew from his half smile
that he knew

Lament

2011-10-17T10:59:00.005-05:00

Dear God

Remember when I got mad at you
Because bad things had happened
To me
Despite yourself

But I found you again
And I flowered
I felt so wise in my triumph

Now I'm mad at you again
Because bad things are still happening
Much worse things
All around me
To the good, the weak, the silent
Millions and billions
Who speaks for them?
You?

Good things are happening to the bad people
The bad people pick on the carcasses of the good people
They fatten and bloat
All the time
In front of me
In front of my eyes
Where are your eyes?

The good people believe in you
The bad people believe in nothing
How much happier they are
Than the broken good people
Who live and die like animals
Or worse

This time I'm mad at you
For everybody else
Burning rage
My mind is ash
Soul smoke
So mad at you
But I can't find you here
To tell you how mad I am
At you
I know you're out there
You were with me once
Are you not the God of all of us?
Where have you hidden yourself?
Are you hiding because of the bad people?
Are you afraid of them?
Are you afraid of your own creations?
The dollmaker is afraid of his work?
Frankenstein afraid of its monster?

You'd promised us
Over and over
Throughout time
In every language so that we'd know and believe
What was true
What was wrong
So, so wrong
But what of you?
Does your mighty throne not tremble now?
You who said would right all wrongs
You who would be our shield
You who have abandoned us!
You who made demands of us
We now make a demand of you
Hear us now wherever you hide
Show yourself, you who created us without our consent!
Show yourself, you who told us that suffering was divine!
Show yourself, we dare, we dare to make demands of you!

Rock star

2011-10-15T14:05:00.003-05:00

"I can't imagine what other people think cold turkey is like. It is fucking awful. On the scale of things, it's better than having your leg blown off in the trenches. It's better than starving to death. But you don't want to go there. The whole body just sort of turns itself inside out and rejects itself for three days. You know in three day it's going to calm down. It's going to be the longest three days you've spent in your life, and you wonder why you're doing this to yourself when you could be living a perfectly normal fucking rich rock star life. And there you are puking and climbing walls. Why do you do that to yourself? I don't know. I still don't know. Your skin crawling, your guts churning, you can't stop your limbs from jerking and moving about, and you're throwing up and shitting at the same time, and shit's coming out your nose and your eyes, and the first time that happens for real, that's when a reasonable man says, "I'm hooked." But even that doesn't stop a reasonable man from going back on it."

- Keith Richards, "Life"

The Beggar with the Red Cup

2011-10-13T22:19:00.000-05:00

the curled up dark brown grey man lying so still on the road
in Delhi
tapping the plastic cup on the tarmac
tap tap
it's a red cup with a white rim
in america you can buy dozens of those cups for cheap
frat boys drink beer in it
then they pound their broad well-fed chests
because they are young american men
you can see it in the movies even
families drink punch in those red cups on the 4th of July
they barbeque and eat on plates of red white and blue
celebrating democracy and credit cards
in the land of the free and the home of the brave

Your Songs

2011-10-13T22:17:00.000-05:00

the songs you told me about
the songs you told me you liked
the songs you would listen to when no one was around
those songs
which made that moment home
a moment that let you believe
that you were who you could be
that there was still time
they take me there too now
those songs
your songs
i am with you then
when
i listen to those songs
my feelings about your feelings about those songs
my memories of your memories
i am with you again

Stay hungry, stay foolish

2011-09-29T16:09:00.005-05:00

"In return, I want to offer you a few pieces of advice: try to keep it real. Stay true to what’s best in yourself and to the best of what you’ve experienced here at Vassar. Continue to expose yourself to new ideas. Trust your instincts and think for yourself. Make art, or at least value it. Look for the core of what makes each person human, appreciate the details that make them unique.

Find something that moves you or pisses you off, and do something about it. Put your self out there. Be brave. Be bold. Take action. You have a voice. Speak up, especially when something tries to keep you silent. Take a stand for what’s right. Raise a ruckus and make a change. You may not always be popular, but you’ll be part of something larger and bigger and greater that yourself. Besides, making history is extremely cool.

Hold our elected officials accountable. They work for you. Ask them anything you want. If you don’t, you’re giving up on democracy. Inez Milholland – Vassar class of 1909 – didn’t let people silence her and she didn’t let anyone stop her. She became one of the pivotal leaders of the suffragette movement. If you forget everything else I’ve said here today or if you choose to ignore it, remember Inez and remember to vote. It’s a radical act that’s still legal, and we need to keep it that way.

Speaking from my own experience, I also want to offer a warning: you will, undoubtedly, meet people who will try to shut you up or entice you to compromise your principles in any number of ways. They’ll try to seduce you and distract you with money, power, security and perhaps, most dangerously, a sense of belonging. Don’t let them; it’s just not worth it. One of the biggest threats to our world is the culture of silence and compromise—politicians who compromise their beliefs because they’re scared they’ll piss off their voters and won’t get re-elected, corporate executives who put profits above principles. You can have a conscience and still make money. You can have genuine values and still get elected. You can even make movies that do well at the box office without playing to the lowest common denominator.

And try not to let love silence you. And don’t let it kill you—always wear a condom, for god’s sake. Partner with someone who loves you and loves your voice, who loves the very core of who you are and believes in your dreams, not someone who is hell-bent on changing you."

- excerpt from Samuel L. Jackson's 2004 Vassar College commencement address

This Cradle of Civilisation

2011-09-18T15:04:00.008-05:00

It's ironic that the one place that I find it hardest to believe in God is in a nation where there are millions of them.

You can feel the absence of a divine presence when you look into the greasy tired faces of the people around you. Their eyes bear the dull cataract of low expectations. I wonder what God the barefooted children covered with rags and mud believe in. This is a country where people are realistic, practical, territorial. There is no room here for dreams. This is the world's largest democracy, a country where its starched leaders fatten as if feeding upon the souls of its withering citizens. The real Indian is an anonymous face, and scores of them fade away everyday without leaving behind their stories. In India, death is a relief, a welcome escape, something worth believing in, like God.

Bharat Mata ki Ek Beti

2011-09-09T11:06:00.006-05:00

If I have ever been judgmental of gold-diggers or mail-order brides (and I have), then I'm sorry. It will never happen again. I now know how they feel, even in some small tiny laughable way.

I've now been living in India by myself for over a year, and it is solely to that fact that I can attribute my metamorphosis from a fiercely independent and principled pseudo-American career woman to a shrunken Indian version of said pseudo-American who's just waiting to be rescued by the capitalist man of her dreams. Rich socialist bhhi chalega. Do we have any takers?

Don't judge me, my own medicine tastes terrible. Everytime I almost fly off of the cycle rickshaw as the rickshawala decides to speed over a pothole, I miss the shock absorbers of the cars I've ridden in in America (and Canada. You too, Oman). I curse the elements everytime I have to devastate a good hair day by savagely pulling my do back in a behenji ponytail just because it's too damn hot/sticky/windy. Over the past year, I've only ever shopped off of the street because clothes, like people, just seem to fall apart faster in this part of the world. It would hurt too much to have that happen to anything I paid more than 100 rupees for (what is that, like 2 dollars?). I never seem to want to dress nice or comb my hair here anyway. I don't even wear makeup anymore. What's the point? Two minutes on the outside, and either the wind from the autorickshaw ride will ravage the curls that usually set beautifully on their own in a controlled environment, or the monsoon mud will artistically splatter itself all along my calves and precious toes. I now scowl or even fling a dirty look at every car that screams its neverending banshee of a horn into my poor ear. I wonder if the smog and traffic exhaust has formed a permanent layer of hopelessness on my once 20-something-year-old skin. I think of all these things and then fondly remember my vanilla-and-cinnamon-scented sparsely populated existence of the West. What's a pretty girl to do when the shadow of socialism falls upon her?

I'll tell you what she's to do. Visit the parlour regularly, dress the best she can in her budget wardrobe, flash a carnivorous smile or bat a virginal eyelash (both if she's talented), and pray to the gods of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll that Prince Charming (age never a bar) will whisk her away to a capitalist country far, far away. Or at least to the nearest suburb in a nice air-conditioned apartment and car and never let her pretty soles scrape the soil of the motherland again. Inhein zameen pe mat rakhhiyega, mailay ho jaaeinge.

Pretty Woman

2011-09-01T12:26:00.005-05:00

He was paying her to look at him that way. It didn't bother him. She was beautiful, soft, clean, and all he wanted was her to spend some time with him. There was no way a woman like that would ever be with someone like him. He knew he had paid for the softness of her eyes, he knew she did not love him, want him, she was only letting him breathe in the perfume in her hair because he had paid for it. He didn't mind. He wanted to rest the scars on his face against the dew on her shoulders, he wanted to feel her soft feet under his cracked soles, he only wanted her to not flinch as he reached out for her skin. He knew that every look of hers, every move of hers, every sound she was going to make was going to be a lie, but he didn't mind. He wanted her to lie to him, he was paying her for the performance. He wanted her to lie to him with all she had, the best she could, the biggest lies she could tell him. He would believe her. He was paying her for the illusion that someone like her could want him, that that was all it took to find a face like hers by his side, looking at him, only at him, reaching out for him with her small soft hands the way he was reaching out to her. It was beautiful. So beautiful. That something in this life could be so simple, such a small easy transaction, it was beautiful.

Casa Mia

2011-08-31T10:21:00.005-05:00

This is the last thing I see before I go to sleep, and the first thing I see when I wake up.

This is the ceiling of the room I rent as a paying guest in Delhi's Greater Kailash I. It's been a year since I first set eyes on this ceiling. It was upsetting, I remember. I had been struggling to remain optimistic about my newest adventure in India, but the sight of the matte orange and disco yellow ceiling was the straw that broke the dam that was soldiering my tear glands. The colour combination made me cry. It was atrocious, aesthetically outrageous, the most depressing thing I'd ever seen.

Moving to India, that too New Delhi, was highly disorienting, but I had heard that the GK1 area was posh. It wasn't. It had potholes like the rest of Delhi, untrimmed trees, and dogs, dogs everywhere, wandering about the colony, peeing and pooping all over the place, snarling and barking at you until you felt your insides vibrate. This was not posh. The dogs chained at the entrance of my PG urinated and defecated all over the entrance to the building, and we would all have to begin our day (and end it) by playing hopscotch around excrement. It was not fun. That made me want to cry, but I used to be fairly decent at hopscotch when I was a kid, so I was able to manage. But I could never forget that under all my shoes would now remain layers of animal excrement that I would be tracking along everywhere I went.

Over the past year, I have shared my room not just with my roommate, but with lizards, spiders, rats large enough to be teenage rabbits, and airborne cockroaches. There used to be a couple of roosters who'd crow all day and night long outside our window, but those were taken care of some time ago, hopefully with delicious sauces. Last week I screamed a purely instinctive scream when I encountered a rat scuttling up the bannister of the staircase I was descending. I am not a screamer, so I wondered about that experience. A few days earlier, a friend had screamed as another rat (or maybe the same one?) had fallen off of the clothes that were hanging on the clothesrack behind her door, just like that, like it was the most normal thing to do, like rats plop off of clothesracks all over the world all the time.

Sigh.

Muslim on the Run

2011-08-28T08:35:00.006-05:00

"After Partition, many Muslims stayed behind in Bihar instead of joining Pakistan. It's an impoverished, mostly agricultural state that is considered somewhat backward by most of Bombay's middle class, and Akhtar is part of a large migration of young Bihari men who have come to Bombay in recent years to find work. He tells Cassim that he's never met a foreign Muslim before, or anyone who is partly from Pakistan; the idea of an educated, well-traveled Muslim is exotic and interesting to him." - excerpt from 'The Girl from Foreign' by Sadia Shepard

I am an educated, well-traveled Muslim, and I would be fine with that except I don't know what being a Muslim means anymore. In Oman it meant something else - reduced school hours in Ramadhan, lots of government holidays, and weekends that conveniently fell on Fridays. There were Sudani Muslims, Egyptian Muslims, Indian Muslims, Phillipino Muslims, Omani Muslims. They all wore their own national clothing and ate their own kinds of food. Masjids were beautiful, grand, clean. In America, Islam was reactionary, so Arabised, so structured. I discovered a new word - zabiha. The Muslims there would look at me funny - you don't know what zabiha is? I'd only ever heard of halaal. I didn't wear a scarf, and I would feel slightly insulted that people were surprised to find out that I was a Muslim because I didn't wear one, as if I was inadequate, not doing Islam quite right. But I was raised in the Middle East! And the more vicious public debate about Islam got, the more I withdrew philosophically into Islam, arming myself with answers to questions that I had learned to anticipate, questions that ordinarily only a scholar should have been expected to have the answers to. Islam, Islam, Islam, Islam. Bismillah-i-rahman-i-rahim. Five pillars, 1-2-3-4-5. Zakaat 2.5%. Polygamy permitted not recommended. No concept of holy wars in Islam. Back off, back off, back off. Self-proclaimed defender of the faith, the Islamic Joan of Arc, brothers and sisters across the Ummah unite. Yes, we can!

Except this past year, I plunged into mainstream India, dying to be set free from the flat two-dimensional Islamic person I'd started to see myself as from the eyes of those around me. I wanted to be more than an example of Islamic pluralism, more than someone's token centrist Muslim friend, see momma she's not a terrorist, she's quite reasonable, she doesn't even wear a scarf, she drinks Pepsi and goes to the AMC and likes Billy Joel.

This whole past year in India I have not had the time to sleep or dream even. There aren't so many Muslims around in mainstream India anyway. If they are there, they keep to themselves in their secular speech patterns and professions. They acknowledge each other in silent ways, but they daren't step over that fine line. They'll smile at each other and then look away, they'll say hello and you both know why but will not admit it. You've been noticed, you're been watched over, but neither party will do anything more about it. And what a relief that is. Nobody wants to talk about religion in this secular space where everybody dresses and talks the same. It's exhausting, it asks more questions than gives answers, and we're a tired, tired, tired country. I was so grateful that I was just another Indian face whose face and language was suspiciously Muslim-like, but everybody was so busy that at the end of the day, everybody just wanted to talk light. What a relief it was. Nobody had any religious expectations of me, nobody poked and prodded my wilting soul for justifications. We're all just too busy, everybody just wants to be left alone in peace. We all really just want to have a job and an Internet connection and the occassional trip to the mall or the theater or Bangkok.

But then a Muslim girl from Kashmir told me she looked up to me, I'm guessing because I was educated and well-travelled. Me? But I don't wear a scarf. I'd fled halfway across this blessed planet of ours just so that people would stop seeing me as a Muslim. Do you know that this whole year I almost never said as-salaam-alaikum or Khuda haafiz to anybody? I never even said insha Allah or masha Allah, and I never said Allah ka shukar in jest the way I usually do. I never said yaar, Khuda ke liye when someone was getting on my case. I didn't want to. Then when I started wanting to, I didn't. I didn't want to stick out again, I didn't want to sound different again. I wanted to be like everybody else, frivolous and carefree, without worrying about the Day of Judgment or if the French were curbing the rights of Muslim women to express themselves.

I don't seem to understand the Muslims of India. I don't know why they live in ghettoes and why they can't just shake their demoralisations off of themselves and say I'm a bloody citizen of this country and let me see you tell me what to do. Why are they so poor, why are they so hostile to the mainstream Muslims who are honestly just trying to make a living? I am not a traitor, I don't even belong to these people, this is only the first year I have lived in this country. I don't know how to look at my own self in India the way others do when they detect my religious identity and all the things it means here. No I don't think it is acceptable to dilly-dally on a court case regarding the demolition of a religious structure where public order is disturbed and oh, people are murdered or tyrannised. Is that a typical Muslim reaction though? I don't understand how to position myself between the Deobandis and Barelvis and the Sufis and the dargahs and the Syeds and all the others. I don't have special knowledge of the Mughal period, and I don't particularly feel too connected to the Ottoman Turks. I just want air-conditioning and regular water supply and no power cuts. I don't want to be a Sharia expert, I don't even want to deal with the autorickshaw driver who insists on charging me an extra 10 rupees. Theek hai, bhaiyya, jo aapki marzi. I want to be pretty, I want to smell nice, and I want to live in luxury. Do any of these things make me more or less of a Muslim? I don't know, I don't know, I still don't know what any of it means.

The Man with the Magazine

2011-08-27T16:17:00.006-05:00

The young man sat down next to the young woman at the library. He held in his hands a magazine. A glossy magazine. He was bored. He sharply flipped one page over in her direction. The warmth of his arms carried the dull bitterness of the gloss to the young woman next to him. It startled her as it softly touched her cheek and began to fade away, but not entirely. He flipped another page. And another. It hit her cheek again. Her cheek began to heat up. He flipped another page. Her heart began to pound, her mouth began to water. Delicious. She smiled to herself.

Non (W)Riting Indian

2011-08-27T15:31:00.008-05:00

I can't write in India. I'm not sure what it is. My head is exploding with things I want to say; I have a dull headache most days because of it. Maybe it's too much stimulus and not enough quiet time where I can process it all and give it form. India is like that - too much stimulus assaulting your senses, clogging up your creative pores so that nothing can come out. It's like you want to sweat but you can't, like you just can't get all those toxins out, so they just swirl about inside you, poisoning your blood, turning everything sour. I can't write, I can't draw, I can't sing, I just can't do it. My head feels like a collapsing star at the red giant stage - the inside is cooking and cooking and cooking, filling up with hot terrible steam, collapsing upon itself, while the outside remains maybe a little flushed and very still, on the verge of an explosion that will send shock waves throughout the universe. There's so much I have to say, and I want it to sound so beautiful and polished, but that is not India. India is not beautiful or polished. India is a crawling beehive, a wasp's nest, layer upon sticky layer of termites, breeding breeding breeding all over themselves, dirty slimy filthy limbs fighting for air and liberty, never stopping, dissolving all resources, leaving me hollow, a dream home waiting to collapse upon all of those who own it.

Narcissus

2011-08-21T13:50:00.005-05:00

Who is that woman in the mirror
She looks like who I was supposed to be
I haven't seen her before
But I saw her looking back at me only recently
She's pretty
In a new way
She has nice lips
Her cheekbones have pride
I like the way her shoulders move
I like the way she sits
The way her hair curls around her ear
Something about the way she looks me in the eye
She has a deep glimmer in her eye
Is she really looking at me
Could this woman
Could she really be me

Why I enjoy being 30

2011-07-25T15:56:00.009-05:00

1. I trust my judgment and live by instinct.
2. I have learned to pick my battles
3. I now know what haircut suits my face shape.
4. I have figured out how to dress according to my body type.
5. I know what sort of makeup looks good on me.
6. I have become patient.
7. I have learned to forgive myself.
8. I know what shape of eyewear works with my facial features.
9. I can recognise my PMS symptoms.
10. I allow myself to be very selective about whom I let into my life.
11. My body has finally stabilised and stopped changing.
12. I once again look like how I did before puberty hit.
13. I know how to center myself and bring myself to peace.
14. I accept what I see of myself in the mirror.
15. I am comfortable with uncertainty.

Censored

2011-05-24T14:56:00.008-05:00

If you saw some footage on NDTV today of the air strikes in Libya, it was edited by me.

There were shots of the night sky somewhere in Libya lit up by what looked (and possibly sounded) like exploding suns. There were some shots of people being rushed into a hospital. There were shots of medical personnel walking about the hospital and treating patients.

What I wasn't allowed to show you was a shot of 3 dead bodies lying on stretchers in some quiet low-priority corner of the hospital. They were the dust-covered bodies of 3 Libyan men dressed in shirts and pants. Their heads lay slung over to one side, like deactivated robots. Their mouths were open, like dead fish. The faces themselves were unrecognisable because most of the facial features had been damaged. The eyes were either closed or had no eyelids at all. The bodies looked like ancient mummies. They were still, very still. Their skin had turned to various shades of yellow and grey. Dirt was in their tousled hair, like as if a sandstorm had raged through it. The dead men looked exactly like the corpses from the movie, 'The Ring'.

Long after the PG-friendly footage that I'd edited had aired without making a dent in anyone's existence, I returned to the original footage on my computer and paused at the shot of the 3 dead men, still lying motionless on those green stretchers. I wanted to see if they would breathe again, if a dangling arm would stir to my surprise. These men hardly looked like they had ever been anything but lifeless. Only a few hours ago they had had names and favourite foods and sleeping habits and desires and facial expressions and plans for the upcoming week. Now they were just APTN footage that no channel would ever air, that no audience would ever witness. Would they ever know that I was here, that I had seen them?

I believe that people really need to see what conflict looks like. They need to see beyond the hustle-and-bustle of its living version, they need to see the stupid stillness of what dies. No wonder the mere mention of war or conflict doesn't outrage us. We've dehumanised conflict. All we see on TV, all that we're shown in the media, are endless shots of living faces and night skies lit up by bombs and tankers rolling down streets that could be anywhere - just lazy passive pictures that lie about, that conceal something that's very wrong and very frightening. What's the point of showing you imagery about an issue when the real imagery is not shown to you in the first place? Have you any idea what you've been missing?

The Mirage

2011-05-18T01:22:00.006-05:00

her hard eyes devour her reflection
proud of a body in movie star clothes
matching shoes that hide knobbly toes and dirty soles
bad skin scratched by long dirty nails
expensive lotion masks the smell of cigarettes
grey skin grey gums grey lips
lips that kiss hard words and curses
a smile that never reaches her eyes
this young woman
her soiled body
her crooked smile
her crazed eyes
a child of this city

You heard it here first

2011-05-17T08:39:00.003-05:00

I saw a UFO when I was in school.

At least that's what I think it was. I was 12-14 years old and in the middle of a lesson in my classroom in Muscat, Oman. Our windows that year had a view of the highway piercing through the rocky al Hajar mountains in the distance. The bright blue waters of the Persian Gulf lay unseen on the other side. That day the sky was the way the local newspapers predicted it to be the whole year round - clear to partly cloudy.

I don't remember what subject we had that period. I remember the teacher going on with the lesson and my classmates silently making (or passing) notes. I was seated at my desk in the front of the class, my upper body leaning over the wooden top, my face cradled in the palm of one hand as I looked on at the teacher with an expression of teenage boredom.

My eyes left the teacher and wandered over to the nearest window. Far in the distance, an object that looked exactly like a flying saucer was hovering above the mountains in the baby blue Omani sky. The UFO didn't move, it just stayed in that one spot for the whole 5 seconds I kept looking at it. I was still leaning over my desk, and my face was still cradled in the palm of my hand.

I shifted my gaze across the classroom and then moved it back over to the window. The UFO was gone. The mountains, the highway, the tiny cars zipping along the highway looked deceptively innocent.

Dumbed down and easy to digest

2011-05-17T08:21:00.004-05:00

"An Islamic government is charged with supporting all religions equally. It is a twist on the American ideal of separation of church and state, which forbids government from having any role in religion. In contrast, Islam says the state must support all religions!

The Islamic government is forbidden to seize the churches, synagogues, or temples of any group, nor can the government meddle in the appointment of religious leaders by each group. The treaty Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, made with a local Christian community is very clear: No bishop can be removed from his office and no church can be confiscated.

From the time of Prophet Muhammad (p) through the last Muslim Empire of the Ottomans Muslim rulers have been particularly concerned with the welfare of their non-Muslim subjects and their religious needs. For example, in the year 1076, the Muslim ruler of Bejaya, in present-day Algeria, wrote to Pope Gregory VII about the desire of the Christians in his land for a certain priest to be promoted to bishop. The pope was so overjoyed at this expression of religious respect that he wrote a beautiful letter in response, which concluded with the words: "We pray with heart and mouth that, after a long sojourn in this life, the same God may guide you to the bosom of happiness of the holy patriarch Abraham."

Has Muslim history had its share of despots and kings? Sure it has, but so has the Christian world. What is to be judged are the principles and not how faithfully they are applied."

- Yahiya Emerick, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Islam, 2nd Edition"

C'est la vie en rose

2011-04-16T14:41:00.013-05:00

In early 2006, Yohanna was a hundred years old. I was 24, but I felt a lot older, as if I had lived too much too soon. I was running on empty. I did not find the company of my chronological peers satisfying, which is why I had started volunteering at the retirement home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That's where I had met Yohanna, the 100-year-old Frenchwoman.

Yohanna was tall and wore a short dark wig. I only ever saw her in pant suits. Her face was doughy and lumpy, as if it had been made of wax and had been placed too close to a heat source before being rescued. The thick downward folds of her skin gave her a permanent scowl. Her skin itself looked bloodless. Her voice was low and sometimes unclear, it was often hard to follow what she was saying. Her fingers looked bloated and shook often, her hands had age spots like freckles, and under the bright nailpolish her nails were surely yellowed and had stopped growing. Like her surroundings, she smelled of napthalene and floral airfresher. Sometimes lavender. Always overpowering.

Yohanna wasn't the sociable type. She mostly kept to herself in her room, or you could catch her shuffling down the hallways. That's where I first met her. It was my first day at the retirement home, and the head nurse was showing me around. She saw Yohanna from afar and whispered to me that she was from France. I had studied some French at university, so I sprang up to Yohanna and tapped her on her bent back. She spun around and gave me a hard look that almost silenced me. Bonjour, ca va, I managed to say. She immediately began muttering in French, too softly and too fast for me to understand. She almost sounded like she was talking to herself, catching up on some conversation she had left off the previous week. Plus lentement s'il vous plait, I said, asking her to please slow down. She eyed me harder. Je suis Khadija, et vous? I asked her. She rambled on in French, and then suddenly switched to heavily-accented English so fast that it took me a second to realise it. She looked at me even harder.

I introduced myself to her once again. She asked me how old I was, and I told her. She suddenly became very friendly with me and started telling me about when she was my age. She said in those days the soldiers would come to her town in France and dance with the local girls. (She often spoke of soldiers, I don't know what soldiers they were, maybe World World II?) She placed one hand on her hip and bent her knees and jiggled her shoulders to show me how they would dance. She stopped dancing just as soon as she'd started - she said she would've taught me those steps except that I was too young and the steps were too risque and the girls had been 'bad'. If these were the days when her complexion had some blood in it, she might've blushed. And we were friends.

I followed her around the rest of the day listening to her stories. She told me how she'd met her husband who had been much older than she was. She said she had never paid attention to boys or love until the day she locked eyes with the man that was to be her husband. He looked at her and she looked at him across a distance between them. That was it, she had told me, something intense was felt between them. She clenched her fists trying to find a word for what it was that they had felt that day, but she couldn't find one, and I didn't need her to. They got married soon after.

She once showed me a picture of her husband, a small black and white studio photograph of a kind-looking man in his early 40s with a round face and a Hitler moustache. I asked her for more photographs but she said she didn't believe in keeping any. Memories were enough, photographs were just things according to her.

She did fish out a photograph of herself a few weeks later. She had allowed me into her room, and I was sitting on her bed beside her. The bedspread was white with pink flowers on it, a very British tea set print. She suddenly put a small black and white photograph in front of me, not saying anything because she wanted to see my reaction, raw and instinctual.

I didn't recognise the woman in the photograph. She was incredibly beautiful though - a dark-haired woman with long hair loosely tied away from her face, full lips with dark lipstick on them, very 1940s. Her eyes were large and bright, her face was full and glowing. She was sitting under a wall in a button-down shirt, looking straight into the camera. What a beautiful woman, one of those who could not see her own beauty, the best kind. You could see it in the demure look in her eyes as she shyly looked at the photographer, as if it was not her usual habit to look people directly in the eye. A soft, effortlessly beautiful, healthy, fresh-looking woman.

I turned to the skinny old woman with the molten face and the pant suit hanging off of her bones, the photograph still in my hands. Is this you? I asked in disbelief, you're so beautiful. She waved her hands in dismissal. Oh I was nothing, she said. But she looked pleased.

Then she suddenly remembered her dead husband. She told me how much they had loved each other. The tough old woman who prowled the retirement home on her own and never betrayed any emotion suddenly welled up. Her voice began to waver. It had been 40 years, she said. Her husband had died 40 years ago. Then her voice strengthened again and her back straightened as she declared with pride that she had never loved anyone since.

She got up and pulled his photograph out of her dresser. She lovingly stroked his face as she told me how she had started shrieking at his funeral when his casket was being lowered into the ground. Her family had had to hold her back. I don't know when she came to America or how many children she had had, but she definitely had one daughter in Tulsa. She had put Yohanna here in the retirement home because it was tough for young people to take care of their parents, what with how busy they all were with their own lives and jobs and children. I had seen Yohanna calming another lonely old woman at the home with that explanation.

And then Yohanna remembered that she needed help with a CD player. She started rummaging through her closet and pulled out a portable player, holding it like the frighteningly unfamiliar piece of equipment that it probably was to her. A CD was still in it. Someone had helped her set it up so that she would just have to press the play button, but something had gone wrong and she wasn't able to listen to her favourite music anymore. Music was pretty much all she had of her past life now, and I could see how helpless she felt around this new piece of technology.

I wasn't very confident about my hardware skills, but I saw that the player was set to radio, so maybe all I had to do was turn the knob to CD and hit play. I did, and soft music floated out of the speakers almost unexpectedly. Yohanna clasped her hands and then reached out to hold mine. Her hands were clammy. I could feel the loose flesh and cold skin hanging off of her bones. Oh my darling, she exclaimed, thank you! She took a few long steps across the room as if she was dancing with a ghost. The music played on. I would listen to this blessed song over and over when I was young, she almost sang to me, thank you, thank you. Por ella, she trilled along with Julio Iglesias.

I smiled awkwardly not sure how to receive her gratitude over such a small task. I didn't even know if I was supposed to join her in the dance, she was swaying to the song with her eyes shut. I felt like I would be intruding, so I decided to just sit there and watch an old woman escape to a happier time.

I did ask her once, how would I know if a guy really loved me? You will be able to see it in his eyes, she had said, he will not be afraid to show it.

I made my mom meet her once at the home. My mom was visiting me for a few weeks, and by then, Yohanna had become my escape from the world I was living in. I would spend time with her every weekend, listening to her stories and asking her questions about life that everyone else seemed to just be lying to me about. I took my mother straight to the home and made our way to Yohanna's door. Yohanna was happy to meet my mother. She immediately started saying something to her in her heavily-accented English. My mother, all 5 feet of her 60-something self, froze with a terrified smile on her face as the tall thin Yohanna adjusted the short wavy locks around my mother's forehead, telling her to take care of her hair like a mother would. I noticed how young my mother looked in front of Yohanna, and then I realised that Yohanna was probably as old as my mother's parents would've been. Maybe even as old as one grandmother of hers. I began talking to Yohanna, and pretty soon I noticed my mother asking me, almost desperately, to leave. Once we were outside the home and back to the living world, my mother told me she felt frightened inside the home and that it smelled funny, like a beautiful farce for the barely living. She remained agitated about the whole experience for the rest of the day.

I met Yohanna every weekend for a couple of months. The first thing I would do every visit would be to find her and start talking to her about things. She told me once that she noticed I was a lover of beautiful things. I had been happily holding a flower then. Once I had held the door open for her and had insisted that she go first despite her feeling awkward about it. She tried to make me change my mind for a minute, and then she came close to me and looked into my eyes with that crazy look she would sometimes get and told me that I was a good person, a very good person, and that some people would take advantage of it, so it was important that I knew when to stop being good and with whom.

Once I met her after an interval of two weeks. I flew around the home, all smiles and happy to be back, asking the residents and the staff where Yohanna was. They said she was in her room. I made a beeline for her door and knocked on it. Yohanna opened the door slightly with the chain locked and peered at me suspiciously with one eye. I started - I was not used to Yohanna looking at me with that kind of a hard look, as if she was being aggressive just to protect herself. It's me, Khadija, don't you remember?

She didn't. I never went back to that retirement home again. I didn't have it in me to start over.

Flight

2011-04-16T12:16:00.003-05:00

"You're sitting with some guys, and you're playing and you go, "Ooh, yeah!" That feeling is worth more than anything. There's a certain moment when you realise that you've actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you. You're elevated because you're with a bunch of guys that want to do the same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you've got wings. You know you've been somewhere most people will never get; you've been to a special place. And then you want to keep going back and keep landing again, and when you land you get busted. But you always want to go back there. It's flying without a license."

- Keith Richards, "Life"

"Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return."

- Leonardo da Vinci

The family that grieves together

2011-04-16T11:49:00.004-05:00

"Afterward, for many days, Kunta hardly ate or slept, and he would not go anywhere with his kafo mates. So grieved was he that Omoro, one evening, took him to his own hut, and there beside his bed, speaking to his son more softly and gently than he ever had before, told him something that helped to ease his grief.

He said that three groups of people lived in every village. First were those you could see - walking around, eating, sleeping, and working. Second were the ancestors, whom Grandma Yaisa had now joined.

"And the third people - who are they?" asked Kunta.

"The third people," said Omoro, "are those waiting to be born.""

- Alex Haley, "Roots"

Do-over

2011-04-16T05:44:00.010-05:00

This is not about Kiran Bedi the celebrity. This story is about me. I realised this while waiting outside her house in South Delhi with the rest of the camera crew from NDTV.

It was only last year in Muscat, Oman, that I had been spitting mad about missing out on Kiran Bedi's visit to the Indian Embassy and to my alma mater. My father had had passes for the event but for some reason had not thought that any of us in the family would have been interested. And I was interested! Growing up outside of India, one could only keep up with the newsmakers in the homeland through the TV and newspapers. You just didn't have the kind of access to these people that you might've had if you'd been living in India. As Indians, you felt like these public figures were yours in some familial way. In India you might be able to run into them at malls or at a rally or something. Somewhere. Anywhere. Not so overseas. So I was mad that I'd missed Kiran Bedi's visit to Oman. I'd lost my chance.

And so an improbable year later I was waiting to enter her house as part of an NDTV crew. A few minutes later I was in her office watching the camera crew set up for her interview as she quietly read some newspapers at her desk. I let my gaze wander about the numerous framed items around her office - a picture of Swami Vivekananda, a 5th grader's handmade sketch of Mahatma Gandhi, numerous awards and plaques, and images of the Hindu deity Ganesha. A small tower of books stood upon a table behind her desk. One of the books was about the influential women of India.

I started as I caught sight of two framed silver Omani khanjar daggers high up a wall. The sudden sight of those familiar objects from a faraway Middle Eastern childhood threw me off for a second - I felt a little bit off kilter as I got confused about which country I was in. Then I remembered once again that I was in India and that the khanjars must've been presented to Kiran Bedi when she was in Muscat last year...during the trip I had been so close to attending. A soft feeling of homesickness for an alien nation warmed my cheeks because I had discovered that another person in the same room had stepped onto its soil as well.

I stayed back in Kiran Bedi's office for a minute after the crew had packed up and left. I told her that I was raised in the country that the khanjars were from and how close I'd been to seeing her there. She smiled. Then I adjusted the tripod bag that was slung across my back and left, not angry about last year's passes anymore.

Read related: Climbing Every Mountain

Dilli ki Hava

2011-04-15T13:36:00.003-05:00

there is shit in the air
and when the breeze blows it's like getting a shit facial
the flavour of the breeze coats my windpipe
a thick coat of shit i can almost swallow
sometimes it's urine
pungent like knitting needles through my eyeballs into my brain
tickling my tear glands but not enough
giving me a dull headache like cigarette smoke but not quite
the smell of old ammonia and something worse

Dilli Live

2011-04-15T09:57:00.010-05:00

Today I spent about 5 hours at the Patiala House Court in New Delhi standing and waiting for the 2G scam accused to step out after a bail hearing. A fellow intern and I arrived at the court complex at 1245am with a reporter and a cameraman and were only able to leave 5 hours later after standing for most of that time on an empty stomach. The hearing was supposed to be from 2pm to 4pm, but the ending kept getting delayed in increments. It felt like waiting for a late Indian train which has no intention of arriving before a delay of 14 hours (that happened to me once).

There was no place for the press to sit, and some photographers eventually decided to sit down on the very filthy ground. I could only bring myself to a squat after around 330pm. The photographers got so bored that they started taking pictures of each other, "for Facebook" someone joked.

When the accused eventually stepped out one by one, cameramen (there were no camerawomen there) ferociously descended on them from all sides in an overwhelming God's Wrath sort of fashion. Who were these guys? Where were the sweet cameramen I had just stood with for so many hours? It was a stampede, the ground was shaking. My heart came into my mouth, and I sprinted out to a safe distance. Tall men with cameras that looked like the Terminator's machine gun were swarming around (up, down, and on the sides of) the accused like giant cyborgs, yelling at each other as flashbulbs went off like juggernaut lightning. It was like a scene from a pilgrimage gone mad. You couldn't see the accused in the middle of the crowd, but they kept moving, trying to get to the safety of their vehicles out on the main road. I felt somewhat afraid that someone would get hurt badly in that chase. There was so much shouting and aggression in that crowd that orbitted around the accused, I realised later that I had held my breath waiting for the sound of a cracking camera or skull. I am still not sure if I'd be able to tell the difference between those sounds.

It was not a short way from the courthouse to the main road. The accused and their suffocating envelope of cameramen pushed and shoved all the way to the outside and rocked the security walkway and a metal gate on their way. The guards kept their distance mostly out of shock. Bystanders both inside the courthouse and outside kept asking us who was being chased. An older man in the court complex huffed and puffed - photography was not allowed in the court complex! An old dust-covered toothless man sitting near the main road was watching the accused dive into their cars. He kept chuckling and calling out, "Ayyy Raja Babu!"

But that was a learning experience that I am grateful for. The real memories that I will be taking with me of the Patiala House Court in New Delhi are:

1. people taking long luxuriant naps on the court lawn
2. a dirt-covered boy of about 4 standing in the middle of a court courtyard with his pants pulled down to his feet and peeing with all the glory that God had intended. He just stood there with his lower body completely exposed, urinating on Indian judicial property as lawyers, judges, and maybe some media personnel walked all around him. They kept walking after the boy had put his pants back on and left. Some walked right over his urine, by then an anonymous puddle in the middle of the courtyard.
3. a lawyer blowing his nose hard and letting it drip to the ground outside a court where the camerapeople , including my fellow intern and I, were standing and contemplating sitting on the ground
4. dogs and cats wandering about the court complex
5. swarms of flies (and much worse?) around all the food stalls in the court complex
6. everything smelling of excrement and urine, especially when the breeze picked up
7. dirty walls that I eventually convinced myself to lean against when my feet began to hurt

Today was a small sample of the paparazzi experience. I expressed my surprise at the aggression of the cameramen to a reporter, what if the accused had got hurt? A fist fight had almost broken out out there on the road. An accused had been unable to get into his car at first because the crowd had pushed him to another car.

The reporter shrugged my concerns away with a grand disaffected declaration - so what, he said. What's more important, getting the visual or keeping the subject safe?

The Coolest Clique Ever

2011-02-23T09:27:00.008-06:00

Random invites to strange chat rooms - I always wanted to be a part of DrunkGirlRoom! And by always, I mean never.

Ag-47

2010-12-23T17:01:00.003-06:00

steel in me
a core of steel
north to south
east to west
a core of steel
strong as death
like blood but steel
silver and ice
it shatters not
high boiling point
soul skeleton
a core of steel

Scaring Indian Muslims

2010-12-23T16:45:00.007-06:00

The short, stout Indian policewoman grimaced as she looked down at my boarding pass. Ugly mustard-yellow curtains separated the two of us from the rest of Terminal 3 at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi. The woman's skin was dark, thick, and shiny, and the tight bun on her head had the dried out look of old hair oil. Her head was round, and her body seriously plump. She didn't look like the police type of woman. Who had brought her here anyway? She should've been buying vegetables somewhere in a bright yellow sari and thin gold bangles that clanged as her too-tight blouse developed sweat stains around her armpits. I was pretty sure her khakhi uniform had pungent sweat stains too. The uniform looked uncomfortable - it was bunching up in all the wrong places in the most unflattering of ways. Am I the only one that ever notices how obscene some government uniforms look on female employees?

"Are you a Muslim?" she suddenly questioned in a flat, restrained tone. She was still looking down at my boarding pass, not making eye contact. From what I could see, her face was tight and bore no real expression. Or maybe concealed another?

Oh God, why did I have to run into this policewoman of all personnel? Why did I have to come back to India? Everyone had warned me about these things. My stomach tightened, and I felt small and powerless. This was India, and the two of us were alone in the fast-becoming claustrophobic security compartment. She was the one with the uniform (ugly as it was) - what was she going to do? Why did I have to end up with the closeted Hindu right-winger government official? I hated being a Muslim in India already.

"Uh, yes, I am a Muslim...?"

The dark oily face looked up at me and startled me with the smile of a small child. "Me also, I am also a Muslim!" it squealed excitedly.

I remembered to breathe. "Masha Allah then!" I said, as she handed me back my boarding pass with an eagerly expectant gaze. She was still smiling, and I had begun to as well.

NDTV Journal, weeks 12-17

2010-12-23T16:35:00.002-06:00

I’m 29. I should have had a husband by now. A well-groomed, kind, and ambitious husband who hugs me and tells me I’m pretty and buys me small, meaningful presents. I should have had a baby by now. The other day I saw a small, fat baby wrapped up in winter wear in the arms of his young mother, rubbing his face into hers, and I honestly felt like someone was stabbing me in the heart. It was all I could do to hold myself up and not crumple like the paper a half-written poem was abandoned on. By now I should have had a house of my own with a kitchen of my own where I could exercise my culinary talents and then invite all my yuppie friends over to parties where I would wear nice clothes and look like a real woman, all made-up and perfumed. I do look great when I’m made up. I am a great cook too. I can make roti and even pizza from scratch. I bake like it’s nobody’s business. You should try my Chicken Biryani, my Karhai Chicken, and my Chicken Sweet Corn Soup.

But you can’t. Because I live as a paying guest where the kitchen is hardly equipped for anything more than boiling eggs. You can’t see how great I look in makeup and nice clothes because I don’t wear any, because the smog that hits me when I ride an auto rickshaw would ruin my face and my clothes. I’m having to relive my student years, right back down to the ghhisi piti jeans, cheap sweatshirt, sports shoes, and baseball cap – attire that is an insult to a woman’s body. One of the bathrooms in my PG has a resident lizard. The sink only runs boiling hot water, and the sink in the other bathroom only runs icy cold water. Someone stole my favourite hoodie from the clothesline up on the terrace. It’s not fun washing my own clothes anymore. My hair is falling out. I thought I’d paid my dues – I lived like a pauper at university, had my heart broken a number of times, and got used to eating meals and going to the movies alone. I’ve worn donated clothes from a church, skipped on personal grooming until I looked like a cavewoman (and then some), and had tears burn my eyes because the winter wind was going through my bones. Later I had a beautiful apartment with a soft cream carpet, huge beach-house windows, a vaulted ceiling, and a shower curtain with butterflies on it. I wore smoky-eye makeup and sexy heels because my new car could protect my makeup and my clothes from the elements. I turned heads in my bouncy skirts. I even used to live next to a Hope Hill. Hope Hill! Could anything sound more meadow-like. And you know what – I gave it all up. Because even the corpses at the local funeral home could be made-up to look alive!

Now I live in one of the most unsafe cities in the world for women. I’m the oldest in a class where ¾ of the folks are in their early 20s and have never had to file their taxes. Most have never even left the subcontinent. I have no handsome husband, no gurgling baby. I used to think that I’d have all those things by 24. All my old school friends on Facebook now suddenly have spouses in their display pictures. I am still listed as in an ‘open relationship’ with my female best friend who’s getting married on Christmas Day. I’m sure most people think I’m really a boy. Every Corolla – heck, every sedan - that passes me by taunts me like a rejected lover, reminding me that I gave it up for this, for standing by the road covered in traffic exhaust and dust, trying to catch an auto rickshaw. That perfumed woman I see in the driver’s seat, the one with the sunglasses and winter boots and lip gloss – she used to have my face once upon a time.

And insha Allah, she will again.

Set to stun

2010-12-22T04:35:00.003-06:00

"Charlie X", the first episode of Star Trek I ever saw:

Kirk: Charlie, there are a million things in this universe you can have and there are a million things you can't have. It's no fun facing that, but that's the way things are.
Charlie: What am I going to do?
Kirk: Hang on tight and survive. Everybody does.
Charlie: You don't!
Kirk: Everybody, Charlie. Me too.

Throwback

2010-12-15T11:27:00.006-06:00

Epilogue to an earlier poem

I held hands with myself today

Now the child within

Is not afraid

NDTV Journal: weeks 7-11

2010-11-14T15:34:00.002-06:00

Dr. Prannoy Roy wasn’t always the man with the famous beard. Once upon a time he was 18 years old and working at a London grocery store. He admitted to my NDTV batch that he wasn’t very good at his job. He said that he knew, for example, where the can of mushrooms were, but whenever a customer would ask him for it, all the cans up on the shelves would start to look the same to him. His boss helped him out the first few times, but then fired him with the grand declaration that the young Roy would never amount to anything ever in his life. Dr. Roy acknowledged that, as an 18-year-old, he was crushed. I’m not sure but at that moment, I think I saw that 18-year-old resurface on the face of the 61-year-old man sitting across the desk in front of me, but that was for just a second.

Dr. Prannoy Roy is now my boss; he is the founder and Executive Chairperson of NDTV. Wikipedia calls him a ‘media baron’, and I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the whole of India probably knows who he is. That really means something in a country of over 1 billion people, a nation where approximately 1/6th of the world’s population resides. Dr. Roy’s got a whole lot of other complicated entries on his resume – Economics graduate from the University of London's Queen Mary College, PhD in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, Chartered Accountant, Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. He has also taught at the Delhi School of Economics and has served as Economic Advisor to the Government of India. He’s been involved in the media world since the early 80s and has made a name for himself as a journalist, election analyst, and anchorperson. He told me that he too had worked with Deloitte for a while but had got bored.

Back in school, an English teacher had once told me that I had terrible style and that I thought too much of myself on two separate occasions respectively. The latter comment was made in reference to a poem I had come up with in a moment of complete angst. It was called ‘I’ll Reach the Top’. I was 14 years old then.

One day I’ll be,
Up there, you’ll see,
I’ll be the best one day.
I’ll be so big,
That all you pigs,
Will have nothing left to say.
I will, just wait,
Be so, so great,
I’ll outshine all of you.
I’ll be the CREAM,
Just let me dream,
I’ll make my dreams come true.

As a college student in the United States, I dreaded one photo editor at the university newspaper where I worked as a writer and photographer. The guy was White American, younger than me, a journalism student, and not only was he the most hated person in the newsroom, but on one incident he insisted that an English word I said existed did not exist. I hated how he assumed that he had the final word on that for some vague predestined reason.

As a foreign IT professional in the United States, I was struggling to carve time for what I really wanted to do – have a book published. I was desperate. I had once promised myself that I would be published by 24, and here I was pushing 26. So I forsook my feeble social life for daily writing time and socializing with a local writing club which was mostly white and over 50. For the first year, most people there didn’t even know my name, but they eventually learned how to pronounce it and ended up teaching me many things about the writing business. A number of them were published many times over.

One year I attended a writer’s conference in Oklahoma City. I remember how when I told a Deloitte coworker about the conference, he raised his fingers in the shape of quotation marks and said, “you mean, “writer’s” conference”. He then laughed in my face.

At the conference, I was terrified. Here were more old white people from the Bible Belt of America. The angry black woman I was set up to room with at the hotel spent the weekend telling me how no one wanted to buy her tome of a novel because it was about a black woman. I had finished my first book by then and was looking for a publisher. I’d pitched it to an editor who was interested at first but politely declined a couple of months later over email. Another editor wasn’t so nice – he said my work was so boring that it put him to sleep in the first few pages, but that he’d try and fish out the rest of manuscript if he could ever muster the bother. Over the next few months I sent letters to about a hundred publishers across America, and only got back 25 rejections. The others never replied. There were a handful of publishers who were interested, but they too turned me down in time. That manuscript has since been put on the backburner.

While I retreated to lick my wounds, a random publisher from Delaware that I’d never heard of got wind of me somehow and asked me to write some books for them. I am now working on my 4th book, and I’m still not sure how the folks at Mitchell Lane Publishers got to know of me in the first place. I need to investigate that one of these days. Or maybe I’ll just let the mystery be for when someone makes a movie about me.

Dr. Roy did go back to find that grocery shop in London. He saw that it had shut down a long time ago.

I didn’t get a book published by 24, but by the time I turned 28, I had had two books published. The first one happened to be released one day after my birthday.

You Can Say That Again

2010-10-28T09:58:00.003-05:00

"Somehow this village of roses was not so foreign to him. His intuition told him that he belonged here, if only for a short period. This would be the place where he would rekindle the fire for living that he had known before the legal profession stole his soul, a sanctuary where his broken spirit would slowly start to heal. And so began Julian's life among the Sages of Sivana, a life of simplicity, serenity and harmony. The best was soon to come."

- Robin S. Sharma, 'The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari'

NDTV Journal: weeks 5 and 6

2010-10-10T08:23:00.003-05:00

A number of my NDTV batch mates had crowded around the TV - the Ayodhya land dispute verdict was going to be announced any minute. Some of my batch mates were seated, some remained standing, and some were ferociously switching between TV channels. I was seated on a chair at a table directly in front of the TV. The longer the verdict went unannounced past its deadline, the closer the crowd began to move in, crushing me into the table until I was closed in from all sides.

I felt self-conscious about being the only Muslim in the group. Was anyone watching me, ready to challenge me about what I dared want the outcome of the verdict to be? In the flux of identities in my inner world – non-smoker, woman, friend, Sunni Hanafi, daughter, author, NRI -, I felt my Muslim identity being forced into the foreground. I didn’t want to be a Muslim that day, but it was like in 1992 and in the years that followed - you were either a Hindu or a Muslim, even if you just ‘looked like one’.

Someone placed their chin on my shoulder. I don’t have a sister but it felt like something a sister would do. I felt comforted, like I had not been abandoned just yet. Was it Apoorva, the Hindu girl from my hometown of Lucknow?

In 1992, our old Muslim moholla in Lucknow shut its black iron gates for the first time in decades. My mamoo and mumaani hid their children, a 5-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl, in an empty water tank on the terrace. The rifle they used to scare monkeys away with was kept ready to protect themselves from a different kind of intruder this time. The voices out on Victoria Street were loud – the old chowk area had gone mad.

I was 11, in Muscat, Oman, and very angry. For the first time, my family would not let me spend the day at my best friend’s house. Her last name was Kothary.

Things felt strained between the adults in the Indian community in Oman. The Muslims felt afraid of the Indian Embassy, so they withdrew to themselves. They prayed hard for peace at milaads and for someone’s son who had gone missing in India. There was no Indian cable TV in Oman in those days; my mother had only found out about the demolition through the BBC News’s Urdu Service on her radio. Cell phones didn’t exist. People still yelled over international phone lines, if they were able to get a connection at all. India felt far away, like a fortress we couldn’t get into, like a madhouse the people we knew couldn’t get out of. I saw a number of grown Muslims cry and say, “there is no place for us in India anymore”.

I don’t have many relatives left in India. Many families were split in 1947, and many began to leave India during the wars with Pakistan. That’s the first time some strange boys mocked my mother on her university bus and asked her whom she’d cheer for during an IndoPak cricket match. Many more of my relatives left India during the 90s. Why did I, after having lived my whole life overseas in safety, choose to come back to this legacy, these echoes? The India of innocent summer vacations in Firangi Mahal in old Lucknow never will be again. But for now, the Hindu girl’s chin on my shoulder makes me feel like it could.

Blue Collar

2010-09-30T14:15:00.005-05:00

My autorickshaw driver this morning was a Muslim. I'd guessed as much from the Arabic inscriptions on the shiny decorative CDs that were hanging above his steering wheel, but I wanted to be sure, so I asked him. "Bhaiyya, aap Musalmaan hain?" I said as we reached the NDTV office and I began to fish around my wallet for 40 rupees. I could only see the back of his dark head as he nodded and said yes. A red-and-white keffiyeh was tied around his neck like a piece of thick rope.

I asked him if he thought any riots would break out in Delhi after the Ayodhya verdict was announced today. He didn't think so. He said that the people of Delhi lived together in so much diversity. People don't get communal in places like that.

After Dark

2010-09-29T14:23:00.008-05:00

Two minutes into my nightly ritual of putting my clothes out to dry on the clothesline did I realise that something was different. It was dark, almost one in the morning. I was on the terrace of my paying guest accommodation. My ears pricked. Was it the moonlight? I looked up at the half moon. I looked down at the dark green tiled floor and stepped into a spot of moonlight. I stood there for a minute. No, that wasn't it.

I climbed further atop the terrace, up the dozen or so black iron steps to the place where the water tanks are kept, carefully hidden from view. Some of the girls in the PG often come up here to smoke at night when the weather is good. They play songs up here in the dark on their cell phones and talk about boyfriends and unhappy family lives.

There was no one here now. There was the horizon - the tops of sluggish houses and tall neon-lit hotels in the east, and dark treetops in the west. The new metro train sped along the eastern horizon. A solitary plane swam in the inky sky. A dog howled.

Then there was silence. For the first time since I'd arrived in Delhi, the city was quiet. The great monster was asleep. Delhi was at peace.

My Big Picture

2010-09-28T10:06:00.007-05:00

It's been a month since I've entered the 'scary' world of the media, and I've been thinking: is the ideal journalist pushy, aggressive, maybe even disrespectful? Is that what is required? Is that what it's all about, the bottom line, and nothing else? Somehow I don't believe it.

The Wind And The Sun, an Aesop's fable

A dispute once arose between the Wind and the Sun, which was the stronger of the two, and they agreed to settle the point upon the issue - that whichever of the two soonest made a traveler take off his cloak, should be accounted the more powerful.

The Wind began, and blew with all his might and main a blast, cold and fierce as a Thracian storm; but the stronger he blew, the closer the traveler wrapped his cloak around him, and the tighter he grasped it with his hands.

Then broke out the Sun. With his welcome beams he dispersed the vapor and the cold; the traveler felt the genial warmth, and as the Sun shone brighter and brighter, he sat down, quite overcome with the heat, and taking off his cloak, cast it on the ground.

Thus the Sun was declared the conqueror; and it has ever been deemed the persuasion is better than force; and that the sunshine of a kind and gentle manner will sooner lay open a poor man's heart than all the threatenings and force of blustering authority.

Breakfast Fruit

2010-09-27T10:21:00.003-05:00

The poor little dark boy with the shy smile and bright eyes was serving breakfast as usual at the NDTV cafeteria. He probably didn't know any English, so I asked him in Urdu for the fruit of the day, did they have any bananas? He shook his head and gave me a pear. It was of an odd shape so I asked him in Urdu again, was it a pear, a naashpaati? He nodded, his eyes uncertain for a second, as he replied, "pine.ap.pil". I said okay and left him to savour the triumph - he'd used a new English word today.

NDTV Journal: weeks 3 and 4

2010-09-24T16:49:00.001-05:00

It’s official: the firangs have declared the Games Village unfit for human beings (unfit for human beings!). Their Indian peers, though, shake their heads and shrug with a smile: it’s okay, this is India. Apparently that’s all one can expect here.

It’s like the time I got harassed in public by a large group of Indian boys, in Toronto no less. When I complained to the Indian uncles and aunties nearby, they too shrugged and smiled. Boys will be boys, they’d told me, I was probably just not used to it. I’d been raised overseas after all.

What?

Why should I have to get used to it? Why should I have to get used to perverts? Why should I have to get used to streets that look as if they’ve been bombed? Why should I have to get used to the presence of diseases like malaria and dengue in India’s capital? From what angle is any of this even remotely acceptable? Who put a cap on our quality of life, who taught us to say ‘it’s okay’ when it’s not? I don’t want to have to get used to anything. Lo ho gayee chhutti, I may as well just stay at home then and wait for the sky to fall on my head.

But I don’t want to settle. I want to stay hungry. I am not okay with the way basic facilities are managed in India. I am not okay with how Indian people behave outside or inside of India. I will never be okay with anyone who not only gets used to mediocrity but who actually defends it. I will never be okay with Indians who, instead of sharing the outrage, treat their Indian critics as whistleblowers and just plain ignore their foreign critics. This is India, I’m told, this is the real world. And I’m what, supposed to feel proud of that? Is this what our patriotism is tied to? Lo ho gayee chhutti.

Chicken Little

2010-09-24T13:22:00.006-05:00

I don't want to punch the rooster next door in the face anymore. I'm told that the little guy has problems - whenever he wakes up, he scuttles out of his coop (or wherever he lives, I've yet to meet him nose to beak) and crows his heart out with his eyes tightly shut. He never knows what time it is or even if the sun is out or not, he just keeps crowing out of some sense of pride, obligation, or maybe even confusion. Poor little man.

A Tale of Two Indias

2010-09-21T08:52:00.001-05:00

The headlines on NDTV's website today...

NDTV Journal: week 2

2010-09-09T13:02:00.002-05:00

Mr. Ajmal Jami liked Rajiv Gandhi the very first time he met him. He thought the young Indian Prime Minister came off as an all round good guy. At one point, Rajiv Gandhi even grabbed the veteran cameraperson’s arm when Mr. Jami, trying to film the PM while walking backwards with his video camera, tripped and almost fell.

Mr. Jami also remembers other things. He remembers rushing to the site where Rajiv Gandhi was blown to bits by a suicide bomber some years later. He remembers the piece of red carpet that had been cut out to take away the remains of the man who in another time maybe could’ve been his buddy. He also remembers almost stepping onto a disembodied arm whose fingernails were painted bright red. He remembers how it had just lain there.

Took me back to ‘Stiff’, a collection of dark but humorous essays I’d once read about the contributions of cadavers to science. I remember the author, Mary Roach, describing a visit to a lab where plastic surgery students would practice their skills. Each student would be given the head of a cadaver to practice a number of cosmetic and reconstructive procedures on. Each was also given one pair of cadaver hands that were severed a little above the wrist. The author described how one particular student’s ‘hands’ had beautiful shapely fingers whose nails were painted bright red. This bit of personality startled the student who touched the hands and wondered about the body - the person - they once used to be attached to.

Elsewhere

2010-09-05T03:05:00.005-05:00

I've been having strange out-of-body experiences since I left Oman for Delhi:

Working on my laptop transports me back to the Qurum City Center where I am stroking the keyboard for the very first time, already knowing that yes, this is the one. I can hear the young Balochi Omani salesman telling me in his heavily accented Hindi that he had spent some years at a boarding school in Dehradun and that it reminded him of his favourite place in Oman, Salalah. I can feel the shoppers around me - brown, black, and white - strolling about the wide aisles of Carrefour that are sharply lit with bright white light. The floors are swept to a sparkle, everyone is well-dressed. It's still the first week of Ramadhan, and the stores are going to be open extra late all month.

I think of my tailor everytime I pull out a set of clothes. The print reminds me of the shopping trip I went on with my mother, the store we bought it from, the Indian shopkeepers who've seen me grow from knobbly knees and pigtails to make-up and heels. Our tailor is Pakistani. His name is Tariq, and he's been making my clothes in Oman with his brother, Rizwan, since I was 7 or 8. I still remember the first grown-up style shalwar qameez he made for me. I had finished my first reading of the Quran in Arabic, and we were going to have a party. For the first time, I got to pick an inky red and dark blue shiny synthetic material for myself, different from the usual flowery cotton stuff my mom would make me wear. For the first time, I got to pick a design for my dress from one of the tailor's grown-up fashion books all by myself. I was under 10, and that outfit made me feel like Sridevi. I've worn many wonderful dresses since, but none that ever gave me that kick.

Everytime I see a young person driving their own car while I'm waiting to find an autorickshaw driver who won't give me attitude, I think about how well I knew the smooth, clean roads of Muscat. I remember gesticulating to Cliff Richard's 'Devil Woman' as it played in my dad's Corolla as I took it out for a spin to the Darsait LuLu, to the Qurum McDonald's, to my beloved alma mater Indian School Muscat, or drove past a 400-year-old fort by the sea. I wonder if there is any other city in the world where I know the roads by landmarks and don't need streetnames.

As I put my contact lenses away at the end of the day, I see the Sudanese optician's handwriting on the lenses container. He'd tested my eyes for the first time when I was 10 years old, and he's been testing my eyes ever since. I'm never sure what he's saying as he keeps switching midsentence between Arabic and English, but he always sends greetings to my father at the end of the transaction.

I remember my Sudanese dentist in his tiny shop in Ruwi whenever I try to floss in the dull light of the shared bathroom where I rent a room. I'd only been going to him for a year, but I've never seen him without his mask, so I don't even know what he really looks like. He's a really nice dentist though, and he doesn't yell at me when a tear or whimper or two escape me when I'm in the chair. Apparently he was educated in Egypt.

As I begin to worry about where to find a good salon in Delhi, I think of the convenience of having the Excellent Beauty Corner a one-minute walk from our apartment in Muscat. It's hard finding an intuitive beautician who can understand your temperament and is skilled at the same time. I remember feeling a sense of separation anxiety the last time I visited the ladies at the salon before I left for Delhi. How am I going to find another salon where the women call me 'dear' and speak to me kindly?

The thought of wanting to rent a movie and not knowing where to go takes me back to Samara Video, which one can reach from our apartment in the MBD area in 5 minutes by car. The guy who works at the counter is an Arab from Bahrain. I don't know his name, but he's distinctively effeminate. His eyebrows are tweezed, and he has a long beautiful ponytail that reaches the middle of his back like a piece of thick rope. He often wears fitted tees, and his speech and laughter are soft. All the women like him. I don't feel as restrained around him as I do with other men. I once entered the store with a bag of popcorn in my hand and offered him some as I exchanged a joke or two with him. He once mentioned to me that he would like to live in Oman for good because it is a peaceful and clean place. One of the last places like that left in the world, I expect.

NDTV Journal: week 1

2010-09-02T08:24:00.002-05:00

This is the first in a series of posts that will chronicle my time as an apprentice at NDTV in New Delhi:

I knew I was back in India when I glanced out the window of the sweaty cab and was met by the bored stare of a cow. I felt greasy, slimy, and I was sticking to the cab’s upholstery. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. For the first time since I had applied for NDTV’s Broadcast Training Program did I encounter doubt and even some dread. Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe everybody had been right. I am unrealistic, and now I and the money from my savings that I had used to pay for the program were stuck. What business did an IT professional have attending journalism training anyway? So what if I used to play around as a kid with our old tape deck, making my own radio news shows? So what if I’d nurtured my interest in filmmaking alongside my day job? So what if I was already a published author three times over? This sort of a thing, this sort of a drift, was just not done. What made me think that I could pull it off? They were right. I had set myself up for disaster. I was going to ruin my future. What had I been thinking? And now it was too late. The evening traffic mirrored my predicament – it didn’t seem like we were moving ahead, and we certainly could not go backwards. These things don’t work that way.

Where are they now?

2010-08-21T08:26:00.004-05:00

I've met many people in this life of mine that I've spent trotting around the globe, recently on my own. I wonder about the ones whom I shared moments with for a while or even just a few minutes and then went our separate ways, never to meet again. Some of them made me happy when I needed to be made happy, and they never even knew it. I wonder where they are now and if they remember me as I remember them:

Florence worked with security in the building across from the Empire State Building that housed the office of Guideposts magazine. She was a middle-aged black woman from Trinidad & Tobago whom I chatted with when I visited the staff at Guideposts on my magical 2007 New York trip. I never saw her again.

The black UPS mailman rode around the Oklahoma State University campus every day in his black truck and brown uniform. I met him as a desk clerk in my residence call where he would drop by everyday on his rounds delivering mail. It was one of my duties as a desk clerk to receive and distribute mail in the mailboxes of the buildings' residents. I can't remember the mailman's name - was it Robert? He was a gentleman and would great me with a compliment and a smile every time. Even after I stopped working at the residence hall, we'd wave and greet each other everytime his truck passed me by anywhere, on-campus or off. He made me feel like a pretty lady. I left OSU in 2005. I never saw him again.

A dusky and statuesque waitress was serving me that late night at the no-name Los Angeles diner. She wore a stereotypical turquoise waitress outfit that went down to her knees, complete with a white apron and white wrap cloth tiara on her crown. She looked Hispanic. Her hair was long, black, and thick, and her skin was the colour of hot chocolate. Her lipstick was a soft dark brown. She asked me where I was from. I said India. Her eyes lit up and she smiled. She was from Bangladesh, she said. She told me her name and I told her mine. We were both Muslims. I looked around the dimly lit diner with its plastic covered seats and plastic-covered menus. What was this beautiful woman doing here, so far away from home, in this town full of freaks and perverts? I never saw her again.

The old woman who looked like she was made of wet white paper was looking at me expectantly, her eyes shining. I told her I liked her gold pendant and that she looked pretty. She clasped her hands and her voice shook. "Oh, honey..." she said as she smiled, her eyes never away from my face. The other university kids who were part of my volunteer group in Stillwater stood a few feet away from us, nervous and uncomfortable in the old folk's home. They were all young, all under 20, and the smell of death, decay, and napthalene made them uneasy. Maybe it's because they were American, or maybe I was used to being around old people, but I felt more comfortable at the home than with them. We didn't stay at the home for more than 10 minutes. I met that old woman in 2000. I never saw her again.

My friend and I were buying movie tickets for the new Mr. Bean movie at the AMC near Times Square. I noticed that the counter had the new Master Card smart card reader installed. I got excited and began to hum the tune of the commercial, a funny little ad that had had the card reader beeping to the tune of Strauss's 'Blue Danube'. The young black fellow working at the counter sang with me. We all laughed. I never saw him again.

When I was in kindergarten in Muscat in the early 80s, our school had hired elderly Omani women to help the teachers take care of the little children. I spent many hours sitting in the lap of the old Omani woman in my class. She was short, strongly built, dark, and had a wide nose. Sh wore colourful cotton Omani clothes. I remember her in a dark green and black outfit. A long scarf covered her hair, and the only parts of her body that were visible were her chubby hands and feet and her face. She didn't speak much. She didn't know any English or much Hindi or Urdu, and the Indian children, most of them South Indian, didn't know any Arabic but only smatterings of English and mostly Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Telegu, Tamil, Kannada, etc. I never saw her again.

The tall strawberry-blonde young Irish fellow at the Navy Pier in Chicago was selling t-shirts and bags that changed colour in sunlight. I didn't want to buy anything, but he stopped my mother and I and laughed and joked as he kept talking about how he was a terrible salesperson and wasn't able to sell anything. He kept saying that he was just visiting his uncle from Ireland. He wouldn't stop talking and smiling, telling me that I probably wore t-shirts sized small. After 10 minutes, we had spent 40 dollars at that stall. The young Irishman gave me strawberry candy and thanked me for making him feel better about his selling skills, even though he was a terrible salesman. I kept that candy, wrapped in its strawberry designed wrapper, for many years after that. I never saw him again.

The middle-aged professor burst into the Microform Media Room where I worked at the university library in Stillwater and exclaimed at me, "Hello there, young person!!!" I leapt from my chair, all the sluggishness and frustration of my life instantly banished as an unknown optimism burst into existence in my chest. The clouds suddenly cleared and the sun shone on me as I realised I wanted to smile and didn't want to sit anymore. I asked the professor how I could help him. I never saw him again.

Once upon a 9/11

2010-08-19T16:08:00.003-05:00

I first moved to the US in 1999. I had just turned 18 and had come to the Oklahoma State University for undergraduate studies. My campus was in Stillwater, a town 80 miles into the country away from the two largest cities of the state. Stillwater would've qualified as rural if it had not been for the university that brought along with it a dynamic and diverse group of people every semester from every corner of the world, students, professors, staff, and their families. Most people on campus were American and a large majority were white, but aside from the usual adjustment and alienation issues that one faces in a new country, it was possible to make new friends rather quickly. If not with the Americans, many of whom were from small towns in Oklahoma or surrounding states in the Bible Belt of America, then with any of the hundreds of foreign students who were all in the same boat as yourself.

In 1999, President Clinton was still in office. Cell phones still charged long-distance fees, not that many people had cell phones in the first place. Most foreign countries did not even use email. Napster was just beginning to get popular with college students across the nation, but many had not even heard of it or knew what it was. ICQ was the number one chat program, and Hotmail had just launched its own version. I remember using it for the first time a few months before and excitedly calling my family to see the alert at the bottom of the chat window that indicated in realtime that the other party was typing from halfway across the world. Most companies did not have websites or include them in advertising. Hardly anyone bought anything online. A home-use PC cost around $1,200, and laptops were only for the jetset. The job market was fantastic. Companies would woo fresh graduates with no experience by the dozens, they were picking people up right, left, and center from all over the country. Giants like Microsoft and IBM were a fixture on every college campus, including ours. A computer science graduate with absolutely no experience was practically guaranteed a job that paid $60,000 annually. Everything was great. In those days, America was on autopilot.

Hardly anybody knew about Islam at that time, and no one seemed to care either. There was no reason for anyone to ask "What is Islam?", people just didn't seem to be thinking on those lines. I was happy to meet Muslims from parts of the world I had never been too - Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Kazakhistan, Lebanon - but I was equally delighted when non-Muslims would approach me with a smile and inquire about my ethnic background. In fact, I preferred interacting with non-Muslims because I found it hard to fit in with the Muslim community in Stillwater. Most of the Muslims were foreigners, and their religious identity came bundled with nationalist, regionalist, linguistic, and cultural ideas that, as foreigners in a completely differently environment, they tried to hold on to extra hard. Even the Arab Muslims were being extra Arab! I enthusiastically attended a few Muslim gatherings that first year, but I always ended up feeling awkward, sometimes unwelcome, and often invisible. Before this I had been wholly raised in the Middle East in a Muslim country and had been around Muslim gatherings all the time, and this new feeling of alienation and sometimes rejection startled me. It never got easier as the years went by. In fact, it became a regular occurrence. From then on I began to shy away from attending Islamic gatherings and kept my religious observances to myself. This would make me the subject of criticism from various quarters over the years and cause me much internal anguish, but my solitude turned out to be the best thing for my spirituality.

I remember when a White American classmate once asked me in freshman year if it was true that the Muslims determined their time of prayer according to the position of the sun. When I confirmed that fact, he nodded and smiled, "Cool!" He asked me if it was true that the Muslims abstained from eating pork. I confirmed that too. He then smiled and added, "actually I'm Jewish; did you know that the Jews and Christians are not supposed to eat pork either?" I had not known that and was excited at this new bit of knowledge. But I'd known many Christians all my life, and they had never had any qualms about eating pork. My bright-blonde short-spikey-haired pasty-white classmate then told me that he ate pork too but technically the Jews and Christians weren't supposed to be eating it. This was exciting. Not only would I have never guessed that my classmate was Jewish, but he was the first Jewish person I had ever met (that I knew of). It was wonderful to be able to exchange stories with other people, it gave you a sort of respectful feeling at the end of it. If this was any indication of what my American collegiate experience would entail, then this was going to be the best phase of my life.

Those days hardly seem real now. 9/11 happened 2 years after I began college. The minute I heard the word 'Muslim' on TV, I panicked. I locked my dorm room door, afraid to even use the common bathroom to brush my teeth. I'd grown up watching the politically motivated communal riots between Hindus and Muslims in India, and I was terrified. The Muslim tag had followed me to America. Pretty soon a bloodthirsty mob would plow down my dorm room door and set me on fire. Many people knew I was Muslim, they would want my blood. I was cornered. How would I go to my classes if I couldn't even go out to brush my teeth?

None of that happened of course. After about 30 minutes, I managed to slip out of my room. I spent the whole day looking over my shoulder as I slipped quietly from class to class. A deathly silence had taken over the usual cheer of the campus. My teachers were having a hard time focussing on their lectures. The president of the university later called an emergency meeting of the International Student Organisation, of which I was a part of, and advised us on safety precautions for all foreign students. For the next many months, security personnel patrolled the campus, available to escort any nervous people anywhere on the campus.

On the whole, I was very impressed with the way America had reacted to 9/11. The government regularly called for public sanity and cautioned against citizen vigilantism. I had never seen morale like this before. If this had been India, the whole Muslim community would have gone into hiding (and this is before the Godhra riots that were to follow some time later). Sure I had less reason to be afraid - I did not look like what most people thought Muslims looked like. Many people still thought I was a Hindu because I looked distinctly Indian. I was a petite girl, I did not have a straggly beard, I did not look Arab, I did not have an Arabic accent. I'm not going to pretend that I wasn't grateful for that disguise. But I loved America and the Americans for the way they were taking the moral high ground. It was incredible. This is why America was the greatest country in the world.

I often reflect on those days. I don't know exactly when it started, but a few years after 9/11, paranoid whispers about Islam/Muslims began to circulate amongst the masses. After a while, I left OSU with a graduate degree and moved to Tulsa. These whispers had never been directed at me, so I'd never taken them seriously, until the day a good American friend forwarded me an email which cautioned all readers to abstain from voting against Obama because, amongst other things, he was a secret Muslim and would destroy the country under his presidency (I've underlined and boldfaced the email as it was in the version I'd received):

"This information needs to be spread EVERYWHERE.......

BARAK HUSSEIN OBAMA'S CHURCH

Obama mentioned his church during his appearance with Oprah. It's the Trinity Church of Christ. I found this interesting.

Obama's church:
Please read and go to this church's website www.tucc.org/about.htm and read what is written there. It is very alarming.

Barack Obama is a member of this church and is running for President of the U.S. If you look at the first page of their website, you will learn that this congregation has a non-negotiable commitment to Africa. No where is AMERICA even mentioned. Notice too, what color you will need to be if you should want to join Obama's church... B-L-A-C-K!!! Doesn't look like his choice of religion has improved much over his (former?) Muslim upbringing.

Strip away his nice looks, the big smile and smooth talk and what do you get? Certainly a racist, as plainly defined by the stated position of his church! And possibly a covert worshiper of the Muslim faith, even today. This guy desires to rule over America while his loyalty is totally vested in a Black Africa!

I cannot believe this has not been all over the TV and newspapers. This is why it is so important to pass this message along to all of our family & friends.

To think that Obama has even the slightest
chance in the run for the presidency, is really scary.

Click on the link below:
This is the web page for the church Barack Obama belongs to:

www.tucc.org/about.htm

We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian... Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain 'true to our native land,' the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community. The Pastor as well as the membership of Trinity United Church of Christ is committed to a 10-point Vision:

1. A congregation committed to ADORATION.
2. A congregation preaching SALVATION.
3. A congregation actively seeking RECONCILIATION.
4. A congregation with a non-negotiable COMMITMENT TO AFRICA.
5. A congregation committed to BIBLICAL EDUCATION.
6. A congregation committed to CULTURAL EDUCATION.
7. A congregation committed to the HISTORICAL EDUCATION OF AFRICAN PEOPLE IN DIASPORA.
8. A congregation committed to LIBERATION.
9. A congregation committed to RESTORATION.
10. A congregation working towards ECONOMIC PARITY."

I did not know how to take this. Had my friend, who had been so kind to me as a foreign student, forgotten that I was a Muslim? Or had it not registered to her because I was Indian and she assumed Hindu? I then ran into an OSU professor I had known who had always been very supportive and encouraging of me, and he told me a lot of frightening things about Islam and Muslims that were inaccurate. When I told him that I had never come across these concepts in Islam, even while being raised in a Muslim Arab country, he said I was probably a good kind of Muslim. I was completely alarmed.

Around this time things got pretty vicious all around in a very short period of time. Seriously hurtful anti-Islamic websites and images sprouted by the hundreds. The 2008 presidential campaign was underway. Educated influential people were saying insane things about Islam on TV and other media. I read a whole feature in a Tulsa magazine about Islam, including statements from some people who left it. People were getting so hostile just with words, it was frightening. I wasn't sure where to draw the line between free speech and hate speech. By the last few years of my stay in America, this hostility towards Islam got overwhelming. I wanted to counter it and scream, "Stop! Don't believe them! That's complete lies! I'm telling you so!", but I was just one voice, and nobody was listening to me. I had an audience of maybe 5 or 10, while these people on TV with their websites had worldwide followers. I just wanted them to stop saturating the air with hurtful lies.

I don't live in America anymore. I still keep my religious observances to myself yet I grieve over how Islamophobia (I hate how that word gives the phenomenon a permanent identity) is now an actual word. I see debates about Islam on every TV channel. Everyone's writing about it (even me!). Draw Mohammed Day, Burn a Quran Day, Islam-is-coming doomsday prophets, Cordoba House, mistrust of an American president over religious identity (he is not a Muslim for sure, I'm sure no Muslim thinks he is either). It upsets me how people unite across borders over their dislike for Muslims. I would've never believed you if you'd told me 10 years ago that in a few years every continent would be dissecting the details of Islam to the extent that most Muslims aren't even aware of. But today, in this world where every Muslim feels hyperalert all the time about having to answer back to accusations about Islam being flung at them from every direction, I wonder if a time will ever come again when a discussion about Islam will end with a simple 'cool'.

Aishwarya Bledel?

2010-08-18T17:42:00.004-05:00

Aishwarya Rai and Alexis Bledel - the real Gilmore girls? They often looked related to me...!

Ryan Kapoor?

2010-08-18T17:23:00.004-05:00

Double takes with Ranbir Kapoor and Ryan Gosling.

Shab-e-Baraat

2010-07-26T11:45:00.016-05:00

The cemetery is about 20 minutes into the craggy Hajar mountains of northern Oman. To reach it, you have to turn away from the shiny, perfumed, soft life of the coast and face the unforgiving interior. One quick turn from the highway of life and the world falls away as you drive further and further into the Oman that encircles the mirage of your safe city life, the Oman that always was and forever will be - silent, sparsely populated, immortal, ever vigilant. God speaks to Man here.

The cemetery lies in the middle of the mountains in a vast flat valley of rock and stone that is now neatly organised into plots and graves. They also have a registration office, a small mosque, and baths for the ablution of the dead. I wonder if my grandfather, in the greater part of his 87 years on the fertile Indo-Gangetic Plains of North India - where he lived through World Wars, the Indian Freedom Movement, the creation/separation of India and Pakistan, Indo-Pak wars, Hindu-Muslim communal riots, the loss of a spouse and some children - had ever imagined that this is where his final destination lay, here, in this secluded maidaan on the Arabian Peninsula. I've wondered about that for 10 years now.

I should've worn flat footwear today. I kept my eyes to the ground as I walked in between graves - some just marked with numbers on short wooden posts - trying to catch up with my father ahead. The ground was covered with small stones, dry patches of desert grass, and cracked caked pieces of soil. I could already feel the hot ground heating up my JCPenney shoes and the soles of my feet. Sunset was probably a couple of hours away.

I looked up from the ground to see where I was going. Beside me was a grave with my name on it. She had died 10 years ago in the month of Sha'baan at the age of 30. I am 29. Today is also Sha'baan. Tonight is the Night of Emancipation.

Translation of the inscription on the tombstone:

In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful;
There is no god but Allah, and Mohammad is His messenger;
The late Khadija;

Surely we belong to Allah and to Him shall we return;*
The late Khadija daughter of Abdu'Rahmaan Khan Mohammad;
Tribe of al-Zadjali, died on a Wednesday;
Date 3 month Sha'baan year 1421;**
Equivalent to 1-11-2000;***
Age 30 years;

* Quran (2:156)
** Islamic Hijri calendar
*** November 1, 2000

Crisis

2010-07-21T16:12:00.005-05:00

An excerpt from 'The Nature and Structure of the Islamic World'...

"The problem faced internally by the Muslim world appear to be overwhelming. Muslims perceive their values to be increasingly dissonant from those of western liberalism, which seems to have lost its moorings in piety, morality and ethics. Islamic polities must be perceived as part of a total epistemology, hence must be judged by their own internally generated criteria. Yet the criteria are subjected to internal conflict as to their meaning and their relationship to the non-Muslim world.

Every great issue of human existence: liberty, justice, welfare, security, dignity, respect, enlightenment, rectitude, death, affection, divine will and divine message has its own scriptural inspiration and internal consistency. It is especially difficult for the West to understand the tacit, indwelling nature of the Muslim psyche. There is no agreed-upon technique for analyzing the salience of the non-verbal, intuitive dimension of man's being: a dimension, which forms an important part of Muslim identity. Only when Spengler's metaphor of the "world cavern" and his use of the term "soul" are understood can the perennial dialectic of the ummah and the modern nation-state have meaning."

With Love, From Canada

2010-07-16T04:21:00.004-05:00

Please forward this message from an old high school friend of mine to people you know...

Hello! My name is Hanan Vedis. I am currently in Penticton, BC, donating my time to an amazing and powerful project for a healing center which will offer raw foods, yoga, massage, playshops, ecstatic dance, love, community etc.

The owner of this healing center cannot pay me right now as he does not have the funds to do so. I am in dire need of finances due to this situation. So I propose that I offer my services and you refer people my way for those services.

I am an excellent life coach and business consultant. My work is all about healing the earth and the world. Unfortunately, I have not had time to market my business as I am working on this healing center, and so do not have any money coming in at the moment. All I need for a thriving practice is some marketing which I have no time for at the moment. Will you help me?

Here is my request: Will you please send potential clients my way? My website is http://brilliantawakenings.com/. I offer free workshops and a complimentary coaching session so people can experience what I have to offer. PLEASE NOTE: ALL COACHING AND TELESEMINARS ARE DONE OVER THE PHONE, INTERNATIONALLY. I have coached people from Australia, NZ, Europe and N. America. You can refer my website to anyone, as all services are over the telephone.

You don't have to do anything, just send your friends/family to the website and let them know they can get a free workshop or coaching session. I also sell a Spiritual Awakening Meditation which is extremely powerful here: http://brilliantawakenings.com/spiritual-awakening-meditation/
If it is in your heart to help me to continue with my coaching which is raising the consciousness of the world, and help my efforts towards the healing center, which is my dream, please simply send people my way with a recommendation. These are the services I offer: http://brilliantawakenings.com/services/.

Any other ideas are welcome!! Thank you so much!! And please help spread the word and invite others to do the same! Invite others to this event. Thank you!!

And, please give me your feedback, and let me know any questions you have.

A Higher Altitude

2010-07-13T17:26:00.003-05:00

"To be affronted by solitude without decadence or a single material thing to prostitute, it elevates you to a spiritual plane, where I felt the presence of God. Now, there is the God they taught me about at school. And there is the God that's hidden by what surrounds us in this civilisation. That's the God I met on the mountain."

- 'Alive'

The Kingdom of God

2010-07-13T17:08:00.003-05:00

"Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the Earth; in the alternation of the night and the day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the benefit of mankind; in the rain which Allah sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an Earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the Earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds which trail like their slaves between the sky and the Earth; - (here) indeed are Signs for a people that are wise."

- Quran 2:164, surah Al-Baqarah (The Cow)

Mirror, mirror

2010-07-13T16:28:00.004-05:00

"I'm starting with the man in the mirror,
I'm asking him to change his ways,
And no message could have been any clearer,
If you wanna make the world a better place,
Take a look at yourself and then make a change."

- Michael Jackson, 'Man in the Mirror'

Mission Statement

2010-07-13T15:52:00.002-05:00

"Say: "We believe in Allah, and the revelation given to us, and to Abraham, Ismail, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus, and that given to (all) Prophets from their Lord: We make no difference between one and another of them: And we bow to Allah (in Islam)."

- Quran 2:136, surah Al-Baqarah (The Cow)

In Memoriam

2010-06-24T04:55:00.003-05:00

Desert God

2010-06-12T07:52:00.004-05:00

Beautiful paragraph from Pauline Searle's 'Dawn Over Oman'...

Almost as dramatic in a quieter, less aggressive but more ominous way is the desert. From the Umm as Samiim, the Salt Flats, in the west of Oman, the silent wastes of the Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter, creep up upon one like the mists of time - nothing, nothing and yet more nothing as far as the eye can see. The silence is so deep here that ears ache from the very pressure of silence. One is alone with one's God now - this is what life is all about and there is nothing between Him and you. This is the type of country where Islam was born: simple enough for a man to find his God and where he can easily believe that God can find him.

Image from Martin Hartley Photography

Time Travelling on Empathy

2010-06-12T06:54:00.012-05:00

When I came upon these paragraphs in Pauline Searle's 'Dawn Over Oman', I felt so sad for the monarch of Oman of the past 40 years. It took me back to America, my silent dead phase, when I'd longingly look at other people's families and friends who'd express emotional support and understanding every step of the way - for bad semesters, burnouts, and moments of madness.

First let us go back to 1962 and to Sandhurst in England, where the young Sultan Qaboos bin Said, the only son of Sultan Said, was passing out as a second lieutenant in the Cameronians. Watching the new officers on their big day were members of their families and close friends as well as military dignitaries, but for the young man from Arabia there was no family present, only a middle-aged British major and his wife who had been detailed by his father to keep an eye on him and who were to exert such a tremendous influence on both father and son in the years to come. Major F. C. L. Chauncey, who had originally come to Muscat as British Consul in 1949, had retired in 1958 from the Foreign Service but, owing to his close friendship with Sultan Said, had returned almost immediately to Oman as the Sultan's personal adviser. Cast in the old colonial mould, for better and for worse, Major Chauncey, ex-Indian Army, took his job very seriously. He and Sultan Said were very much akin in character - autocratic, obstinate, but with great integrity and even greater determination that Oman should progress only in their way and in their time.

With surprising forethought, Sultan Said decided to send his son round the world for three months to broaden his horizons. Accompanying the young man were the Chaunceys to guide the young Qaboos and to restrain any youthful enthusiasm which the Sultan himself so distrusted. But this broad-minded action towards his only son was to be the last.

...

The young Qaboos personified to the Sultan the dangers of the future. At all costs he was not to be contaminated by the modern world. There was only one way to prevent this: to keep him isolated. Qaboos, who by this time was living near the palace in Salalah, little realised that this would be his home for the next eight years.

Within

2010-06-11T17:03:00.003-05:00

Nighttime once more
Thank God
For silence
For dark
For stillness
For deep blue and black
That drown the details of the world outside
That lull the ugly voices that shout over mine
At night I win

I hear

Memories that live
Filmroll
Some screams
Some smiles

Relive an admirer
Or a suprise
The memory is mine
The memory is alive
Revisit and heal
Woman and child

My own sister am I.

The Light from a Supernova

2010-06-11T08:38:00.004-05:00

I used to feel so stupid in America.

I was a super-confident well-adjusted 18-year-old when I moved to America by myself in 1999 for university. Until then, I had had the reputation of being very talkative, charming, pretty, extroverted, artistic, and a quick learner - I was a go-getter, my English was solid, and I was a star! That is what I had learned of myself, a delicate jigsaw puzzle that I had carefully put together piece by piece over the years with feedback from the people in my world - my family, my teachers, my friends, oh my darling friends. I was all over the place. I would win contests, I would get selected for special programs, I knew what I was good at, and I was so, so confident. I just knew I would conquer America - they would love me!

I continued on my super enthusiastic streak for about a year after having moved to the US. I didn't make many friends. A girl in my dorm told me that someone had told her that I was a phony. I didn't know what that meant, but it hurt a lot. Why would someone say that when I was nice to everyone?

I felt stupid having to ask people to repeat what they were saying because I'd miss words in their strong southern accent. I'd feel so stupid when they'd slow down and stress every word as if I was testing their patience.

The first part-time job I applied for (university catering), the interviewer/manager, an overweight white woman with short grey hair, grimaced and tossed my handwritten application aside and said she couldn't read my writing (but my teachers had always recruited me to work on special handwritten documents in school). She did hire me though, and I quit 2 weeks later. No one had told me that it was the worst job on campus.

I couldn't believe that I didn't get hired for the next job I applied for, one that I really, really wanted, the one that I would be so good at. Even after the interview. When I had been typing up the application on a computer at the computer lab, a Pakistani student had ridiculed my answers, saying that the manager didn't care if I was proud of the DNA model I had presented so well at my high school science exhibition (but the application had asked me to talk about something I was proud of).

I distinctly remember developing tunnel vision and having the bottom of my stomach fall out when I received a rejection letter for the first scholarship I applied for as a university student.

I felt so stupid around American students. They knew so much about computers and American pop culture. They didn't know any of the English songs I knew, and many said I was weird or exotic. Everytime I'd have to ask "what is (insert random American cultural reference here)?", I wouldn't know what to say when they responded with "you don't know??".

Most American students did not return my friendliness, many did not even know I was there. Some did. Most of my friends ended up being international students. One overweight grumpy white American girl in my dorm hardly ever responded to my greetings, and I felt distressed at the stoic glances she would give me in return. Eight years later when I ran into her in another city in America at a pet store she was working in, I greeted her once again, and she was startled but still didn't look happy to see me. She didn't look anything to see me. Another white boy in my dorm, who was friends with this girl, looked a lot like one of the members of the Irish boy-band Westlife, and I'd happily tell him so, but he'd only reply in monosyllables and never talk to me himself.

I wasn't in on a lot of the lingo in America. I felt so stupid being misunderstood and having someone think it was humourous to make fun of Indian accents in front of me.

I felt so stupid misunderstanding social cues in America. I didn't know what dating entailed, how to respond to boys here, what being gay was, what a condom looked like, and why dancing always had to be dirty. I felt so lost.

I felt so stupid when I didn't know as much about computers as the American students, even though I was a Computer Science major. I didn't know what ethernet was (we'd only got dial-up in Oman in 1998), and in 2000, I felt so stupid when someone introduced me to copy/cut-and-paste. Before that, I used to manually type information that I wanted to extract from websites. Most people didn't even have computers, forget the internet (or ethernet?), in Oman at that time. I was the only person in my class in Oman that knew advanced MS Word features, but here, I didn't know what most people were talking about. Everyone was so tech-savvy, I felt so stupid. If I ever asked a question, they'd say, "you don't know??".

I felt really angry when a white American student tried to argue with me about an English word he said didn't exist. Of course it did, but he didn't accept it.

I felt really hurt by comments about how ugly, fat, mis-shapen, and probably retarded I was following me from college and after to my workplace. Someone once sent me hate-mail saying I was ugly and had chink-eyes like a Mongol. I heard at work once that I had a huge head and that I was so fat that I looked pregnant.

I felt really stupid in America, but one day I stopped trying to play catch-up. Maybe one day I will once again begin to feel like the superstar I used to be.

Star light,

Star bright,

The first star I see tonight,

I wish I may,

I wish I might,

Have the wish I wish tonight.

Restoration

2010-06-11T07:15:00.004-05:00

Something that has been bothering me for 15 years has finally been resolved today.

In 8th or 9th grade, I had come across a poem a girl in my batch had written. This poem, along with creative work by other students, had been displayed for a while on a public chartboard for all to see. The chartboard would be updated regularly, like once a month or once a week, I can't remember exactly how often. I do remember when I was asked to update this chartboard by the teachers who were in charge of it, to take down its old collection and put up newer student submissions in its place. Regarding the work that had just been taken down, not every student had come back to claim their work, and the teachers certainly didn't want to keep unnecessary papers, so the leftover stuff remained with me. The poem in question was part of the leftovers.

The poem was wonderful, and I was stunned that that girl had come up with something like that. Everytime I came across that bunch of papers over the years, the same thought would occur to me. I felt terrible for feeling that way - was I jealous? No, I know what jealousy feels like, this wasn't it. Maybe I was resentful that it wasn't something I could come up with? I felt so guilty for thinking this way, I hated myself. I went over the poem so many times that day in that sweaty corridor - I could not keep my eyes off that page - that I'd committed it to memory. How could anyone not? It was so fluid, so run-a-long, so perfect, how could that girl have written that poem? How could I have not?? I was the lauded writer of my class, my batch, of the world!

These feelings bothered me for many years. They would crop up at odd moments in those spaces between my thoughts, the spaces where your real self lurks in the shadows of the daytime sun, the nighttime spaces that yawn into wakefulness and swallow the pretenses of civilised, safe, monitored thoughts. I hated myself for feeling this way, and I hated myself for not having written that poem first.

Until today, when Amitabh Bachchan, whom I follow on Twitter, tweeted a line from that poem. I balked. I googled. Turns out the poem is a famous one of anonymous origins.

The Cautious Man

There was a very cautious man
Who never laughed or played.
He never risked, he never tried,
He never sang or prayed.

And when he one day passed away,
His insurance was denied.
For since he never really lived,
They claimed he never died.

The disembodied whispers that had tormented me in moments unlived by all but myself have found their peace. The sun and the moon are divorced no more, the sky is one.

Echo

2010-06-03T16:58:00.005-05:00

When mommy stays in bed
When daddy stays at work
When children want to play
When children want to please
Their parents
Unhappy parents
People unhappy
With themselves
With the world
Who can't see their children
Blurry phantoms on the edge of their rage
Asking for permission
To get in
Dying
Just dy-ing
For a smile
Little pups
Wag wag wag
Thump my restless tail
Stand on my head
So you can think I'm smart
"That's my kid!"
Crush me not

Who tells these children
That their parents
Are too wounded
To notice
To nurture
Anything
Outside
Chasms with so much noise inside
That the voice outside
The plea outside
Could never
Cannot
Get in
Be heard

?

.

Not Sonia Gandhi

2010-06-03T08:29:00.002-05:00

For the last time, this is Reese Witherspoon. Even NDTV aired this picture thinking it was Sonia Gandhi...

Shattered Faith

2010-05-29T10:41:00.008-05:00

One last carton had remained unopened for months. I finally opened it. Out of the objects from what seemed like a previous life, one item emerged, perfectly representing the last chapter of my life, hidden from view for over a year in 15 lumpy tired-looking boxes that had travelled across the world. The gist of a whole decade, a chunk of my life, I now held in my hand.

Be careful - it can cut you.

Regarding intolerance

2010-05-29T05:04:00.005-05:00

An excerpt from one of my favourite books, 'The Land of Far-Beyond' by Enid Blyton. The travellers from the City of Turmoil carry the burdens of their misdeeds along the narrow and difficult path to the City of Happiness, the Land of Far-Beyond, where they have been told they will lose their crushing burdens. The book is based on 'The Pilgrim's Progress' by John Bunyan.

They went on for a good way, and then met a man who called upon them to stop.

"You can't pass by here unless you tell me what is in your luggage!" he said, looking at the burdens on the backs of Mr. Scornful and the children. "Nobody takes luggage to the City of Happiness. So you must be carrying something you shouldn't!"

"It isn't luggage," said Mr. Scornful, not at all liking the look of the man, who had rather wild eyes, and a hard mouth. "It's - well, I hardly know how to describe it - it's just a burden we can't get rid of till we reach the Land of Far-Beyond. So pray let us pass."

"What's in the burdens?" asked the man, his eyes flashing. "You must tell me!"

"Oh, don't be silly," said Mr. Scornful, getting tired of the wild-eyed fellow. "Let us pass - or I'll knock you down. Who are you, any way?"

"I am called Intolerance," said the man. "I live here, not far from the path. I see travellers going by on their way to the City of Happiness. But a lot of them don't deserve to get there, and I try to stop them."

"What right have you to stop anyone!" cried Peter. "You've no right at all! Let us pass."

"Tell me what's in your burdens first," said the man. Then, as nobody answered, he looked with his mad eyes at the loads on the traveller's shoulders. "Ah - I can see what is inside them! I can see!"

"You can't!" said Anna.

"I can see selfishness - and unkindness - and spite - and greed - oh, what terrible burdens! No one carrying those deserves to go to the City of Happiness!"

"I dare say, we don't deserve to go - but we are going all the same!" said Mr. Scornful. "The Stranger told us that we might go there, and he should know because he came from there. You've no right to try to stop us."

"I detest the things you carry in your burdens," said Intolerance. "I hate sinners! I hate people who do not think exactly as I do."

"It is right to hate sin, but it's all wrong to hate the sinner," said Mr. Scornful, impatiently. "You're a sinner too because you hate people who don't think as you do! Now get away or I'll push you over!"

"If you dare to lay a finger on me I will open the gates of my dam over there, and flood the path!" shouted Intolerance, quite beside himself with rage. The others looked and saw that the gurgling stream beside which they had walked for a mile or two, had now swollen into a rapid river that almost overflowed its banks. Near them was a stone dam which kept the river away from the path. In it was a sliding iron gate. Intolerance ran to open the gate of the dam.

"I'll flood you! I'll sweep you away!" he shouted. "You dare to threaten me - well, I'll show you what I can do. This is my River of Hate. I will let is overflow the Banks of Persecution, and sweep you off your feet. Then maybe you will crawl back to me and beg my pardon. You will say I am right, and will think as I do, and believe what I believe!"

"Stop!" yelled Mr. Scornful, as he saw the man turning a handle that lifted up the iron gate from the opening in the dam. "You're mad, fellow! Why try to drown people just because they are not what you think they should be! Stop!"

But Intolerance was half-mad, and he opened the gate in his stone dam. With a rush the water poured out, sickly yellow in colour, and swirled around the feet of the four travellers at once. They yelled, and tried to run from it, going forward on the path as fast as they could. But the water followed them, licking round their knees now, pouring over the banks and down to the path.

"I hope it doesn't get any deeper," cried Anna, trying to keep her balance. "Mr. Scornful, yell to him to shut the dam."

But all the yelling in the world would not make Intolerance do anything he didn't want to! He stood beside the dam, shouting.

"I'll rescue you if you'll say you're sorry, and will agree with me!"

"Silly fellow," said Peter. The boy had found a firm place on the path, and had dug his feet hard into it to withstand the force of the water. "Anna, Patience! Come here to me and hold on to my arms. I'm steady here."

The two girls were almost bowled over now by the water, which had reached up to their waists. With Mr. Scornful's help they reached their brother, and held on to his arms.

"You're as steady as a rock, Peter," gasped Anna. "I was almost in the water just then! And goodness knows where it would have taken me! It is pouring away into the field over there. Oh, how horrid of Intolerance to treat us like this."

The water rose higher still. It reached to the children's shoulders, and up to Mr. Scornful's chest.

"We shall drown soon," said Anna. "Oh, Peter - don't you think we'd better yell to Intolerance to stop the river overflowing - we can easily say we're sorry, and that we agree with everything he says - even if we don't."

"Well, I'm not going to do that!" said Peter, holding his sisters very firmly indeed. "We've a right to think as we like, and to do what we think is best. Why, Intolerance would be a real tyrant, if he had his way - trying to make everyone think as he does! And see how wicked he is really, for all he pretends to hate evil things! He has nearly drowned us in his River of Hate!"

"The water's up to my chin!" groaned poor Patience. "I'm holding on to you, Peter - but the river is very strong."

"Look! There's a raft!" suddenly cried Mr. Scornful, and he nodded over the water, which was now a raging torrent. The children could just see the raft bobbing on the surface. On it was a sturdy youth, who was holding a rope in his hand, ready to throw it to anyone caught in the flood.

"Hie!" yelled Mr. Scornful. "Hie! Can you save us?"

The youth heard his shout and threw the rope at once. Mr. Scornful gave it to the two girls, and the youth pulled them to safety on his raft. Peter swam up to it and Mr. Scornful waded over and pulled himself up.

"Goodness!" said Peter, shivering. "That was a most unpleasant adventure. Does Intolerance do this kind of thing often?"

"Whenever he can," said the youth, paddling the raft over the water. "But as soon as I see the water rushing over the path I get out my raft of Independence. It has saved many a traveller from Intolerance's River of Hate! My name is Charitable, and I'm quite the opposite of Intolerance!"

"I am glad you came when you did," said Anna, trying to squeeze the water from her clothes. "I should have been swept away the very next minute. I simply can't imagine how it was that Peter stood so steady!"

"Oh - your brother's name is Peter, is it?" said Charitable, his grey, wide-set eyes looking directly at the boy. "Well, you know what the name Peter means, don't you? It means a rock. So Peter is like his name, is he - steady as a rock when trouble comes along! That's good."

After some time the youth reached the end of the flooding water. His raft scraped on the ground and he jumped off. He helped the girls to the dry ground, and then waved his hand to where a big bonfire burned nearby.

"I always light that when I see the river flooding over the path," he said. "Then travellers can dry themselves."

The children and Mr. Scornful dried themselves gratefully by Charitable's big fire. It was a curious fire for it seemed to dry them completely in no time. Even their clothes underneath soon became dry. Charitable piled on more twigs when the fire died down.

"Why doesn't somebody punish Intolerance?" asked Peter, holding his steaming coat out to the flames. "He has no right to treat people like that."

"Oh, sooner or later he will be swept away in his own river," said Charitable. "And I don't mind telling you that I will not be out on my raft that day! He is the one person in the world I won't help, for he has persecuted others so often!"

Maya

2010-05-26T04:40:00.009-05:00

Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
- The Holy Bible, James 4:14

My parents have reached that stage in their life where their friends have started passing away. Over the past year, at least two families that we've known have lost their husbands and fathers. These were the adults that seemed immutable to me, fixtures that the tent of my life was pegged to in the sandstorm of the desert of life, people that remained the same as I progressed from kindergarten to high school to grad school to respectable fulltime employment to quarterlife crisis.

Yesterday my mom caught up with a friend she had gone to school with in a faraway time in Lucknow, India. My mother remembered the schoolgirl version of her, and now, decades later, she discovered a widow in her 60s who had 4 grown children living in various countries in the Eastern hemisphere. In the process of catching up with her friend, my mom discovered a few more girls she used to know who had passed away. One of these was a good friend from her schooldays whom she had lost touch with.

This comes at a time when I'm immersed in the history of Oman as part of my research for a book. During such periods, I may be physically present in the current time, but my mind and soul are suspended in that realm where I'm outside the dimension of time, looking in at all the ages that have come and gone and are yet to occur. Cities forgotten except when discovered buried intact under our feet, lives that were lived, and faces that once had strange names. Echoes of trials, sorrows, betrayals, and joy. Powerful kings and queens, bloody battles, great civilisations and cultures, youth and life, noble ideals. The wind stole them all, and the earth bears silent witness to their shadows even as we unknowingly build lives over their remains.

While my mother contemplates the meaning of the quiet end of the lives of the girls she once giggled with, the image of a novel whose last sentence has been neatly written and the book closed continuously runs in my mind. A dull sense of loss suspends itself within my stomach. I am feeling the absence of people that once were, even though I've never met any of them, none of the schoolgirls, widows, kings and queens, travellers, godmen, warriors, healers, dreamers, fathers, mothers, and children. I mourn them. I miss them all in the quiet place where there is no Time, where even I have no name, no face, and no voice. I never did.

Who Hijacked Islam??!

2010-05-23T07:34:00.001-05:00

Rebirth

2010-05-21T12:48:00.008-05:00

It's been a long time since I've drawn anything, so I thought the first thing I should try is my face. I've never drawn myself before. Seems somewhat appropriate to reclaim my skill with myself.

'Infidel' lover?

2010-05-21T08:45:00.007-05:00

7 It may be that Allah will grant love (and friendship)* between you and those whom you (now) hold as enemies. For Allah has power (over all things); And Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.
8 Allah forbids you not, with regard to those who fight you not for (your) Faith nor drive you out of your homes, from dealing kindly and justly with them, for Allah loves those who are just.
9 Allah only forbids you, with regard to those who fight you for (your) Faith, and drive you out of your homes, and support (others) in driving you out, from turning to them (for friendship and protection). It is such as turn to them (in these circumstances) that do wrong.

- Quran 60:7-9, surah Al-Mumtahinah (The Woman to be Examined)

* This verse is from the surah that differentiates between two kinds of non-Muslim (or people), one that may try to hurt you for whatever reason, and the other who bears no such hostility towards you. This surah was revealed after the pagan Arabs had broken the peace treaty of Hudaibiya with the Muslims by attacking and murdering some Muslims. The enemies in this surah, as is throughout the Quran, refers to those who were persecuting the small group of Muslims in the 7th century. These were certain Jewish tribes, pagan Arab tribes, and hypocritical Muslims. It may help the reader to know that the verses of the Quran were revealed in realtime to address any given issue that the Muslims at that time were facing. Therefore, it is not possible to pick and choose verses at random from the Quran without understanding the context within which they were revealed. Verses that are often quoted as evidence of Islam's hostility towards all Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims are taken out of context from the surahs that are referring to specific individuals, families, and tribes that were openly persecuting the Muslims at that time. Those verses in no way make aggression towards non-Muslims a religious duty for all Muslims at any time. The small group of Muslims, who had been under extreme persecution from their own brethren and their allies, from being harassed in the streets to having their property stolen to being turned out of their own homes, had not retaliated even to defend themselves until verses were revealed to do so under strict conditions to cease when the oppression had stopped. In fact, many non-Muslims, including Jews, Christians, and pagans, have been acknowledged for the refuge, aid, and charity they provided to the persecuted Muslims of that time. The verses above, therefore, not only contradict notions that Muslims are not allowed to befriend non-Muslims, but that it is Allah Himself who creates such friendships. And because it is God Himself who has willed the friendship, it is every Muslim's religious duty to cherish it.**

** How come people never mention these things??

Tomayto Tomahto?

2010-05-20T15:55:00.003-05:00

"When you attack black people, they call it racism.

When you attack Jewish people, they call it anti-semitism.

When you attack women, they call it sexism.

When you attack homosexuality, they call it intolerance.

When you attack your country, they call it treason.

When you attack a religious sect, they call it hate speech.

But when you attack the Prophet (peace be upon him), they want to call it freedom of speech."

- viral Facebook status

The Circle of Life (version India)

2010-05-14T04:30:00.006-05:00

Repost from an online support group for Nirupama Pathak, a young Delhi-based journalist who was murdered in an alleged honour killing.

Indian parents are torturing and killing their own sons and daughters
by Kv Gautam

This is just to put the things (about overrated Indian parents and family) in the right perspective. Of course, it applies to most of Indians, not all. There is need to make parents understand what they have been doing to their wards without consciously realizing it. Most of young people in India are at greater risk of getting tortured and killed in a family than outside.

See how:

Risks for boys:

Your birth will be celebrated but soon you will be a soft target for venting out of personal frustrations by your parents. It is common for Indians to be beaten at will by parents. There is no rule (at least I do not know about one) that can protect you against physical punishment by parents. As a boy you receive a lot of physical beating by teacher also, which is now (due to more awareness) illegal. There are new rules against teacher giving students physical punishment after some serious physical damages to students were reported by media.

As a student high level of pressure will be put on by parents on you to perform excellently in textbook studies, even if your natural talent lies not in roting learning books but thinking originally, or some other skill. Suicide level is alarmingly high due to extreme pressure by parents. More children die in India due to suicides than diseases during their student days.

Many parents (mostly poor) take their sons out of school and send for earning money at tender age. It takes away their entire childhood and right to be a better citizen and a person by getting educated.

In adult age, relationships with the opposite sex is not accepted by majority of parents, resulting in you becoming sexual frustrated.

When you become adult you are at a high risk to be put under intense pressure during marriage matters. Arranged marriages are most popular in the country. According to my estimates around one fourth must be forced marriages. Adult sons are at the receiving end of some intense emotional blackmailing.

Honour killings and social boycott are frequent in many parts of the country, if boys marry without consent of parents. You are just a pawn in the little silly game of family honor being played by your parents.

When you become father you repeat the same treatment to your son that your parents did to you as accept that behavior normal and a done thing. So, the tradition of torture continues generations after generations.

Risks for girls:

Many parents will not let you be born and will kill you in fetus itself.

In many parts of the country, girls are killed just after birth

If you survive, you will be at the receiving end of a systematic exploitation by the whole family structure. You will be discriminated against at every step of life.

Your parents can any time stop your education and make you learn a basic thing – cooking. It stops you from becoming a well-informed and independent minded person. Your brainwashing for making you submissive to men and suffer everything silently starts now. This prepares girls for further exploitation, discrimination and torture that they suffer later in life.

In adult age, relationships with the opposite sex is not accepted by majority of parents, resulting in you becoming sexual frustrated.

Thousands of girls are killed every year if they become pregnant due to some affair.
You do not have right on your own body and life. Parents think they own you and you are their property.

Due to brainwashing many girls do not value their own life and commit suicide if something goes wrong (getting pregnant for example) in their affair with boys. Lack of sex education further puts you at risk in relationships with the opposite sex.

You are likely to be forced into a marriage with a boy of your parents' choice, not yours. Most of girls are not even consulted in the whole affair.

Thousand of girls are killed every year in India when they marry without consent of parents. Most of the cases are not reported by media and are never known by general people. Or shown as accidental death or suicide.

Most of the times, you get no support from parents if you are tortured or killed by in-laws due to dowry demands after you are married.

Domestic violence is common for you after marriage. According to data with the Indian government, one third of women are victims of domestic violence. Do not expect any support from parents as they condone these.

If you are lucky enough to survive these all, then you unconsciously take revenge with your own daughter and mete out the same treatment to her that your suffered at the hands of your own parents.

My deja vu

2010-05-12T07:29:00.011-05:00

Within these gates, I am never grown. Within this perimeter, the world cannot follow me. This is the only place where I can visit the past, for nomatter how the people within its hallways come and go, the hallways themselves remain the same. They say that people leave a part of themselves in every place they have ever been. The air here is thick with mirages from the past, and walking through the grounds can sometimes feel like walking under water, with layers and layers of old livings blanketing you into slow motion. If you touched the walls, looked out a window, you'd see all that had happened there before you, all of it at once, like video that's been exposed many times over.

Some people believe that time doesn't exist in a linear fashion, like a single train track that the carriage of one's life can only move forward on just once, never to find that track again. Some believe that time is like a TV set, a single location where all channels, with each channel being a thread of time, are streaming through at the same time, all happening at the same time. All one has to do is choose the channel, the reality, that one wants to be a part of.

As I stood in my old school's senior library, handing over an autographed copy of my very first book to the librarian who used to be in-charge of the middle school library when I was a student, the library became the TV set, and I began to feel dizzy as the channel I was in, the present time, began to fade in and out of other channels. Each blink of my eyes put me into a different channel. But who was changing the channel? Why was I existing across channels? Was I not a part of any one channel? Blink, the librarian was flipping through my new book. Blink, I was waiting for the librarian to issue me my book before the bell rang for my next period. Blink, the librarian was congratulating me on getting my first book published. Blink, my classmates were trying their best to keep their voices down and not annoy the librarian. Blink, all the students around me looked like all the classmates I'd ever had.

Blink, I smiled as the librarian finally issued the book to me. Blink, I smiled as the librarian told me he'd keep my book out on display.

"For men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever." - Alfred Lord Tennyson

Top of the Poll

2010-05-11T15:26:00.002-05:00

These are the top trending topics on Twitter. David Cameron just got announced as the new Prime Minister of the UK, and poor Gordon Brown is already at the bottom of the list.

What's really sad is that even Justin Bieber is doing better than Gordon Brown.

Oscar speech

2010-05-06T06:40:00.007-05:00

I would like to thank the following for helping me become the person I am today:

India for teaching me about sanctity and diversity
Oman for showing me the difference between religion and culture
America for making me bold and inquisitive

Was a time

2010-05-03T11:23:00.005-05:00

(Click on the image below to enlarge it.)

The Dancing Cavalier

2010-05-03T10:30:00.013-05:00

One of my favourite songs from the 1985 movie, Alice in Wonderland. The White Knight saves Alice from the Red Knight and then sings a beautiful song to her.

"We are dancing.

We didn't need a cue,
Yet with a girl like you,
It seems the thing to do,
Don't you agree?

I hear the strings,
My poor heart sings,
And we are dancing.

We share a smile,
And for a while,
We two are dancing.

If ever time should bring another year,
Another spring,
They'll be compared,
To what I've shared,
With you.

I hear the strings,
My poor heart sings,
And we are dancing.

We share a smile,
And for a while,
We two are dancing.

If ever time should bring another year,
Another spring,
They'll be compared,
To what I've shared,
With you."

Where have all the knights gone?

What a beautiful song, what a beautiful performance. This song bored me when I was really young but it brings me to tears now. It's sweet, in a sad way, how one thing can appear different to a person at different times in that person's life.

Watch the whole movie!

Alice in Wonderland

Through the Looking Glass