One year of hard living in Delhi wiped out ten years' worth of social integration in America for me. I was quite Americanised when I used to live here before, but now I feel like I'm in a foreign country. I speak so much Hindustani at home these days that talking to an American in English feels...like an effort. I sometimes mistakenly even use a Hindustani word or two in my English! I have been back in the US for more than a year, and I still freeze when people whom I don't know try to make friendly conversation with me. Today it was the bank teller, who startled me when she casually asked me what my plans were for the evening. I froze, then panicked, and then delivered an awkward "...nothing?" Her interacting with me beyond our banking transaction made me feel uneasy. I guess I have become more reserved since Delhi. People don't look each other in the eye in Delhi, and they are deeply suspicious of friendly strangers. India seems to have affected me deep in my subconscious in extreme ways. It makes me feel like Jason Bourne because now I sometimes have strong, instinctive reactions that I can't explain. The face in the mirror is familiar but the personality is someone else's. I'm a slow motion ungreza.
Showing posts with label Bollywood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bollywood. Show all posts
Friday, December 13, 2013
Thursday, September 6, 2012
The Song on the Radio
"Saajan!" I shouted in the crowded NDTV shuttle, but the song on the radio meant nothing to my friends. How could it, I realised, they were all mostly born in the late 80s. The movie had probably come out before they started kindergarten. Everyone in the minivan - other NDTV employees whom I didn't know - looked at me; none of them remembered Saajan.
"You know, Saajan!" I continued, returning their startled gazes. "The Madhuri Dixit/Salman Khan/Sanjay Dutt love triangle! Sanjay Dutt was a poet whose pseudonym was Saagar?"
Everyone was looking at me funny. Who was this crazy woman having a happy meltdown to an old Hindi movie song on the oldies radio channel? Was I the only one who remembered how Saajan had turned India and even Pakistan upside down with its solid starcast and Pankaj Udhas songs? When did Saajan become an oldie?
"Haanji, the songs were very nice," said the usually silent driver quite suddenly, "jiyein toh jiyein kaise bin aapke."
I was happy.
"You know, Saajan!" I continued, returning their startled gazes. "The Madhuri Dixit/Salman Khan/Sanjay Dutt love triangle! Sanjay Dutt was a poet whose pseudonym was Saagar?"
Everyone was looking at me funny. Who was this crazy woman having a happy meltdown to an old Hindi movie song on the oldies radio channel? Was I the only one who remembered how Saajan had turned India and even Pakistan upside down with its solid starcast and Pankaj Udhas songs? When did Saajan become an oldie?
"Haanji, the songs were very nice," said the usually silent driver quite suddenly, "jiyein toh jiyein kaise bin aapke."
I was happy.
Friday, June 29, 2012
The Indian Restaurant by the Arkansas River
Desi Wok was a mad, bad hit in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The little restaurant had only been running for a few months, but every single person I knew was addicted to their food. Even white people! My favourites were their chicken biryani, chicken tikka masala, and lollipop wings. I ate from there sometimes twice a week, and their portions, like most American portions, were large enough to last me for two meals. And the biryani only cost 7 dollars! Hotdiggity, I loved that place. Someday I will go back there. I am not much of a foodie, but the fact that the very memory of Desi Wok is making me salivate right this minute says a lot.
Desi Wok was only a 10-minute drive from my place, so I often called in my order and picked it up to eat at home. It was on one of those days while I waited by the cash register for the folks there to pack my food up for me that my eyes fell upon a yellow flyer up on their wall. They usually put up flyers there to advertise cultural events and to make other announcements. That's how I had one day come across the ad for a new movie called 'Om Shanti Om' that was being screened in the normal theaters where they played American movies. I had never heard of that movie before, but an Indian movie being screened in a regular theater in Tulsa was always a big deal, something that you'd go to just because it only rarely happened in white country. Imagine my shock in the theater when I discovered that it was a Shahrukh Khan movie and that he now had abs and was flashing flesh all over the place. Scandalous! And I had loved it!
So I paid closer attention to the yellow flyer on the Desi Wok wall. It had a picture of a man on it. He was a middle-aged Indian man and looked serious in that smudged black-and-white reproduction of his passport photo. He'd died, and they were collecting money to send his body back to India.
I looked at that man, and he looked through me. I wondered where that picture had been taken, and if when he had been looking into the camera lens at that point if he had looked a little deeper and seen me looking back at him from the future, from outside the yellow flyer he would eventually be inked across. I knew him. I had met him once. He had been a waiter at the other older Indian restaurant on the other side of Tulsa, the one by the Arkansas river. I didn't go there very often, but I had eaten there the first time I had visited Tulsa.
It had been a couple of years ago when I was in my final semester as a graduate student at the Oklahoma State University in Stillwater 80 miles away. I had been interviewing with the Deloitte office in Tulsa, and a few of us from my university had been invited to visit them. I had bunked a ride with another student (who always weirdly introduced himself as 'of Persian descent') and had met up with an Indian friend of his who lived in Tulsa. He had taken us that Indian restaurant, the one by the river. This was around February 2005.
I hadn't wanted to ask that guy for a ride at all. He had been in a few of my classes, and I'd always found him highly obnoxious and arrogant. I'd seen him around for a couple of years at university, and though he was a Zoroastrian (Parsi) who had lived in Bombay, he would spare no opportunity to insult Indians every chance he got. The word 'a**hole* was invented for him. He'd speak with a phony elitist British accent and only befriended white people, and he used to treat me with ugly contempt until the day he discovered that I listened to English music, after which he stopped sneering at me and would approach me in a friendly way. I couldn't stand him. What an a**hole. I had seen him introducing himself to people as 'of Persian descent', ridiculing Indians in public and often in the presence of other Indians, yet miss no opportunity to audition for and MC the annual (and wildly popular) India Night event on campus where he paraded around on stage for the whole show and praised India and its usual Himalayas and rivers and languages and ancient history or whatever on centerstage. God, what an a**hole. I know, I had been the other MC. What a jackass. He was haughty, thought everyone un-white was beneath him, and he always had a contemptuous mocking grin plastered on his face. During a group study session, I once asked my fellow students for advice on buying a digital camera (a new invention in those days), and he'd suddenly looked at me from far across the long desk and said, "why don't you just buy it from Walmart and return it after using it? Isn't that what all Indians do?" He'd had that same haughty glint in his eyes when he'd said it. I couldn't stand him.
The almost two-hour-ride back and forth between Stillwater and Tulsa had been a long, painful, and silent one. At some point I'd interrogated him about his citizenship. He'd held an Indian passport but had been born in Iran. After the Islamic revolution of 1979, his family had moved to India to join his Indian Parsi relatives only because his father had waited too long to apply for asylum in the UK. So the Persian had grown up in India. He'd apparently also spent a couple of years in the UK as an adult with some relatives. But man, was he a jackass. I'd seen him use his Indian background when it suited him, to connect with Indian recruiters (whom he secretly despised, I guess?) or get a chance to be on stage, but otherwise he'd fake being this exotic brown person with some murky connection to ancient Persia and ye ol' Queen.
So it was with this man I couldn't stand and a friend of his I'd only just met that I showed up for lunch at that Indian Restaurant by the Arkansas River. It was an Indian restaurant much like all the others you'll find anywhere in the US. A slightly mouldy interior with a name any combination of [Mahal, Taj, Masala, House, India(n), Spice(s)], very agreeable smiling brown waiters, strange pictures on the wall of people and elephants that looked Rajasthani, Mughal, and erotic all at once, sticky table-tops, old wooden chairs with upholstered seats that I didn't want to touch, and some faint music ('Chaudvin ka Chand' - mostly instrumental - or classical) playing from speakers hidden somewhere in fake potted plants.
We'd arrived during the lunch rush, and we'd opted for the buffet (I've eaten at way too many Indian and Chinese buffets in America) over the menu. We must've eaten the usual food that these usual Indian restaurants outside of India serve at the buffet table - coagulated daal makhani, soupy butter chicken, stiff pieces of white roti that everyone calls naan, some generic chunky yellow-green vegetables, white rice, salaad, and gulaab jaamun. And don't miss the brittle 'lentil wafers', the broken ones with the jagged edges, at the beginning and the stale but sweet mouthfreshners on your way out.
My Indiaphobe friend and his Indian friend sure looked like they were enjoying the Indian food. They ate a lot. God, I hated this guy. He sure had a chip on his shoulder about 'Persia'. I used to call him the 'Prince of Persia' behind his back at university; he had been quite universally disliked. It was at a potluck party at our department head's house the year before when I happily looked at the qorma an Indian student had brought that he had snapped at me and hissed, "oh yeah, well did you know that qorma was Persian??" This was a man being bitchy. Only an hour ago when we had dropped by his friend's apartment to pick him up had he started going gaga over his large flat-screen TV (another new thing in those days). He'd looked at me but I had been bored. "This is HD!" he'd told me. Do you even know what HD is, his tone implied. He'd given me a dirty look. I guess he was the sort of guy who didn't know how to deal with a difference of opinion.
I couldn't wait to get back to Stillwater. We still had to get through lunch, and we had just started. We'd been greeted at our table by a middle-aged Indian waiter. He had looked a little bit like Narsimha Rao, but his manners were a lot better. I had been so angst-ridden about having to be around the Persian for the past two days, and this older man's manners made me feel better. He had been very attentive, almost clicking his heels. His English had an Indian accent, but he spoke it very well. "Is there anything else I can get for you?" he'd ask with a nod. "Have you had dessert?" "We hope you've enjoyed your experience at Masala/Taj/Spice/India Mahal/House." What a great waiter, I'd never seen anything like him before. That was in February 2005.
I got the job at Deloitte and moved there a few months later in June. I probably saw that yellow flyer in Desi Wok 3 years later in 2008. I remembered that man. He had been the best waiter I'd ever met. He had been very professional, and he had almost behaved like he had been a trained butler. I looked at his picture some more, but my food was ready, so I packed it and took it home with me.
A few days later I withdrew some money from my bank and made my way to that Indian Restaurant by the Arkansas River. I never went there very often, it used to depress me; the insides were a little too dark, it almost felt like you were entering Ali Baba's cave except that there were no great treasures within.
I walked up to their bar and told the man there that I had wanted to donate money to send the body of that middle-aged waiter back to India. The man's eyes became soft, and he took out his register to wrote down the amount I was donating. I think we spoke in whispers, although I'm not sure why. He took the money. I asked him how his co-waiter had died. A heart attack. He'd been living in Tulsa for many years and had been sending money to his wife and children and old mother in India. Now it was time for him to go back too.
I don't know why I remember him so clearly from that day with the Indiaphobe Persian and his Indian friend. It's not like I'd ever seen him after that. I don't know why you remember some people after one meeting. I don't know why it always feels like they're still out there somewhere living, talking, waiting.
Desi Wok was only a 10-minute drive from my place, so I often called in my order and picked it up to eat at home. It was on one of those days while I waited by the cash register for the folks there to pack my food up for me that my eyes fell upon a yellow flyer up on their wall. They usually put up flyers there to advertise cultural events and to make other announcements. That's how I had one day come across the ad for a new movie called 'Om Shanti Om' that was being screened in the normal theaters where they played American movies. I had never heard of that movie before, but an Indian movie being screened in a regular theater in Tulsa was always a big deal, something that you'd go to just because it only rarely happened in white country. Imagine my shock in the theater when I discovered that it was a Shahrukh Khan movie and that he now had abs and was flashing flesh all over the place. Scandalous! And I had loved it!
So I paid closer attention to the yellow flyer on the Desi Wok wall. It had a picture of a man on it. He was a middle-aged Indian man and looked serious in that smudged black-and-white reproduction of his passport photo. He'd died, and they were collecting money to send his body back to India.
I looked at that man, and he looked through me. I wondered where that picture had been taken, and if when he had been looking into the camera lens at that point if he had looked a little deeper and seen me looking back at him from the future, from outside the yellow flyer he would eventually be inked across. I knew him. I had met him once. He had been a waiter at the other older Indian restaurant on the other side of Tulsa, the one by the Arkansas river. I didn't go there very often, but I had eaten there the first time I had visited Tulsa.
It had been a couple of years ago when I was in my final semester as a graduate student at the Oklahoma State University in Stillwater 80 miles away. I had been interviewing with the Deloitte office in Tulsa, and a few of us from my university had been invited to visit them. I had bunked a ride with another student (who always weirdly introduced himself as 'of Persian descent') and had met up with an Indian friend of his who lived in Tulsa. He had taken us that Indian restaurant, the one by the river. This was around February 2005.
I hadn't wanted to ask that guy for a ride at all. He had been in a few of my classes, and I'd always found him highly obnoxious and arrogant. I'd seen him around for a couple of years at university, and though he was a Zoroastrian (Parsi) who had lived in Bombay, he would spare no opportunity to insult Indians every chance he got. The word 'a**hole* was invented for him. He'd speak with a phony elitist British accent and only befriended white people, and he used to treat me with ugly contempt until the day he discovered that I listened to English music, after which he stopped sneering at me and would approach me in a friendly way. I couldn't stand him. What an a**hole. I had seen him introducing himself to people as 'of Persian descent', ridiculing Indians in public and often in the presence of other Indians, yet miss no opportunity to audition for and MC the annual (and wildly popular) India Night event on campus where he paraded around on stage for the whole show and praised India and its usual Himalayas and rivers and languages and ancient history or whatever on centerstage. God, what an a**hole. I know, I had been the other MC. What a jackass. He was haughty, thought everyone un-white was beneath him, and he always had a contemptuous mocking grin plastered on his face. During a group study session, I once asked my fellow students for advice on buying a digital camera (a new invention in those days), and he'd suddenly looked at me from far across the long desk and said, "why don't you just buy it from Walmart and return it after using it? Isn't that what all Indians do?" He'd had that same haughty glint in his eyes when he'd said it. I couldn't stand him.
The almost two-hour-ride back and forth between Stillwater and Tulsa had been a long, painful, and silent one. At some point I'd interrogated him about his citizenship. He'd held an Indian passport but had been born in Iran. After the Islamic revolution of 1979, his family had moved to India to join his Indian Parsi relatives only because his father had waited too long to apply for asylum in the UK. So the Persian had grown up in India. He'd apparently also spent a couple of years in the UK as an adult with some relatives. But man, was he a jackass. I'd seen him use his Indian background when it suited him, to connect with Indian recruiters (whom he secretly despised, I guess?) or get a chance to be on stage, but otherwise he'd fake being this exotic brown person with some murky connection to ancient Persia and ye ol' Queen.
So it was with this man I couldn't stand and a friend of his I'd only just met that I showed up for lunch at that Indian Restaurant by the Arkansas River. It was an Indian restaurant much like all the others you'll find anywhere in the US. A slightly mouldy interior with a name any combination of [Mahal, Taj, Masala, House, India(n), Spice(s)], very agreeable smiling brown waiters, strange pictures on the wall of people and elephants that looked Rajasthani, Mughal, and erotic all at once, sticky table-tops, old wooden chairs with upholstered seats that I didn't want to touch, and some faint music ('Chaudvin ka Chand' - mostly instrumental - or classical) playing from speakers hidden somewhere in fake potted plants.
We'd arrived during the lunch rush, and we'd opted for the buffet (I've eaten at way too many Indian and Chinese buffets in America) over the menu. We must've eaten the usual food that these usual Indian restaurants outside of India serve at the buffet table - coagulated daal makhani, soupy butter chicken, stiff pieces of white roti that everyone calls naan, some generic chunky yellow-green vegetables, white rice, salaad, and gulaab jaamun. And don't miss the brittle 'lentil wafers', the broken ones with the jagged edges, at the beginning and the stale but sweet mouthfreshners on your way out.
My Indiaphobe friend and his Indian friend sure looked like they were enjoying the Indian food. They ate a lot. God, I hated this guy. He sure had a chip on his shoulder about 'Persia'. I used to call him the 'Prince of Persia' behind his back at university; he had been quite universally disliked. It was at a potluck party at our department head's house the year before when I happily looked at the qorma an Indian student had brought that he had snapped at me and hissed, "oh yeah, well did you know that qorma was Persian??" This was a man being bitchy. Only an hour ago when we had dropped by his friend's apartment to pick him up had he started going gaga over his large flat-screen TV (another new thing in those days). He'd looked at me but I had been bored. "This is HD!" he'd told me. Do you even know what HD is, his tone implied. He'd given me a dirty look. I guess he was the sort of guy who didn't know how to deal with a difference of opinion.
I couldn't wait to get back to Stillwater. We still had to get through lunch, and we had just started. We'd been greeted at our table by a middle-aged Indian waiter. He had looked a little bit like Narsimha Rao, but his manners were a lot better. I had been so angst-ridden about having to be around the Persian for the past two days, and this older man's manners made me feel better. He had been very attentive, almost clicking his heels. His English had an Indian accent, but he spoke it very well. "Is there anything else I can get for you?" he'd ask with a nod. "Have you had dessert?" "We hope you've enjoyed your experience at Masala/Taj/Spice/India Mahal/House." What a great waiter, I'd never seen anything like him before. That was in February 2005.
I got the job at Deloitte and moved there a few months later in June. I probably saw that yellow flyer in Desi Wok 3 years later in 2008. I remembered that man. He had been the best waiter I'd ever met. He had been very professional, and he had almost behaved like he had been a trained butler. I looked at his picture some more, but my food was ready, so I packed it and took it home with me.
A few days later I withdrew some money from my bank and made my way to that Indian Restaurant by the Arkansas River. I never went there very often, it used to depress me; the insides were a little too dark, it almost felt like you were entering Ali Baba's cave except that there were no great treasures within.
I walked up to their bar and told the man there that I had wanted to donate money to send the body of that middle-aged waiter back to India. The man's eyes became soft, and he took out his register to wrote down the amount I was donating. I think we spoke in whispers, although I'm not sure why. He took the money. I asked him how his co-waiter had died. A heart attack. He'd been living in Tulsa for many years and had been sending money to his wife and children and old mother in India. Now it was time for him to go back too.
I don't know why I remember him so clearly from that day with the Indiaphobe Persian and his Indian friend. It's not like I'd ever seen him after that. I don't know why you remember some people after one meeting. I don't know why it always feels like they're still out there somewhere living, talking, waiting.
We Called Her Ruby
The last time I met Ruby Baaji was the night before I was about to fly out to the US for university. It was August 1999, and I had recently turned 18. She was married by then, the mother of 2 young children - a baby girl and a boy - and she gave me a present that I kept for a long time. A pouch full of makeup brushes. A blue, yellow, and green pouch. The brushes inside had pale white handles. It was a rather grown-up present for me from a person who symbolised my childhood. Our relationship had always been that way. I had no elder sisters, and she had been to me what I think one is like. I still remember her giggling in that tinkly laugh of hers as she handed me the present. Ruby Baaji used to laugh everytime she felt like it. Her eyes would grow small, and she'd slightly lean back and hunch as she laughed from head to toe. I'd felt slightly embarassed and self-conscious about the make-up pouch. It meant that she was looking at me as if I were a young lady and not a gender-free school kid (we still had those in those days). I had not been ready for that. Our relationship had been changing as the both of us were growing into our 20s and the things that can mean, and this was another new thing for me.
Ruby baaji died in a car accident a few months later in early 2000. I was in my second semester at university in the US at the time. That's around the time I bought my first lipstick. A dark brown one. Browns were in in those days. Ruby Baaji had been about to move to Canada with her husband and children but had decided to accompany her family and her in-laws for a quick umrah in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. They had all been returning to Muscat by road when one of the tires of the car had exploded. Ruby Baaji had been flung out of the fast-moving car with her little daughter who had been sitting in her lap. I was told that they had both been found lying by the road outside, her little daughter unhurt, still shielded by her mother's body. But Ruby Baaji had already passed away from internal injuries. She was eventually buried in a cemetery somewhere near Riyadh. That was 12 years ago. Was it really? I think Ruby Baaji was 8 years older than me. She was born on May 1st; I remember because I had made a big deal about it being the same as Labour Day. I had had a 365-days storybook - one story or poem for every day of the year - and I had made her read the story that was listed under her birthday. It was about a caterpillar that felt ugly and wanted to be beautiful until it went to sleep and woke up a beautiful butterfly. It was crowned the May Queen by all the insects, the most beautiful of them all. The moral of the story was that some people may not be born beautiful but they can grow beautiful.
Ruby Baaji had once cut out butterflies for me from a pretty writing pad she owned. She had put them in an envelope for me to take home. It was on one of those evenings when my parents would drop me off at her house because they had a serious grown-up event to go to. I spent many days like that with her. Ruby Baaji was very popular with the younger kids she knew, myself very much included. We were all in primary or middle school and she was in high school. We all used to bounce around her at parties or whenever we stayed over at her place. And Ruby Baaji used to talk to us like we were the most interesting little people ever. She used to laugh with us all the time.
I guess you could say that Ruby Baaji was one of those soft, feminine kinds of girl, the sort that wears red on Valentine's Day and likes babies. She was thin, not too tall, and wore glasses (contact lenses weren't common in those days, I only got mine in high school). She had pale skin, the kind that grows yellower the lighter it gets. She had a long smooth face and long delicate limbs. I remember her feet, they were very beautiful. Long delicate light-looking feet with very clean skin. Sometimes I look at my feet, and when they're in their best shape, they almost look like hers.
Ruby Baaji was very talkative, and she used to laugh a lot. Her voice was husky but not raspy, you could call it a girly breathy. I, like all the other little girls, used to follow her around like a tail. Our mothers used to shop together a lot, and I have a memory of Ruby Baaji and I sitting together on the dirty worn-out carpet that covered some wooden steps in that store and her singing the title song from 'Chandni' to me. "Khaali haath nahin aate, khaali haath nahin aate..." she tinkled in her sweet voice. I think we were sitting next to a wall with a poster of Sridevi's, possibly in one of her signature tight chiffon saris from that time. I have since stopped by that store a number of times or just simply walked by, and every single time I can see Ruby Baaji and I sitting on that dirty carpet and singing songs from that old Hindi (the word 'Bollywood' hadn't been invented then) movie. The Sridevi poster has long since gone, but they always do.
Sometime after a spate of Salman Khan starrers had been released in the early 90s that I noticed that Ruby Baaji used to talk about him all the time. I remember one dinner party where she was explaining to us clueless younger girls that Salman Khan's character was more noble than Sanjay Dutt's character in 'Saajan' because he had decided to sacrifice his true love. Everytime I now see that old Salman Khan - thinner, swifter, a better actor - from 'Saajan', 'Pathar ke Phool', 'Maine Pyaar Kiya', I think of Ruby Baaji at that table in that restaurant I don't remember.
Ruby Baaji left Muscat for university in India, and I began to see less of her. I remember the first time she returned on a holiday; I'd visited her at her home with my mother, but I'd been nervous and awkward. So had she. We'd had less to talk about. We'd become more formal, and she was getting along better with our moms. Something had changed between us. I guess we didn't have as many things in common anymore, and I'd only met her after a long time. I had brought my Arabic test paper from school with me to show her the way I used to show her every small thing before; I'd aced the test, and I had wanted to tell her that, but it somehow felt stupid and unimportant when I did. I told her about how I was angry with my parents for not letting me visit my Jain best friend's house just because in India the Ayodhya Masjid had been demolished by a right-wing Hindu mob. I must've been in 6th grade then. Eleven years old. I told her that it made no sense. I didn't think she agreed, but she didn't say anything. I think I stopped talking to her too much after that, it all felt too awkward. And I just felt ridiculous, I don't know why. But it was alright.
And the years sped by. I discovered boys and menstruation and my own movie star crush (Shahrukh Khan, right after 'Baazigar') that lasted me well into high school. Ruby Baaji entered her 20s, got married into a family we also knew in Muscat, and had kids. I only saw her at grown-up parties where I had to wear grown-up clothes and behave myself. My hair was longer, and I had learned how to wear liquid eyeliner. Ruby Baaji looked like light, like she was truly made of light. She was young, newly married, and always laughing. She looked wonderful and glowy and dressed so beautifully. I remember running into her at a party when I was in high school. She wore a gharara, I can't remember what colour, but she looked like light. I was shy and only spoke to her formally, but she was still very friendly. I didn't know how to behave with her - like the 10-year-old I used to be or the chirpy 17-year-old I thought I was supposed to be. But she was still very full of life. And happy. I think she was the type of person that has a clean heart. Everyone doted on her. All the aunties and uncles and even the young ones. She'd grown up around all of us. Even her two little children would call her Ruby because that's what they heard everyone around them call her. Ruby, Ruby, Ruby. She once sent me a card that I think I still have with me somewhere. It had two ducklings, one blue and one pink, cosying up together on the front. The card read 'I like it when you're nice...' on the outside and '...but I love it when you're naughty!' on the inside. It was adorable. It was only many years later that I realised that at that point, when I had just finished high school, that neither she nor I had realised in our innocence that it was not a card that was meant for friends.
Her real name was actually Masarrat. I remembered her very strongly yesterday because of a glowy young wife I saw in a Pakistani drama the other day. She had long hair like Ruby Baaji's and was very light-skinned. She wore a white gharara that made her glow. She had very little make-up on because she didn't need any, she glowed without it. I've been meaning to write about Ruby Baaji for such a long time. I'm 31 now, she would've been almost 40. After Ruby Baaji died, her mother found an old friendship band in her belongings that I had made for her as a kid. Did she really die 12 years ago? I can still hear, see her giving me that make-up bag.
Ruby baaji died in a car accident a few months later in early 2000. I was in my second semester at university in the US at the time. That's around the time I bought my first lipstick. A dark brown one. Browns were in in those days. Ruby Baaji had been about to move to Canada with her husband and children but had decided to accompany her family and her in-laws for a quick umrah in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. They had all been returning to Muscat by road when one of the tires of the car had exploded. Ruby Baaji had been flung out of the fast-moving car with her little daughter who had been sitting in her lap. I was told that they had both been found lying by the road outside, her little daughter unhurt, still shielded by her mother's body. But Ruby Baaji had already passed away from internal injuries. She was eventually buried in a cemetery somewhere near Riyadh. That was 12 years ago. Was it really? I think Ruby Baaji was 8 years older than me. She was born on May 1st; I remember because I had made a big deal about it being the same as Labour Day. I had had a 365-days storybook - one story or poem for every day of the year - and I had made her read the story that was listed under her birthday. It was about a caterpillar that felt ugly and wanted to be beautiful until it went to sleep and woke up a beautiful butterfly. It was crowned the May Queen by all the insects, the most beautiful of them all. The moral of the story was that some people may not be born beautiful but they can grow beautiful.
Ruby Baaji had once cut out butterflies for me from a pretty writing pad she owned. She had put them in an envelope for me to take home. It was on one of those evenings when my parents would drop me off at her house because they had a serious grown-up event to go to. I spent many days like that with her. Ruby Baaji was very popular with the younger kids she knew, myself very much included. We were all in primary or middle school and she was in high school. We all used to bounce around her at parties or whenever we stayed over at her place. And Ruby Baaji used to talk to us like we were the most interesting little people ever. She used to laugh with us all the time.
I guess you could say that Ruby Baaji was one of those soft, feminine kinds of girl, the sort that wears red on Valentine's Day and likes babies. She was thin, not too tall, and wore glasses (contact lenses weren't common in those days, I only got mine in high school). She had pale skin, the kind that grows yellower the lighter it gets. She had a long smooth face and long delicate limbs. I remember her feet, they were very beautiful. Long delicate light-looking feet with very clean skin. Sometimes I look at my feet, and when they're in their best shape, they almost look like hers.
Ruby Baaji was very talkative, and she used to laugh a lot. Her voice was husky but not raspy, you could call it a girly breathy. I, like all the other little girls, used to follow her around like a tail. Our mothers used to shop together a lot, and I have a memory of Ruby Baaji and I sitting together on the dirty worn-out carpet that covered some wooden steps in that store and her singing the title song from 'Chandni' to me. "Khaali haath nahin aate, khaali haath nahin aate..." she tinkled in her sweet voice. I think we were sitting next to a wall with a poster of Sridevi's, possibly in one of her signature tight chiffon saris from that time. I have since stopped by that store a number of times or just simply walked by, and every single time I can see Ruby Baaji and I sitting on that dirty carpet and singing songs from that old Hindi (the word 'Bollywood' hadn't been invented then) movie. The Sridevi poster has long since gone, but they always do.
Sometime after a spate of Salman Khan starrers had been released in the early 90s that I noticed that Ruby Baaji used to talk about him all the time. I remember one dinner party where she was explaining to us clueless younger girls that Salman Khan's character was more noble than Sanjay Dutt's character in 'Saajan' because he had decided to sacrifice his true love. Everytime I now see that old Salman Khan - thinner, swifter, a better actor - from 'Saajan', 'Pathar ke Phool', 'Maine Pyaar Kiya', I think of Ruby Baaji at that table in that restaurant I don't remember.
Ruby Baaji left Muscat for university in India, and I began to see less of her. I remember the first time she returned on a holiday; I'd visited her at her home with my mother, but I'd been nervous and awkward. So had she. We'd had less to talk about. We'd become more formal, and she was getting along better with our moms. Something had changed between us. I guess we didn't have as many things in common anymore, and I'd only met her after a long time. I had brought my Arabic test paper from school with me to show her the way I used to show her every small thing before; I'd aced the test, and I had wanted to tell her that, but it somehow felt stupid and unimportant when I did. I told her about how I was angry with my parents for not letting me visit my Jain best friend's house just because in India the Ayodhya Masjid had been demolished by a right-wing Hindu mob. I must've been in 6th grade then. Eleven years old. I told her that it made no sense. I didn't think she agreed, but she didn't say anything. I think I stopped talking to her too much after that, it all felt too awkward. And I just felt ridiculous, I don't know why. But it was alright.
And the years sped by. I discovered boys and menstruation and my own movie star crush (Shahrukh Khan, right after 'Baazigar') that lasted me well into high school. Ruby Baaji entered her 20s, got married into a family we also knew in Muscat, and had kids. I only saw her at grown-up parties where I had to wear grown-up clothes and behave myself. My hair was longer, and I had learned how to wear liquid eyeliner. Ruby Baaji looked like light, like she was truly made of light. She was young, newly married, and always laughing. She looked wonderful and glowy and dressed so beautifully. I remember running into her at a party when I was in high school. She wore a gharara, I can't remember what colour, but she looked like light. I was shy and only spoke to her formally, but she was still very friendly. I didn't know how to behave with her - like the 10-year-old I used to be or the chirpy 17-year-old I thought I was supposed to be. But she was still very full of life. And happy. I think she was the type of person that has a clean heart. Everyone doted on her. All the aunties and uncles and even the young ones. She'd grown up around all of us. Even her two little children would call her Ruby because that's what they heard everyone around them call her. Ruby, Ruby, Ruby. She once sent me a card that I think I still have with me somewhere. It had two ducklings, one blue and one pink, cosying up together on the front. The card read 'I like it when you're nice...' on the outside and '...but I love it when you're naughty!' on the inside. It was adorable. It was only many years later that I realised that at that point, when I had just finished high school, that neither she nor I had realised in our innocence that it was not a card that was meant for friends.
Her real name was actually Masarrat. I remembered her very strongly yesterday because of a glowy young wife I saw in a Pakistani drama the other day. She had long hair like Ruby Baaji's and was very light-skinned. She wore a white gharara that made her glow. She had very little make-up on because she didn't need any, she glowed without it. I've been meaning to write about Ruby Baaji for such a long time. I'm 31 now, she would've been almost 40. After Ruby Baaji died, her mother found an old friendship band in her belongings that I had made for her as a kid. Did she really die 12 years ago? I can still hear, see her giving me that make-up bag.
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Dueling Partners
My parents satdown to test our new carrom board, and I decided to test my new DSLR.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Thursday, April 26, 2012
A Letter to the Departed
Hi Nana Mian,
I made a cover yesterday for a book that Amma is going to get published soon. She's going to compile all the things your peers and others had written about you after you had passed away. That was 22 years ago. I was 9 that year, in Muscat where I lived far away from where you lived in Lucknow. I remember finding out about your passing by overhearing Amma when she heard about it over the phone. I had heard her crying, but I hadn't known why she had been crying. I knew somebody had died though, because that's how we used to find out about these things in those days. I used to get nervous everytime the phone would ring and it turned out to be an international call. I'd only feel better if my mother hadn't started howling in the scary choppy way she used to within one minute of the call. I knew someone had died that time also, but I had only figured out who it was when Amma called Abbu at his office and told the secretary in her chunky English that her father had died. But I had almost known that it had been you. She had cried like that when she'd found out about Kakko Ammi passing away before. That's how I used to find out if someone had died. No one would tell me these things directly; it'd be assumed that I'd heard from all the crying.
Amma was still on the phone with Abbu, and I'd gone and locked myself in the brown coloured bathroom the way I did when I needed space or quiet. I'd sat on the edge of the bathtub and thought about things. Then I'd stood on my toes and looked into the mirror above the sink and made the face my mother had made while she had been crying. I wondered about my 3-year-old cousin who used to live with you in Lucknow. I wondered about how he was feeling. He used to dangle around your neck all the time and laugh, laugh, laugh. You used to chuckle about that. He doesn't remember you very much now.
I haven't seen you in 22 years, Nana Mian, but I remember you like it had been just yesterday. You were my favourite person in the world because your eyes would glimmer when you saw me and you wouldn't mind if I knocked you down when I flung myself at you. You were the first person I wanted to see everytime we'd visit Lucknow for the summer. We'd arrive to stay at Abbu's family's house, but I'd race out of there while our luggage was still being pulled in and dash off to your house two doors down so I could see you. You were always glad to see me. You always smiled when you looked at me. I remember your strong shiny teeth and dark lips under very white beard. I thought you looked like Santa Claus, and for a long time I thought the Prophet Muhammad must've looked like you. What does a kid have to do with a man in his 60s anyway? We didn't use to talk about anything really, but I just wanted to be around you all the time because...because I don't know, you always smiled at me. It made me smile back, and it made me feel nice, like I had been seen. Most people ignore you when you're a kid, many just want you out of their way. Some people are even mean to you because you are small and vulnerable. When you looked at me, you actually saw me. Your eyes would be fixed on my face, and you would be smiling at me. Me. It was so nice. You were my favourite person in the whole world.
I don't know if you saw the book cover I made yesterday. I made 3, and I put your pictures on them. Amma liked the second one because you can see where you wrote 'Azeezaz-Jaan Farzana beti' on an aerogramme in the background. I didn't know when I was 3 or 5 or 7 or 9 and smiling at you that when I was 30 I would put you on a book cover.
Do you remember, Nana Mian, that one time you bought me a bird made of thin metal sheets whose wings I could make flap? And that one time you were crouched in the old stone washroom doing your wuzu for the namaaz? I was standing by the grey wooden doorframe and watching you wash your dentures. You'd noticed me and had smiled and popped the dentures back into your mouth with a wet click, and it had made me laugh. It's still making me laugh. Your green parrot with the red beak that every single household in India seems to have, the one that in every family is called Mithoo, was hanging upside down in his little cage nearby. You had taught him to say my name. Not Khadija, but Asma, my other name.
You were in your study a lot, the room where nobody, especially children, were allowed to disturb you. I don't know if that's a rule you'd made or just something the other grownups had made up for you. I'd peeked into your room a few times. The doors were dark brown and metallic looking, but I could peek through the keyhole. I'd seen a quiet, dark room with light streaming in through the blue, green, yellow, and red glass on the windows. The light was blue, green, yellow, and red. I'd never seen anything like it. It looked like magic. Amma had caught me once looking through the keyhole and was about to drag me away, but you'd heard her and had me let in. You'd been smiling at me. When you're little, nobody can seem bigger and more frightening than your parents, so I thought it was amazing that my mother was rendered helpless with one word from you. Nobody ever stood up for me, so you must've been someone amazing to rescue me from my parents and to let me in to the place that nobody else was allowed. I don't think I spent too long in your room, but it was incredible. I never even saw any grownups, not even my parents, enter your study, it was like some kind of sacred space that people spoke of in hushed tones. But there I was, in that dark room with the colourful shafts of light. I saw some furniture in the parts of the room where the light was dark brown - a sofa, a table, a bookshelf? The room seemed cooler than the rest of Lucknow, less noisy. I didn't know where to stand or what to do. Nobody ever entered that room, so I had established some kind of precedent. That room is someone else's living room now, and it's like you were never there and like I had never stepped in that one day long ago. Sometimes when I'm in that room with other people, I look at the spot where I had stood many years ago and where you had sat at your desk and smiled at me. You're not there anymore. A few years after you'd died, I had been given some spare fabric to help a cousin who had moved to your house with her school project. One of the pieces of cloth had been from your sofa. Narrow orange and white stripes. They always reminded me of sivain. It's like you had never been there, like coloured light had never streamed in through those coloured windows. I have never seen the light from those windows ever look that way again.
I'd seen bits of you here and there in your old house over the years since then. I once saw your old passport lying on the ground in an old room where all your manuscripts had been stuffed. Some were original works, and some were translations from Arabic and Persian, some were unfinished because you had passed away while you were working on them. It was bunches and bunches of yellow paper cruelly stuffed in the shelves that were built high up on the walls all around the room. I had heard that the room on the terrace was full of your work too. You worked like a man possessed, your mind was always ticking. I think I know something about that. I had picked up your passport and looked at your photograph. I had felt bad that your passport had been lying on the ground like that. I had been in my early 20s then.
Nana Mian, the world changed after you died, you know? No one smiled at me the way you used to. My parents were always shouting at me or fighting with each other. In Lucknow, your parrot stopped speaking. People set him out of his cage but he'd just sit around in some high-up corner and not fly away. He always looked angry and withdrawn. A cat got to him and killed him one day, and that was that.
I once had a dream when I was little that I'd rushed to your house from Abbu's house two doors away, but when I entered your house, it was dark. Like an old ruin. No one was there. It looked like no one had ever been there. I called out for Amma but no one answered my calls. Your house had felt like it was part of some other world away from this one where there are sounds and colours and people.
I don't know if you have seen me all this time, Nana Mian, and I understand if you haven't, because I sometimes wonder if God even did. I wonder if God exists even. Things have been difficult. The world isn't what it used to be in your time. When you were alive, people used to invest in people. Now people invest in things they can buy, and they are lonelier than ever. They treat objects like people and people like objects. Maybe being a Muslim back then meant being educated and passionate and driven and ethical. Top class. I don't think you would recognise the Muslims of today. Do you know that when I moved to India for one-and-a-half years that most people assumed that I was an expert in Urdu poetry? Even the young Muslims would approach me in that regard, as if that's the only thing we were. We have been caricaturised, Nana Mian. I don't know by whom, but we spend our lives trying to match those caricatures as perfectly as we can. It was scary to see how the young Muslims of India struggle to fit in into the mainstream, and nomatter the world they choose to live in, they feel guilty all the time. The young Muslims force themselves to have an interest in Urdu poetry and to speak Urdu even if it isn't their mother tongue. That's what being a Muslim has become in India. That and Sufi music. The Bollywood Muslim. What has happened to the Muslims I have seen, the ones who used to be intellectuals and used to stay aware of the world and used to have class, where have those Muslims gone? I don't know these Muslims who live in the ghettos, these young Muslims who don't know how to reconcile their heritage with the strange new Islam of veils and poor morale and self-censorship and authoritarianism. I always thought that being a Muslim meant being a paragon of ethics, integrity, justice, and equality. I still think it's about spiritual independence and breaking free from the shackles that people live in and die in. I think it's about the pursuit of rational thought and the spirit of inquiry and individual dignity. Revolution, freedom from superstition, equality for all. Defiance, if required. These silly grinning poets, this is not Islam. The poetry of Islam is fiery and inspiring, not insipid and commercial. Fine divine inspiration, not cheap libidinous couplets.
Nana Mian, I only knew you as the smiling white figure who would play with me, but over the years I learned in bits and pieces that you had been much more. You had been a journalist, a freedom fighter, a mufti, a professor, a writer, a translator, a real intellectual. I learned that you had been a man of integrity whose peers had included Gandhiji and Jawaharlal Nehru. I learned that you had believed in the power of the pen and had been disheartened when politics took over the newspapers you had worked for. You had refused to parade around the Prime Minister as a token of the progressive Indian Muslim. You had turned down a Padma Shri award because the honours of a government that didn't live up to its promises to the Muslim community didn't meant anything to you. I spent a year in Indian journalism, Nana Mian, maybe you knew that because I'd dreamt of you my first week there. I'd dreamt that I was running towards a burning pair of towers that had had planes crash into them. I was running towards those towers that the crowd I was in was running away from because my old photographs of you and that old life were in those towers. Then I'd felt someone put their hand on my head, and I'd turned up to see that it had been you. I'd woken up from that dream, still feeling your hand on my head. I'd dreamt of you my first week in India, but after a few days I realised that I couldn't feel you in the general Indian air anymore. You had really gone. Then the rest of the year I realised that the old journalists I had seen - you and your friends - those were not the kind of people in Indian journalism today. I didn't like most of these people that I saw. I thought journalists were supposed to be the intellectual elite. These were not. None of these people were even close to the classy people you and your peers were. But then, the standard of everything in the world has fallen nowadays. It's a disposable kind of world I live in, Nana Mian. Songs and books come and go without making any real sort of impact on anybody. Just about anyone can become famous if they know the right people or behave badly enough. People's speech has become harsh, it's hard to find any sort of real grace in anybody these days. Men who behave like crude cavemen are called smart, and the women who behave like these men are called success-oriented. The world has lost much of its finery, Nana Mian, I wonder what you would have thought of it all.
Nana Mian, I have often seen people trying to be like you because you are still known amongst your peers and the younger people in your professional field as a singular man. I think the correct way to be like you is to not try to be like anybody but to be driven from inside. You were a man of your time, and you did what you thought was best in the circumstances you were in. I often see people quoting you and trying to sound like you but it seems so out of context now. I think that if they really wanted to be like you, then they would not try to be like you at all. They would simply live in their own time and make their own decisions at every crossroad they ever came upon.
I am a woman of my time. It is not the same world my parents grew up in, which was similar to the world you were from. The world has changed very drastically in the past 20 years, and my parents were not able to help me adjust to it at all. I think you would've listened to me, though, at least I hope you would've. I sure could have used your help many times in the past. Maybe you would've listened to me without brushing me under the carpet like everyone else did. Or maybe you would've behaved like them too. I don't know, but I've wanted to talk to you many times over the years about the world I was seeing and the way it is acceptable to behave now. Things don't even mean the same today as they did before. I've often felt like an orphan in my own family. I never saw much of myself in my father or in my mother. I was too impetuous and too straightforward, and I felt things too intensely. I have walked away from things that other people were dying for because I just cannot compromise on my integrity. I cannot work for people who disrespect me or don't believe in the principles that I live by. I have spent my life thinking there was something wrong with me because I could never shut my eyes when people were being unethical or cruel. Everyone else seemed to always be okay with these things, but it was always me who would call things into question and feel disturbed or even torn in such situations. I can't just shut my eyes and go with things when someone's explanation just doesn't add up. Why couldn't I be like everyone else in
this rat race that the world has become? What was wrong with me that I was always having trouble blindly accepting things the way they were, why was I never satisfied with the choices that were given to me? So when I heard today that you turned down the Padma Shri or refused to become one of the Prime Minister's clingy yes-men because it conflicted with what you believed in, I felt so relieved because I realised that there had been at least one other person in this world that had rocked the boat. Like me. It's not been easy being so rigid about these things, Nana Mian, and I don't want to be this way sometimes. I never even realised that the way I was was undesirable until I realised that it put me out of step with this world. I really always wanted to be like everybody else, because society has a way of punishing you in various forms when you think too much or ask too many questions or don't discriminate between the people and the institutions you question. I don't want to be this way because I have seen that the people who aren't like this lead an easier life. I tried to fix myself over the years, but I couldn't. I can't just stop thinking, and if I stop speaking and just go along with everything, something inside me starts punishing me in ways more horrific than society could ever come up with. I thought I was doomed; nobody especially likes a girl who's like that. Someone had once told me in all seriousness that I ought to stop being intelligent because no one would want to marry me. I just didn't understand what the matter was with me. But today I heard the things you had said in your professional and personal life and the way you had behaved, and it sounded exactly like the things that had come out of me. So I don't feel guilty anymore about being the way that I am. I don't feel orphaned anymore because I finally feel like I am like somebody in my family.
I hope you liked the book covers I made, Nana Mian. Thank you for your legacy. You weren't ever very wealthy because you never sold yourself out, but your children loved you very much and still love you even now that they're all in their 50s and 60s and some have their own grandchildren. You've been gone over 20 years and people still swear by you. Someone still remembers how one cold foggy Lucknow night you gave your expensive shawl to a man shivering on the street. Your children never felt like they were poor. All they remember is how they'd all run up to you and hang on to your various limbs whenever you came home from work. And how much you loved that. I've dreamt of you so many times over the years, and it's always been with you watching me from afar and running away whenever you saw that I'd noticed you. Over time my dreams changed to my running to catch you but never actually being successful with it. Then I progressed to actually catching you. And then you came to me yourself in my dream with the two flaming towers.
Thank you for those 9 summers. And the dreams.
Your granddaughter,
Asma
I made a cover yesterday for a book that Amma is going to get published soon. She's going to compile all the things your peers and others had written about you after you had passed away. That was 22 years ago. I was 9 that year, in Muscat where I lived far away from where you lived in Lucknow. I remember finding out about your passing by overhearing Amma when she heard about it over the phone. I had heard her crying, but I hadn't known why she had been crying. I knew somebody had died though, because that's how we used to find out about these things in those days. I used to get nervous everytime the phone would ring and it turned out to be an international call. I'd only feel better if my mother hadn't started howling in the scary choppy way she used to within one minute of the call. I knew someone had died that time also, but I had only figured out who it was when Amma called Abbu at his office and told the secretary in her chunky English that her father had died. But I had almost known that it had been you. She had cried like that when she'd found out about Kakko Ammi passing away before. That's how I used to find out if someone had died. No one would tell me these things directly; it'd be assumed that I'd heard from all the crying.
Amma was still on the phone with Abbu, and I'd gone and locked myself in the brown coloured bathroom the way I did when I needed space or quiet. I'd sat on the edge of the bathtub and thought about things. Then I'd stood on my toes and looked into the mirror above the sink and made the face my mother had made while she had been crying. I wondered about my 3-year-old cousin who used to live with you in Lucknow. I wondered about how he was feeling. He used to dangle around your neck all the time and laugh, laugh, laugh. You used to chuckle about that. He doesn't remember you very much now.
Do you remember, Nana Mian, that one time you bought me a bird made of thin metal sheets whose wings I could make flap? And that one time you were crouched in the old stone washroom doing your wuzu for the namaaz? I was standing by the grey wooden doorframe and watching you wash your dentures. You'd noticed me and had smiled and popped the dentures back into your mouth with a wet click, and it had made me laugh. It's still making me laugh. Your green parrot with the red beak that every single household in India seems to have, the one that in every family is called Mithoo, was hanging upside down in his little cage nearby. You had taught him to say my name. Not Khadija, but Asma, my other name.
Nana Mian, the world changed after you died, you know? No one smiled at me the way you used to. My parents were always shouting at me or fighting with each other. In Lucknow, your parrot stopped speaking. People set him out of his cage but he'd just sit around in some high-up corner and not fly away. He always looked angry and withdrawn. A cat got to him and killed him one day, and that was that.
I don't know if you have seen me all this time, Nana Mian, and I understand if you haven't, because I sometimes wonder if God even did. I wonder if God exists even. Things have been difficult. The world isn't what it used to be in your time. When you were alive, people used to invest in people. Now people invest in things they can buy, and they are lonelier than ever. They treat objects like people and people like objects. Maybe being a Muslim back then meant being educated and passionate and driven and ethical. Top class. I don't think you would recognise the Muslims of today. Do you know that when I moved to India for one-and-a-half years that most people assumed that I was an expert in Urdu poetry? Even the young Muslims would approach me in that regard, as if that's the only thing we were. We have been caricaturised, Nana Mian. I don't know by whom, but we spend our lives trying to match those caricatures as perfectly as we can. It was scary to see how the young Muslims of India struggle to fit in into the mainstream, and nomatter the world they choose to live in, they feel guilty all the time. The young Muslims force themselves to have an interest in Urdu poetry and to speak Urdu even if it isn't their mother tongue. That's what being a Muslim has become in India. That and Sufi music. The Bollywood Muslim. What has happened to the Muslims I have seen, the ones who used to be intellectuals and used to stay aware of the world and used to have class, where have those Muslims gone? I don't know these Muslims who live in the ghettos, these young Muslims who don't know how to reconcile their heritage with the strange new Islam of veils and poor morale and self-censorship and authoritarianism. I always thought that being a Muslim meant being a paragon of ethics, integrity, justice, and equality. I still think it's about spiritual independence and breaking free from the shackles that people live in and die in. I think it's about the pursuit of rational thought and the spirit of inquiry and individual dignity. Revolution, freedom from superstition, equality for all. Defiance, if required. These silly grinning poets, this is not Islam. The poetry of Islam is fiery and inspiring, not insipid and commercial. Fine divine inspiration, not cheap libidinous couplets.
Nana Mian, I only knew you as the smiling white figure who would play with me, but over the years I learned in bits and pieces that you had been much more. You had been a journalist, a freedom fighter, a mufti, a professor, a writer, a translator, a real intellectual. I learned that you had been a man of integrity whose peers had included Gandhiji and Jawaharlal Nehru. I learned that you had believed in the power of the pen and had been disheartened when politics took over the newspapers you had worked for. You had refused to parade around the Prime Minister as a token of the progressive Indian Muslim. You had turned down a Padma Shri award because the honours of a government that didn't live up to its promises to the Muslim community didn't meant anything to you. I spent a year in Indian journalism, Nana Mian, maybe you knew that because I'd dreamt of you my first week there. I'd dreamt that I was running towards a burning pair of towers that had had planes crash into them. I was running towards those towers that the crowd I was in was running away from because my old photographs of you and that old life were in those towers. Then I'd felt someone put their hand on my head, and I'd turned up to see that it had been you. I'd woken up from that dream, still feeling your hand on my head. I'd dreamt of you my first week in India, but after a few days I realised that I couldn't feel you in the general Indian air anymore. You had really gone. Then the rest of the year I realised that the old journalists I had seen - you and your friends - those were not the kind of people in Indian journalism today. I didn't like most of these people that I saw. I thought journalists were supposed to be the intellectual elite. These were not. None of these people were even close to the classy people you and your peers were. But then, the standard of everything in the world has fallen nowadays. It's a disposable kind of world I live in, Nana Mian. Songs and books come and go without making any real sort of impact on anybody. Just about anyone can become famous if they know the right people or behave badly enough. People's speech has become harsh, it's hard to find any sort of real grace in anybody these days. Men who behave like crude cavemen are called smart, and the women who behave like these men are called success-oriented. The world has lost much of its finery, Nana Mian, I wonder what you would have thought of it all.
Nana Mian, I have often seen people trying to be like you because you are still known amongst your peers and the younger people in your professional field as a singular man. I think the correct way to be like you is to not try to be like anybody but to be driven from inside. You were a man of your time, and you did what you thought was best in the circumstances you were in. I often see people quoting you and trying to sound like you but it seems so out of context now. I think that if they really wanted to be like you, then they would not try to be like you at all. They would simply live in their own time and make their own decisions at every crossroad they ever came upon.
I am a woman of my time. It is not the same world my parents grew up in, which was similar to the world you were from. The world has changed very drastically in the past 20 years, and my parents were not able to help me adjust to it at all. I think you would've listened to me, though, at least I hope you would've. I sure could have used your help many times in the past. Maybe you would've listened to me without brushing me under the carpet like everyone else did. Or maybe you would've behaved like them too. I don't know, but I've wanted to talk to you many times over the years about the world I was seeing and the way it is acceptable to behave now. Things don't even mean the same today as they did before. I've often felt like an orphan in my own family. I never saw much of myself in my father or in my mother. I was too impetuous and too straightforward, and I felt things too intensely. I have walked away from things that other people were dying for because I just cannot compromise on my integrity. I cannot work for people who disrespect me or don't believe in the principles that I live by. I have spent my life thinking there was something wrong with me because I could never shut my eyes when people were being unethical or cruel. Everyone else seemed to always be okay with these things, but it was always me who would call things into question and feel disturbed or even torn in such situations. I can't just shut my eyes and go with things when someone's explanation just doesn't add up. Why couldn't I be like everyone else in
I hope you liked the book covers I made, Nana Mian. Thank you for your legacy. You weren't ever very wealthy because you never sold yourself out, but your children loved you very much and still love you even now that they're all in their 50s and 60s and some have their own grandchildren. You've been gone over 20 years and people still swear by you. Someone still remembers how one cold foggy Lucknow night you gave your expensive shawl to a man shivering on the street. Your children never felt like they were poor. All they remember is how they'd all run up to you and hang on to your various limbs whenever you came home from work. And how much you loved that. I've dreamt of you so many times over the years, and it's always been with you watching me from afar and running away whenever you saw that I'd noticed you. Over time my dreams changed to my running to catch you but never actually being successful with it. Then I progressed to actually catching you. And then you came to me yourself in my dream with the two flaming towers.
Thank you for those 9 summers. And the dreams.
Your granddaughter,
Asma
Monday, March 19, 2012
Voice of the People
Diesel prices had gone up, and the input desk at NDTV in New Delhi had dispatched me to get reactions from customers at a gas station. Vox pop, they call it in the business, the voice of the people. I was interning in reporting that very hot month of June, so off I went. I picked up a memory chip for the camera from the video tape library, I arranged for a cameraperson, and I arranged for a car. We stopped outside a gas station at Nehru Place, and we decided to get reactions from the folks that would drive up to the diesel pump there. The red-and-gold OB van with NDTV written in huge letters on its sides that had accompanied us was parked right outside the gas station, and we'd uplink the footage back to the newsroom from there. Sounded simple enough.
Except that it was Saturday morning. Except this was diesel. Only a handful of people passed through the gas station for diesel that whole couple of hours, but I did speak to them and uplink their reactions back to the newsroom. The quiet cameraperson - a dark-skinned man with weather-beaten skin - and I had thought that we were done, but I received a call from the edit bay telling me that the reactions I had got were not good enough and that I'd have to get more. I can't remember exactly what I was told was lacking in the footage, but I remember the gist of it: the people didn't look good/educated enough for TV. They spoke Hindi too. There's a word for that in India: ghhaati. Low class.
But it was a story about diesel. The only people who bought diesel at gas stations were truck drivers, autorickshaw drivers...and other people's drivers in general. Weren't these the people whose reactions you'd want in a story about diesel? They were the ones who'd be affected by the price rise, right? I didn't understand the issue with the Hindi either. Sure, we were an English channel, but we subtitled non-English footage all the time. It was not a big deal, so what was so different this time? I'd tried explaining that to the person who'd called me from the newsroom, but I was very silkily asked to just get some English bites from better-looking people who weren't uneducated drivers.
I got it. They wanted freshly-scrubbed white-collar reactions for the white-collar-catering Inglis channel. Didn't matter if white-collar India didn't care about diesel prices.
I hung up and looked at the quiet cameraman. Camerapeople remind me of Rambo sometimes with those huge machine-gun-like cameras resting on their shoulders. They also remind me of the boombox-carrying kids from the ghettoes of America. My cameraman looked bored, emotionally disconnected. Cynical even. He wore what camerapeople, who are mostly men, wear around India - loose trousers, a loose button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled-up, and heavy shoes. All of it eventually a strange shade of don't-care. The colour of Delhi. "Kya karein (what do we do)?" I asked him. The newsroom wanted reactions from mall-going Indians. But that still didn't change things on the ground. It was still Saturday morning, hardly anyone was coming through the gas station, and almost nobody was passing through for diesel. Nobody that was English-TV-worthy, that is.
The cameraman shrugged as much as he could shrug with Rambo's machine gun on his shoulder, not completely unlike Jesus wincing under the weight of the crucifix on his back. He looked a bit cross. He suggested I go pull a customer from the petrol pump where all the nice sedans were rolling in with their upper-middle-class-and-higher clientele. The English-speakers of India. I felt a little ridiculous. My intelligence and integrity felt vaguely insulted, but I still went. I put my Hindi aside and put on my best American accent because I was representing an English news channel to the English-speaking persons of India. "Oh, NDTV!" they'd say with an appreciative smile, "of course, what do you need to know?" I got reactions in English from an elderly ex-army Sardar gentleman, a bearded intellectual type, and an outspoken clean-shaven polo-shirt-wearing man with a sharp haircut. I felt a bit empty standing there with my mic with the red NDTV muff on it, smiling and encouraging the people along on their performance. "Thankyousomuch," I'd say before trotting off. I'm sure they were nice people, but that wasn't what was bothering me. Only the previous month, when I was interning in the edit bay, had I been asked to edit vox pop footage that had come in from Kashmir about another price rise. I'd put the bites together, all of them in Hindi, and was then told by a young employee that they couldn't put that footage on air. But why, I had asked, the bites had good content. The girl had laughed. "Have you seen their faces?" she had said, screwing up her pretty light-skinned nose at me, the poor newbie. "We can't put such visuals on air."
Such people? Dark-skinned people from lower-income families? But what about the content? That footage never made it on the air on our English channel, but our Hindi channel ran it all day long. So the English channel only showed the good-looking people of India? But what about content? What about what we had initially been told at NDTV about journalistic ethics and the real issues and how journalism was supposed to be a pillar of democracy, the voice of the people? Or was it the voice of certain sections of the people depending on the segment of India you were catering to? The unattractive sweaty Indian is also a part of India. In fact, he is about 90% of India. Doesn't what he say also matter, even if he is not soothing enough to the eye of the English channel's global audience? NDTV's English channel is watched all over the world. At various points in my life, I have watched it in America, Canada, and Oman. The Indian diaspora feels proud to see India looking so dynamic and good on NDTV. "India is developing so fast," they always say so proudly, "everyone speaks English so well now. It is not the India we left." And then they proceed to daydream about a return to the homeland that never happens.
So what was this happening here??
That's what was running through my mind at the gas station at Nehru Place that Saturday morning. Much later, after the footage had been uplinked to the newsroom (and happily approved), after we'd all returned, I was asked to isolate a short 10-second clip from the English reactions they'd decided to use. I'd been transcribing the footage, and the news editor asked me if there was anything with 'punch' that was said that could be used when the headlines rolled for the news bulletin. Something expressive, something emotionally-charged.
I did have something. "But does the guy look clean-cut and suave?" I was asked. I said yes. The bite was from the agitated man in the polo shirt and the short grey hair. An Indian Anderson Cooper. That's suave, I guess. It was perfect, and his angry 10-second rant ran with the headlines all day.
Except that it was Saturday morning. Except this was diesel. Only a handful of people passed through the gas station for diesel that whole couple of hours, but I did speak to them and uplink their reactions back to the newsroom. The quiet cameraperson - a dark-skinned man with weather-beaten skin - and I had thought that we were done, but I received a call from the edit bay telling me that the reactions I had got were not good enough and that I'd have to get more. I can't remember exactly what I was told was lacking in the footage, but I remember the gist of it: the people didn't look good/educated enough for TV. They spoke Hindi too. There's a word for that in India: ghhaati. Low class.
But it was a story about diesel. The only people who bought diesel at gas stations were truck drivers, autorickshaw drivers...and other people's drivers in general. Weren't these the people whose reactions you'd want in a story about diesel? They were the ones who'd be affected by the price rise, right? I didn't understand the issue with the Hindi either. Sure, we were an English channel, but we subtitled non-English footage all the time. It was not a big deal, so what was so different this time? I'd tried explaining that to the person who'd called me from the newsroom, but I was very silkily asked to just get some English bites from better-looking people who weren't uneducated drivers.
I got it. They wanted freshly-scrubbed white-collar reactions for the white-collar-catering Inglis channel. Didn't matter if white-collar India didn't care about diesel prices.
I hung up and looked at the quiet cameraman. Camerapeople remind me of Rambo sometimes with those huge machine-gun-like cameras resting on their shoulders. They also remind me of the boombox-carrying kids from the ghettoes of America. My cameraman looked bored, emotionally disconnected. Cynical even. He wore what camerapeople, who are mostly men, wear around India - loose trousers, a loose button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled-up, and heavy shoes. All of it eventually a strange shade of don't-care. The colour of Delhi. "Kya karein (what do we do)?" I asked him. The newsroom wanted reactions from mall-going Indians. But that still didn't change things on the ground. It was still Saturday morning, hardly anyone was coming through the gas station, and almost nobody was passing through for diesel. Nobody that was English-TV-worthy, that is.
The cameraman shrugged as much as he could shrug with Rambo's machine gun on his shoulder, not completely unlike Jesus wincing under the weight of the crucifix on his back. He looked a bit cross. He suggested I go pull a customer from the petrol pump where all the nice sedans were rolling in with their upper-middle-class-and-higher clientele. The English-speakers of India. I felt a little ridiculous. My intelligence and integrity felt vaguely insulted, but I still went. I put my Hindi aside and put on my best American accent because I was representing an English news channel to the English-speaking persons of India. "Oh, NDTV!" they'd say with an appreciative smile, "of course, what do you need to know?" I got reactions in English from an elderly ex-army Sardar gentleman, a bearded intellectual type, and an outspoken clean-shaven polo-shirt-wearing man with a sharp haircut. I felt a bit empty standing there with my mic with the red NDTV muff on it, smiling and encouraging the people along on their performance. "Thankyousomuch," I'd say before trotting off. I'm sure they were nice people, but that wasn't what was bothering me. Only the previous month, when I was interning in the edit bay, had I been asked to edit vox pop footage that had come in from Kashmir about another price rise. I'd put the bites together, all of them in Hindi, and was then told by a young employee that they couldn't put that footage on air. But why, I had asked, the bites had good content. The girl had laughed. "Have you seen their faces?" she had said, screwing up her pretty light-skinned nose at me, the poor newbie. "We can't put such visuals on air."
Such people? Dark-skinned people from lower-income families? But what about the content? That footage never made it on the air on our English channel, but our Hindi channel ran it all day long. So the English channel only showed the good-looking people of India? But what about content? What about what we had initially been told at NDTV about journalistic ethics and the real issues and how journalism was supposed to be a pillar of democracy, the voice of the people? Or was it the voice of certain sections of the people depending on the segment of India you were catering to? The unattractive sweaty Indian is also a part of India. In fact, he is about 90% of India. Doesn't what he say also matter, even if he is not soothing enough to the eye of the English channel's global audience? NDTV's English channel is watched all over the world. At various points in my life, I have watched it in America, Canada, and Oman. The Indian diaspora feels proud to see India looking so dynamic and good on NDTV. "India is developing so fast," they always say so proudly, "everyone speaks English so well now. It is not the India we left." And then they proceed to daydream about a return to the homeland that never happens.
So what was this happening here??
That's what was running through my mind at the gas station at Nehru Place that Saturday morning. Much later, after the footage had been uplinked to the newsroom (and happily approved), after we'd all returned, I was asked to isolate a short 10-second clip from the English reactions they'd decided to use. I'd been transcribing the footage, and the news editor asked me if there was anything with 'punch' that was said that could be used when the headlines rolled for the news bulletin. Something expressive, something emotionally-charged.
I did have something. "But does the guy look clean-cut and suave?" I was asked. I said yes. The bite was from the agitated man in the polo shirt and the short grey hair. An Indian Anderson Cooper. That's suave, I guess. It was perfect, and his angry 10-second rant ran with the headlines all day.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
India: poverty, apathy, the mad drive to oppress
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'.
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'.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Aishwarya Bledel?
Aishwarya Rai and Alexis Bledel - the real Gilmore girls? They often looked related to me...!
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Wishlist
I couldn't wait to grow up when I was a kid. I had three major issues with being so young:
1. I didn't like my face and was dying to see what I would look like as an adult. All the Hindi movies showed the knobbly-kneed female child growing up into the most glamorous woman ever, complete with a ruby pout and butterfly eyelashes. I often wondered, and with impatience as I spent hours primping and posing in front of the mirror, about which beautiful face I would have - Sridevi's, Kimi Katkar's, or Parveen Babi's?
2. Nothing mainstream was ever in my size. The walkman's headphones kept falling off of my head, the bathroom mirror was too high, and I always had to climb on a chair to check out if we had any ice cream in the freezer. I absolutely hated having to ask and wait on others to help me with things out of my reach. I envied the adults who lived in a world that was built for them. Heck, even my dolls had houses and furniture their size.
3. The grown-ups looked like they knew everything about everything. I hardly knew the names of more than 2 movie stars (Amitabh Bachchan and Sridevi) and Michael Jackson. The grown-ups knew what to do, where to go, how to talk and to whom - they never made any mistakes! Being the youngest of the family, no one ever took me seriously, and my frequent crashes after bouts of excitement had me erroneously labelled as the poor weak child who would never have any physical stamina. I existed on the edge of society. I was physically smaller than everyone else, and I always felt like I didn't know enough things - I still remember the day when a friend mentioned how she'd discovered the magical fact that you knew the movie was about to start right after the director's name showed up on the beginning credits. Even my much older siblings knew what they wanted to say. I couldn't wait for the day when I'd grow up and suddenly know how to do everything right.
That was 1985. In the time since then, Sridevi has had multiple nosejobs, I stopped growing after 5'2", and Michael Jackson...well, he died last year. The beautiful people took off their makeup and grew old, and I discovered the farce of adulthood.
1. I didn't like my face and was dying to see what I would look like as an adult. All the Hindi movies showed the knobbly-kneed female child growing up into the most glamorous woman ever, complete with a ruby pout and butterfly eyelashes. I often wondered, and with impatience as I spent hours primping and posing in front of the mirror, about which beautiful face I would have - Sridevi's, Kimi Katkar's, or Parveen Babi's?
2. Nothing mainstream was ever in my size. The walkman's headphones kept falling off of my head, the bathroom mirror was too high, and I always had to climb on a chair to check out if we had any ice cream in the freezer. I absolutely hated having to ask and wait on others to help me with things out of my reach. I envied the adults who lived in a world that was built for them. Heck, even my dolls had houses and furniture their size.
3. The grown-ups looked like they knew everything about everything. I hardly knew the names of more than 2 movie stars (Amitabh Bachchan and Sridevi) and Michael Jackson. The grown-ups knew what to do, where to go, how to talk and to whom - they never made any mistakes! Being the youngest of the family, no one ever took me seriously, and my frequent crashes after bouts of excitement had me erroneously labelled as the poor weak child who would never have any physical stamina. I existed on the edge of society. I was physically smaller than everyone else, and I always felt like I didn't know enough things - I still remember the day when a friend mentioned how she'd discovered the magical fact that you knew the movie was about to start right after the director's name showed up on the beginning credits. Even my much older siblings knew what they wanted to say. I couldn't wait for the day when I'd grow up and suddenly know how to do everything right.
That was 1985. In the time since then, Sridevi has had multiple nosejobs, I stopped growing after 5'2", and Michael Jackson...well, he died last year. The beautiful people took off their makeup and grew old, and I discovered the farce of adulthood.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
An Actor has Many Faces
I went all-out morphing Shahrukh Khan's face with the Perception Laboratory's Face Transformer.
L-R: child, teenager, himself, old
L-R: Black, himself, Asian, White
L-R: himself, female, ape, Manga
Anyone else think that Shahrukh Khan's female counterpart looks a lot like Julianna Margulies?
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Double-take
I was clicking through photos of Bipasha Basu's upcoming movie when I noticed the ad on the right...
...the similarity betwen Bips' and Angie's pose and what can be seen of their tops made for a mildly amusing coincidence.
...the similarity betwen Bips' and Angie's pose and what can be seen of their tops made for a mildly amusing coincidence.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Happy Valen-birthday
Rare photos of Mumtaz Begum Jehan Dehlavi aka Madhubala, born February 14 1933, died February 23, 1969, at age 36.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
SRK bin ein Berliner!
When I first saw Shahrukh Khan at a concert in Muscat, Oman, in 1994, I never realised that that 20-something not-particularly-good-looking newbie would grow up to become an international sensation. Shahrukh Khan today...
...has crazy White fans!
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