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 video. Show all posts
Showing posts with label video. Show all posts
Friday, December 13, 2013
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
A Good Idea Turns 16
Like 2012, 1996 was an Olympic year. That was the year I turned 15. That was also the year my high school in Muscat, Oman, was turning out an Olympics-themed issue of our school magazine.
My English teacher was in-charge of putting this issue together, and I had very excitedly gone up to him with an idea I had had. I had told him that I had the lyrics of the Gloria Estefan song 'Reach' and that it would be a great idea to include those lyrics at the very end of the magazine. The song had been released as part of the Olympics, and its lyrics were very inspiring. These were the days before the Internet; song lyrics were either published in expensive or hard-to-find (especially in Muscat) book collections or on a flimsy sheet of printed paper inside the pastel-coloured plastic cases that some audio cassettes came with. I had an ear for song lyrics and usually wrote down those of my favourite songs and shared them with my friends who desperately wanted to be able to sing those songs correctly. I had found the lyrics of 'Reach' in a youth magazine and had torn the page off and saved it. I still have it with me somewhere.
But my teacher ignored my idea. He never even shot it down, he just plain ignored it. He almost made me feel like I wasn't there standing in front of him. I even think he looked over my head and continued about his business. I didn't know why then. He was an unpleasant sort of person, and I now can recognise him as the sort of person you don't want to hire or work with. I've met people like him over the years; these are the people who recognise a good idea when they see someone else come up with one, and some dark bitterness in them makes them want to kill it immediately. They do this by using humiliation, shame, discouragment, mockery, or repeated silent dismissals. My teacher used the last technique on me on this particular occassion. He used the others on me and other people the rest of the time. For everything. These kind of people ought never to be allowed near children who can't recognise or know how to interpret this brand of toxicity. These are the kind of people who can never be happy for someone else, who flinch at the sight of a smile, who feel relieved only if they can say or do something to dampen another's success somehow and get them to just.stop.smiling. These are the kind of people who feel big by making others feel small. My teacher had once told me that I thought too much of my poetry and that I was arrogant. I hadn't understood what he had meant, I was chirpy, chatty, and quite sensitive about feelings that belonged to me and also to other people .
The lyrics never made it to the school magazine. I still think including them would've been a great idea. So here is the song. It's songs like these that make me want to direct and edit a music video someday. It's people like my bitter high school English teacher that keep people from reaching. Thank goodness we eventually learn to recognise them and don't let them get in our way.
My English teacher was in-charge of putting this issue together, and I had very excitedly gone up to him with an idea I had had. I had told him that I had the lyrics of the Gloria Estefan song 'Reach' and that it would be a great idea to include those lyrics at the very end of the magazine. The song had been released as part of the Olympics, and its lyrics were very inspiring. These were the days before the Internet; song lyrics were either published in expensive or hard-to-find (especially in Muscat) book collections or on a flimsy sheet of printed paper inside the pastel-coloured plastic cases that some audio cassettes came with. I had an ear for song lyrics and usually wrote down those of my favourite songs and shared them with my friends who desperately wanted to be able to sing those songs correctly. I had found the lyrics of 'Reach' in a youth magazine and had torn the page off and saved it. I still have it with me somewhere.
But my teacher ignored my idea. He never even shot it down, he just plain ignored it. He almost made me feel like I wasn't there standing in front of him. I even think he looked over my head and continued about his business. I didn't know why then. He was an unpleasant sort of person, and I now can recognise him as the sort of person you don't want to hire or work with. I've met people like him over the years; these are the people who recognise a good idea when they see someone else come up with one, and some dark bitterness in them makes them want to kill it immediately. They do this by using humiliation, shame, discouragment, mockery, or repeated silent dismissals. My teacher used the last technique on me on this particular occassion. He used the others on me and other people the rest of the time. For everything. These kind of people ought never to be allowed near children who can't recognise or know how to interpret this brand of toxicity. These are the kind of people who can never be happy for someone else, who flinch at the sight of a smile, who feel relieved only if they can say or do something to dampen another's success somehow and get them to just.stop.smiling. These are the kind of people who feel big by making others feel small. My teacher had once told me that I thought too much of my poetry and that I was arrogant. I hadn't understood what he had meant, I was chirpy, chatty, and quite sensitive about feelings that belonged to me and also to other people .
The lyrics never made it to the school magazine. I still think including them would've been a great idea. So here is the song. It's songs like these that make me want to direct and edit a music video someday. It's people like my bitter high school English teacher that keep people from reaching. Thank goodness we eventually learn to recognise them and don't let them get in our way.
Some dreams live on in time forever
Those dreams, you want with all your heart
And I'll do whatever it takes
Follow through with the promise I made
Put it all on the line
What I hoped for at last would be mine
If I could reach, higher
Just for one moment touch the sky
From that one moment in my life
I'm gonna be stronger
Know that I've tried my very best
I'd put my spirit to the test
If I could reach
Some days are meant to be remembered
Those days we rise above the stars
So I'll go the distance this time
Seeing more the higher I climb
That the more I believe
All the more that this dream will be mine
If I could reach, higher
Just for one moment touch the sky
From that one moment in my life
I'm gonna be stronger
Know that I've tried my very best
I'd put my spirit to the test
If I could reach
If I could reach, higher
Just for one moment touch the sky
I'm gonna be stronger
From that one moment in my life
I'm gonna be so much stronger yes I am
I've tried my very best
I'd put my spirit to the test
If I could reach
If I could, If I could
If I could reach
Reach, I'd reach, I'd reach
I'd reach' I'd reach so much higher
Be stronger
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.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
A New Island Religion
"In 1964 there appeared a celebrated documentary movie called Mondo Cane, or "the world of the dog", in which the directors captured numerous human cruelties and illusions. This was the first occasion on which one could see a new religion being assembled, in plain view, on camera. The inhabitants of the Pacific islands may have been separated for centuries from the more economically developed world, but when visited by the fatal impact many of them were shrewd enough to get the point immediately. Here were great vessels with billowing sails, bearing treasures and weapons and devices that were beyond any compare. Some of the more untutored islanders did what many people do when confronted with a new phenomenon, and tried to translate it into a discourse that they could themselves understand (not unlike those fearful Aztecs who, first seeing mounted Spanish soldiers in Mesoamerica, concluded that they had a centaur for an enemy). These poor souls decided that the westerners were their long-mourned ancestors, come back at last with goods from beyond the grave. That illusion cannot long have survived the encounter with the colonists, but later it was observed in several places that the brighter islanders had a better idea. Docks and jetties were built, they noticed, after which more ships came and unloaded more goods. Acting by analogy and mimesis, the locals constructed their own jetties and waited for these, too, to attract some ships. Futile as this proceeding was, it badly retarded the advance of later Christian missionaries. When they made their appearance, they were asked where the gifts were (and soon came up with some trinkets).
In the twentieth century the "cargo cult" revived in an even more impressive and touching form. Units of the United States armed forces, arriving in the Pacific to build airfields for the war on Japan, found that they were the objects of slavish emulation. Local enthusiasts abandoned their lightly worn Christian observances and devoted all their energies to the construction of landing strips that might attract loaded airplanes. They made simulated antennae out of bamboos. They built and lit fires, to simulate the flares that guided the American planes to land. This still goes on, which is the saddest but of the Mondo Cane sequence. On the island of Tana, an American GI was declared to be the redeemer. His name, John Frum, seems to have been an invention too. But even after the last serviceman flew or sailed away after 1945, the eventual return of the saviour Frum was preached and predicted, and an annual ceremony still bears his name. On another island named New Britain, adjacent to Papua New Guinea, the cult is even more strikingly analogous. It has ten commandments (the "Ten Laws"), a trinity that has one presence in heaven and another on earth, and a ritual system of paying tributes in the hope of propitiating these authorities. If the ritual is performed with sufficient purity and fervor, so its adherants believe, then an age of milk and honey will be ushered in. This radiant future, sad to say, is known as the "Period of the Companies", and will cause New Britain to flourish and prosper as if it were a multinational corporation."
- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'
In the twentieth century the "cargo cult" revived in an even more impressive and touching form. Units of the United States armed forces, arriving in the Pacific to build airfields for the war on Japan, found that they were the objects of slavish emulation. Local enthusiasts abandoned their lightly worn Christian observances and devoted all their energies to the construction of landing strips that might attract loaded airplanes. They made simulated antennae out of bamboos. They built and lit fires, to simulate the flares that guided the American planes to land. This still goes on, which is the saddest but of the Mondo Cane sequence. On the island of Tana, an American GI was declared to be the redeemer. His name, John Frum, seems to have been an invention too. But even after the last serviceman flew or sailed away after 1945, the eventual return of the saviour Frum was preached and predicted, and an annual ceremony still bears his name. On another island named New Britain, adjacent to Papua New Guinea, the cult is even more strikingly analogous. It has ten commandments (the "Ten Laws"), a trinity that has one presence in heaven and another on earth, and a ritual system of paying tributes in the hope of propitiating these authorities. If the ritual is performed with sufficient purity and fervor, so its adherants believe, then an age of milk and honey will be ushered in. This radiant future, sad to say, is known as the "Period of the Companies", and will cause New Britain to flourish and prosper as if it were a multinational corporation."
- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'
Monday, May 3, 2010
The Dancing Cavalier
One of my favourite songs from the 1985 movie, Alice in Wonderland. The White Knight saves Alice from the Red Knight and then sings a beautiful song to her.
"We are dancing.
We didn't need a cue,
Yet with a girl like you,
It seems the thing to do,
Don't you agree?
I hear the strings,
My poor heart sings,
And we are dancing.
We share a smile,
And for a while,
We two are dancing.
If ever time should bring another year,
Another spring,
They'll be compared,
To what I've shared,
With you.
I hear the strings,
My poor heart sings,
And we are dancing.
We share a smile,
And for a while,
We two are dancing.
If ever time should bring another year,
Another spring,
They'll be compared,
To what I've shared,
With you."
Where have all the knights gone?
What a beautiful song, what a beautiful performance. This song bored me when I was really young but it brings me to tears now. It's sweet, in a sad way, how one thing can appear different to a person at different times in that person's life.
"We are dancing.
We didn't need a cue,
Yet with a girl like you,
It seems the thing to do,
Don't you agree?
I hear the strings,
My poor heart sings,
And we are dancing.
We share a smile,
And for a while,
We two are dancing.
If ever time should bring another year,
Another spring,
They'll be compared,
To what I've shared,
With you.
I hear the strings,
My poor heart sings,
And we are dancing.
We share a smile,
And for a while,
We two are dancing.
If ever time should bring another year,
Another spring,
They'll be compared,
To what I've shared,
With you."
Where have all the knights gone?
What a beautiful song, what a beautiful performance. This song bored me when I was really young but it brings me to tears now. It's sweet, in a sad way, how one thing can appear different to a person at different times in that person's life.
Watch the whole movie!
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Monday, March 22, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Frankenfood
Multi-national corporations are trying to bring genetically-modified (GM) foods to India. But what does that mean? Let Mahesh Bhatt fill you in in 30 minutes.
Poison on the Platter from Jeffrey Smith on Vimeo.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Do you realise?
As 2009 draws to an end, and people all over the world prepare their party itinerary for the new year celebrations, let us remember that:
- the Gregorian calendar has only been around since the 16th century
- there were innumerable calenders all over the world before the Gregorian one
- there are many, many other calendars that are still being used today
- human beings have relied not only on the sun but the moon, constellations, planets, seasons, natural disasters, and reigns of kings to mark time periods
- calendars rely on at least one external object to relatively define the passage of time
- your age says more about the number of times your planet has revolved around the sun with you on it rather than anything about you
- even time, as people define it, is a relative concept
Reminds me of a seance transcript I once read where the medium repeatedly failed to get an answer from the channeled entity regarding dates and how long it had lived. The entity seemed to have answers for everything except the time-based questions. It would go silent, or ask for clarifications, like it could just not get its...head around the concept.
This is not about believing in ghosts. This is about accepting that you are not the authority on everything, that your view of life is limited to your very localised circumstances. Even the religions of the world simplify Creation for you in a version that you may understand, asking you to just trust, have faith in the actual reality that cannot be fathomed right now with your limited senses. Understand the limitations of what you think you know as an absolute fact. Unlearn what you have been told, every single bit of it, so you can really begin to see the true message. Unlearn that blue is for boys and pink is for girls - colours are merely light vibrations. Unlearn that chiseled or hairless or tall is all that's acceptable - it's just what you've been fed. Unlearn that summer means June and winter means December - there is no such thing really as a month. When you touch a table, a tree, another person, yourself, do you think they're all solid? They're not. They are all made of molecules which are made of atoms which are made of protons, electrons, neutrons, which are further made of smaller particles that only differ from each other in the way they behave. But your skin, your eyes, your every sense tells you that the table, the tree, the other person, yourself are solid. So are you going to believe everything your 5 senses tell you?
Unlearn the stereotypes. Unlearn it all, challenge what you define yourself by. Do it if you have the courage to discover what is absolute, what is universal. Undo all the conditioning and break free. Everything you know right now is someone else's opinion. You can't even be sure of what you have seen. Don't you see, I mean really feel in some strange place inside? The only thing you can be sure of is that you can't be sure of anything at all.
- the Gregorian calendar has only been around since the 16th century
- there were innumerable calenders all over the world before the Gregorian one
- there are many, many other calendars that are still being used today
- human beings have relied not only on the sun but the moon, constellations, planets, seasons, natural disasters, and reigns of kings to mark time periods
- calendars rely on at least one external object to relatively define the passage of time
- your age says more about the number of times your planet has revolved around the sun with you on it rather than anything about you
- even time, as people define it, is a relative concept
Reminds me of a seance transcript I once read where the medium repeatedly failed to get an answer from the channeled entity regarding dates and how long it had lived. The entity seemed to have answers for everything except the time-based questions. It would go silent, or ask for clarifications, like it could just not get its...head around the concept.
This is not about believing in ghosts. This is about accepting that you are not the authority on everything, that your view of life is limited to your very localised circumstances. Even the religions of the world simplify Creation for you in a version that you may understand, asking you to just trust, have faith in the actual reality that cannot be fathomed right now with your limited senses. Understand the limitations of what you think you know as an absolute fact. Unlearn what you have been told, every single bit of it, so you can really begin to see the true message. Unlearn that blue is for boys and pink is for girls - colours are merely light vibrations. Unlearn that chiseled or hairless or tall is all that's acceptable - it's just what you've been fed. Unlearn that summer means June and winter means December - there is no such thing really as a month. When you touch a table, a tree, another person, yourself, do you think they're all solid? They're not. They are all made of molecules which are made of atoms which are made of protons, electrons, neutrons, which are further made of smaller particles that only differ from each other in the way they behave. But your skin, your eyes, your every sense tells you that the table, the tree, the other person, yourself are solid. So are you going to believe everything your 5 senses tell you?
Unlearn the stereotypes. Unlearn it all, challenge what you define yourself by. Do it if you have the courage to discover what is absolute, what is universal. Undo all the conditioning and break free. Everything you know right now is someone else's opinion. You can't even be sure of what you have seen. Don't you see, I mean really feel in some strange place inside? The only thing you can be sure of is that you can't be sure of anything at all.
Friday, December 18, 2009
My secret way to the Truth
Love. Real Love.
I'm not talking about what people think they feel for someone else out hormonal or social compulsions. I mean Love the thing, like Good or Life or Universal Law. Love the force that is always, whether you have ever felt its presence or not. Love the thing that is bigger than your faith in it, bigger than your experience of it, bigger than your understanding of it. Love the thing, the silent song of the universe. Love is what we think we've glimpsed from the corner of our eyes sometimes in shadows and echoes, some truth of existence that we remember from another time, in the back of our mind, a long forgotten story, a repressed memory of being that we don't believe in anymore. Love is a clear pool that is always there, a pool we sometimes find when a catalyst leads us to it, a pool we are surprised to see reflecting a saga back to us, a pool we surrender to, to sink into, to let us breathe its secret waters, to let us never go back to the dry world again. Love was not the catalyst, it was not because of the catalyst, and it will not cease to be once the catalyst has served its purpose. The catalyst, whatever it may be - a person, a song, a temperature, a scenery - suddenly lets us see a wordless truth. Then, Love looks like the single radiant flower that startles us when it delicately blooms on its own in the darkness inside us, its roots agonisingly pinching your numb soul to a tantalising temporary sight. Then the sight is gone and we are blind once more, but we remember.
Every time I listen to Swan Lake, my eyes closed, I'm immersed into that pool each time, and I am so grateful. I fall deeper and deeper into the pool, into Love itself, sinking into its very depths, my tears mixing with its waters, at peace at last, so grateful to be able to touch the intangible for however long the music, my catalyst, lasts. I can fall in Love over and over again, I don't need anything else to know the truth anymore. I know Love, I know the stirrings of the Universe, and I am home, I am where I came from, where I one day long to go back to, to be...effortlessly.
I'm not talking about what people think they feel for someone else out hormonal or social compulsions. I mean Love the thing, like Good or Life or Universal Law. Love the force that is always, whether you have ever felt its presence or not. Love the thing that is bigger than your faith in it, bigger than your experience of it, bigger than your understanding of it. Love the thing, the silent song of the universe. Love is what we think we've glimpsed from the corner of our eyes sometimes in shadows and echoes, some truth of existence that we remember from another time, in the back of our mind, a long forgotten story, a repressed memory of being that we don't believe in anymore. Love is a clear pool that is always there, a pool we sometimes find when a catalyst leads us to it, a pool we are surprised to see reflecting a saga back to us, a pool we surrender to, to sink into, to let us breathe its secret waters, to let us never go back to the dry world again. Love was not the catalyst, it was not because of the catalyst, and it will not cease to be once the catalyst has served its purpose. The catalyst, whatever it may be - a person, a song, a temperature, a scenery - suddenly lets us see a wordless truth. Then, Love looks like the single radiant flower that startles us when it delicately blooms on its own in the darkness inside us, its roots agonisingly pinching your numb soul to a tantalising temporary sight. Then the sight is gone and we are blind once more, but we remember.
Every time I listen to Swan Lake, my eyes closed, I'm immersed into that pool each time, and I am so grateful. I fall deeper and deeper into the pool, into Love itself, sinking into its very depths, my tears mixing with its waters, at peace at last, so grateful to be able to touch the intangible for however long the music, my catalyst, lasts. I can fall in Love over and over again, I don't need anything else to know the truth anymore. I know Love, I know the stirrings of the Universe, and I am home, I am where I came from, where I one day long to go back to, to be...effortlessly.
It is so beautiful.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Oliver Twist and Optimism
Welcome to post-independence India!
Some say that art is a snapshot in time of a particular society. See if you can decipher the socialist dreams in this timeless number!
Some say that art is a snapshot in time of a particular society. See if you can decipher the socialist dreams in this timeless number!
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
The Sound of Music
It's not often you come across a tune that just punches you in the gut and makes you add it to the soundtrack of your life that they'll use when they make a movie about you. Sometimes a song just feels like what your eternal soul would sound like if it could sing.
I was in the car waiting for my mother when 'When Love Takes Over' (David Guetta featuring Kelly Rowland) came on the radio. I hadn't really been paying attention to the music until then, it was just something to fill the silence as I waited for my wet hair to dry in the oven-like desert afternoon. Simply put, I was struck, like when something resonates with your soul. OMG I can't stop listening to this song, it makes me want to jump up and yell out loud for the joy of being alive. Have you ever felt like that?
I was in the car waiting for my mother when 'When Love Takes Over' (David Guetta featuring Kelly Rowland) came on the radio. I hadn't really been paying attention to the music until then, it was just something to fill the silence as I waited for my wet hair to dry in the oven-like desert afternoon. Simply put, I was struck, like when something resonates with your soul. OMG I can't stop listening to this song, it makes me want to jump up and yell out loud for the joy of being alive. Have you ever felt like that?
Monday, September 15, 2008
Why I love this boyband anyway
They have a new song! Oh this brings back such good memories. Let me go fish out my Boyzone and Mr. Bean soundtrack audio cassettes.
I should do this the next time I fly
I LOVE this commercial - hurrah for completely unrealistic security checkpoints!
PS - his eyebrows are so sharp that I think I cut my finger (don't ask me what my finger was doing on his eyebrows...)
Friday, September 5, 2008
When Jimmy met Disco
It was 1982 and super-shine was in style.
PS - At 3:06 I start to get the feeling that she's scolding a noncompliant pet
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Vocally separated at birth?
Is it just me or do Strawberry Rick Astley and Cher the Fierce-Maned sound similar? You decide.
PS - it only works if you listen to their songs with your eyes closed.
PS - it only works if you listen to their songs with your eyes closed.
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