Once upon a time there was a slum in New Delhi near the tomb of Humayun, the mild-mannered Mughal emperor who fell to his death from a ladder in his library. A few centuries after his death, a young woman walked into that slum with a camera and tripod slung all over herself to conduct an interview and take some shots for the NGO she was volunteering with. She was accompanied by another young volunteer. He was a college student, a Youth Congress leader, who visited that slum often as part of the NGO's Right to Information programme. He and his team helped make the people who lived in that slum aware of their rights as the citizens of India because those rights were often denied to them.
The young woman and the young man couldn't have been more different. She had an Indian passport but had never lived in India. He probably didn't have a passport because he had never travelled outside of India. She had travelled east from the Western hemisphere to be there. He had travelled north from Rajasthan. A decade yawned between the two of them. But he was her guide that winter afternoon in one of the most densely populated parts of the world. She had been asking him a lot of questions about himself, his work, and the people he had met at the slum. She had never been to a slum before and didn't know what to expect. They had taken an autorickshaw to Humayun's Tomb and had then started walking down a dust path right around the corner.
And then it happened.
A handful of scrawny brown children came tumbling down the path and called out to the young woman. "Hiiiii, Didiiiiii!"
They were gone as fast as they had appeared. The young woman and the young man kept walking. She didn't pay any attention to the children, they had probably mistaken her for one of the other volunteers they had met before. A thin man passed them by on a rickety cycle that was hitched to a wooden cart. Both he and his vehicle creaked and shook over the broken stones that stuck out from the ground as if they were growing out from it. The young woman remembered something her father had once said about the fertile soil of that part of India. "Something will start growing even if you spit on the ground." Magic soil. She remembered Stephen King's 'Pet Sematary'. The soil of life? What kind of life?
Some more children bounced past them. "Didiiiiiii!"
They're talking to me, she realised. She didn't know how to feel about it. Delhi was not a city where strangers almost fell over with excitement upon meeting you. She had spent a year around the smooth-talking, educated, rich, famous, sometimes good-looking segment of the Indian population. The elite. She was used to the people she worked for not knowing her name and not caring about if she lived or died. As long as she got the work done, as long as she made them look good. She was used to hard eyes and snarls and bad behaviour. Then what was this?
They had followed the path to its end into the heart of the slum. They had passed thin children hopping around chained puppies, they had passed an immobile old man exhaling smoke outside his shanty on a charpai he shared with an equally immobile white dog. An outdoor tap dripped Chinese torture onto a pile of steel pots and pans. Shanties lined both sides of the path until where it ended into a dusty open area. That is where the piles and possibly miles of garbage began. A couple of older women in saris and a baby sat on a charpai near the hill of garbage. There was a tall green gate nearby, some Muslim organisation. A clothesline with ratty colourful clothing hung along its wall.
The young man set out to find the woman they needed to speak to. The young woman surveyed the scene for a good interview location. She settled on a pink and blue wall that tapered off into the background to a line of shanties. She pulled the tripod out of its cardboard box and set it up on the ground. She screwed her camera on top of the tripod and peered through the viewfinder. Someone tugged at the bag she kept slung on her hips.
"Didi, meri photo khheencho na." She turned to a girl with messy short hair and dirty clothes. And missing teeth on a happy smile. A disarming smile meant for the young woman. It almost frightened her, she hadn't seen a selfless smile in a long time. A number of children suddenly surrounded the serious young woman and her equipment. They clung to the bottom of her shirt, to her bag. Someone reached for her arm, another grabbed her fingers. The young woman from another world could feel the warmth of their hands burning through her clothes onto her skin. A couple of them began to dance in front of the camera. They began to chant, "Didi, didi, didi, didi!" They were excited to see her. Their faces were glowing, they could not contain their joy. It made her feel unsteady, unsure how to react. She had learned how to react to hostility and condescension, she knew how to handle those things, but what was this?
A smile that almost broke into a laugh awkwardly began writing itself on her mouth.
The young man returned with the woman they were meant to interview. The young woman shushed the children, "shhhhhhh!" The woman seated herself in front of the camera and the interview began. The young woman kept a close watch on the camera's viewfinder and an even closer eye on the children who had crowded around her. She shushed them whenever they squealed, she tapped their little fingers whenever they couldn't bear to not touch the tripod. She even took one little girl aside and asked her to tell one of the shanties nearby to turn down their TV set which was playing old Mohammed Aziz songs.
After the interview, the young woman spent the rest of her time taking shots of the slum. The children followed her wherever she went. She was the pied piper, and she made them dance. She made some young boys on bicycles race past her, and they did. One of the boys yelled in triumph as he sped past her - "yeahhhhhhhh, Didi!!" Some of the children were dangling off of an abandoned autorickshaw near the garbage pile. One of the little girls with the uneven pigtails and the very high-pitched voice grabbed another girl by the hair and shook her head in play and laughed. They all laughed. They were all so poor and they lived in slums, and they treated the young woman as if she was the most important person in the world. The young woman looked around for the young man she had come with. She saw him being lead a way off by a little boy. "Hey, where are you going??" she called out to him. He turned to look at her with a smile and shrugged. The little boy obviously wanted to show his big tough friend something interesting in his life.
At the end of their visit, the young man and the young woman were saying their goodbyes to the woman they had interviewed and her family. "Thank you," the young woman said, the camera and tripod once again slung across her body. They were on their way out. The woman from the slum replied to her. She told her that they should be the ones doing the thanking, that if it weren't for the young man, the young woman, and their NGO, that they would not be able to put their children in school or even acquire their basic forms of identification from the government. They would never know their rights if it had not been for them.
The young woman stood there, half her body wanting to leave, the other half wanting to move in the other direction. She realised that she had suddenly stopped looking at the woman from the slum in the eye. She felt small. It had all been too much. First the children who had flung themselves at her out of affection and trust when they didn't have to, now this woman who spoke so directly that it made the young woman from the outside world feel like everything she had gone through to get to this moment had been worth it. All the good things, especially the bad things, it was alright because it had brought her here, to a woman who said thank you.
She wondered about the rich and beautiful and famous people she had been around the whole year. She remembered the big talk and the small actions. She remembered how after a while the most beautiful and powerful people had started looking unbearably ugly to her. So, so ugly. They were ugly in their behaviour, they were ugly in their words, they were ugly in how they treated the world around them. They were ugly in how they were competitive and not cooperative, ugly in how they wanted to tear down but not build up. The things people do to get on television can anger you. You know what they say about how power and money show the true character of a person? Add putting them on camera to that list. Many times it's not even about the message but about seeing themselves on screen. Many of them are people you wouldn't speak with if you met them elsewhere. But the young woman had seen people at the NGO cringing at seeing themselves in one of their own videos and insisting ad nauseum that the video be edited to put focus on the people, the people, the people. The people they are trying to empower.
The young man stopped by a small shop on their way out. He asked the young woman if she wanted him to buy her some gum. She did, so he bought some for her and for himself. The sun was beginning to set, the smog was beginning to darken. They continued on their way out to the main road. The young woman suddenly realised that the young man had not given her the gum he had promised her himself. She asked him for it, and he then fished it out of his pocket and handed it to her. She had a good laugh over it. "Such a typical politician," she said to him. "You offer me something on your own, then you pretend as if you never did. You make me go out of my way to demand something that I had never wanted in the first place!"
Sometime later, the young woman remembered a time when she was looking for a place to volunteer. She had spoken to a women's organisation over the phone who had turned her down because of the television news channel she had worked at. They had told her that they knew of others from that channel and that, if the young woman was anything like them, then they didn't think that she would be able to handle working with people from the slums.
But I can. I am not like the others.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
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'.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Backwards/forwards
Oh, what can I tell you about why I'm in India? That answer has so many parts, I'm tired of listing it out for everyone who asks me why I came back here. Most of all, I'm tired of going over it for my own self when I need reminding. They've told me that most people move forward but that I've chosen to move backwards. I've been here so long, away from the world that I came from. I am beginning to forget...
* * *
I've started volunteering as a Film Editor for the Youth Parliament Foundation. This past week they'd been hosting the 'Know Your Body, Know Your Rights' national consultation in New Delhi. A bunch of young folks from various states - Gujarat, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Uttarakhand, and others - landed up in the capital to talk about sexual health awareness for 4 days. I had been asked to help shoot the event for a video we'd need to edit and send to the sponsors, the MacArthur Foundation and UNESCO. I was grateful for the opportunity to hide behind the lens. As a videographer, one's goal is to capture an event without interfering with the subject or affecting the environment. It was only my second week with the organisation, and I was still getting used to its social dynamics. I didn't have any work friends as yet, I wasn't in on the inside jokes, and I couldn't imagine surviving on smalltalk and shooting out clever one-liners on the field all week. Thank God for the job description - shoot, be invisible, go home.
We were packing up by the end of the 4th and final day of the consultation. I had played the part of the mute camerawoman perfectly - I hadn't bonded with any of the attendees and had sat down for meals with the organisation staff without contributing much to the conversation. I hadn't had the energy for anything more than work anyway. Cameras get heavy hanging from one's neck after 8-10 hours. They give one achy shoulders, cramped thighs, and burning shoulder joints. That and keeping an eagle-eye out for good shots hour after hour after hour consumes any leftover desire to cross over and reach out to the subject. I don't mind though. The world often seems a lot more beautiful through a camera. I don't mind spending as much time there as possible. I don't mind not being noticed.
"Didi." Sister.
I turned to face a young rural boy, not more than 18. Like most people from the rural parts, this one was skinny with not an ounce of fat on him anywhere. Not even on his face. His skin stuck to his smiling skull like a thick layer of paint. Oil kept his side-parted hair in place. He wore a generic button-down shirt and generic pair of trousers. A generic Indian rural person holding out a generic Indian notebook to me. Made of recycled paper.
He was smiling at me, shyly, possibly even admiringly.
"Didi, autograph."
Four days of silence behind a camera, and I'd forgotten how to speak. My voice came out with a crack, as if I'd been asleep. "Me?" My autograph? What had I ever done for him? I'd never even spoken to anyone during the consultation. What reason would he have to smile at me?
But he kept smiling anyway. "Accha, theek hai," I said - right, okay - and I slowly took his notebook and pen and smiled, still in a haze after being woken from my cameraperson stupor. Life behind the camera dulls one's social instincts sometimes.
"Main kya likhhoon?" I asked him gently. What do I write?
"Naam, email address, aap kahaan ki hain, aur aap kya kaam karti hain." Your name, email address, where you're from, and what you do.
Oh, boy.
I started writing my name in English. K-H-A-D-I-J-A. In uppercase because it's easier to read. He looked at what I was writing and told me that he couldn't read English. So I wrote my name and email address in English, and then began to write in Hindi.
I wrote my name.
I skipped the email address. I didn't know how to translate it into Hindi.
Of the remaining two questions, I tackled the easier one first. What did I do for a living? I was a trained IT professional. I had recently trained at NDTV in broadcast journalism. I was a published book author. At that moment, I was a film editor. Media, I wrote.
I wondered what to write about where I was from. I was born in Lucknow, but I had never lived there. I never felt Lucknawi, more so after my latest trip early this year. That had snapped any emotional ties I had to that place. I just did not recognise it anymore. Most of the people I knew there who had remembered me from my childhood had died, their name plates still on their ancient wooden doors, their houses abandoned by their children who'd moved out to the newer parts of Lucknow, to other parts of India, to other parts of the world. Greener pastures. They hadn't even bothered to take down the old nameplates. Like Scrooge who had been too miserly to remove his dead partner's name from their office signboard, 'Scrooge & Marley'. Old Lucknow was a ghost ghetto, a grinning skeleton. Like this rural boy here, wanting to know where I was from.
Maybe I was from Delhi? It was the only place in India where I had actually lived, for over a year, working, not on a holiday. I could recognise landmarks and the 'India Today' office in the latest movie 'Rockstar'. And the 'India Today' signboard had been extremely blurry and in the background. You couldn't even see any text, just red and white squares. But I had recognised it. I had even shouted the block out at the theater - F-14/15 Connaught Place! I get excited whenever I can recognise landmarks in any city I'm in. It makes me feel that maybe, just maybe, this is what home feels like. There once was a time in my life when I had started recognising landmarks at airports. The restaurant where the chicken nuggets and fries were good at Zurich. The worship room in Amsterdam. I like the food court at Terminal 3 at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi. The smell of cinnamon and the sound of jazz at Chicago's O'Hare. The casino posters near the baggage claim area in Tulsa. I remember the woman's face. She was a white brunette in her late 30s and was ecstatically clapping about winning something.
But my Facebook account says that my hometown is Muscat, Oman. I spent 18 years straight there after all. That's the most amount of time I have lived anywhere. A close second is America with my 10 years. Canada was only for 4 months in total, but I am a resident there. I did feel a sense of belonging there for a while because of my immigration status. It made the immigration officer smile at me and say "welcome home". I've even got used to Tim Horton's and the Rogers monopoly. I even know some intersections and Go Train stops in Toronto. I know Dundas Square. I had attended a music fest there for Michael Jackson when he had died. It hadn't felt like he had died then.
The rural boy with the long eyelashes was still looking at his notebook, waiting to see what I wrote, wondering about the long pause before I wrote the name of my hometown. I wrote them all. Lucknow/Delhi/Oman/America/Canada.
"Yeh kya hai?" he asked. What is this?
I told him that I was from all those places. I read out the names even though he could read Hindi. His eyes widened, and he looked at me with new respect. This was probably the first time he'd left his town somewhere in Jharkhand, Uttrakhand, wherever he was from. India's soul is in its villages, Gandhi had said. This was probably the first time he'd visited Delhi. Reaching Delhi had been a miracle for him. Like a trip to Rome for the ancients. Babylon, Cairo, Persepolis. It was what Hollywood had been for me. Staying in Beverly Hills, coming on TV on Jay Leno from Burbank. Having my picture taken on the bridge of the Enterprise-D at the Star Trek museum at the Las Vegas Hilton.
We had both come a long way. Such a long journey it has been.
* * *
I've started volunteering as a Film Editor for the Youth Parliament Foundation. This past week they'd been hosting the 'Know Your Body, Know Your Rights' national consultation in New Delhi. A bunch of young folks from various states - Gujarat, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Uttarakhand, and others - landed up in the capital to talk about sexual health awareness for 4 days. I had been asked to help shoot the event for a video we'd need to edit and send to the sponsors, the MacArthur Foundation and UNESCO. I was grateful for the opportunity to hide behind the lens. As a videographer, one's goal is to capture an event without interfering with the subject or affecting the environment. It was only my second week with the organisation, and I was still getting used to its social dynamics. I didn't have any work friends as yet, I wasn't in on the inside jokes, and I couldn't imagine surviving on smalltalk and shooting out clever one-liners on the field all week. Thank God for the job description - shoot, be invisible, go home.
We were packing up by the end of the 4th and final day of the consultation. I had played the part of the mute camerawoman perfectly - I hadn't bonded with any of the attendees and had sat down for meals with the organisation staff without contributing much to the conversation. I hadn't had the energy for anything more than work anyway. Cameras get heavy hanging from one's neck after 8-10 hours. They give one achy shoulders, cramped thighs, and burning shoulder joints. That and keeping an eagle-eye out for good shots hour after hour after hour consumes any leftover desire to cross over and reach out to the subject. I don't mind though. The world often seems a lot more beautiful through a camera. I don't mind spending as much time there as possible. I don't mind not being noticed.
"Didi." Sister.
I turned to face a young rural boy, not more than 18. Like most people from the rural parts, this one was skinny with not an ounce of fat on him anywhere. Not even on his face. His skin stuck to his smiling skull like a thick layer of paint. Oil kept his side-parted hair in place. He wore a generic button-down shirt and generic pair of trousers. A generic Indian rural person holding out a generic Indian notebook to me. Made of recycled paper.
He was smiling at me, shyly, possibly even admiringly.
"Didi, autograph."
Four days of silence behind a camera, and I'd forgotten how to speak. My voice came out with a crack, as if I'd been asleep. "Me?" My autograph? What had I ever done for him? I'd never even spoken to anyone during the consultation. What reason would he have to smile at me?
But he kept smiling anyway. "Accha, theek hai," I said - right, okay - and I slowly took his notebook and pen and smiled, still in a haze after being woken from my cameraperson stupor. Life behind the camera dulls one's social instincts sometimes.
"Main kya likhhoon?" I asked him gently. What do I write?
"Naam, email address, aap kahaan ki hain, aur aap kya kaam karti hain." Your name, email address, where you're from, and what you do.
Oh, boy.
I started writing my name in English. K-H-A-D-I-J-A. In uppercase because it's easier to read. He looked at what I was writing and told me that he couldn't read English. So I wrote my name and email address in English, and then began to write in Hindi.
I wrote my name.
I skipped the email address. I didn't know how to translate it into Hindi.
Of the remaining two questions, I tackled the easier one first. What did I do for a living? I was a trained IT professional. I had recently trained at NDTV in broadcast journalism. I was a published book author. At that moment, I was a film editor. Media, I wrote.
I wondered what to write about where I was from. I was born in Lucknow, but I had never lived there. I never felt Lucknawi, more so after my latest trip early this year. That had snapped any emotional ties I had to that place. I just did not recognise it anymore. Most of the people I knew there who had remembered me from my childhood had died, their name plates still on their ancient wooden doors, their houses abandoned by their children who'd moved out to the newer parts of Lucknow, to other parts of India, to other parts of the world. Greener pastures. They hadn't even bothered to take down the old nameplates. Like Scrooge who had been too miserly to remove his dead partner's name from their office signboard, 'Scrooge & Marley'. Old Lucknow was a ghost ghetto, a grinning skeleton. Like this rural boy here, wanting to know where I was from.
Maybe I was from Delhi? It was the only place in India where I had actually lived, for over a year, working, not on a holiday. I could recognise landmarks and the 'India Today' office in the latest movie 'Rockstar'. And the 'India Today' signboard had been extremely blurry and in the background. You couldn't even see any text, just red and white squares. But I had recognised it. I had even shouted the block out at the theater - F-14/15 Connaught Place! I get excited whenever I can recognise landmarks in any city I'm in. It makes me feel that maybe, just maybe, this is what home feels like. There once was a time in my life when I had started recognising landmarks at airports. The restaurant where the chicken nuggets and fries were good at Zurich. The worship room in Amsterdam. I like the food court at Terminal 3 at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi. The smell of cinnamon and the sound of jazz at Chicago's O'Hare. The casino posters near the baggage claim area in Tulsa. I remember the woman's face. She was a white brunette in her late 30s and was ecstatically clapping about winning something.
But my Facebook account says that my hometown is Muscat, Oman. I spent 18 years straight there after all. That's the most amount of time I have lived anywhere. A close second is America with my 10 years. Canada was only for 4 months in total, but I am a resident there. I did feel a sense of belonging there for a while because of my immigration status. It made the immigration officer smile at me and say "welcome home". I've even got used to Tim Horton's and the Rogers monopoly. I even know some intersections and Go Train stops in Toronto. I know Dundas Square. I had attended a music fest there for Michael Jackson when he had died. It hadn't felt like he had died then.
The rural boy with the long eyelashes was still looking at his notebook, waiting to see what I wrote, wondering about the long pause before I wrote the name of my hometown. I wrote them all. Lucknow/Delhi/Oman/America/Canada.
"Yeh kya hai?" he asked. What is this?
I told him that I was from all those places. I read out the names even though he could read Hindi. His eyes widened, and he looked at me with new respect. This was probably the first time he'd left his town somewhere in Jharkhand, Uttrakhand, wherever he was from. India's soul is in its villages, Gandhi had said. This was probably the first time he'd visited Delhi. Reaching Delhi had been a miracle for him. Like a trip to Rome for the ancients. Babylon, Cairo, Persepolis. It was what Hollywood had been for me. Staying in Beverly Hills, coming on TV on Jay Leno from Burbank. Having my picture taken on the bridge of the Enterprise-D at the Star Trek museum at the Las Vegas Hilton.
We had both come a long way. Such a long journey it has been.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Voodoo Man
voodoo man
magic man
cast a wicked spell on me
hooked me in my gut like a fish
and tugs at me when he's bored
blew black magic dust in my lungs
without laying a finger on me
just with the way he moved
spanish dancer prowl
he knew i was watching
he did it with the way he looked at me
he knew
he knew
i knew from his half smile
that he knew
magic man
cast a wicked spell on me
hooked me in my gut like a fish
and tugs at me when he's bored
blew black magic dust in my lungs
without laying a finger on me
just with the way he moved
spanish dancer prowl
he knew i was watching
he did it with the way he looked at me
he knew
he knew
i knew from his half smile
that he knew
Monday, October 17, 2011
Lament
Dear God
Remember when I got mad at you
Because bad things had happened
To me
Despite yourself
But I found you again
And I flowered
I felt so wise in my triumph
Now I'm mad at you again
Because bad things are still happening
Much worse things
All around me
To the good, the weak, the silent
Millions and billions
Who speaks for them?
You?
Good things are happening to the bad people
The bad people pick on the carcasses of the good people
They fatten and bloat
All the time
In front of me
In front of my eyes
Where are your eyes?
The good people believe in you
The bad people believe in nothing
How much happier they are
Than the broken good people
Who live and die like animals
Or worse
This time I'm mad at you
For everybody else
Burning rage
My mind is ash
Soul smoke
So mad at you
But I can't find you here
To tell you how mad I am
At you
I know you're out there
You were with me once
Are you not the God of all of us?
Where have you hidden yourself?
Are you hiding because of the bad people?
Are you afraid of them?
Are you afraid of your own creations?
The dollmaker is afraid of his work?
Frankenstein afraid of its monster?
You'd promised us
Over and over
Throughout time
In every language so that we'd know and believe
What was true
What was wrong
So, so wrong
But what of you?
Does your mighty throne not tremble now?
You who said would right all wrongs
You who would be our shield
You who have abandoned us!
You who made demands of us
We now make a demand of you
Hear us now wherever you hide
Show yourself, you who created us without our consent!
Show yourself, you who told us that suffering was divine!
Show yourself, we dare, we dare to make demands of you!
Remember when I got mad at you
Because bad things had happened
To me
Despite yourself
But I found you again
And I flowered
I felt so wise in my triumph
Now I'm mad at you again
Because bad things are still happening
Much worse things
All around me
To the good, the weak, the silent
Millions and billions
Who speaks for them?
You?
Good things are happening to the bad people
The bad people pick on the carcasses of the good people
They fatten and bloat
All the time
In front of me
In front of my eyes
Where are your eyes?
The good people believe in you
The bad people believe in nothing
How much happier they are
Than the broken good people
Who live and die like animals
Or worse
This time I'm mad at you
For everybody else
Burning rage
My mind is ash
Soul smoke
So mad at you
But I can't find you here
To tell you how mad I am
At you
I know you're out there
You were with me once
Are you not the God of all of us?
Where have you hidden yourself?
Are you hiding because of the bad people?
Are you afraid of them?
Are you afraid of your own creations?
The dollmaker is afraid of his work?
Frankenstein afraid of its monster?
You'd promised us
Over and over
Throughout time
In every language so that we'd know and believe
What was true
What was wrong
So, so wrong
But what of you?
Does your mighty throne not tremble now?
You who said would right all wrongs
You who would be our shield
You who have abandoned us!
You who made demands of us
We now make a demand of you
Hear us now wherever you hide
Show yourself, you who created us without our consent!
Show yourself, you who told us that suffering was divine!
Show yourself, we dare, we dare to make demands of you!
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Rock star
"I can't imagine what other people think cold turkey is like. It is fucking awful. On the scale of things, it's better than having your leg blown off in the trenches. It's better than starving to death. But you don't want to go there. The whole body just sort of turns itself inside out and rejects itself for three days. You know in three day it's going to calm down. It's going to be the longest three days you've spent in your life, and you wonder why you're doing this to yourself when you could be living a perfectly normal fucking rich rock star life. And there you are puking and climbing walls. Why do you do that to yourself? I don't know. I still don't know. Your skin crawling, your guts churning, you can't stop your limbs from jerking and moving about, and you're throwing up and shitting at the same time, and shit's coming out your nose and your eyes, and the first time that happens for real, that's when a reasonable man says, "I'm hooked." But even that doesn't stop a reasonable man from going back on it."
- Keith Richards, "Life"
- Keith Richards, "Life"
Friday, October 14, 2011
The Beggar with the Red Cup
the curled up dark brown grey man lying so still on the road
in Delhi
tapping the plastic cup on the tarmac
tap tap
it's a red cup with a white rim
in america you can buy dozens of those cups for cheap
frat boys drink beer in it
then they pound their broad well-fed chests
because they are young american men
you can see it in the movies even
families drink punch in those red cups on the 4th of July
they barbeque and eat on plates of red white and blue
celebrating democracy and credit cards
in the land of the free and the home of the brave
in Delhi
tapping the plastic cup on the tarmac
tap tap
it's a red cup with a white rim
in america you can buy dozens of those cups for cheap
frat boys drink beer in it
then they pound their broad well-fed chests
because they are young american men
you can see it in the movies even
families drink punch in those red cups on the 4th of July
they barbeque and eat on plates of red white and blue
celebrating democracy and credit cards
in the land of the free and the home of the brave
Your Songs
the songs you told me about
the songs you told me you liked
the songs you would listen to when no one was around
those songs
which made that moment home
a moment that let you believe
that you were who you could be
that there was still time
they take me there too now
those songs
your songs
i am with you then
when
i listen to those songs
my feelings about your feelings about those songs
my memories of your memories
i am with you again
the songs you told me you liked
the songs you would listen to when no one was around
those songs
which made that moment home
a moment that let you believe
that you were who you could be
that there was still time
they take me there too now
those songs
your songs
i am with you then
when
i listen to those songs
my feelings about your feelings about those songs
my memories of your memories
i am with you again
Friday, September 30, 2011
Stay hungry, stay foolish
"In return, I want to offer you a few pieces of advice: try to keep it real. Stay true to what’s best in yourself and to the best of what you’ve experienced here at Vassar. Continue to expose yourself to new ideas. Trust your instincts and think for yourself. Make art, or at least value it. Look for the core of what makes each person human, appreciate the details that make them unique.
Find something that moves you or pisses you off, and do something about it. Put your self out there. Be brave. Be bold. Take action. You have a voice. Speak up, especially when something tries to keep you silent. Take a stand for what’s right. Raise a ruckus and make a change. You may not always be popular, but you’ll be part of something larger and bigger and greater that yourself. Besides, making history is extremely cool.
Hold our elected officials accountable. They work for you. Ask them anything you want. If you don’t, you’re giving up on democracy. Inez Milholland – Vassar class of 1909 – didn’t let people silence her and she didn’t let anyone stop her. She became one of the pivotal leaders of the suffragette movement. If you forget everything else I’ve said here today or if you choose to ignore it, remember Inez and remember to vote. It’s a radical act that’s still legal, and we need to keep it that way.
Speaking from my own experience, I also want to offer a warning: you will, undoubtedly, meet people who will try to shut you up or entice you to compromise your principles in any number of ways. They’ll try to seduce you and distract you with money, power, security and perhaps, most dangerously, a sense of belonging. Don’t let them; it’s just not worth it. One of the biggest threats to our world is the culture of silence and compromise—politicians who compromise their beliefs because they’re scared they’ll piss off their voters and won’t get re-elected, corporate executives who put profits above principles. You can have a conscience and still make money. You can have genuine values and still get elected. You can even make movies that do well at the box office without playing to the lowest common denominator.
And try not to let love silence you. And don’t let it kill you—always wear a condom, for god’s sake. Partner with someone who loves you and loves your voice, who loves the very core of who you are and believes in your dreams, not someone who is hell-bent on changing you."
- excerpt from Samuel L. Jackson's 2004 Vassar College commencement address
Find something that moves you or pisses you off, and do something about it. Put your self out there. Be brave. Be bold. Take action. You have a voice. Speak up, especially when something tries to keep you silent. Take a stand for what’s right. Raise a ruckus and make a change. You may not always be popular, but you’ll be part of something larger and bigger and greater that yourself. Besides, making history is extremely cool.
Hold our elected officials accountable. They work for you. Ask them anything you want. If you don’t, you’re giving up on democracy. Inez Milholland – Vassar class of 1909 – didn’t let people silence her and she didn’t let anyone stop her. She became one of the pivotal leaders of the suffragette movement. If you forget everything else I’ve said here today or if you choose to ignore it, remember Inez and remember to vote. It’s a radical act that’s still legal, and we need to keep it that way.
Speaking from my own experience, I also want to offer a warning: you will, undoubtedly, meet people who will try to shut you up or entice you to compromise your principles in any number of ways. They’ll try to seduce you and distract you with money, power, security and perhaps, most dangerously, a sense of belonging. Don’t let them; it’s just not worth it. One of the biggest threats to our world is the culture of silence and compromise—politicians who compromise their beliefs because they’re scared they’ll piss off their voters and won’t get re-elected, corporate executives who put profits above principles. You can have a conscience and still make money. You can have genuine values and still get elected. You can even make movies that do well at the box office without playing to the lowest common denominator.
And try not to let love silence you. And don’t let it kill you—always wear a condom, for god’s sake. Partner with someone who loves you and loves your voice, who loves the very core of who you are and believes in your dreams, not someone who is hell-bent on changing you."
- excerpt from Samuel L. Jackson's 2004 Vassar College commencement address
Monday, September 19, 2011
This Cradle of Civilisation
It's ironic that the one place that I find it hardest to believe in God is in a nation where there are millions of them.
You can feel the absence of a divine presence when you look into the greasy tired faces of the people around you. Their eyes bear the dull cataract of low expectations. I wonder what God the barefooted children covered with rags and mud believe in. This is a country where people are realistic, practical, territorial. There is no room here for dreams. This is the world's largest democracy, a country where its starched leaders fatten as if feeding upon the souls of its withering citizens. The real Indian is an anonymous face, and scores of them fade away everyday without leaving behind their stories. In India, death is a relief, a welcome escape, something worth believing in, like God.
You can feel the absence of a divine presence when you look into the greasy tired faces of the people around you. Their eyes bear the dull cataract of low expectations. I wonder what God the barefooted children covered with rags and mud believe in. This is a country where people are realistic, practical, territorial. There is no room here for dreams. This is the world's largest democracy, a country where its starched leaders fatten as if feeding upon the souls of its withering citizens. The real Indian is an anonymous face, and scores of them fade away everyday without leaving behind their stories. In India, death is a relief, a welcome escape, something worth believing in, like God.
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