Msg for Gaurpriya

During my three time sent-for-repairs cell phone, have lost your tel number.

Please do call :-)

Black or White... Sons and Moms.....

The magazine Time has decided to tell us about Obama’s mother who was this (white) PhD in anthropology. After all these days of building up the story of the first ‘black’ candidate who’s reached so far, the media finally wants us to think of him as legit as if we can now talk of his ‘acceptable’ side or something? Crazy.

Anyway, no point in agonizing over this duniya’s sense of do's and don'ts, rights and wrongs. Have had a nice lazy morning reading the meandering blogs of Abhinav Jain. He loves to talk of his loving 52 year old mom ( the shape of things to come in a few years when my daughter starts to announce the parental age with impunity. I mean the age by itself is not the problem, I wouldn't mind some more grey as I wouldn't mind waist length hair. In the hope that it makes one look suitably distinguished - and sexy. It is the way the nextgen carelessly shunts the parent over to a sort of passion-less territory :-)). And here’s the interesting bit – he has a persistent gang of ‘commentors’ who are all almost equally entertaining. Like there’s this continuous hyperventilation over Abhinav’s punctuation marks and why he always leaves a gap before his commas and full stops. Then there's this gang who wants to score points by being the first (or the 50th or the 100th) to post a comment. Quite a fan following of girls – has this young and single 26 year old namesake (Munnu). Each of his string of blog comments always seem to end with some anonymous haplog mail that goes blah blahHindi.haplogdotcom Malayalam.haplogdotcom kannada.haplogdotcom music.haplogdotcom radio.haplogdotcom tv.haplogdotcom (Tamil.Haplogdotcom)

I am sure there was yet another mom and son combo I had been meaning to write about – before I got called away on dire emergencies at home. By bai (‘didi, istri wala keh raha hai ye kapde aapne diya pur maine ye pehle kabhi nahi dekha’), by Ganesh (‘didi, kachra wala terrace ka kachra nahi lega, kahan phenku?’).

Was it about my hubby and his mom? My younger bro and his mom (mine too?). Nah I I don't think so…

May be this is the onslaught of early Alzheimer’s. Am not sure how deeply I should agonize over the memory loss. Worse is what if the retrieved memory is quite a let down. Perhaps it is better to stay in this stage of ‘let me see if I can recall’…

Like nostalgia. And mushy sentimentality. Wonder if this is a necessary side-effect of blogging. Am sure everyone keeps getting called away. The other thing I wonder about is if everyone has this feeling of being vaguely guilty. At taking time out to blog. As if there are more important things to do and I am shirking from the things that make the planet go round....

(Three hours later)...

Yaad aaya. Two more combos actually. Richard Branson & his mom, and SRK and his mom - both pairs as gleaned from resp autobio and bio. Anupama Chopra displays her usual assured sense of the heartbeat of Bollywood. As usual her books are total paisa-vasool and sometimes she uses phrases that resonate long after the book is over and done with. Here I love her take on Hindi movies esp of Yash Raj films that she says are never about 'the inexplicably untidy debris of relationships'. SRK's mom completely endorsed all that the son planned to do and was not around to see the heights he reached.

Richard Branson's autobio is rivetting. Am on page 136 now. The SRK book gives a great feel for the superstar's life, especially its unreality. It even has a 'cast of characters' in the beginning - that theatrical it is... The 'cast of characters' has real people as well as Gabbar Singh listed.
Otoh, RB's is so real so down to earth that you feel you can be one of his friends too, invite him over for dinner to your home for potluck perhaps and he'll come.

And his mom. The sort of things done thru childhood to instill values - make him bicycle 50 miles to make him independent, continually find things ('work') for the kids to do, ensure that the company at dinner was as interesting (often more interesting) than the food, always valued the children's opinion....

My indefatigable mom is no less come to think of it. (Don't want to tell her I'm writing this. She may get a heart attack or something what with our constant 'loggerheads' way of reaching out to one another!) She made me and my bro human and whatever we have achieved today is as much her level of motivation. Right now, she is resident at the village of Kamarpukur, all the time going after families of beggars ensuring they send their children to come to school. Since the state schools give lunch on the other days, she feeds them breakfast everyday plus two hours of morning tuitions, and on Sunday, lunch. Busy, busy, busy with her Spoken English classes as well as Computer classes (we sent our old desktops over to her) for the youth of the village. Her logic to go off into the boondocks was that we grew up and did not need her services any longer. Needless to say, they all adore her. The streets resonate with 'amma' , 'amma' wherever you go with her. She loves this name far more than her own - Nivedita.

As Gerald Durrell has said of his mom in 'My Family and Other Animals', our mom is a credit to how well we have brought her up :-)

And now that I am reading RB , let me surf the net for what I wanted to check out - the sound of Tubular Bells.

The Reader-Author Jugalbandi

Some 5000 read my Jab We Met review. In 2 days? Bollywood topics sure attract the readers, no?

MSN allows the reader to rate it, some 49 of these readers have taken the pains to mark a very middling 3 out of 5 in their rating. It only means this: Next time, shall keep in mind that the saamnewala is - right this moment - scoring me a low grade :-) when I hold forth at gatherings and parties.

Did the scores get averaged out? If I give myself a low rating of 1 out of 5 now... wonder how that'll get reflected in the overall scheme of things...

Earlier today, I seemed to come across the Dalai Lama everywhere. (In every paper and magazine I mean, aam aadmi jo hum thehre). Here is one revered individual who we get to meet, mediated by the skew and tilt of the newspaper and the lens of each writer. Newsweek, just arrived at our doorstep, for instance, starts off the entire interview by asking Dalai Lama straight out something like ‘What happens when you die?’

??

One can even hear the casual Amriki twang in the tone of this question & little matter if there is an Indian journalist Sudip Mazumder who’s also supposed to be partially taking this interview. He speaks Newsweekean. Ultimately, it is what 6 billion plus non- Amrikis see as the inward gazing ‘I don’t give a damn’ attitude. The overall article is full of innuendos and quotes on the Dalai Lama... The way he is spoken of, is full of 'He said he was driven to tears' (instead of - 'he was driven to tears') or look at this line : 'Meanwhile the Dalai Lama is losing his ability to rein in his militant followers' . Or this one: The Dalai Lama's 'great respect' (quotation marks of Newsweek as if let's begin to doubt if this is real) for Hu Jintao etc. Newsweek just a week or so back had this article on how 'we' are oh-so-unbiased, but in the overall sum and substance, is the media's new smart and sneaky way, to go out and be as biased as you wish.

The magazine ‘Time’ was lying in the HSBC waiting area. Here, the magazine does the ‘We know Dalai Lama the best – after all, it is Asian Pico Iyer who writes on His Holiness for us, over the years, 1987, 1997, and now in 2008’. (Thus kal- ka - chhokra Pico Iyer shares his name and almost equal space on the cover, with the revered DL). More of a sense of deep respect evident through the article, beginning with how the young Pico kept a picture of the Lama on his desk all through his childhood, and yet, Time is another magazine out of the US. Bending backwards the other end.

And Vinod Mehta of Outlook does the ultimate Indian reverse snobbery thing – the ‘I-don’t believe-in-these-spiritual-types-though-I-am-an-Indian’ . But one who reveals his totally dehati and desi roots when he owns up to touching the Dalai Lama’s feet, before he leaves his presence!

Am reminded of Foucault’s ‘What Is An Author’. The author as the origin of something original is deconstructed by Foucault. Right now, how we plebeians view the exalted soul, depends on what we read in the media and who writes about the Dalai Lama.

The only point of view is that each medium presents a fragmented point of view. The truth is, there are no universal Truths, even when His Holiness is involved. Perhaps even more so when Buddhism is the central theme. Each author is nothing but one more manifestation of the current social dynamic. Each one somewhere deep down dwells in and revels in his (his magazine’s) own ‘Will To Power’… to quietly swell his chest in his role of mediator in moulding and creating a reader perspective. (Aside: I use the pronoun 'he' purposefully in these politically correct gender times we live in :-) )

The identity of the Dalai Lama then shifts from the reader perspective – from author to author. All we get to see - in today’s media-exploded, internet enabled world, is that the author-function is murkier than ever before.

And if we hapless readers give a low ‘grade’ to the media spewed output, like I'm doing at this moment, all we are doing is deluding ourselves on having had a say.