Dadikaka, we miss you.

'Jug-jug jiyo, beti'... who'll say that so lovingly each time, Dadikaka?

A completely unexpected joke each time - where will the 'each time' now come from, Dadikaka? And your infectious laughter?
Those wonderful paintings of yours - who will now paint them? That fabulous Hindi hand-writing of yours, that we so painstakingly tried to copy, the shuddha bhasha - and the values we imbibed in your presence....
That absolutely amazing voice of yours - really, the side of you that the world is usually aware of, and that youtube does have some bits of - where did it go now, Dadikaka?

Our earliest childhood memories are so wrapped up in your enveloping warmth - you taught us what unconditional love is. That we unconsciously imbibed and have hoped to have replicated. And more than anyone else, you loved this name we called you by - Dadi-kaka = Bearded Uncle.... Dad's brother with a beard.... One day, after a decade of having called you by this name, Ma tried her level best to get us to call you 'Uncleji'. She said it does not sound good to yell out dadikaka in a crowd, making everyone turn around in shock - to a figure who is so completely revered in public.
Uncleji sounds respectful, she felt.
'Nahi bhai!' you said (thankfully!).
'I will always be Dadikaka to my Munnu-Mitku'. And Dadikaka continued to reign as ever.

You brought spirituality to us - by just being you.

I know what you will say now... stop regretting. Look ahead. Jeeti raho, meri bachchi....
And I suppose we shall do so. Go on in life. Enjoying the silly and unexpected twists of life.
How many people are lucky to have had your electric presence in their lives anyway? To be touched by you in this lifetime, to be blessed by you... And to now regret that we did not meet often enough.... When did we grow up and become so preoccupied with our own lives, Dadikaka?

Tera Raamji karenge bedaa paar, udaasi man kahe ko kare, you sang this song that Bappa and you put together. Way way back in the 60s.

Bappa and you - that is another amazing story. Of how you met. Unbelievable.

Lots and lots of love, and eternal respect, Dadikaka, we adore you...

Munnu-Mitku, behan-bhai
Abhi bhi yaad hai, woh butterfly

(Ah, Dadikaka, while the bhajans you wrote yourself were out of this world, your poems on us were pretty gross ... and you knew that!)

Aaja, Khinchle...

Watched Aaja Nachle, about 'small town Shamli' - in an asli small town Solapur. A town deep inside Maharashtra - no flights, no three, four or five star hotels. One where, 'families with ladies' were allowed to enter the cinema hall first ('As in Titanic?' quipped the hubby), and the balcony ticket cost Rs. 40/- (also price of hiring the autorickshaw for an hour). Solapur welcomed the entry of Madhuri Dixit on screen with whoops of delight and wolf-whistles. Later, collapsed into laughter everytime we were shown the two locals of Shamli sitting down for a drink and pouring a bit into the tin cup of the third hanger-on (Why did they find this so funny? Who knows... but hey, it was crazily infectious :-) ). An audience WANTING to love this movie about their amchi mulgi coming back, and soon, an audience let down completely, resulting in an ominous quiet very soon, as the story got - not curiouser and curiouser, but 'boringer and boringer'.

Aaja Nachle was like falling into the hands of a bad dentist who's taking his/her own time to khinchofy your teeth.

So here was one more movie with the trope of a Bollywood small town - a vanishing point of low buildings beyond the hillock, a place where announcements, we were given to believe, still needed to be made from a bhonpu-cycle-rickshaw... the geography always looks suspiciously similar in all these places. What else can we expect, built as they all are under the sky of the Film City property in Goregaon Mumbai, where if you turn the camera an extra inch either way, you get to see the high-rises of the suburbs.

Ill-thought out storyline of half-baked aspirations. Worse, the makers forget that small towns whether quarter or half baked, do rest their beliefs within the ideological framework of the 'Indian Family' - much more into 'shame' and 'values' than their more metropolitan counterparts - for that very reason, the protagonist comes across as one that not the hip youngster nor the wannabe of the city, and not quite the small-towner will relate to... a carelessly carefree woman, following her own instincts. Instincts are shown to be proven wrong - from a small town perspective anyway, when it is carelessly thrown in, that she got 'divorced' (bad girl!), and one who comes back running at the bidding of a long forgotten 'guru', but never the parents, presumably because they did not yell out for her.
And why Laila-Majnu for God's sake! as the story-within-the- divorcee-story? In 2007?

Well, it didn't seem to weave any magic in a small town, that's for sure. Not sure if the folks in metros will throng the multiplexes situated within shopping malls to see this sanctimonious story that is built on the theme that small towns should not get this shopping mall. Oh boy.

Ugh, and why does every movie have an audition sequence nowadays? Was intriguing in RDB, just about OK in OSO but by now in this one, it is like mildewed roti being served on a platter. And the only actor who manages to step out of the pasteboard boundaries set for them is Irrffaaan or whatever his spelling goes nowadays. An unscrupulous businessman is an ubiquitous Indian phenomenon, and he makes it spine-chillingly so. The rest are just not there anywhere in the story. Kunal, Konkona, Raghubir, Ranvir, Jugal are not different from the hundreds of 'Shamli' residents who suddenly step out on stage during the grand finale ('yeh kahan se tapke' asked the Solapur audience to one another).

And will YRF please explain the most inexplicable point of all? How do you get the pulse of India so right with Chak De, and so devastatingly, off-kilter in your very next?

God. Not again....

It is one thing to read about folks with fanatic beliefs (or even see them on strident TV). It is quite another to run into them out of the blue, in an absolutely average and otherwise normal day-to-day life.

Within the past one month, have jaw-droppingly met two human beings - one an MBA classmate of my husband (from IIM-B, OK?) who I was meeting for the first time, and the other (another day) a senior marine engineer I was introduced to, at a dinner party.

Each convinced about their personal way of looking at the world. Of complete distrust of the 'other' religion they had constructed in their minds. Equally distrustful of anyone's pluralistic credentials. In the midst of a staid dinner-do, with its polite guests, to have an oh-so-polite row with a stranger, was to me, a strange, disorienting experience by itself. Also made me aware of how easy it is for all of us to fall into a routine and pattern of our everyday lives, with little need to meet / interact with folks from outside our usual ambit (thus, we usually spend all our time with folks who have similar thoughts as ours). And then, when you do meet someone this way, how easy it is to find not just a healthy difference of opinion (that makes life interesting actually!) but someone completely completely polarized in his / her own set beliefs. [I expect these two chaps felt the same way about me..]

Coincidentally or not, I am currently reading Richard Dawkins 'The God Delusion'. While I am not an atheist like him, I am intrigued by his logic. So far (page 156 now), his definition of God - the Christian / Islamic / Judaic / Hindu one - one in a human form, who is supposed to listen to your prayers and even answer them by favoring you - in these respects his distrust is well taken. I have zero patience with a karva-chauthified country... But I can't quite figure out what it is with RD's own strident all 'Reason and Rationality' tone of voice and 'evidence and proof' fundas. We are splitting hairs, methinks, re: God.

To me, God is the name I give the awesomeness I feel - of the Universe, the very fact that we exist, that we question our existence, that we 'love', we 'smile and laugh'. It is in the sheer diversity of the immense yet puny planet we inhabit, a world where even chaos theory has a logic of fractals behind it. In short, a world that never ceases to amaze, in its order as much as its disorder.The formless 'consciousness'. That was there in the era of the dinosaurs, now and long after we'll be gone.

Where miracles are not just in the mysteries left to be solved, but the miracle of the possible - the three airplanes I can now see out of my window, waiting to land over Mumbai airport, in the 'sms's that I can receive at a moment's notice, from anywhere in the world. That is akin to reading someone somewhere's deepest recess of their minds. In everything that we have 'created' where nothing existed earlier.

It is even in the exasperation of meeting folks who dig in their heels, and believe all 'proofs' proffered by their own kinds, are right, and nothing you can say can anyway change their already-made-up minds. :-)

Reminds me also of Andy's Christian sister-in-law. Andy is one of my corporate clients from the UK, and he mentioned one day, how she does not believe that we human beings 'evolved' from apes such as orangutans or chimpanzees, for like she says 'have you ever or has anyone ever , ever seen even one of the thousands of apes in our zoos becoming a human!?' :-) :-) Ahhh....

At yet another do last week, a gentleman (who loves conundrums) posed this query to me: How come he could recall at least 5 occasions in this past year, when in a gathering of 20 people, two had their birthdays on the same date and month... and what is the statistical probability of something like this happening, he asked, when each could have been born on any of 365 different dates. He said he threw this challenge at me since I am a Stats student (was too, in my undergrad!)

My reply - not sure if it was to his satisfaction - was this: you and I have just met today, and here are 15 other people around us. With no birthdays matching. This will be promptly and conveniently forgotten by all of us. We human beings are social by nature and meet folks ALL the time. Everyday. But when on the rare occasions, birthdays do match, it sticks in our mind. This is psychology. Not statistics.

Now, the question that I am intrigued by is: What was the probability of running into such well-educated fanatics who believe so totally in their own version of the world. On two out of three social dos, in one month. One of them, in fact, disbelieved all statistics... census or otherwise, and actually indicated to me that he thinks Muslims outnumber Hindus in India due to their 'high birthrates'. How did I know we Hindus were in the majority anyway, he demanded.

Well...
This reminds me of Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot. As quoted by Dawkins. 'How can you doubt', Russell asked, 'my suggestion that between Earth and Mars, there is a china teapot circling the Sun in an elliptical orbit'?
And any proof you give, will always be 'non-proof', you see, for I can always ask 'How do you REALLY know it is not there, eh?"

Pandeji, Purchase Power Parity etc.

Pandeji has just delivered some piping hot samosas and glistening lavang latas. On this bright and clear Diwali morning. The samosas are just as we like it - light, crunchy, not over-spicy and not too large. And the LLs melt in your mouth - not too sweet, not too soft.

This old man appeared out of nowhere at our doorsteps around a year ago, with a large white-cloth wrapped hill of degchis containing various mithais, with a word-of-mouth recommendation from a distant neighbor. I refused to buy anything initially and quizzed him with what I like to believe was a hard-nosed attitude - 'who cooks this? how can you just expect me to buy your stuff when I don't even know you? where do you stay' etc. I never got any satisfactory reply and warned him, I won't buy it next time (and bought a lot of stuff anyway).
By now, months later, of course, it is like 'oh, it's you - give me six samosas and twelve lavang latas, will you?' Without having figured out his antecedents yet.
And the total? Rs. 60/-

Nowadays I tell myself about how tickled I am at this wonderfully sublimated globalization. That we can partake of such prices at my own door, in the so-called gated community of Hiranandani Gardens. At around a dollar and a half, in the Y2K plus 7 year of 2007, a wonderful snack for the entire family. AND a couple of friends who dropped by, over chai.
All this talk of purchase power parity - how does one compare a Pandeji across the world anyway? What exactly is the equivalent of 6 sams plus 12 lls in the West?
The istriwala just delivered 10 items of clothing. Ironed at a price of a total of Rs. 20/-: This is 50 cents in all. The fellow that washes the car charges Rs. 200/- per 'bada gadi' and Rs. 150/- per chhota gadi, per month that is - and makes an income of over Rs. 5000/- working from 5 am to 8.30 am, across a few homes. He then works full-time elsewhere 10 am to 6 pm, and is seen as one of the successful guys in his circle.
How can we measure parity for something only we have and understand, as part of our economy? How can we put a price to the slogging put in? Should we be celebrating this 'value-for-money' we get or wondering seriously if this is to be seen as 'exploitation'?

And then there is the 'bauni' factor. Pandeji claims to begin his day's sales at my place (hubby dearest believes dryly, that this is his stock line-of-trade). But all said and done, the thing is you don't want to not-bauni someone. If the first customer brings him luck, let the luck come in, we say. That's our pride in our peculiar Indian 'culture' again. How can you turn away such an old man who's earning a living anyway? (my family pegs him at a doddering 80, he says he is 64).

And what the heck. It is like harking back to the times of our childhood when we lived in the now - fast-vanishing 'middle-class' padas where hawkers announced their wares, each with a lilting and individual call of his/ her own. When the poring over the goods with the neighbors' helpful comments was an essential part of our socialization. When they all aided in the bargaining along with us. When it was essential to crib about something or the other to the hawker. The rising prices. If the prices were good, then the quality ('last time it was not at all like you used to make it').

So. One of these days, we may all be poisoned by Pandeji. That's what say the cautionary doubters of today. Or worse, he may be thrown out by the 'gatekeepers' before we even get to know he had arrived.

And that is when we shall be totally McDonaldized - No taking pity. No bauni (imagine, the guy in the McDonald's counter telling you 'aaj aapka bauni hai' and then doing one elaborate circling of the cash register with your 100 rupee note). Or imagine this: Telling McDonald's "last time your ruthlessly 'always-the-same' McChicken burger was not at all like you make it'!


Ah, Globalization - here we come.

The Vanishing Lakes, Trees, Clouds, Rivers...

Nature.

In the wild. In human nature...
Metaphor. Metanym....
Out there.
In me...


WE BANISHED NATURE

We banished Nature, made it bleed -
As if Nature ever had the need
For us.

Clouds drift slow across faint stars
As the moon's bright light falls onto rocks,
And out of all our feverish minds
Flows the stench of a terrible pox.

We banished Nature, sowed dark seeds -
As if Nature's darkest deeds
Could not reach us.

Wild waves roar rough upon the breeze
As birds take easy wing,
But all our spreading cities bring
A creeping dread disease.

We banished Nature, banned its creed -
As if Nature ever had to heed
Fool us.

Mountains call, sweet waters sing,
There's beauty found in everything,
But we keep chasing bitter dust
In our crazy, grasping lust.

We banished Nature in our greed -
As if Nature won't be freed
From us.


Dreams hang soft upon the air,
There's silence gathering everywhere,
Yet we haven't got a care
About the damage we have done.

We banished Nature at top speed -
As if Nature cannot easily lead
Us to oblivion.

There's nothing now that's left to die,
Just smoke rising in the sky,
And if you listen there's just a cry
To show that we have gone.

Copyright © Richard Macwilliam

(And, thanks Sir at IIT for the pointing out
of this poem,  the  'deictic',
now that I've learnt tis new word :-)
In relation to the trees
in the campus.)
'Banish' is a deictic too, no?

But then, Nature shall have the last laugh,
as she will say
'I still rise'...  as did Maya Angelou...

As time will surely tell. Over a period of eons...

ROFL - Rowling on the Floor, Laughing....

Kind of late in the day to do a 'deathly' review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? Or is this the right time, now that the initial euphoria is over, I mean?

Here's a book and a series that has involved the world real-time into a fictional world. In the past ten years, we have kept pace with the author's imagination - happily gone wherever it has led us. I recall coming back from a trip to the US, telling all and sundry here in India, you've got to read Harry Potter. I'd bought five copies of Chamber of Secrets (that was the one out those days) along with Philosopher's Stone, as the de facto gift for everything - birthdays, weddings, home visits, whatever. And trying to explain it was an amazing children's book series though it was me recommending it; also a book for all ages...

JKR's confidence by now, her seventh in the series, borders at an arrogance - that we Harry Potter lovers would be waiting with bated breath, would've read the books in the right order, and know all about Polyjuice Potions, Expelliarmuses, Disillusionment Charms etc. No need to explain and no need to try and come up with any other new surprises that a magical world gives full leeway to its maker to bring about. Recall the amazing idea of Tom Riddle's diary? Pensieve? Time Turner? And in this Deathly Hallows, forget coming up with the new stuff, she seems to have kedged a line off Pulitzer winner Toni Morrison's Tanner lectures of 1988 ( wherein Toni refers to one of her novels as 'Book can be seen to open with its close'). Uh oh...
Kavya Vishwanathan, you are no longer alone. One, a does-not-know-any-better teenager and the other, a nouveau billionaire with a host of secretaries to do the background reading up, and provide the appropriate warnings wherever necessary.

Also why try to keep the book lean and crisp any longer, when the world - mainly consisting of children following the proverbial Pied Piper, fawns over every extra word put in? So we get 600 plus pages of a vista that seems either to take its readership for granted ( it meanders along even while the book seems to move at breakneck speed) or made to order with a Warner Bros. future for itself - wont this Big Battle look great on screen? Same with the Gringotts seige that is suspiciously like an entertainment ride in one of the modern 'Disney Worlds' (can already imagine this ride in the future 'Harry Potter World' coming up). Humour is absent even when the Weasley twins are around - and often, when we are exhorted by the author to LAUGH since the characters on the pages are laughing till their bellies ache or something like that (page 119: they were all laughing so much...) bewildered we smile at the joke that escapes us.

And she puts Deaths (the capital D is my interpretation), into the story with the attitude of - 'haven't I told the world I am writing for a mature world and not merely for children'? Haphazardly, and helter-skelter. When a Weasley brother dies - come to think of it, one of the ones we loved best all through, it is with this same sanctimonious underlying feeling - did you think I'd leave you to get away scot-free, she seems to be saying to the hapless readers, caught in the throngs of the imagination of a You-Know-Who author who has risen Phoenix-like in the past decade, to capture and ensnare our minds. There is no real mourning for this character. And no naming of children after him either, in the nineteen years later last chapter. With all the other dead guys having got their place in, with the names of the next gen, this most deserving bro is left 'out in the cold'! :-(

A last chapter that seems to have a close-to-reality feel paralleling JKR's personal life - as the brood expands, and the babies start to grow. A fellow blogger Uma Damle has written it well : the unexpectedly expected ending rather than an expectedly unexpected one. Also, wonder what a feminist reading of the book will come up with... Mrs. Weasley, Hermione and Fleur do all the cooking as and when there is any cooking spoken of, and the men - well, they go out to work. Also, in the last chapter, please note, it is men who do the driving, no mention of women, however 'brainy' they may have been through the long journey so far.

Anyway, the wait - from July to September, was worthwhile. I did not have to buy the book after all :-) My nine year old niece Ishani has kindly lent her personal copy of the book to her much much older aunt, just a few days ago. To me, this has been a well-timed borrowing along with being down with a viral attack ... in other words, no rapid reading, and consequently, more time to mull over JKR's plans for our imagination.

And a glimpse into hers too. Why in the world does she want us to accept that if a Horcrux has a bit of your soul, you don't feel a modicum of anything while it is being destroyed, but just sharing a thought within your mind, like Harry does with You-Know-Who, is excruciatingly painful.

Or why she believes that a mom can protect a child only till his 17th birthday. Is it because the law so decides in this non-Muggle world? The eons-old maternal instincts actually follow the bureaucratic decree of current times!

Perhaps, what does it matter, eh?
While the Galleons roll in, into the Gringotts of the Muggle...
ROFLOL.

Chak De India

My eleven year old daughter’s obvious delight was infectious. Ultimate compliment to Yashraj films is now paid: She wants to ditch basketball, that she is pretty good at, and go for hockey. And loves the idea of bashing up the 'bad guys'. At McDonald's no less, her mecca of gourmet food.

Am impressed with Yashraj’s finger on the Indian pulse of today:

• Pride at firangi lehraoing jhanda
• Our cultural symbols e.g. we value and respect age, little matter if its incomprehensible to others : The coach of the international team asking, during a match, in frustration: ‘Which one of them is Didi?’
• Bharat is a word consigned to the history bin. It is 'India' all the way.
  
• Girls who at last look endearingly normal and not the Yash-Chopra-filmy looking
• There is a time and place for romance – and it is not during the ‘winning that is everything’. Same goes for chiffon that gives way to khadi-types sarees.
  
• Women stating their wishes and needs – that men are beginning to pay heed to, but it’s a long haul yet… (Indian Men versus Women - Nah, women can't win!)
  
• Recognition that Madrasis is a phrase we use to club Telugu+Tamil + Malayalam+ Kannada in one; that we think of those from the North-East as ‘foreigners’; that we have new states like Jharkhand. But then, ultimately, in yashrajese, the North still rules... Punju sounding ‘Chak de’ is the phrase to go with. While some of the girls have been allowed to keep close to their real life names, Sagarika Ghatge becomes Northy Priti Sabarwal.