Colorzzzz – Impatient; Untameable

Pause

“When can I drop this off Ma’am?”  Umm.. Anytime is fine. I will be here! You see I am now one of those `working from home’ types that all those `have to go to office’ types envy! Oh it has it disadvantages to be sure. You can lounge about in your tees all day, declare power-nap time when the sun blinds you thru the window, have a window to look out of, pretend to be hard at work if the pesky aunt wants to chat, eat lunch out of proper plates, raid the refrigerator for inspiration… Oooh what is that green pallor on all you office-types? Heh! Heh!

Seriously, there ARE some dis-advantages too. But for now the advantages, to me, are more in focus. Changing from office-goer to work-from-homer brought about a total change in the daily rhythm of my life. Suddenly those early morning yoga sessions were do-able, scheduling personal work on weekdays was do-able, getting chat-time with an itinerant hubby at a decent time for both was do-able. `Can do’ took on a whole new meaning for me!

Now I recognise the urban song my neighbourhood grooves to & can listen to any single note and tell you what time of the day we are at. That’s the lady in the bungalow next door sweeping the yard with the kharaata. So its about 5 am. I can dawdle in bed for another 5. Bliss. Vishwanathan Uncle is at his mridangam.. mid-morning… Earlier I had never paused to register what was happening around me. Time was always a blur until I got into the car to drive to work. And then time and the traffic streeeeeteched unending. Just when I didn’t want it to.

Reminds me of the song `Jame Raho’ from Taare Zameen Par! And I am in the happy situation of being closer to the Yahaan Alag Andaaz Hai than ever before!

Now that I walk to do my errands instead of drive around I am `seeing’ the neighbourhood afresh. I no longer do the `drop this off of for photocopying, go pick up groceries, come back to pick up copies’ kind of planning. I twiddle my thumbs and chat awhile with the vendors, sit there while the puncture is being repaired, wait while the chicken is being cleaned and the fat trimmed.

I have learned that my tyre-repair wallah, Raja, is from Orissa. He is getting married in a month. He doesn’t like it here as much as his brother does. On a good day there are 4 cars that he works on for punctures and one that needs a tube change (today I am that statistical `One’!)  The fruit vendor is from Jejuri – home to one of the most famous Khandoba temples. He thinks it’s very silly how people pay fancy rates without demur in the `shops’ but haggle with him for 2 and 3 Rs.  “Hmmm”, I agree with him while quietly handing over his `asking’ rate. He reddens and returns change I didn’t ask for. The hairdresser … THATS an interesting story now … but you get the drift … now I get friendly waves and nods in the neighbourhood where earlier I was a stranger.

I am seeing the day in 300 dpi resolution not 72 dpi quick-upload, compressed version. And it feels .. different.. nice different methinks. At least for now.

Coffee Break

My fingers itch. I can’t concentrate. But I MUST NOT move. Let it be. Let it be… It’s not important. I am strong. I can control an urge. …. Sigh.. I give up. Give me a minute while I move that candle-stand a couple of millimetres to the right. There, now the world is fine again!

Do you suffer from this.. this.. urge to place things `just so’? I am a long suffering patient. It is an unending source of merriment in my family -  how I go about making tiny adjustments to stuff placed around the house after the maid has finished with her dusting. I suspect my father and better half have at times laid bets on how long I will be able to sit still without `adjusting’ something that is not placed `just right’ !

I find that objects around us speak – by virtue of their shape, color, their weight, how they are angled…

Approach

Here are some snaps of  coffee and tea mugs that, to me, painted a picture of human body language ……

Conversation dynamics de-constructed. What do you think just happened here? (Now you know why my family treats me with the fond indulgence reserved for the slightly off- the- rocker, essentially harmless specimens)

Yes??

WHAT did u just say??!!!

That's it. SCAT!

Grief

It is International Women’s Day today. My inbox is flooded with Happy Women’s Day messages. Today my thoughts are with one woman. A woman I know but slightly. She is my friend’s sister. And today she has lost her son. All of twenty-three he is, no, was, a strapping young lad who was in the Indian Army. I do not know the circumstances of his death. But today, I doubt it matters to her. What matters is he is no more.

I remember her. Full of life, smiling, happy, a teacher in a local school. Having gone through the trauma of losing her husband early on and faced with the challenge of bringing up a little son. Now the son is gone too.  I can see how their home must be today. Throngs of relatives, oceans of concern, the unavoidable buzz of activity as the last rites are planned and performed. In all of this she must be sitting. Stunned. I wish I could reach out to her in some way. But I don’t even have the courage to go there. And what is there to say really?

Hindu traditions being what they are she would be left behind in the emptiness of the home that had seen his first halting steps, heard his exultant shout on being selected into the NDA, the million images would be pressing down on her, her alone as the men-folk make their way to the cemetery. In all her grief to have to look out for an even older mother… who has had to see three members of the family bid an untimely farewell. Who will be the consoler and who the consoled?

And I don’t know if I can face you either my friend. I shall be a coward and not meet you today. I wish for the three of you that you find some way of holding on to sanity, of finding meaning in life again. I don’t know how, I don’t know from where. But I pray really hard that it comes to you. I wish I could do more.

Me & my bookshelf

I admire those who read multiple books concurrently. I really do. And I also admire people who plough through books at an amazing pace. My son is like that. Give him a book, any book, and he stays glued to it like most people stick to their favourite TV shows. I have tried telling him that the story will be kind enough to wait for him to get back after attending to somewhat important actions like bathing or eating. But that’s not a risk he thinks is worth taking!

Me, I have to savour the book.  I need to experience for myself what the central and not-so-central characters are going through. I need to smell the air around them and live their emotional lives vicariously. If Humayun is making a lonely trek across the high passes to reach Persia I need to feel the cold air on my face, worry that the stock of firewood and dried dates is almost over. My stomach cramps in shared labour with Hamida as Akbar pushes his way through into the world and I quiver with indignation as my half-brother carts away little Akbar and dares to look upon my wife directly.  As you can possibly sense, my reading leaves me exhausted!

If the book is one of those `non-fiction’ ones I need to constantly summarise in my head what the author is saying, have long monologues with her on why this is or is not making sense from where I sit . And so books sit on my stand for what, to my son, seems an eternity! Ah well! Better that than no bookshelf at all I assuaged myself.

So it was with a sense of wonder that I read that Raj Kapoor once allegedly (heh heh… the Times Of India newspaper style `alleging’) said in an interview that he had never read any books other than Archie Comics. That the bunch from Riverdale told him all that he ever needed to know about life. Now I don’t understand ALL comics e.g. I have never quite got Peanuts. Give me Calvin any day. But what is it about Archie that I am missing here?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to dismiss comics as frivolous at all. They are a seriously serious form of art. Every little line and indeed, the absence of some little line too, is not a matter of chance but born of studied understanding of human perception and inferencing. The book `Understanding Comics’ opened my eyes to THAT once and for all. But I still think the Archie comic thing is bit fanciful. What say?

That reminds me of a candidate I interviewed once. He courageously (and fans of Humphrey Appleby will remember this isn’t a very bright path to take) voluntarily proffered that he was not into reading. `I learn from movies’ he proclaimed. So, seeing as he was hoping to channelize the discussion and keen to see where this would lead, I asked, `So which is your favourite `learning’ movie?’ and he says, “It is No Entry”. I acquiesced. My courage failed me.

Is this art?!

An exchange of comments on my last blog post made me ponder – What is art? Who is an artist? And some parallel streams of thought suddenly connected. Erich Fromm in  The Art of Loving talks about wanting to dissolve separateness as a driving, fundamental need of man.

We live, I sense, in a constant state of tension – between the urge to establish our unique identity, our individuality, our separateness from the multitude of humanity and the equally deep yearning to merge with, be one with, for want of a better word, the `essence’ of life that is in all creation. To connect.

Art, to me, seems to be a beautiful way of marrying these two divergent needs. The artist in choosing his medium, his language, in his creativity expresses his individuality, his uniqueness. In offering the gift of his creation to others he seeks to connect with them, not just superficially, but in a very deep sense. To make a `soul connect’.

Seth Godin in a recent post says, ` Art is not in the eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist” So what IS art?  One way of looking at it is, art is that which goes beyond the minimum, necessary functional requirement of a task. Be it a poem, a painting, the elegant flip of a roomali roti, the perfectly timed six that Sachin hit yesterday or the three lines of code that do what would otherwise have taken twenty lines – they are all art. And each one of these creators is an artist. Driven to take what they do to something beyond the ordinary. And in that final flourish of the brush, that last keystroke the artist feels a deep sense of completion.

The English-born, Canadian painter Arthur Lismer said, “.. an artist is, a child who has never lost the gift of looking at life with curiosity and wonder”

And of that curiosity and wonder is born what we term `art’. Heres to the artist in each one of us – wondering, curious, just waiting to make art!

Art e`sense’

That’s what I like about modern art. It gives both the artist and the consumer a sense of involvement and accomplishment. And you can never be `wrong’. So I can get away with expounding on how the soul of the artist is seeking freedom through the random unfettered brush movement. While the artist goes out to buy  replacement colours for the bottles his five-year old unfetteredly (artistic licence if you will) dropped onto the canvas in a burst of imagined freedom of movement in Dad’s workspace!

“What’s the trip?” I say to the Monet’s and Manet’s of the world, these artists who labour to re-create and contain nature in their puny canvas. Why choose God (or the electron-neutron-boson- whatever colliding machine for the atheists out there) as your competitor? Give me a treat for more than just the eye. If your medium constrains you from involving all my senses at least involve my mind!

My professor from back in college was a genuine artist. After a particularly long, completely meaningless burst of CP (class participation) from a student he would pause for a decent interval, seem deeply appreciative and say `OK. Therefore what you are saying is….’ and proceed to say all those points that he deemed necessary for the progress of the case to the next level of analysis. That’s what I call sheer artistry. Professor happily moves on. Student CP artist nods sagely and sits back pleased that he has made such an intelligent contribution and that he can close his CP account for the rest of the semester. The rest of the class continues their mental excursions without being stressed.  Perfect example of win-win if I ever saw one!

What’s the connect? Where is this post going you say? Well. Nowhere. It is like modern art. It will be what you make of it. Come, come. Surely you have a responsiblity towards making sense of what you read?!!!

The circle of life

Spring is here, I am sure. A little bird told me. Two little birds to be exact. I don’t know exactly what birds they are. My knowledge of birds while not little enough to fit on the back of a postage stamp is nowhere close to even amateur ornithologist status.

They are swallows of some kind I think. They are migratory. Of that too I am sure. Cos they frequent their mud home outside my window only in the two months of spring. And they swoop.. very elegantly too.. they must be swallows. Swallows swoop don’t they? Not for them the inelegant flap flap and `i hope my wings can lift me a few feet’ of the other feathered specimen in my apartment block – the pigeon. But more on them later… this one is about the swallows.

They appeared suddenly while we were breakfasting .. peering in through the glass windows, ensuring the occupants were the same benign, albeit slightly crazy family that they had seen the last time around. Satisfied with the `Sssh.. don’t move..they’re back’ reaction they got.. they proceeded to inspect the mud nest they had abandoned many moons ago once their kids had had their diving lessons and moved on in life.

The first morning they spent sitting around inspecting the nest that was in a state of dilapidation. Size does matter you know. You just need to know how and where to use it. The little things made me feel quite guilty for landing them in this state of affairs (when God knows I had, for ten months, done everything in my power to ensure no cleaning lady ever got close to their nest in her over- zealousness). But duniya zaalim hai... all I got in return was accusatory stares from the two of them. Once they realised neither the sharp looks nor the aggrieved stance they adopted later were going to be much help they got to work.

From the sounds of it they had a fairly long drawn argument on how much repair and of what kind was needed but by day 3 they were hard at work. Assiduously bringing in soft feathers, long grass strands, mud, some other un-identifiables and glueing it all together with I-have-no-idea-what.

Once again the little half-cup shaped mud nest is up and ready for starting a new family. This time the choice of colour for the external walls is more blackish than the reddish of the previous years. Housing aesthestes in the swallow world are possibly gung ho on black this year.

Looking forward now to their congenial neighbourliness as they go about laying eggs, watching over the hatchlings, feeding them, pushing them out of the nest to fly….. it does my soul a lot of good to see this little piece of never-changing circle of life …. year after year for the last six years… brings all the ups and downs of the financial markets, the earthquakes in New Zealand, the craziness of IPL, the anger over corruption and traffic, the rising prices.. into perspective.

This, finally, is what life distils into. A cadence that is simple, meaningful, unchanging .. and all the rest is noise.

That’s not what I really meant!

I love them. I think I have been in love with them all along. Mid-life crisis notwithstanding. Love to tease them, play with them, roll them around to see how they ..er..roll… and best of all i love to hear them. Hear them cackle with glee when they are pronounced a certain way, smile when they get the right tone, nod sagely when they are delivered with the weight they need… I love to make love to them, leave a mark on them before they go out there and I lose control of them. Yes. I am sure as I can ever be…  I love words and I love giving voice to them.

But I don’t love them enough to bury myself in their place and time of birth and the complications of who parented them or who their close relations are. Be that as it may.. they are here.. with me for the moment .. and that’s all that matters…

And like a true artist I love them for the sake of them and am not unduly worried about whether the babies I create with them will be cared for by listeners, whether they will make a name for themselves in the annals of reading history.

And because they mean so much to me I refuse to see they are not as important to many. That what they say and how they say it should not be read so much into. That every pause, every slant, every syllable  is not laden with meaning and intent! And they mean it when they say “Oh! That’s not what I really meant!”

Ah well… it takes all kinds

And that’s how it ends

One would think a first blog post would be about beginnings. But I don’t want anyone, least of all convention, to dictate to me the order of things. So I am going to talk about ends.

I like to end conversations with a Ciao. I think it’s light and breezy and gives the connotation that this is a temporary lull in the tide of our interactions. I never did like the servile air of the school-prescribed `Yours faithfully’ and remember agitated negotiations with my son to at least risk using `Yours sincerely’ in place of it in his school letter writing.

.. So it comes as a bit of a shock to me that Ciao shares etymological background with the Italian `Schiavo’ – which means `I am your slave’…. Sigh. I’ll never be able to Ciao that easily again!