Plans

Death Cab For Cutie made an album in 2005 called Plans. The music was enjoyable yes, but it was the semantics of the title that had this earth shattering effect on me.

This is an entry illustrating what sort of animals plans are.

Plan is a simple word, perhaps the most ironic one in the entire English language. A plan, by virtue, is both baseless and absolutely indispensable. because its loaded with this humaneness - it is optimistic, poetic, tragic and beautiful.

This winter I found myself back at home, a place where I had spent 8 years plotting my escape. The consciousness that I wanted to leave home, first verbalized itself at age 10, when I didn't win free airfare to Florida and tickets to Disney world. I was so unhappy about it that I cried alone for hours in my room. I had sent my drawing of Mickey and Friends to Zee TV's Disney hour and had been absolutely certain that I would win. I fished the stamps and envelope out of Papa's study and mailed it myself. I didn't tell anyone about it because the dream was too big, it was too sacred and consequential to be uttered out loud. I was afraid of jinxing it.

Once the mail was out, I spent all my free time imagining I would go to a place where there would be nice little roofed houses with sprawling lawns, arranged along wide, straight cut roads (this is also, incidentally, how my textbooks described the roads of excavated Harappa). There would be people in shorts and they would go to high schools with lockers. I planned to have a sunny day in Florida, wear my jeans and my sneakers, let my hair down and buy ice cream from a man in an ice cream van. I wasn't interested in meeting any of the Disney characters. I just wanted to go to a place where people dressed like Veronica Lodge and I could dress like Betty Cooper.

That's all it was, a simple matter of dress. I couldn't dress the way I wanted to in Coimbatore. Not even as a 10 year old child. When I did, I'd get stared at. Everywhere, all the time. Its not like that now, but it was like that then. So I wanted to go to a nice sunny place, where I could walk down a neat little street, licking my Popsicle stick, wearing my jeans and sneakers. Amma wouldn't stop me because it was safe to walk down the street alone, safe to eat ice-cream that wasn't from a proper shop. I wouldn't have to plait my hair or wear a calf-length pinafore to school or drag a 5 kilo school bag along. All I wanted was two days of this, just to know it was real and entirely possible for me some day.

When the contest results were announced by Vishal on TV, my vision of this life was shattered. And I'd been reclaiming it ever since.

A few days ago, I was walking down from the bus stop to my apartment, in my jeans and sneakers, with my hair whipping in the breeze, when a bicycle bell tinkled from behind and nudged me back to the present. The picture was vaguely familiar. I had never noticed that all my dreams have long since come true :)

The strange thing is, it feels like a part of me has died.

Dying to live

Everyone's always saying, how crazy it is that you work so hard, you work so hard all day and for what? For money to dress your nest with? For health insurance, because your lifestyle wrecks your mind and body? For travel, even when you don't have days on your calendar? No maybe, I got it all wrong. You work for love. You work for that thick and warm feeling of having changed the world, albeit in a small way. Or maybe you work for that crisp feeling of having conquered the world, albeit in a small way.

You also try some other stuff. Write a story. Take language classes. Ring your mom. Head to town for a party with friends. Make a movie. Visit the sick or the aged or the unfortunate. You fill in the empty spaces of your life with things that aren't result oriented. Tingle your sense of creativity, sympathy and empathy, so that you feel less like a robot and more like a creature that can also feel, understand and inspire. Ultimately, you want to create something thats as alive as the earth spinning on its axis. Perhaps you'll find some joie de vivre in the process. Making a life is nearly as difficult as making a living.

This morning, life imitated art and I woke up from my 17 year old self in a dream, into my 24 year old self. My 17 year old self had in turn woken up from my 14 year old self, in a dream within the dream. All my selves were forlorn. Where had time gone? It had gone off, like a loaded gun.

Increasingly, there's a fretful Djinn in me that's throwing tantrums quotidian. It wants out of the office cubicle. It comes up with crazy, impractical ideas- paint, sing, strum on guitar-sitar, dance. It conjures up phantoms of an alternative life, all bohemian and unreasonable, living everyday on a lark. But what will happen once I get to sunny island central? I'll probably start preparing for my GMAT, because my Djinn is monkey wearing a purple turban.

This is 'how to be unhappy 101'. Aim for something really difficult to get. Suffer the hardships through this quest, with eyes on the prize. Once you've eroded irreplaceable bits of yourself in this mad-match and secured the trophy, be self-derogatory, belittle your achievements, decide that you were all along, chasing a mirage. Then embark on a self-destructive, hedonistic barrage all over town. Don't celebrate your victory, because after all, victory is just a matter of perspective. The only thing worse than your prayers being unanswered is having them answered. Of course, you could abandon your project before completion. That's an even better way to feel like shit.

When you accept the senselessness of it all, it makes sense all the more.

The thing that makes life worthwhile, are goals. I came to this conclusion after years of aimlessly wandering across days and days of nothing to live for and wondering what that elusive thing was that made people get up and go.

Having nothing to live for can happen to anyone. It can happen to someone who has everything. It can happen to someone who has nothing. It can happen to the young, to the old. It can happen to the beautiful as well as the diseased, to saints and to sinners. Its a thing, like say, a cold, that cannot be cured, but it can be silenced - by making a to do list.

India Diaries: Writing in India

I used to be friends with this guy who hated living in Singapore. By hated, I mean viscerally despised it more than anything else, for its clinical coldness and lack of poetry. A student of linguistics and a talented writer, all his written work would be singed with this frothing fury of being islanded in a place like Singapore, with its one track focus on daily bread graduating to cash, car and condominium. This was absurd to me because growing up, THE AIM had been clear - leave India. To go anywhere else- the US (being the plum), or the UK, or Austrailia, or Singapore or the ‘Gulf’. Anywhere but here. The earlier you leave, the better.

I’ve been home for a week now and this time, my experience here has been different. Coming back home between college was still just a nostalgia trip back to old times. India still never opened itself and amazed me like it has this time. A long time has passed since my old friend last complained about the horror of a realized Utopia and what it does to the left brain. But now I see that perfection is uninspiring. Perfection means stagnation. Once you peak, there’s nowhere to go but down. Not like India, at least not like it is for us upper middle class folks.

Not like India, where the New Indian Express at Rs.3.75/- goes like an espresso shot to your head.

Not like India, where the average advertisement, between the morning-midcap headlines, has the creative quality of a 30 minute American sitcom.

Not like India, where the girls with their beautiful faces, in their tight jeans and embroidered, noodle-strap Kurtas and their horrible, DIY streaked orange hair, eat rice, rasam and avial at home and then sneak out with their secret boyfriends to pubs in 5-star hotels, that close at 11pm.

Not like India, where you don’t need a trashcan or public toilets because that’s what the foot path is for.

Not like India’s ‘rich’ world heritage sites that still house homeless people under its carved arches.

Not like India where you come back home for a 10 day winter vacation from Austin or Cincinnati or U-Penn and the first thing you do is gather your old school buddies, who’re also just back from MIT or Stanford or Virginia, to play cricket at the empty plot by the town graveyard.

Not like India where the women are colorful without a trace of make up.

Not like India where stray dogs swarm in packs around housing complexes, like street wolves.

Not like India’s with its bruised roads, heat, pollution and dust.

Not like India with its blood and terror and stupefying kindness.

Not like India’s mess, not like India’s problems, not like India’s organized chaos and chaotic organizations, that still somehow make people of the highest quality, still makes people who are determined to make it and still makes people who shape the world.

I’m so envious of all those young writers in Zeitgeist, who’ve been here long enough to be acclimatized to this experiential extravagance. It was so hard to write in India because there’s so much to write about. Its like opening Pandora’s box. Its scary for a child; the first short story I wrote at 14, was a horror story.

I find it so easy to be creative in Singapore. Almost all my inspiration comes from the memory or the dream, of life in India. Singapore is my comfortable little jail cell away from real life, where recollection visits me in tranquil captivity. In India, real life is madness and it never ever ceases to stuff itself down throat, petrifying me with amazement. The ink freezes in my pen and my fingers are paralyzed over the keyboard, because I’m looking for beginnings and ends. In India, there’s just flux, the start is obscure, the end point is non existent. In Singapore, everything is cleaner - the beginning is at my departure from India and the end is when I return.

India Diaries: About access

As far as perfection goes, the mind can be like dark wine; if you leave it aside, in the dark and the cold, and it matures, not festers. But this is not an easy realization to come to, because this is not an age, nor a place that appreciates fine things. Its an age that appreciates fast things, quick things, easy things, flashy things - its like the entire world has gone nouveau riche. Just the other day, I was day dreaming that if someone should call me a splendid woman, I should feel very out dated. What a pity.

'its like the all these people are turning into tribals.’ I complained to my brother.

‘no Aparna, its that all the tribals are turning into people.’

The other day, in the Indian Express' letters to the editor, an offended reader complained after the whole Shashi Tharoor cow-class fiasco, that Tharoor was just another elitist ****** who has trouble concealing his contempt for the common man. I think thats unfair. I think the common man's clique is the hardest one to access, even if they garland you, invite you home and give you tea and parle G. Its because you cant just say sorry and shake off a thousand years of privilege. The meek are inheriting the earth- its only fair and its about time. Hence we eat humble pie on behalf of our great-granddaddies. What fun.

India Diaries: The Great Indian Railways

I landed in Chennai the next night and for the first time instead of a domestic flight, took an overnight train, the Cheran Express, which goes all the way from Ahmedabad to my home town, Coimbatore. This was taken up mainly to convince myself that its really not a big deal, travelling alone in an Indian train, especially in the ‘safe’ South, where a stolen hand-bag is the worst that can happen. A kind cousin and family helped me through the chaos of the train station. But once I got to my berth, I was ON MY OWN in a compartment packed with strangers. As usual, I was fumbling around the tiny space, because my enormous Samsonite bag was some twenty kilos too heavy for me to handle. Two men from seats adjacent to mine promptly helped me stuff my bag under the seat. Only once that was done, did I notice that both men were so starkly contrasted, they could have been in a Social Studies text book. One was a middle aged Muslim man, wearing a long beard, poly-cot Kurtas and a lace cap. He was travelling with his elderly parents, the father dressed similarly and his mother totally veiled in her long, black hijab. As luck or drama would have it, the other man was in starched white, with a vermillion cast-mark on his forehead, a beaded rudraksh neklace and yellow threads around his wrists, looking as blatantly Hindu as possible. I blustered a thank you, and they both smiled at me sympathetically and at each other knowingly, since I was obviously an ignorant, NRI fool. It was almost immediately time to turn in. Of the Muslim family, the son had the uppermost berth while his parents had gotten the middle ones. I asked the son if his mother would like to exchange berths with me, since I had the lowest one. But he smiled and said ‘no, no, no problem, thank you very much!’, before heading to the toilet with a Pepsodent toothbrush. The lower birth on the other side, was occupied by RSS man, who, boisterously insisted on giving up his berth for the old man. Old man took it up gratefully. I followed RSS man’s suit and gently pressurized old lady to switch berths with me. It didn’t take much convincing, of course. By the time, the son was back from the train toilet, he found his parents curled up in the bottom berths like snug bugs. ‘Ah! You exchanged!’, he said to his mother. ‘Yes. But they gave it to us. Voluntary.’ She said the last word in English. The son grinned at RSS man, ‘Thank you!’ RSS man smiled right back, ‘Inshah Allah’

Gagging on postmodernism

I take it all back. All that gooey-gushing in the last post about having access to multiple languages and hence their systems of thought- all of that, I take it back.

It would all be so simple if we thought, talked and communicated in the same language. How about Binary? Really, just erase all this word business, rely on the bland absoluteness of numbers and just put up without poetry.

Its almost easy to imagine how and why the Brave New World would emerge- its because people would get fed up of living in pieces.

I wish we didn't have to choke on our accents and on the aftertaste of the Empire, long after its been chewed and digested by history. If you know what I'm talking about. Well, who ever knows what I'm talking about anyway? Need a break from the madness, goodnight.

Modes of Existence

As a classical dancer I always feel a bit cagey. This irritation, that its not enough to express myself.

I've often wondered, of all the things that I could have chosen to focus, why this? I guess its a means to mediate my existence - the odd genetic constitution that has deemed me chemically more susceptible to feel, than to think. In other words, I choose to focus on the thing that will use this natural tendency for a greater good.

But its not enough. Nope. It becomes gut-wrenchingly clear, when a guitar plays in the distance, or I find myself staring at a perspective-less chinese painting, of cliffs lost in mist. There are things in there that I could never put into mere words or bodily movements.

The medium of expression, the language- be it painting or a type of music, is never limitless. There are just some ideas that are out of its grasp. Take English for example. I began writing when I was very young, into a book that only I would read, because it was the only way to decode my existence. Once an experience or an emotion was locked into a word, and pressed onto a page with the nib of a Hero pen, it was REAL. It was something someone else could recognize and understand. Until then, it was like a dream or a ghost. An unreal thing, a thing with no handle. Unprovable.

The art of a good writer is to present familiar feelings in words that ring true. Then you have to play tricks with it, you have to juggle it into metaphors, spice it up with hyperbole, you have to allude to stories of yore. Of its own accord, the language's scope scope for expression is really limited. How wonderful it would be to have the gift that was stolen at Babel. Grasp all languages and hence have access to ideas that are accommodated easily in one language, but are almost absent in another. Take Zeitgeist for example. Or Bismillah. Or Namaste. There is not one word for it in English, though we can string several to make up the meaning-roughly.

So of late, I've been feeling that Indian Classical dance is not enough. In this dance, all the energy of the universe is drawn from the earth and is centered in the dancer- so bharatanatyam is like advanced yoga, set to song. There's no room in there to express my Conan-the-Barbarian-spewing-fire-and-venom seasons; even if I can get mad on a colossal scale at God Almighty and all, it still seems to require a language, say Tamil or Telugu, and it still requires allusions to stories of yore. I'm in 2010 now. I'm 23. I need another form to allow some room to explode in and its not just Bharatnatyam that fails me. The other disappointments are:

1. ballet, because ballet is all about flying, there's no grounding in ballet and that upsets me.
2. contemporary western dance- because that has spun off of ballet and is miserable at keeping time, thanks to all the arbitrariness involved in flying
3. contemporary Indian dance- its fine, but i still require a fully developed genre.
   
4. hip hop- because, its just not me, I can neither make bro' nor ho'. Its not flexible enough to accommodate just anybody's personality.
   

So while I've been stewing there in this frustration, I happened to find something extraordinary in the show I was running today- a Flamenco performance by the students of Los Tarantos, a local school for the dance form. And there it was, what I'd been looking for- Its well timed and 'earthed', with feet staying on the ground, while the soul soars. The language of song Spanish, is beautiful, but you dont really need to know what it means. While the dance is complex, the complexity is not in technique, its in the expression. And all energy here is centrifugal, it comes from the core of the artiste's emotional experience and spirals out into the world like a phenomenal whip. And balance and beauty here, comes from release.

Perfect.