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.

The 'inter'somniac dreams up a script

I sleep terribly and remember a lot of my dreams these days. According to my sage-like brother, insomnia passes like the seasons, it comes and it goes and there isn't much to do about it than enjoy it. An acquaintance recently made a film about the writer's insomnia, as I expect he might have experienced it, since he recently also published a book (making him a legit writer unlike some people, say, yours truly). I guess sleep suffers when you cant (or dont want to) switch your brain off.

Goddamnit! had promised myself, never to use parantheses!

Anyway, in between dreams, strange things happen and most of the time, I wake up totally incapable of drawing the line between what actually happened and what was only a dream. In last night's case, it went like this:

I'm looking down at my bank balance on the white slip from the ATM.
Available Balance: $147.50.

I'm hungry. Hungry as frick.

Ha! I think, what the hell, you're here today, gone tomorrow. Live like its your last day.

I head to a five star place, with a creepy, yellow toothed concierge who looks like the general manager at my yoga place.
There's tandoori chicken and raita and butter naan and I polish it off like I've been eating nothing but okra and arrowroot for the last 15 years.

Then I flash my NUS Alumni VISA at concierge who in turn, flashes yellow teeth at me.

Bill says $164.70. I am screwed.

I don't have all of the money, I say. I'll pay you the $20 later. Please. Please. Please.

Conceirge looks amused. I'll just add it to your tab, he says and pulls out a rolled up bill which hits the floor when unfurled.

$944.60. I owe them close to a grand.

Okay, later, on the 18th, I promise. He nods and lets me go.
Thank you, thank you thank you and I break into a run.

I woke up sick with worry, wondering what I was going to do for food and bus fare till the 18th. I didn't realize it was a dream till I was standing at the ATM this morning.

Now if this were a Madhur Bhandarkar Film, the story would be set in Mumbai, the protagonist would be a poor, pretty girl - daughter of a construction worker or something, who'd have come into some money through a game of cards, the largest sum she'd ever had. A lifetime of persistent hunger and ignorance would make her overeat at the Taj and she'd have to sleep with the concierge to pay off the $20. Thus her foray into the world of prostitution. The rest of the film would be an expose, of course.

SVK, of course, had a cleaner reinterpretation, very much a la Srinivasan- aam aadmi from Kerala - the only other person in the world, apart from myself, who can make my father laugh.

This guy... poor guy... maybe a rickshaw driver

His biggest dream in having a meal in a 5 star restaurant

Oh wait!
He's with his friends

and they, 'chalo yaar taj mein khaate hain'

and so everyone's like, 'chalo chalo ... at least chai to peete hain'

and then they go for it... only to realize that a chai costs a few 100 rupees... and they have only a 100 each

So from then on, all rickshaw-walla wants, is to have a full meal at the Taj. It becomes his veri, his vaashi, his personal Mt. Everest.

He works and works and works to save up for that

And the big day comes and he does go and have a meal there

In crisp new clothes and all

After footing a bill of of a few thousand rupees... probably his savings of a year

The End.

So SVK has requested copyright to my dream and plans to turn her version of it into a short film. SVK being herslef, will probably have the film done by the middle of next year, yet another charming addition to her kitty
So anyway, copyright granted. All yours now.

Delicacy

...many of them recently returned from university abroad as though it were the most natural thing in the world to come back, to return home, no reason not to.
-Kartography, Kamila Shamsie (2002)

And for those of you who've read the book, here's the Nasreen Room of Ali, Zafar, Maheen & Yasmin from Flickr