Passage to Venice – III

(Sometimes writing does not go chronologically. It leaps across time to a memory that is suddenly new and fresh, one that evokes laughter, a sigh, even a feeling of wanting that time back…)

Venice was almost like a whole new city. We had been there before, but it felt like a different life, a different dream. This time, I was near-adult, almost grown up but still needing that reassuring presence of parents and a frame of reference that they provided. My friend was with us and we were in Venice, city of canals, city of dark romance, city of strange smells, gorgeous people, bloody history and environmental disaster.

But for us, still teenagers with moods more whimsical than the Italian weather, Venice was fascinating. We pretended to be expert photographers, our small box cameras taking sweetly silly instant pictures that we all found worthy of comment, if not outright praise. And it was that self-professed talent that got us into a bit of deep water…though not especially of the hot kind.

We had driven into Venice fairly late in the day and checked into our hotel, all piled into one large room because of a severe lack of alternate space in the city. It was, after all, New Year’s eve and everyone was set to party. You could see the buntings all over the narrow cobble-stoned streets and people dashed hither and yon carrying mysterious cartons on their shoulders. Stores were open well after sundown, their windows blaring announcements of sales and their mannequins wearing the most vivid conformations of sequins I had ever seen. Gondolas and small motorboats slid over the canals, carrying loads of party-goers and musicians – one boat even had an entire rock band, long hair, leather, silver studs and all.

But we were rather less adventurous. All of us wanted not much more than to sleep and, after a quick dinner, we decided to retire…and then my friend and I found that the door of our hotel opened almost into the foyer of the movie house across the alley. In we ran, watched – I think – three shows back-to-back of The Aristocats – and then wandered sleepily to fall asleep with unwashed faces and our socks still half on our feet.

The photography started the next morning. It was very cold in Venice, the wind whistling sharply down the alleyways and straight into our ears. But we had to take our pictures from the middle of St Mark’s Square, so it was there that we headed. There was, however, one small problem, it was high tide and the square was thigh-deep in water. VERY cold water, we discovered, when we waded in, shoes and socks and purses left in the custody of my parents.

On the tips of frozen toes, our jeans rolled up as high as they possible could get, we edged out shivering way to a flagpole in the middle of the square. There we clambered atop the small platform and balanced, precariously, on the concrete block, our fingers shaking, our hair blowing madly, our sunglasses doing nothing to stop tears pouring out of our eyes from the sheer cold. But we were there, we had the sun glinting off the gold of the frescoes on the cathedral full-focus in our lenses and nothing could stop the enchantment of moment, not even blue feet and the prospect of going back into the water to find our way to warmth.

It all worked perfectly. The photographs still have that magic, all these years later, and the thought of that morning still makes my toes curl gently in the search for heat, never mind that it is summer-hot and sweaty in Mumbai these days.

Passage to Venice – II

We had planned to be in Milan for lunch, but got there only very late in the evening. As we slid down through the mountains, occasionally getting a little to close for everyone’s comfort to a cliff-edge or another sliding vehicle, all orchestrated by a few squeaks and many gasps, the day wore slowly into the afternoon. We demolished some chips, a few cookies and lots of hot chocolate from a large flask, but the hunger for lunch was kept at bay by the sheer terror of the conditions in which Father had to drive our little Volkswagen Golf. Finally, tired, tense and at last ravenous, we tottered – in a manner of speaking – into Aosta.

Well known for its ski slopes and celebrity visitors (though that was not top-of-mind then), Aosta was a small town with many large hotels. We parked outside one and walked in, brushing snow from our coats and boots and demanding food. The dining hall was large, luxurious, welcoming and, most of all, warm. We sat, we asked, we ordered and we wilted as we waited. The food arrived and we fell to, not really noticing what we ate until it was halfway done. Then I saw that the seafood risotto I had been so avidly working my way through has tiny bits of octopus tentacles, suckers and all, arrayed around the edge of the soup-plate. I like octopus, I am fairly adventurous as an eater, but when the octopus looks at me, so to speak, I quail a bit. Some help from a parent and I was equanimous again, chewing happily.

We actually got to Milan only for dinner. Our hotel was an old and charming one, with no elevator, and we lugged our bags up heavenwards, heaving and pushing and puffing and occasionally saying a rude word, bashing into ankles and squashing a finger or two en route. Food meant we had to walk all the way down, but it was easier without luggage. I was just starting into my health-food bias then and wavered agonisedly between hamburgers and fries and salads and natural juices. I compromised with a large cola and a leafy salad, one that seemed to include all sorts of plant life, from artichoke hearts to spinach, mushrooms to what was thence-forth fixed in my mind as nettled – the stabbed me suddenly mid-bite in the roof of my mouth and left my tongue stinging painfully for some time afterwards.

A painful meal, a fairly late night, a long drive…it all led to a very deep and surprisingly refreshing sleep. We bounced up and out the next morning, all keen to see the chapel in which the Last Supper was being slowly restored, to eating a typically Italian pasta and walking past the stores that we had only read about that sold big-name designer fashion that we sighed over but never imagined even seeing in real life. We did all that and more. And furtively peeped at gorgeous people walking down the pavements, delicious cars prowling the streets and beautiful buildings that for some reason always had a cold wind blowing against them that made our eyes water. But it was Milan, the city of beautiful visions and the warmth (even in mid-winter) of a freedom to live a dream.

Passage to Venice – I

Many moons ago we spent a few weeks in Italy, a country we all like very much. There was my mother, my father and me, along with a friend who had been at school with me in India and now went to a prep school in England – she was spending the winter break with us in Geneva, Switzerland, and was with us, almost automatically, on our holiday. We drove through snowstorms and over skid-icy roads to get to our first stop, and then wandered through from big city to small town with happy arbitrariness….or so it seemed to us girls, but what did we know then, we were just sloppy teenagers who slept a lot, giggled a lot and worried about washing hair and zapping zits. But it was, then and still now, a trip that was indeed memorable.

It began not-too-early one morning, or perhaps after dinner the nights before. My friend and I were old enough to be ‘grown up’, but young enough to play silly tricks on each other. And we had just gone through the worst – she had done something I cannot remember now, but I retaliated by spraying the most awful perfume that I had been given by a friend for Christmas on her pillow; my mother was most annoyed, since the smell permeated the whole apartment for days after my friend had gone back to school some weeks later. And, when the day was more or less done, my friend tried on a pair of jeans that had fit perfectly when she had bought them in England not that long ago. They didn’t any more. She lay on the floor near the dining table and yanked, pulled, groaned, wheezed, to no avail. So she went to bed in them and the next morning, just before we were ready to leave, she managed to zip them up. Of course, she had to undo the zip once we got in the car, since sitting down made her face turn blue…

My parents piled us into the back seat, a couple of acrylic car blankets snuggled around us to keep the cold out as far as possible. You could just about see the tip of my friend’s nose, but the rest of her was a fuzzy pile of synthetic pile. The heater was on full, everyone was smothered in wool and we started off. We would be in Milan for lunch, my father promised. Life was great, the roads were clear, the sun was shining, the world was a joyous place. And then we drove through the Mont Blanc tunnel that links Switzerland and Italy. The Swiss side was typically efficiently pristine, immaculate, even the snowdrifts along the sides of the road arranged just-so at regular, nicely-shaped heaps of cold whiteness. The border security guards beamed happily at us as we drove into the well-lit tunnel, our collective claustrophobia acting up but not too severely, with only a slight panic expressed by my mother at the thought of so many tons of rock above our little car.

But the other side, even we emerged, was rather different. Italy is warm and beautiful and friendly and happy, we all knew, but the Italy that greeted us was just white. Right after going through the friendly, warm, beautiful and happy security zone that marked our passage into the country, we slid neatly down an icy road to a parking spot at the side. Our snow tires were not enough traction; we had to use chains as well. My friend and I volunteered to do the fixing – lots of rude words muttered as clouds of white mist and a broken nail or two later, we were back in the car, pink nosed and snow spattered, but warmed by the exertion of clipping the very cold metal links together around the very cold rubber tires with a very cold wind whistling down the backs of our necks.

And then we drove on. Slowly. The car turned left around a bend on to a bridge over a small frozen stream and kept turning. There was a squeak, but who it came from was not known – it could have been all of us, or any one. As my father worked his feet furiously on the brakes, changing gear, spinning the steering wheel, trying to get some traction and undo the skid, we slid gently to a halt, just about an inch away from the stone of the bridge wall, the slabs of rock that kept us from sliding straight into the ice beneath.

It was a good start to a good vacation.

On the road

For about a week my driver decided to go off to his village, leaving me to drive myself to and fro between home and work, sprained/pulled/strained wrist and all. While I have no idea how I damaged myself in the first place, I do know that driving in Mumbai traffic made it worse to the point where even brushing my teeth or dragging a comb through my mop of hair made me wince. But in the driving, I learned a lot that gave me more to ruminate on, both about myself and about the world around me that has any kind of impact on me.

Perhaps what really made it to the front of my consciousness was the most obvious. One night, driving back alone, fairly late, after a long day at the most dreary routine of page-making, I was switched off in my head but fully focussed on the road and traffic. Suddenly there was a flash of light that bounced off my tired retinas. It came again…and again. And then I heard it, that sound that never fails to make my hands go cold and my mind blank. There was an ambulance close behind me, demanding passage. Even though I know well that ambulances in this country tend to sound their sirens just to get through traffic jams – and less for the urgency of getting its passengers to emergency medical care – the sing-song blast of noise always makes me freeze, first emotionally and then intellectually. The rest of me works fine, but on auto-pilot.

The siren blared incessantly, unforgivingly, mercilessly. It demanded a route past me and others in its path, or even through us or over us…just beyond us. It loomed up against my back window and its lights showed me my fingers gripping the steering wheel so hard that my knuckles were white, just like in the bad description of stressful murder-chase scenes in bad thriller novels. Trained to give way almost automatically, I started to edge towards the lane where there was less traffic – well, one less car or motorbike or truck than the zillion that clamoured just around my little car – and, sweating gently in the blast of the air-conditioning, finally managed to get out of the way. the ambulance roared past me, not going too far ahead, but far enough for the sound and light show that it was putting on to fade a little from my immediate sphere of attention.

I am not normally phased by things like this. Ambulances are a normal part of everyday life in a crowded ever-commuting city like Mumbai. But it takes me back to a traumatic early morning when my mother was taken to hospital and we never brought her back. It was a bad time, one I should learn to get past. One day, when I can face – or hear – an ambulance yell for through-way without flinching, I will know that I have. Until then, I just grit my teeth and pretend it is all just part of a life I have to live.

First we win…

…Then, more often than not, we lose.

It’s a cycle that typifies Indian behaviour, in some strange way. Even as I write this, the office is going mad with joy. All day the televisions have been on, blaring every move on the cricket field as India and Australia slug it out Down Under, over the last hour or so, people have gathered around the TV sets, staring fixedly up at the screens, breathing heavily or not at all, cheering when not gasping or going into little huddles of hectic parlay on who played what shot hot and why they should have done otherwise, who was doing what when while that shot was being played, etc etc etc. and then, as it got closer to the end, the volume went up when something good happened for Team India and switched almost completely off when it didn’t. and then it happened. That last shot made sure we won…after a pause when the decision was finally taken and announced by the power that was and then, after a micro-second of stress-induced silence, everyone leaped and cheered and hugged each other, on the field, in the stands and in the office.

So India won the tri-series, or whatever it is called. Our team – please note the jingoistic ‘our’ there – did their best, sledging and all, and mustered up all forces to beat the rather persistently rude Australians quite comfortably, thus challenging all the nay-sayers to make themselves heroes. So when they come home – as they did after the first Twenty/20 match that they won – they will be feted and lauded and celebrated and all those good things that essentially mean the same thing every which way. There will be parties and bus rides and bouquets and champagne and more endorsements and so money and more adulation and more everything that will make the collective and individual heads of Team India and the country in general swell with pride… and get so inflated in the process that it will no longer fit through the door that opens into success.

Yes, that kind of falls flat every now and then, almost as an inevitable cycle of what goes around comes around, without fail. But it is true. It may be an Indian trait engendered by the weather, as someone once said and backed it up with some highly tenuous research, which makes us so complacent and smugly self-satisfied that once we get what we fight for, we give up and let it all slide into ignominious failure very soon after. If that is what will happen to Team India and its game, all the battling on the field and off in Australia will hardly be worth it.

Socially networked

This is something I am not, not in the today sense of the word, at least. I do know people who know people which means that in some roundabout way I know the people that the people I know do know, if you know what I mean, because I am not sure I know. But it’s called networking – knowing someone who can find you someone you need when you need that someone for some purpose that you can define only in reference to a specific context, since why would you need that someone if the context was not what it is at a certain point in time? Be that as it may be, it just happens that ever since I started working with a newspaper many years ago, my social networking skills improved. And if I did not know someone, I found that I invariably knew someone who knew someone who was exactly the someone I needed at any moment in time.

But this is the old-fashioned version of networking. Today it all happens in cyberspace, where someone pings someone and then invites them to join some social networking site or the other and exchange news, views and plain old gossip with everyone else who happens to be a member of the same social networking site. So there is everything from Orkut to Facebook to LinkedIn to goodness knows what else, leaving me cold and rather bewildered about why anyone would want me to be part of the whole cloud of chatter going on online. It is not about being part of something that large and unwieldy, or even that I become a tiny mote in a community that is stretched beyond the limits of my knowledge base and my personality management skills, but a rather more simple reason I prefer to stay out of it all. My memory. Each of these sites needs a registration form filled in, with a password and a login name. Which means that even if I just join two of them, I need to remember four more pieces of information that are not exactly earth-shatteringly important to me or even remotely relevant to what I do through my day.

But, being conformist up to a point, I agreed to log into three such sites. Which never fail to send me email telling me that there is a message form someone or the other waiting for me. And that in itself leads to more problems than I want to handle. First, I need to log into the email accounts that tell me that I have those aforementioned emails. Which is manageable, since I use those addresses anyway to check mail, personal and for work. Then I need to open the mail I get from whatever networking site it is, and go into the site itself. That asks me for registration details, which I will have forgotten, since I rarely use them. That in itself implies two or three stabs at it, with me flailing – in a manner of speaking – not just on the keyboard, but also in cyberspace. When I finally access the message, it will probably be a friend suggesting I join some other group online, which means more registration forms, login names and passwords….

That is why I am very glad that many offices are gradually banning the whole concept of social networking sites being accessible. While I wish the easy ways of communication, from MSN Messenger and Googlechat would continue working they way they do, their access via a bootlegged gateway or otherwise, I am fairly glad that Orkut, Facebook and goodness knows what else have been blocked at work. If they weren’t, I am sure that someone would insist I join in, with registration, login, passwords and whatever else I need to be part of a warm, friendly, communicative, valuable, useful, etc etc community. Frankly, I prefer to know someone who knows someone who knows someone.

Trophy lives

It’s the time of year where filmi types all over the world get together and give each other statuettes and air kisses. It’s awards season.

A couple of nights ago, India time, the Oscar awards were given out. There was the usual guff about who was wearing what and who designed which jewels for whom, but under the frivolity there was the reality of a situation that has been, in a way, mirrored here, too. The films that won were not the usual pulp fare, the commercial formulae guaranteed to succeed, but the movies that were unusual, made a strong statement, may not have found box-office bonanzas, but took home the bacon the form of critical applause. Which about what happened here, with a little concession to the usual round of popular and populist principle of appeasement.

I watched some of the Indian awards ceremonies on television, the ones that have been held, like Star Screen and Filmfare. And when I was part of the Times of India group, I even watched the Filmfare Awards live, standing right in front near the stage and bopping along with the music, loud, crass and tremendously appealing as it was. And the memories come flooding back every time I watch any vignettes of the occasion on TV. It was a formative time in my life, when I learned that not everything Bollywood is nasty, most of it is great fun and infectious in its appeal. And I found that the space in my head that is ready and willing to absorb has pulled in everything I have read and seen about the Hindi film industry with an osmotic pressure that has been, to me, not just revealing, but startling as well.

I rarely watch a movie in a theatre. In fact, I cannot even remember when I last went to a movie house – I do not like the noise levels, the cold and the proximity to other creatures, human and insect, that a theatre mandates. So I wait until the film is either available on DVD or on cable, and watch it at my own comfort levels, my feet curled up under me on the couch, Father within yelling distance if something scary happens and Small Cat muttering and rolling about on the carpet. I can switch off when I get sleepy, knowing full well that the same film will be broadcast endlessly and I can have seen all of it, albeit in parts, and put it all together somewhat like a jigsaw puzzle without a ‘finished’ picture as a template.

Perhaps the first movie I saw that way was Amar Akbar Anthony, with Vinod Khanna, Rishi Kapoor and Amitach Bachchan. It was a giggle-fest, with slapstick comedy punctuated with family drama, fights, songs and bimbo-heroine love stories. Great fun, even seen in choppy bits, and memorable indeed. Another favourite is the Aamir Khan-Juhi Chawla starrer, Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke, where chaos and confusion are dotted with completely OTT fun and games that are not in the least bit credible, but hilarious any which way. And, of course, more recently there have been the Karan Johar potboilers, with Shah Rukh Khan dominating the proceedings, all glitz, glamour and glycerine. Those are rather easier to watch, since the fashion dominates the plot and everyone is so busy looking gorgeous that nothing much really happens that you cannot catch up with in whatever little you do see.

But this time a lot of smaller films have been part of the marquee for the awards – Bheja Fry, Life in a Metro, Cheeni Kum…all part of a line-up that dares to be hatke and manages to do so without losing kudos. Of course, the big winners were the big tickets: Om Shanti Om, Kareena Kapoor, Shah Rukh Khan, Taare Zameen Par and more. But that was expected…and accepted.

View from my window

I sit next to a window at work and every now and then peer out to see what the outside world is up to. Not that there is much to see, since we overlook a parking lot and garden, with a factory and chimneys beyond the retaining wall, but it can often be more exciting than the view within, which is mainly people hacking away at keyboards or else standing around in groups chatting or, at certain times of the day, sitting in clusters and yelling madly in what is defined as an ‘edit meeting’. Occasionally there will be a wild outburst if there is a cricket match on television, or if there is a birthday, after which the housekeeping crew bustles about trying to get frosting out of the anonymously coloured carpet. Beyond the small upheavals of life, it is routine in here, nothing really exciting happening other than the daily grind of a broadsheet being made ready for production.

On an average day – which is what most of them are – life outside is far more exciting. Right now, as we speak, there is a gentleman in a brilliant pink shirt and blue tie (his trousers are unremarkably black) walking up and down the garden, talking animatedly on his cellphone. Nothing unusual about that. Except that every now and then he peers at another mobile phone in his other hand, texts out a message and then continues his conversation. Somewhere along the way, he stops, unhooks his first phone, speaks briefly into his second and then reverts to type. Which makes me wonder what he is saying to whom and why he cannot sit in the cool confines of his office and do it, instead of wandering about in the heat of the late afternoon.

My driver was telling me recently about some drama that happened right outside my window. You didn’t see it, he was astonished, but then he did not realise that every now and that I get pulled into one of those rather meaningless edit meetings and an dragged away from my little panorama of the world outside. Apparently, there was a human drama that unfolded late in the morning. A couple from the office next door had a little spat outside and there was violence, he exclaimed. First they came out, smoked cigarettes, drank coffee – or maybe it was tea, he speculated – and then chatted briefly. The talk became an argument and finally a bit of a fracas, as the woman hauled off and slapped her male companion. He, startled at first and then obviously furious, returned the favour – he hit her full on and she stood there, I was told, her mouth open, one hand to her shocked face. Then he put an arm around her and she leaned against him. They chatted a little more, smoked another cigarette and then went back in to the office they came from, evidently friends once more.

Perhaps more worth watching is the animal life outside. Apart from the birds, there is often a dog outside, playing in the garden or romping in the parking lot, frequently with a puppy or two in tow. The first litter that we saw was given a lot of attention by the staff of the newspaper – one or the other would run downstairs with milk or biscuits and feed the babies, while others played with the dirty, semi-starved little creatures. But by now so many of these litters have come and gone that we are all rather blasé about them, admiring the puppies, coochieing with them if we meet them at close quarters and then more or less forgetting they exist. We cannot do more; we have only that much angst and time to make them more special than they are already as young animals just starting to make a life for themselves.

For now, life outside my window is a diversion from the humdrum working day. Once in a while, it colours a blue mood and sometimes lowers my otherwise blithe spirits. But it is always changing, always new, always different, just like life itself.

Prophecies of the day

I once wrote a blog on how people are dead keen on horoscopes. A former editor of mine would grab the afternoon tabloid from my hands if I had bought one on my lunch break and then flip fast forward to the forecasts for the day. Once she was done with that, my paper was mine again; the rest of it was not relevant.

Then I worked with Internet sites on astrology. Which meant that I had to do a lot of research to find out just what people wanted from them, what kind of stuff they wanted to read and how deep they were willing to go online. It was amazing that so many would even plunk down money to learn that they would be married in such-and-such year and find a new job say when and have to deal with a personal/professional crisis then and not now. But I was and still am a bit of a cynic. It doesn’t really make sense to me to consult anyone who does not know me about what will happen to me.

And as for horoscopes – well, I have to confess this one: when I was just starting out as a journalist, I have on occasion had to juggle around predictions for the week if the astrologer who normally sent them had been derelict in his duty and we were horoscope-less for at least that day that I was making the relevant pages of the newspaper. Which meant that even if I just moved the forecasts around, changing them slightly, it really made little difference. It worked – the astrologer never objected and the reading audience lapped it all up.

A few years after that, I was in charge of an online astrology portal (almost) that had a number of astrologers on board to answer queries for a fee. Since it was essentially e-commerce, and I was rather averse to dealing with people who had some kind of beef about the money they spent that was not being realised in the way they would prefer, I stayed out of it. But then I was asked to filter the experts and retain only those who were really worth having, contracts renegotiated and re-signed to the company’s satisfaction rather than that of the astrologer. I was only the editor, I protested fairly violently, but no one would listen. So I girded my loins, swallowed my qualms and got down to the job.

It was an interesting but exhausting business. Each of them was so eager to please, so keen to stay in the loop we had created for them that they bent over practically backwards to make sure they were pleasing me and the chappie who was in charge of the money part of the deal. Each insisted on charting my astrological profile and telling me what my fate was all about, past and present. None of which made me happy, since all I wanted to do was get out of there and either get back to work or go home, depending on what time it was that day. The experts worked very hard to do their jobs, my colleague worked even harder to get me to stop being my usual nasty self and just hear them out, even if I had to be in a semi-asleep daze to do it. The net result of the exercise was entirely predictable – the astrologers were disgruntled because so many of them were thrown out of the portal citing contractual non-extension, and I was disgruntled because I was bored, not-pleased and completely out of the depth I normally cruised at.

But somewhere along the line I was amazed at the similarities in the various predictions. Most of the experts said the same thing, about my past, my present and, more or less, my future. That I would never have paid any of them to predict my life for me on the Internet was a different issue all together. It was just not my style to do that, even if I had believed in the whole shebang. And it all made me rather sick with the unctuousness of the people involved and the oiliness with which we had to eliminate them without causing rancour. All a hoot. And we should have known better - and we would have, if only we had consulted our horoscopes!

One for the birds

I was at work, wondering what to do after a rather healthy lunch that made me feel like saying “Moo!” when a pigeon landed heavily on the light fixture just outside the window beside which I hack away at my keyboard all day. It peered at me with its beady little eye, first one then the other, and seemed to dismiss me as being not just irrelevant, but unworthy, since it shrugged, settled its feathers and then took off to more interesting and important assignations. For a moment there I was startled, then thought deeply and darkly to myself that since for so many years I have regarded the wretched birds with so much contempt, it was only fitting that I should be seen in a similar light. And pigeons have such expressive eyes that you can read what they are thinking by just looking at one.

Once upon a different lifetime we lived in an apartment that was high up on a hill. Which meant we not only got a fabulous view all around, but also got all manner of fowl wandering into our flat when all the windows and French doors were open. It was, of course, fairly unpredictable, this kind of invasion, since we never knew when it would happen that a bird flew into the house and forgot how to get out again. It often was the case that we had to chase the silly thing all around the apartment, swearing madly and wondering if we would ever get the poo off the brocade cushion covers and the pin feathers out of the Chinese lampshades. All the fans would hastily be switched off and the glass-slatted vents closed, just so that the idiotic creature would not fly into something that would injure it. Every time it headed that way, I would close not just my eyes, but my ears as well – just as I do in the spooky moments in movies and television shows, to avoid seeing anything that would be unwontedly bloody and stick in my rather fragile psyche for the rest of my life.

The incursions were not infrequent. It came to such a pass that we had to put up chicken wire – or bird wire, as would be more appropriate – over all the openings that the pigeons could fly into, from the large windows to the even larger balconies. In a way that sort of solved the problem, for the most part. But the stupid birds (lovers of the pigeon community would instantly censure me for that, saying that the IQ of a pigeon was higher than I believed it to be) managed occasionally to find a way in and flew bashingly into the mesh and got tangled it is, sometimes breaking through into the flat and causing the aforementioned merry - and loud – havoc in the process. We did avert most of these mishaps, but had to replace the netting at regular intervals.

In the apartment we now live in, pigeons are not visitors, though they do peer hopefully in once in a while. As soon as they land on the awnings over the windows, Small Cat takes grave objection and chatters her teeth with a yarring sound, looking glaringly in the general direction of the birds. That is all very well, except that she does that even if the pigeons perch on a rooflet in the next building. She will keep doing this for as long as it takes for me or Father to shoo the fowl away. But she will never make any attempt to attack or jump at the birds, preferring to lie regally like a furry little princess on the carpet or a chair, sounding off. Only rarely, when she is feeling exceptionally hoppity and believes that the pigeons are daring to make inroads on to her turf, will she gallop across the living room, leap onto Father’s large armchair and chatter at the enemy from a more vantage point.

I am still wondering what Small Cat will do if a pigeon actually comes into the house and does its version of testing the chaos theory. But I am not particularly keen to find out.

Speaking in tongues

We were talking today at work about how nobody in this city speaks Hindi as it should ideally be spoken. Except perhaps Amitabh Bachchan, someone said with a bit of a sly grin showing. His sonorous voice and his nicely rounded vowels make listening to him a pleasure, though I did hear some time ago that some of his voice-overs were actually done by someone else and you could tell the difference only if you knew whether the Big B had done the assignment or not. Be that – as I giggle saying – as it may, there is admittedly hardly anyone I know who is a good average Mumbaikar and who can do the Hindi thing like it should be done. Our Bollywood movie stars least of all.

Most of them speak in tongues that are not discernibly anything. In the ‘old days’, as my irascible boss loves to put it, the actors came from parts beyond, usually north-ish, and spoke Hindi like the natives of the heartland that they were. Dharmendra had his good looks and his drawl to endear him to the masses who clamoured to watch his films. And he spoke decent Hindi, though he stumbled through English with pitiable results – every speech he made at every awards function was fraught with stress and effort for both the actor and his viewers. Then there was Dilip Kumar, who had moments of chaste Urdu in his public appearances. And there was Sanjiv Kumar, Rajesh Khanna and so many more. The women, too, were articulate, from Madhubala to Geeta Bali to Sadhana, even Hema Malini, who spoke good Hindi in a wonderfully Tamilian accent and never managed to do much with her English, even years after being the well-travelled public persona that she is.

Today the younger stars, be it Shah Rukh Khan or Salman Khan, Aamir Khan or any of the others of that generation, are far more comfortable in English, albeit oddly accented at times and definitely ‘Indian’. When SRK speaks to the public through a media interview or some kind of special show, he tends to say whatever he wants to say in ‘Hinglish’, mixing his own special brand of cocktail that works wonders for his articulate and expressive image as well as for his appeal to even those who are not Khan fans. Salman Khan speaks his strangely American-accented English without very much hesitation, though where he acquired his twang is still a mystery. Aamir Khan talks a lot when he does say anything, and he goes far deeper and is a lot more diplomatic than his peers. Akshay Kumar’s English is not as good as his Hindi and the action-emotion star very wisely sticks to the language he is more comfortable in, which makes a lot more sense than to babble on in a strange tongue that no one really understands but is too polite to question.

The women, too, are off-and-on types when it comes to speaking. Kajol talks a lot, in loud and very ‘Bombay’ English, though her Hindi is not bad either. Rani tends to trip over her pronunciation, and her accent is never very far from her Bengali roots. Tabu is unabashedly a non-English speaker, never mind her experience, and Manisha Koirala’s speech varies with her escort of the moment. Priyanka Chopra, Lara Dutta, Sushmita Sen and Dia Mirza are very articulate and can hold their own in an international forum, but Aishwarya Rai’s accent tends to slip into Tulu when she is self-conscious, which is most of the time. But all these women have the unfair advantage of being well-finished products of their time, polished from toenails to phonetics. And they have been communicating internationally for so long now that it all comes naturally.

Which makes me wonder – if the men were shoved into international beauty pageants, would they speak better?

Friends for ever

It’s funny how the whole concept of friendship changes over the years, as you grow up. Once upon a time I stayed far away from the idea of ‘friends’, because we moved in and out of the country and any that I did make had to be left too soon; for a child, that can be devastating. But as I grew up, I got more cynical and a little more realistic – I made friends, albeit not very close ones, whom I could spend time with, laugh with, play with and then leave, perhaps keeping in touch for a few months, or even a couple of years, before relegating them to the back of the memory-closet where they could be looked at and savoured when the time and need arose, with no rancour or regret. Rediscovering friends like these is in itself a unique experience, refreshing from the point of view of a psyche battered by time and always looking for a new way to recuperate and reenergise.

Many years ago, I had a ‘best friend’. We spent more time together than anyone who lived in the same house would, and we shared everything from childhood dreams to teenage crushes to eyeshadow travails to driving lessons. Since she was a little older than me, it all happened to her earlier than it did to me and I often found myself running harder to catch up than I really needed to. It was only many years later that I understood that it was not necessary at all for me to catch up with her, or indeed with anyone else. I was myself, I was what I was and why should I feel the need to be or do anything that was not in my own destiny?

My ‘best friend’ and I had our own lives, quite separate from the one we shared in so many ways. She became another child in our household and was treated as one, an open affection often opposed by me, overly possessive of my parents’ affection, attention and time. I made occasional visits to her home, while she had free season in ours, neither of which really mattered to any of us. And we spent most waking moments in communication with each other, as only two little girls can manage to do – we would wake up and call each other, we would bathe and call each other, we would call each other just before we left our own homes, walk down to school together and then spend most of the day together in our various classes, finally walking home together after the sports session was done, the immaculate hair dishevelled, the uniforms wrinkled and grubby, the socks sagging somewhat over bruised ankles and the pong of sweaty little girl hovering like an almost-tangible aura over us both.

We grew up soon enough. It was often not too happy a process and we dealt with angsts and anxieties, parents and, in her case, siblings. There was rivalry and small envies, none ever spiralling into an argument or anything that could remotely be described as a ‘fight’. But slowly, as we grew in different directions, so did the friendship. I had new experiences she could never be part of, she had a life that never impinged on mine. For a while, we did not communicate at all – I was out of the country, she had a separate orbit. And then we met again, almost like we had never been apart. Adult now, both of us were careful about how we talked and what we talked about. But there was the old affection, the old teasing and knowing and awareness. It just was not that important to me when it all ended. It didn’t seem as important to keep it going, or to find out why it stopped.

But, like the cycle of perhaps life itself, it seems to have come around again. There is some sort of contact between the families…or what is left of them. What happens next, I wait to find out. It should be fun, any which way it goes.

Keeping the faith

Today is Pancake Tuesday. The day when all old food is cleaned out of the house to make way for a period of austerity and piety called Lent, which begins tomorrow, with Ash Wednesday. I used to know all this, since close family friends that became my home for a period of time when I was in college observed all the customs and traditions associated with the religion that I was peripherally familiar with and had watched with interest ever since I was very young. It was perhaps at that time that I seriously started thinking about faith and its observance, the way different people in different countries and decided that I liked a little of each and would ‘talk’ to whoever or whatever I believed to be divine rather than do it the conventional way via prayer, rite and ritual.

And, for me, it has worked. It makes sense to be somewhat like Akbar’s own brand of religion, the Din-e-Ilahi was said to be in my history textbooks, but more so. Where the Mughal emperor tried to blend the best of what he considered to be faith in Hinduism and Islam, for me God – of the godhead – was wherever I wanted it to be, from a temple to a mosque to a church to a synagogue and a gurudwara, wherever the spirit, in a matter of speaking, beckoned to me and I followed. It was not a God, never one figure to whom I addressed whatever I ‘said’. It was a wild combination of various entities that all embodied one aspect of belief: the faith in something that was clean, true, honest and, most of all, supportive.

For a while now my ‘God’ has been paying little attention to me, or so it seems. I love and it is taken away when I want and need it most. I trust and that trust is shattered. I believe and my beliefs are destroyed by everything from humans to circumstances that are beyond any conceivable human control. And whenever I think about loving, trusting or believing again, that nasty little voice inside my head asks me whether I really want to replay my own history and live through that same trauma once more.

But then I think about it and my own native, natural, internal sense of logic kicks in. Faith is about believing in oneself first, about trusting in oneself before in anyone else, in loving oneself and then spreading that love. I have all that. I have it coming into me and going out of me. I have a home, a life, comfort, support, security. So what am I complaining about? Everything in human existence has a shelf life, all faiths say that. I need to just accept that all that I am is also here for now. As for tomorrow…God knows!

When the wind blows

The past week or so has been unseasonably cold for Mumbai and everyone has been shivering gently around the edges, even the die-hard, self-professed, semi-Eskimo-related folks who are transplants to the city from more icy climes. Today I went out in the blazing sunshine and found that my fingertips were frosty and my nose started running, my toes curled in their search for a warmer part of my sandals and my cheeks were slowly going pink. Meanwhile, the wind blew my hair around my head in a streaky black cloud and my eyes watered black runnels of un-waterproof mascara along the rim of my lashes and the corners of my eyes. As I walked along the shopping street to my destination, I found people in sweaters, shawls and – I almost stopped to stare there – one young thing proudly showed off a pair of pink Ugg boots worn over skintight jeans and a tiny camisole (presumably only her bottom half was cold, the top seemed quite happy bare). And I was quite glad to dive into the store I was headed to, with its tinny piped music and all, because it sheltered me from the wind, so dried out my sniffles and let me replace my dishevel with a general state of more dignified kempt-ness.

They say it is all because of cold spells in the north of the country that we are more chilly than we are used to being down here in the mid-lands. The breeze blowing in from the sea is cool, getting colder as the sun sinks slowly over the horizon. And the tall buildings act as funnels for the gale to shoot down the roads that snake between them. Even as we shiver, as we drive with the air-conditioner off and we snuggle into sweaters that would normally be relegated to a mothballed suitcase in the attic, we revel in the novelty of being able to jog around the block without sweating, even welcoming the crush of the crowds in the commuter trains and the hordes of people who clamour for the bus. At work I yell for the air-conditioning to be switched off until there are more people in the vast space to warm it up and I drink mugs of hot water (or herbal tea) to make my insides a little warmer than my outside can be in this environment.

But even as we huddle against the cold, we Mumbaikars are a warm lot. We care, we get involved, we have the strange disregard for personal privacy that is so characteristically Indian. We are not the anonymous big city that I have always preferred being a resident of. We know our neighbours and their troubles, we help our servants through domestic tribulation and we want to know what life in the other building is all about. But there is one snob value that is truly ours that we are very proud of: the fact that we are Mumbaikars because we live here. This is our city. It belongs to us and we belong to it.

That, at the moment, is causing some upheaval in this city. A cold wind of dissent and disturbance is blowing in through the city. There is a section of the political fraternity that insists that Mumbai is for Maharashtrians. They, spurred on by their leader, have been saying – nay, yelling – so for a while now, but the yelling is getting more strident and more aggressive. Over the past couple of days, there has even been violence when the matter has been debated. Why should someone who lives here and calls Mumbai his home be willing to work for the betterment of another part of the country, is one question being asked. It is indeed a valid one, since it is the immediate environment that should be nurtured first. But, as one sassy, seasoned, savvy politician has said, we should be saying not that Mumbai is ours, but that India is.

We may be Mumbaikars, and very proud of it, but we are, over all the argument, Indians. Which is a matter for even greater pride.

Hang the minions!

Some years ago, most newspaper offices in this city declared themselves to be peon-less. While that in itself was a brilliant idea, since people should really learn to do things for themselves, aspects of functioning like deliver of books for review, pick-ups of photographs for printing, etc etc etc were left rather hanging in the air with all those concerned spending more time worrying about the logistics than actually getting any work done. This was, you must remember, before the days of courier services and inter-office deliver systems, high-capacity email and such like. And while a lot of people – especially the old school types – were fairly unhappy with this situation, setting up their own private arrangements with the ‘assistants’ (as they were called, since they were available only to the top layer of management in any branch of any media company by then) to fetch and carry, all at a small fee and undiluted bonhomie.
But India is known for its system of minions. However ‘western’ an establishment may be, under the circumstances of climate and just sheer existence, it is the norm in this country to hire people to do a lot of the ordinary, run-of-the-mill routine work that ranges from cleaning the house and its accoutrements to driving the car to doing the cooking to fetching, carrying, polishing, filing, painting, ad infinitum. In the West, too, this is becoming popular, apart from just among the local Indian population – many of the Indian friends I have in the United States, for instance, tend to hire ‘help’ at least once a week to do everything from washing the patio furniture to doing the laundry. Very white American friends and relatives have now started doing the same thing, finding the ‘help’ so useful, almost vital, that they do almost anything to keep the person – very often of Hispanic origin and sometimes of rather uncertain immigration status – happy and working on.
Over the past few months, I have had problems more than joys with my own domestic help. Of course, much of it is probably my own fault, since I do not know how to treat the ‘minions’ and tend to overdo my niceness and accommodation to suit their needs rather than my own. There is no patronage involved, just basic ineptness, my friends who do it better tell me. When I give too much, they take more and then I get into the bind of not wanting to give more, but being pushed into giving more than I am willing to by inertia rather than a spirit of generous compromise. Everyone shouts at me about it, but I never learn to fix this particular mistake that I keep making. And I get into more trouble than the service I get is worth. This time was no exception.
It started with driver problems, as it always does. The young man who chauffeurs me around – I am very comfortable with the service, even though I hate the idea, I have to say – demanded more money. He was due for a raise soon anyway and he would have got it, no questions really asked…or not too many. But he went a tad too far in his demands and compounded his felony by taking a day off when he was really needed, without permission from the people who paid him: Father and me. When he was confronted, he cited a prior appointment. It did not wash. He was in deeper trouble than he needed. Now his job with us is debateable. We are still debating it.
The same sort of thing happened with the maid. Young, aspiring and very ambitious, she worked with us more because she got my clothes and make-up rather than because she was making good money – she has another full time job for that. But after a couple of months of slacking, when I finally lost my almost-infinite patience and got rather more firm than I had previously been, she left us. Well, not as gracefully as that sounds, actually. She just never turned up. So, after a few days of fuming and tiptoeing around the house to avoid disturbing too much of the dust that was fast accumulating, we managed to find another maid, an older lady, one who had previously been with us for many years. The girl turned up for her money on the scheduled date, and found a very cold reception indeed. She had pushed her luck a little too far and hit a wall. And she knows now not to try it again if she is ever allowed into our house.
The same thing happens with more close and meaningful human relationships. Sometimes you allow it to go further than you are happy with just because the other person is in some way important to you. Until they hit the aforementioned wall. Then it is all up to everyone’s power of negotiation and compromise.

Who needs a hero?

We all do. But perhaps not one who has feet made of the stuff that has been used for centuries to make pots to carry water – and other sundries – in: clay. All of us need someone to look up to, to aspire to, to dream about, even to hide behind on occasion. This is the man or woman who will is now what we will be tomorrow…or the day after, if we take too long about it, but we all know we will get there.

For many children – and indeed, an astonishing number of adults – in this country, Sachin Tendulkar is that hero. Or Sania Mirza. So is Shah Rukh Khan. And, of course, Sunita Williams, even though she is not Indian and has not been familiar to most people in India until she went into space and then came to this country in a blaze of media glory. There are so many others like this who are the stuff of dreams, the stuff of a Walter Mitty-esque life and world that stays in the realm of dreams and never really becomes actual fact.

Heroes change with time. If they didn’t, they would not be human, and most people that we look up to are very human. When I was a small girl and watching the shooting of a Hindi film in the enormous complex in which we lived, I thought the heroine was “very pretty”, perhaps even the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my whole short life. She was a popular actress then, and is a nicely rounded home-maker with a history of grief and tears today. Now when I look at her on television, where she makes the occasional appearance, I find her hardly inspiring. For me, now, from where I am after all these years, someone like Cate Blanchett or Rukmini Arundale or Anita Desai would do it, people who have worked hard and made it big in their own way, sometimes quietly, sometimes steamrolling the opposition with relentless talent and charm.

But where there is a hero of any greater than personal perception, there will be public recognition. And following that wave, public adulation. As is the case with Sachin Tendulkar these days in India and, it seems, in various parts of the world. While I do not profess to know anything about cricket (frankly, I think it is a fairly big waste of time, energy and money, but each to their own if it makes their cookies crumble), I do know that people who are enduring stars in cricket do not get there by sheer fluke, luck, fate, or the spin of a single ball. Tendulkar worked hard, long and often injured to get where he is in the whimsical world of sports, and well deserves to be seen as a hero, by his adoring fans and cricket buffs alike. He has earned his place in the echelon and is still young enough to be excited by the continued appreciation.

But a knighthood? Visiting British prime minister Gordon Brown suggested in a speech in Delhi that Tendulkar be knighted. And the media went mad. Which is typical of the whole machinery, but hardly something to be taken too seriously. First and perhaps most importantly, as a republic, India does not allow knighthoods. So Tendulkar cannot be called Sir Sachin, except in future headlines where sensationalism is the raison d’etre. Second, a suggestion by a visiting alien (which is really what Brown is, though perhaps not from the point of view of ET, Jadoo and others of their ilk) in this country for only a short time is not one that should be taken without a couple of tablespoons of salt. After all, he was honouring one of our own in his way, which sounded silly because of the context, not the intent to praise. Even though Sir Sachin sounds good, it is not likely to become reality.

Even in the unlikely event that is does happen, I wonder – will he, like others before him, return the honour with polite thanks? After all, that would be real hero behaviour.

Cold wave

It has suddenly turned chilly in Mumbai and people have brought out their warm woollies, much to my amusement. What is even more amusing is that I sit in this wonderfully plush newspaper office, gently minding my own business – rather like Pakistan occupied Kashmir, a colleague insists – wrapped snugly in a large rough woollen shawl, since the air-conditioning is so fierce that my fingertips slowly go blue and my goosebumps have goosebumps that have goosebumps. As a result, I drink only very hot water, never eat ice cream during the day and make sure that I am dressed to insulate, even with the fat reserves that should but don’t do anything to keep me any warmer than if I did not have them.

But it is a cold day today, as it was yesterday and we are told by the weather people, it will be tomorrow. All the papers have been talking about it, citing the cold front from the North, ice fall in Kashmir, sudden drop in temperature in the mountains, ad infinitum. The reporters at the paper – as in every other daily publication and media house, I bet you - have been rushing around in various directions trying to get semi-articulate and intelligent quotes from the Met Department, the climate experts, the environmentalists, the clean-air campaigners, the futurists, even astrologers. Everyone wants a substantiation of what the rest have been saying, so that they can get their own ‘exclusive’ version of why the city is suddenly, precipitately so much colder today than it was yesterday…or yesterday than it was the day before.

And, truly, it is. I had been complaining to Father that it was a dull winter this year in Mumbai, since I had not used my fuzzy blanket even once – which I do for about a week every December-January in the city, especially very early in the mornings, before the sun is out and the voltage fluctuates enough for the fans to whiz faster than they do at other times of the day. But yesterday, after all the household chores had been done and home and hearth were in proper order, enough to keep me even vaguely happy about my housekeeping skills, I decided I would indulge in my Sunday afternoon nap. Instead of being sprawled all over my bed when Father came in to wake me for tea-time, I was curled snugly around a pillow under a swathe of warm fuzzy blanket, only the tip of my nose and a shock of wild black hair showing outside. It was a chilly afternoon, yes.

And outside is where I want to be, basking in the sunny glow on the lawn outside, except that the wind is blowing rather strongly and I hate having damp toes from the wet grass. We drive to work with the car air-conditioner off, the windows open just a crack to keep the air inside as fresh as it can be. And I am tempted to sit on my hands so that my fingers stay as toasty warm as the arm I have in the sun that beams down into the back seat of the car.

But in all this, it is not really that cold in Mumbai. It just feels that way. For this city, anything below a balmy 25 degrees Celsius is freezing and people bring out their winter clothes even as the visiting knitwear sellers from the North make a killing on their wares at street corners. Watchmen sit at the gates of their buildings around small fires in the night, their torsos wrapped in thick shawls and sweaters, their heads nicely muffled in monkey caps and scarves. And the maid comes in every morning blowing on her hands and sniffing, her nose redder than usual and her grin even wider.

It is winter. I wish it would stay like this through the year.

An art in violence

(I 'meet' a lot of interesting minds in the course of working for a newspaper. Artists are a great proportion of those and some of the minds there can be very interesting indeed. here's one...)


Artist Praneet Soi uses the central reference point of the ‘angel of history’, the mythic vision described by Walter Benjamin, German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator and philosopher: "His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet…The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." Soi has crafted work that uses a form of political documentary to bring together the forces of war and globalisation, history and the future and presents his vision in Juggernaut, his new show

You present the trauma of war/disaster. Why?
I’ve been living in Europe in the past five years and before that in California. Especially after 9/11 there has been a huge amount of media coverage of a specific kind of violence, of terrorism, telling stories that are all about fundamentalists and extremism. What is coming out of it is very particular kinds of images - unrest in Baghdad, in Afghanistan, the blasts in London and Madrid and, of course, 9/11 itself. When I was in California, I began comparing these images and how they were shown. A very distinctly different lens has been put on these subjects. We have a different take on fundamentalists in India, because we have dealt with it for centuries.
I began to have a very personal interest in the subject. For me, the paintings were a kind of investigation into what makes these images symbolic. So the series – The Disasters of War – became a way to investigate how to look at these images, how certain images might reach symbol-hood and some may not. I am referencing Goya’s black and white (Disaster) series that showed the kind of violence unleashed by Napolean in Spain; there was a lot of destruction. Violence can be caused by the enforcement of some kind of democracy. This makes the images interesting and evokes questions: What does democracy mean? Why is the West pushing for democracy?

Why not happy images?
I am extremely positive; I do not feel pessimistic. But I am ambivalent. There is something very beautiful about progress, something sublime. There are so many forces, how can you choose to talk about them? I did the series in miniature format. It’s about war, but there could be a beauty behind it too. I have done other works that directly address the notion of progress, not war, as in a big painting called Juggernaut – which is, of course, the unstoppable force or ‘juggernaut’ of progress.

Why does political documentary, as it is called, influence you so strongly?
I am from Bengal, a Marxist state, surrounded by a certain kind of ideology. I am not Marxist, but you come out of Kolkata aligned somewhat left of centre. Then I went to Baroda, which is very political; then there was my California experience. It is not just politics, but how to make a contemporary image that connects with the social context that could be considered political.

Your work is said to present questions but provides no answers…
I am not providing a point of view. I am not saying through my images that something is good or bad. Government can also be very cold and not very nice. My imagery does not ask you to take a side, but to examine the phenomenon. Again, there is a sense of ambivalence. The work is meant to draw the viewer into the argument. I am not presenting a one-sided argument, but hoping it would throw up opinions.

Living in the Netherlands and in Kolkata, has Dutch painting influenced you?
Yes it has – especially 17th century Dutch painting, which is not narrative, but very descriptive, presenting interesting arguments. But the light and the landscape somehow finds its way into your work, wherever you are at that point in time.
Living in various places as I have and continue to do, certain aspects of these spaces are collaged together and so enter the language of my work. This notion of the collage not only underlines my existence as an artist who lives in Europe and India, but also enters the work in how the imagery is collaged together. It is through the collaging and juxtaposition of various imagery that the story of the show reveals itself to the viewer.

Sex appeal

I was sitting in the office waiting for the edits I needed to come in, when the always-on televisions flashed clips of actor Salman Khan at Madame Tussauds doing something or the other, his beefcake image on full show. One of the young women trainees gazing open-mouthedly at the screen sighed deeply and then almost shrieked, “He is sooooo sexy!” I looked up, saw Salman Khan looking at the wax model of his own starry self, and then went back to my work. But the concept of ‘sexy’ has been pinging in my mind for a while, more so after that squeaky sigh that the girl emitted, sounding vaguely like a cross between a fire-engine in a hurry and a very large bat.

What is ‘sexy’? To me, for years, it has been just one man, an actor I first saw on American television when I was in school. He played a detective-by-accident, a man with no clue what he was doing, but with a way of doing it that made women (and lots of other men) sigh longingly. He wore his designer suits with élan, smiled his way into more hearts and minds than he had any right to and wiggled his nicely shapes behind most enticingly when he ran, which I bet the scriptwriters wrote into each episode because they knew it would bring in the viewers. It certain kept me there, had Mother giggling girlishly and Karen looking more goofy-eyed than she would ever have done otherwise. The actor was Pierce Brosnan and the show was Remington Steele. We watched re-runs of re-runs of re-re-runs and never tired of wistfully viewing that wiggle. And because he was, to me, the definition of ‘sexy’, I even sat through screenings of dreary and dark movies where he played Irish terrorist, sidekick fiancé and much more.

And then came James Bond. Brosnan wiggled his way through all sorts of completely improbably adventures and stunts, enjoying himself (or so it seemed) while he battled the baddies and seduced the women, flew planes, drove stunning automobiles, blew things up and generally has a whale of a time. And we all sighed as he ran through the mayhem, his gorgeous face grimy but still gorgeous, his bottom still wiggling happily through it all. And we sat through The Thomas Crown Affair, where he rolled about with Rene Russo and we all looked on, green eyed and fuming, but still buggy about him. And we probably will stay that way even as he ages his way through the sequel to that film and more.

That is one version of ‘sexy’. Once upon a time, I was accused of liking some young man (I still don’t remember who) because he had long eyelashes that curled upwards. There was a dress I once fell for that I thought was ‘seriously sexy’, with a large and glorious frill that slid off my shoulders when I wore it. There is a design for a bracelet that I saw in the window of Gubelin in Geneva when I was a teenager and still believe to be the ultimate in ‘sexy’. The first Ferrari I saw on the autostrada just outside Naples elicited a fairly unanimous “Wow! Sexy!” from all of us in the family car in the next lane. And there was a certain chocolate mousse that I ate in a rooftop restaurant that echoes a softly luscious ‘sexy’ in my tastebuds even today….

But seriously, what is ‘sexy’ all about? Speaking as a woman, it almost mandates a male identity. Is it the way his eyes melt into warmth when he looks at you? Or is it the way he smiles as he reads your writing? Or even perhaps the way he argues passionately about why he needs a photograph of you in his wallet? Who knows. It’s all about what makes you go warm and fuzzy and smile idiotically when there is really nothing at all to smile about. And that’s what ‘sexy’ is...or should be.

And a car to match…

(The Indian media is all excitement about the new 'people's car' that represents a dream that industrialist Ratan Tata had. The Nano has finally been unveiled and will be available in a few months. Until then, there is one aspect of it that is not being talked about....)

After all the hype and with lots of hoopla, the new Tata small car is finally here. Well, not quite here, but by the end of the year it should be. And it will be a very good thing when it does get here, since it is perhaps the one accessory that my rather extensive fashion statement was so sorely missing. After all, it is small, neat, rounded, portable, with nice proportions of glass to paintwork, an ideal shape and size to tote around town on the occasional jaunt to look for new carpets or an artist to interview. Best of all, from my point of view, it comes in a nice range of hues, which means I can colour-coordinate my automobile to my shoes to my dress to my earrings.

This is not a new need for me. In fact, my family knows it well. Many years ago, when I was a mere child, the story goes (albeit perhaps apocryphally), I refused to ride in the car belonging to a family friend since it did not match with my sandals, which would have been a vivid red. Many years later, as a grown up who was gainfully employed in another city, I drove a car that was a nicely elegant pale gold, a colour that went so well with the gold-brown of the Indian skin, I explained to someone who wanted to know why I had not chosen my favourite red. And for our new family car, hopefully to be acquired this year, I fondly hope that it will be available in the delicate champagne (a lovely gilded peach-rose) that is the perfect offset for both wardrobe and complexion.

But this need to be matched has nothing to do with style; more with genetics. My mother, bless her chic soul, always wore accessories that toned with her clothes – from sandals to bangles to bindis, she made sure it presented a total harmonic picture. And she taught me to be that way too, making sure I had footwear in every possible colour to coordinate with the vast wardrobe that she accumulated for me. It is now an automatic response, almost a duty, for me to make sure that I – and Father with his socks and even Small Cat with her collars – am as properly turned out without her help.

So the Nano is just another feather in my cap…or accessory in my closet. I can ask for the car of whatever colour that matches with my slippers of whatever colour that match with my watchstrap of whatever colour for that particular day. And I can have the whole spectrum of those colours in my garage, since it will all be so affordable, easy to run, eco-friendly and, fabulously, easy to access.

Festive cheer

I went to the temple this morning. No, it was not a visit to do any praying, since that doesn’t do the trick for me, but it was to make sure that the traditional rituals of this time of year in the South Indian home – ours, actually, which is modified in every which way – are not neglected or ignored or forgotten. I did this last year as well, but far more successfully. This morning, it was a bit of a scramble, linguistically and time-wise, since I had little control over schedule, procedure and, unfortunately, it seemed my own tongue.

Next week it will be Pongal, the harvest festival. We have no fields to harvest, and do no harvesting, except perhaps from the pots of wheat grass grown outside the kitchen window for the edification (literally) of Small Cat. But we make sure that we follow the festival calendar, at least gastronomically, since that has always been the norm in our home. For Pongal, food means two kinds of the eponymous pongal – the ven-pongal, or savoury, ghee-laced blend of dal and rice punctuated with cracked pepper, mustard seeds and cashewnuts, and the sakkarai-pongal, the same dal and rice mixture cooked with milk and jaggery, aromatics like cardamom and saffron and lots of cashewnuts and raisins. I can make the former with little effort; the latter tends to daunt me somewhat, which means that I have never tried to do it myself at home because the labour-intensiveness makes me rather nervous.

So Father suggested last year that we get the sweet stuff that we both relish from the temple in central Mumbai known for its prasadam of sakkarai-pongal. I called around, got the number, managed to battle my own linguistic deficiencies and ordered enough to keep us happy and nicely rounded. It all worked out fine, everyone was happy and my spiritual conscience was assuaged, since I did a small prayer for Mother in the process of getting it all done.

But this time I was defeated. I called the temple yesterday, well in time I thought, since the festival is only mid-next week. A rather gruff gentleman who refused to speak anything but Tamil answered and demanded to know what I wanted and who I was. All this during a very long day at the paper, page-making interrupted by constant phone calls and queries and a tummy that wanted me to commandeer the dreadful offerings of junk food that drift past in the corridors after 5 o’clock in the evening. My Tamil completely and ignominiously failed. I was left stuttering incoherently, wondering how to get past the subject of who I was to what I wanted. I felt, in fact, a little like Oliver Twist, asking for more of something that I knew was a commodity that could be easily bought.

That is where Father came to the rescue. While his Tamil is perhaps only fractionally better than mine, he had the leisure and the mindspace to think about what he was saying and how to phrase it. He was also rather more compos mentis, less hassled and frazzled by the world at large and the sounds, sights and stresses of production time at a newspaper. So he made the appropriate arrangements, told me what to do and left me to it. This morning, I drove up to the temple in air-conditioned comfort, said my set-piece in Tamil that was decent and comprehensible, if not completely accurate and classical, and collected my prasadam after paying in my money and stating what my birth-star was. There seemed to be some kind of ceremony in progress, which had me running a little scared, so I did a quick round of the shrines, sent a thought up to Mother and fled.

My duty is done for the year. It is not likely that I will be at another temple again until that time comes around for me to start having menageries about tradition and ritual. And, in that hiatus, I could learn to relax and practice my language skills.

Battle with the bank

It is that time of year again, and I don’t mean anything to do with celebration. People are running around with furrowed brows and glowers that would rival a hungry alligator’s. and the papers and television commercial breaks are all about scams – aka investments – that can help you make some money instead of paying most of it to the government in…hold your breath…taxes. Even after having complained for years that I paid more in tax than I actually made, I am still fairly honest about declaring to the authorities the amount of money that I earn and allowing them to take what they need to out of my paychecks before I get to even see them. Which means a nice dent in any budget that I may dream of, be it vacations in Manhattan or new carpets that Small Cat can shed on, a Rolex for Father or a diamond the size of – if not the Ritz – a nicely sized pea for me. And by the time I have enough saved up for any of those, it is time to hand a good proportion of it over to the Tax Man. But I remain honest…more or less.

As a result of all this, when the office sends around a notice about investments, I jump to it. And jumping means forwarding the email to Father, who painfully works it all out and tells me where to sign what. Which I do, like a good and dutiful citizen who pays taxes even though she grumbles a bit about them. And to be a good daughter who does not want to tax (ha ha) her male parent too much, I volunteered to go to the bank to do at least a part of the aforementioned investing. It would not take that long, I said with greatly misplaced confidence. I could do it easy. All that had to be done was to hand in a form or two, sign in various places, smile sweetly at surly clerks and swish nonchalantly out of there without a care in the world since my conscience would be clear and my taxes paid…almost.

As I said before, HA HA!

If life were that simple, I would be in Manhattan wearing my diamonds and asking Father for the time as seen on his Rolex while Small Cat burrowed under new silk carpets looking for her toys.

I went nice and early to the bank. Or tried to. It took a while, since everyone and their cousins were going in the same direction that I was and all of them wanted to get there first. So in good Mumbaiyya driving style, they all crowded and pushed into the same lane and honked madly as they inched forward in the rather futile hope of realising their unilateral ambition. By the time we got to the bank, I was more than a little frazzled and the driver was falling asleep at the wheel. I told him I would be about 15 minutes and walked in.

It has changed. The bank that I had been a customer of since I was about 11 years old had become all modern and futuristic. I was stopped at the door that had never been there before and asked to take a token by a security guard who needed to either learn some manners or understand that I was not the child he addressed me as. I punched the button he demanded and took the token he asked me to. And then I looked for someone, anyone, who looked as though they could help me. No one would, maybe no one could. Finally, a sweet short stout gentleman who had been most kind on a recent visit rescued me and told me what form to fill in how, which check to make out to what account and where to sign. I did all that and then was shown to a line I needed to stand in.

I stood. And stood. And stood. Then I sat, since I was wearing heels and my feet started hurting. And I sat and sat. Finally, after I glared at the Chief Manager, he came out of his cabin and asked me what I was waiting for, in a very polite and vaguely oily tone. I told him. He offered me a chair. And another. Then bustled off to see what the hold-up was. On his way there, he waved me to yet another chair. Then some minion came bustling up with a chair I had never met or seen before and asked me to sit down. The Chief Manager came past again. Another chair was shoved in my general direction. And, just when I was stepping forward to finish my work at the counter with the very bad-tempered clerk behind the glass, a security person (a woman this time) rushed up wheeling another chair that she made valiant attempts to shove beneath my bottom.

My work was finally done. By which time Father had got into the act, and called the Chief Manager, who was back in his cabin and bowing and scraping desperately, sweating slightly at the edges as he listened to Father’s most acerbic best over the fibre optic cable from the other end of the city. I popped my head into that same cabin, handed over my business card and said that ever since I had become a customer at the bank, it had gone gradually from decent to awful. I then smiled sweetly at the most uncomfortable Chief Manager and left.

It was only when I was in the car that the thought struck me: I could have collected all the chairs and sold them. The money would have paid my taxes, even though it would probably not finance a vacation in Manhattan.

Gem of a day

It happened during the week that my friend Karen came to visit us from Denver. It had been a few years since we had met, but had we kept in touch off and on – more on than off – ever since we first met through a bathroom door in the college dorm so many years ago. My visits to her home had been nicely balanced by her visits to mine, and our holidays together, albeit brief, had been memorable. Since this was the second time she was coming to my city and she had little time to spend in it, leave alone to wander around the country, we decided to concentrate our energies and attention to what we could do during the day, coming back home to roost every evening. A lot of the travel time we had in the car, waiting in traffic jams for the lights to change or bouncing about while the driver negotiated potholes, was spent in excited chatter about everything new and familiar, each of us learning something from each encounter and relearning a lot that had slipped into the recesses of time and memory.

One day Father took us to see a gem dealer, one that I had heard about for years and had even spoken to, but never met. He had a small office deep in the old part of the city, very close to where the presiding deity, Mumba Devi, had her abode. Karen and I walked there to meet Father after doing some desultory shopping in the main market, and dodged cows, people and sleazebags alike, doing agile twists, turns and side-tracks to avoid being bumped, felt up or just plain commented at. Every now and then – to her disconcernment, she insisted – I would grab my friend’s arm or hand and yank her in the direction that I wanted her to go; only later, after I explained, did she understand that it would have taken a while for me to explain and it was far easier and quicker to just hold and pull. We did want to go into the temple and say hi to the Goddess that Karen had met on her earlier visit, but were daunted by the crowds of loitering young men who insisted on trying to attract our attention and make comments that were descriptive, to put it mildly.

But finally we found the place we had to rendezvous at. It was in a not-too-high and very dilapidated building, one that I would never have imagined to be holding so much of such high value. After some hesitation and my carefully asking the person who seemed to be most respectable and least lecherous, we walked in. The entrance was narrow, almost like a dingy alleyway between two walls. The elevator was the old fashioned kind, one with sliding doors that had to be pulled open and shut. We walked up uneven, dirty, slippery stairs to a small door in one wall. The place was dimly lit and dank, smelling of stale food and perhaps a rat or two. I rang the doorbell and vaguely felt someone staring at me. From the seemingly fragile wooden door an electronic eye looked sternly at us, deemed us fit for entry and buzzed us in. In a very small and narrow foyer that was a-drip with laminate, we had to take off our sandals and wait a second or two before we pushed open a heavy door into a room where Father sat across a long desk from three other men.

The Big Man had a seat near the window. He and his obvious junior, a large and smiling-faced moustached gentleman, beamed fondly at me and stared curiously at the orange-haired visitor I had brought in. we were offered water, something cold, something hot, something to eat perhaps? But we had other business there; it was getting close to lunchtime and I was set on finishing what I had come for and then heading food-wards. So it was down to the wire. The Big Man emptied packet after packet of the most exquisite gemstones – emeralds, rubies, tanzanite, alexandrite, pearls…He practically flung ropes of preciousness at me and I looked and felt and wondered. It was a bewildering embarrassment of riches that made my head spin and my acquisitive instincts long to run helter-skelter out of there. So much was frightening. And all I wanted was something small, something – on the scale of what we were being shown – so minor that it would be like one grain of rice in the plenty cooked for a feast. I saw, managed to ask intelligent questions, and made my decision as fast as I could. And then, we left, sweating slightly at the stress of the whole deal and excited at the results.

A violation

The world is a shocking place to live in and I am reminded of it every so often, when something happens that creates a buzz of major proportions. Like has happened in Mumbai over the past couple of days. Photographers from a newspaper (not ours) took some horrendous pictures of four people being pushed around by a large group of unruly men just outside a multi-star hotel in the western suburbs of the city. There was a married couple and another woman and man, all fairly young, all non-residents from the United States. The men were shoved aside while the women were heckled, then felt up, then their clothes disarrayed. One of the photos - perhaps the most awful of the lot - showed one of the girls on the ground with her skirt pulled up, her underwear on display for all the paper’s readers to see. These images were picked up by various media all over the country and the matter dissected and discussed to the point of boredom.

Today’s headlines announced that the perpetrators had been caught, or at least identified. But the likelihood of them being released and not indicted in any way is high, since the people who were molested have flown back to their own homes. They refused to file an official complaint with the police, since all they wanted to do was forget about it and get on with their own lives. It has been the righteous – sometimes even self-righteous – citizenry of the Mumbai who has followed the whole sorry incident up, mustering up evidence, pushing the police to work on the case, making sure the media relentlessly covered it and doing their best - and worst – to bring the ‘criminals’, as they in a way, to book.

But overall, with all the clamour of the story, the question remains: Whose fault was it? The story goes that these four came out of the hotel and were wandering down the road to where they were staying. They were obviously drunk, say the journalists. A crowd of men, also reportedly rather happily high, started heckling the women, making comments that were of a sexual nature. One of the women retaliated. And there it all began, progressing to utter humiliation and very public pain for the two girls, one newly married, while the men – one of them the husband - could do nothing to help. The public at large took over, with little help from the lone policeman in the vicinity and none from the staff of the hotel, though there should have been some security guards at the entrance, one presumes.

The reaction of readers and watchers – since the story has been on television all through – has been fairly clear. The women feel that they should have the freedom to be what they are and if they are in any way provocative, they should be responsible for their own actions and willing to face the consequences. The men are almost unanimous in their opinion that men are creeps, badly behaved, to say the least, and should learn how to treat women. Both are right, I presume. Or perhaps neither is.

I have my own views on this whole matter, as will anyone who wants to bother to think about it. For me, it does not make sense to behave in a manner that invites trouble, though I have done my share of it. Whether it is dressing provocatively and unsuitably in context or whether it is saying what should not be said in certain circumstances, violating that mandate will only result in unpleasantness. A woman must always remember that she is under a constraint in this country, however modern and liberal a city like Mumbai may be. To wander about on the streets while not completely aware of the situation and yourself is just asking for nastiness. And to attract the attention of a group of people who are ready and willing for a fight is sheer stupidity. I wonder if the young women who went through a traumatic end to a new year’s celebration and a very new set of relationships have understood that yet.

A violation

The world is a shocking place to live in and I am reminded of it every so often, when something happens that creates a buzz of major proportions. Like has happened in Mumbai over the past couple of days. Photographers from a newspaper (not ours) took some horrendous pictures of four people being pushed around by a large group of unruly men just outside a multi-star hotel in the western suburbs of the city. There was a married couple and another woman and man, all fairly young, all non-residents from the United States. The men were shoved aside while the women were heckled, then felt up, then their clothes disarrayed. One of the photos - perhaps the most awful of the lot - showed one of the girls on the ground with her skirt pulled up, her underwear on display for all the paper’s readers to see. These images were picked up by various media all over the country and the matter dissected and discussed to the point of boredom.

Today’s headlines announced that the perpetrators had been caught, or at least identified. But the likelihood of them being released and not indicted in any way is high, since the people who were molested have flown back to their own homes. They refused to file an official complaint with the police, since all they wanted to do was forget about it and get on with their own lives. It has been the righteous – sometimes even self-righteous – citizenry of the Mumbai who has followed the whole sorry incident up, mustering up evidence, pushing the police to work on the case, making sure the media relentlessly covered it and doing their best - and worst – to bring the ‘criminals’, as they in a way, to book.

But overall, with all the clamour of the story, the question remains: Whose fault was it? The story goes that these four came out of the hotel and were wandering down the road to where they were staying. They were obviously drunk, say the journalists. A crowd of men, also reportedly rather happily high, started heckling the women, making comments that were of a sexual nature. One of the women retaliated. And there it all began, progressing to utter humiliation and very public pain for the two girls, one newly married, while the men – one of them the husband - could do nothing to help. The public at large took over, with little help from the lone policeman in the vicinity and none from the staff of the hotel, though there should have been some security guards at the entrance, one presumes.

The reaction of readers and watchers – since the story has been on television all through – has been fairly clear. The women feel that they should have the freedom to be what they are and if they are in any way provocative, they should be responsible for their own actions and willing to face the consequences. The men are almost unanimous in their opinion that men are creeps, badly behaved, to say the least, and should learn how to treat women. Both are right, I presume. Or perhaps neither is.

I have my own views on this whole matter, as will anyone who wants to bother to think about it. For me, it does not make sense to behave in a manner that invites trouble, though I have done my share of it. Whether it is dressing provocatively and unsuitably in context or whether it is saying what should not be said in certain circumstances, violating that mandate will only result in unpleasantness. A woman must always remember that she is under a constraint in this country, however modern and liberal a city like Mumbai may be. To wander about on the streets while not completely aware of the situation and yourself is just asking for nastiness. And to attract the attention of a group of people who are ready and willing for a fight is sheer stupidity. I wonder if the young women who went through a traumatic end to a new year’s celebration and a very new set of relationships have understood that yet.

Going forward

Over the past few days I have been getting a lot of text messages on my mobile phone wishing me and my family well for the New Year. These have ranged from simple greetings for 2008 to screen-loads of text to make sure all bases are covered, from my health to my wealth, my love, my life and, in one funny one, even my eating habits. And all along there has been a general air of bonhomie and a surety that each one of those smses are forwards, none original and custom-composed for me. In fact, I got quite a few repeats, with the same message from different people just seconds apart, showing how what goes around inevitably comes around again within a very short span of time.

Forwards are like that. I get plenty of them on email, too, and have set up a nice filtering system that weeds out many of the ones that send me a little non-compos with their text and even their pictures. Today, in fact, a colleague sent me a mail that showed a rather strained gentleman contorting his face to bite his own nose. I never thought it was possible. More important, I never thought that anyone would even want to try it. And why would they do it with people watching long enough to photograph each stage of the seemingly very painful process? It has me wondering why people do things like this. And wondering even more why people would expect me to be even remotely interested in seeing it happen.

Perhaps the more common forwards in this country are the religiously referenced ones. At almost any time of the year a picture-heavy mail – usually a Powerpoint presentation - will clog up my official inbox and prevent other more important communication coming through. It is most irritating, but since it invariably involves one or the other of our 33 million or so gods, one cannot protest too loudly or too vehemently without upsetting someone along the way. But I really am not religious, I say mildly, and then delete the mail after a cursory scan. Sometimes, when it is my favourite God, Ganesha, I might just open the mail to check what the pictures are; they can be really cute and I occasionally will lower my strictly retained walls and forward them to close friends.

But there ere other mails that will never wing their way through cyberspace to my friends, family and assorted acquaintances. These are the ‘send-this-to-at-least-seven-people-to-see-a-favourable-change-in-your-life-in-just-five-days mails that have come through a convoluted series of forwards into my mailbox, usually sent to me by someone who not only should know better than to believe this kind of guff, but also should know that I hate getting it. What I truly deplore, however, is the kind of mail that tells me about the courage of some little girl who died, or some little boy who saved his world from sure destruction of some kind. For some odd reason I could probably explain if I wanted to dig into my own psyche, I can never resist reading these stories and, even as they make me feel a kind of ‘awwwwwwwwwwwww’ feeling, I am disgusted at myself to check out what is blatant emotional blackmail of sorts.

And then there are the sms forwards that I abhor with every synapse. These are the incredibly male chauvinistic, sexually loaded, often smutty messages that purport to be funny. They are far from it. Just horrible reflections of minds I prefer not to know exist in my life.

HAPPY 2008!

It’s that time of year again. I say that every time something date-worthy happens, which is almost once a month, if I calculate right but, being rather number-dyslexic, I could be way off the mark I am really aiming at. It is January 1, 2008, which will take some getting used to, as it always does. For almost 12 months now, I have been dating things 2007; I say ‘almost’ because it took a little while to get used to the fact that it was 2007 and no longer 2006. At work, it doesn’t really matter, since other people do most of that date stuff and anyway the computers do it automatically. And at home, why would I need to know what year it is, except when I am filling in checks, which I rarely need to do since everything became direct debit.

But 2008 is, as Father pointed out, a leap year. Which means that various friends who are born on February 29 will have a birthday – disconcertingly, they seem to be somehow younger than me, even though they actually came to this planet (this is assuming the extra-terrestrial origin of life theory) many years before I did. It also means that women have that traditionally (albeit a western concept) conferred freedom of being able to ask men for what they want in the whole man-woman thing, be it marriage or a date. I have seen many leap years come and go and no one that I know, even myself, has ever done anything like that. In reality, we do not need a special year that comes just once in four to ask for what we want; we are of a different ilk – we just take it, most often than not doing the polite thing if we feel like and saying a cursory ‘please’ just before we reach out and grab hold.

But in this new year, I am told, I am supposed to decide to do something. In other words, make a resolution. I never bother, because I never keep to it more than for a day or two, be it to never again play Solitaire when I am at work (of anywhere else, since it is a perniciously addictive game that should never have been invented or loaded on to computers) or to stay far away from that favourite shoe shop where I know my friend will create exactly the heel that I have always wanted when I want it. I rarely remember what the resolution is, never mind keep it, since I cannot be bothered to search my memory for a clue or four to figure it out. And since that aforementioned resolution is often made as a huge and giggle-some joke when I am chatting online or on the phone or across the lunch table with a close friend, I never take it all as seriously as perhaps I am supposed to do. Which means that any resolution I could make under those circumstances would inevitably be broken before the last fullstop is added to the sentence in which I make it.

But this year – surprise, surprise! – I actually do have a resolution. It has nothing to do with fibre, let me assure all those who believe that that is the sole obsession of my existence. It has nothing to do with getting back into shape and fitting into those extremely to-die-for floral-printed jeans, though that is part of my great plan for the next few months. And it has absolutely nothing to do with being more polite to people I do not like and gnashing my crocodile pearly whites at all those who believe that they should know me or, better yet, that I should know them. Those are incidentals. My resolve is more my own, nothing to do with anyone else, not really. I am going to grow up, at last, painful though the process has been and will continue to be. I will become less accepting, less trusting and less forgiving, more responsible, more proactive and far more analytical before I do anything, be it buying diamonds or frying fries or letting people into my life.

I think it’s called looking before I leap. And in this particular year, it seems moot.