Wednesday, October 20, 2010

leading on and being lead
commotions in this ol' head
jumping over the hurdles
and fixing the errors
I see a new face
every time I look in the mirror

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

des-tiny

Can’t believe the tirade I threw at our society a few days ago on my blog. The inane insults that I’ve have had to go through just to live on for another day and grow up have sure made me irascible.
Most around me will say it was my destiny; I wouldn’t say much about destiny except that for some it is used as a term to justify “move on” for others “walk all over”. I’ll kill you and say, “sigh! He/she was destined to die.” Sure sounds ridiculous but the staunch believers of destiny would say “if I die by your hands then, it was destined to happen”. Sure there’s no way to disprove that.
For me life is about choices; easy, difficult, calculated, pleasurable, painful choices. I needn’t justify the past as destiny. For me it takes more sense to analyze the course that life took due to the choices that I, and the people around me, made. That however seems to be a difficult way to lead life because it requires undertaking a lot of responsibility and answerability. I’ve just found the path, treading on it is difficult but I’m not gonna give up.
When I appeared for the PhD interview at the PGI, way back in 2005, and told one of the PIs there that I was born in PGI, the instantaneous “destiny syndrome” kicked in within me and the PI as well. What a pleasant thought, I’d do my PhD at the same place I was born. Funny how I disliked my short stay in the PGI that I’m glad I never pursued PhD there. In fact after seeing the maternity ward one day I was dumbfound, “THAT’S THE KINDA PLACE I WAS BORN IN? I hope it was less crowded (and a bit cleaner) back then”
Or that I ended up buying the bike I was fierce opponent of. Here’s another one, a nut case stops me in the middle of the road to click a picture of my bike. The stars were just in the right place that I happened to be in that place that night, a place where I’d normally never be seen and at that hour, and that too happened because the clutch wire of my bike broke down. And I’d exchange numbers with this person, something I never do. End up falling in love and somehow the course of her life changes and we’re going steady and undergoing the most complicated interpersonal education of my life till date…and then steadily away from each other.
Or that I made my profile at a wedding portal and a “kind of an” interesting person shows interest in me and I accept her offer by clicking a button, just like I casually had for eight other women who’d shown interest. Then I think its destiny and take the first cheap flight to a city more than two thousand kilometers away from mine to meet her. And the very first night she take me out, the first day that she’s met me, she’s hardly covered with clothes. I have the most terrorizing experience that I never could tell her about how I felt while she was feeling good! But then again, she said that that’s the way people dress around in Bangalore and true maybe I am from a backward place called Chandigarh but what the heck, I didn’t see anyone else dressed up like that in Bangalore either, maybe she’s disillusioned. Had I not believed so much in destiny, I’d saved a good amount of money by now.
Yeah but my experiences have been the kinds I’d never thought I’d get to experience, or even that they existed. So call it destiny, or call it imprudent choices, there's nothing of the past that I wish to change.
It’s time to calculate affordability when time, money and not to forget, a life is at stake.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Those Serpentine Roads

It was another trip down memory lane with her this evening, a short ride through those roads and avenues and those streets from not-so-long-ago yet from the times that can aptly be called The Past. It felt good and not burdened and I didn’t feel that lump in my throat that I did on an earlier occasion. We’re lovers no more, we’re not friends either. Today we were like two free souls that were charting the paths that we moved through in the past. I never thought we could hang around like that. Anyway we were just out for a very short while; took a detour on my way back home and I was late anyway so I had to rush.

There’s this ominous thought in my head (even right now) that I’m gonna break down and start to feel that remorse again, the utter helpless remorse of having lost her. However I take a deep breath and take solace in the fact that if “we” were foolish enough to have lost something that was so dear, we need to pay the ultimate price and not repeat those mistakes in life. True also is the fact that she’s still in there and this space where she sits will only be freed once she goes away, once she’s out of sight, which will be very soon. I feel sad thinking that she’ll be gone soon but I’m happy too that I will finally let her go and gradually her memories will fade (will they ever?). Maybe they’ll just take a back seat and make way for more important aspects of life and more important relations too. I wish her well. I will not let such beautiful memories poison my life.

Speaking of poison, I just watched a guy who got bitten by a rattler on Discovery Chanel. They say a snake can strike out to a distance from half to two-thirds its body length. This one was an eight-footer so it had quite a reach. It dug its big viper fangs just a wee bit into the hand of the guy who’d picked him up (!!). The guy said it didn’t hurt so much for a minute but then when the pain kicked in, it was unbearable and his hand started to swell up. He described it as feeling like his hand was being minced in a meat-mincer. By the time he reached a hospital his system had started to shut down. Medics jumped in to save his life first and after declaring him stable, they concentrated on his hand which had become necrotic by now. His flesh had dissolved and one could see through his hand it was bleeding profusely and the venom was still acting and dissolving more flesh. He was administered antivenin but that could only stop further damage, what had already occurred couldn’t be reverted. Rattler venom can dissolve bones as well; pity the animals/rodents it feeds on, they’re well digested and dissolved from inside by the time the snake starts to ingest them. The medics pressurized him to allow them to amputate his hand but he refused. The video was horrific, he was all needeled with drips in one hand and the other one looked like rotten meat and he was writhing in pain. The docs did the best they could and saved his hand, saved being a relative term. His thumb joint got almost dissolved and couldn’t be fixed in a normal position, and the same happened to his index and middle fingers, all of which are almost nonfunctional. His ring finger and small finger are normal though but I guess he still can’t play guitar if he used to and if was right handed i.e. Sad but true, time and chance, in a fleeting moment, can alter the course of your life, like what happened to my dad when he met with that horrific accident when a bus ran over his foot.

Anyway, time flies and dad’s ok, as ok as he could’ve been after an accident like that, I do miss his big toe and the other toe next to it. As a child, I remember cutting his nails. I’ve never talked to him about it for I wonder how much he misses it himself. Sure, time flies and so does a bot-fly, an insect of the rainforest that lays its eggs on mosquitoes. When the mosquitoes bite humans and other creatures, they lodge the bot-fly eggs on the skin. The moisture and nutrients on the skin cause the eggs to hatch and the larvae bore through the skin and start to eat the flesh inside. The keep digging and keep eating. This happened to an American guy who’d gone to roam the South American wilderness. Five weeks after he’d returned to the US, his two-hundred odd bite-marks had subsided cept two that kept growing big and started to ooze blood and other strange fluids. The docs in the US gave him IV antibiotics and discharged him. Apparently a case in the whole of the US had never been reported before and no one suspected a case. The guy decided to tape up the holes in his legs one night. When he woke up the next morning one of the tapes had come one and he saw something wiggle from the hole. Apparently the bot fly larvae requires copious amount of oxygen unlike some other parasites of the gut, like the tape worm. The guy quickly switched his video camera on, grabbed forceps and pulled the wiggly thing out of the hole in his leg, it was half an inch big and looked quite annoyed. Now this guy was motivated to pull the other one out as well so he covered up the other hole with large amount of Vaseline. The bug wiggled out a big but no sooner had the guy caught hold of him, he escaped back into the hole in his leg and buried itself deeper, chewing into his inner flesh while doing so. The guy screamed in pain but was determined and repeated the procedure, this time he grabbed the worm well and what followed was a tug-of-war with the guy pulling the larva out and the larva holding on to the inside of his flesh with great strength. Slowly and surely the guy pulled it out, this one was thrice the length and fatness of the first one. It wasn’t a pretty sight at all but hats off to the guy for his guts.
Sometimes it so happens that the experts cannot figure the problem out and prescribe a treatment that doesn’t cure. A couple of thousand bucks, countless hours and a spike in stress levels has been the cost of the wobble in my bike. A condition that no one till date has been able to solve. 42 emails exchanged with the bullet guru of the world, Pete Snidal and he’s run of ideas too. My bike still wobbles, without letting out the scene of crime. No bullet mechanic that exists in Chandigarh has been able to fix it. But I think I finally see the wiggly end of the larva. When this is done, I’ll educate a couple of hundred mechanics about the strange, uncommon problem they probably never faced but never gave a second thought to look into because they were all too busy making a quick buck doing the mundane stuff. I don’t blame them, not like I’d kept a prize money for the one that cures my bike but I see it happening at the first chance that I get to fix it and how sweet will that feel when I finally ride my stable bike.

There’s so much in life to stay happy about and to stay excited about. I’m learning that you shouldn’t pick up a big rattler on the road, you not throw caution to the wind when you’re out exploring the unknown, you should observe your surroundings and the people with a keener eye, and last but not least, you shouldn’t let beautiful memories poison the happiness in your life.

I can smile about today evening’s little outing with her without a heavy heart. I still can’t believe we didn’t make it, but then I must accept it. Goodbye, wish life free of serpents, bot-flies or any other unhappiness.

Monday, October 11, 2010

My foot

Ramlila sounds outside are blaring. I wonder why I don't feel the need to take a closer look. When was the last time I watched ramlila? I guess it was way back when I was younger than ten and maybe no more than twice back then also. I couldn't understand much owning to the loudspeakers of the time being acoustically poor. Extremely loud sounds make me uncomfortable. Back then the sets, the actors, the attire and all the paraphernalia seemed royal and grandiose. As I grew up and observed better—sounds counter-intuitive doesn't it—I reckoned that all those things that I found grand as a kid were actually quite shabby. However that only raised the respect I have for these artists; keeping a tradition alive through thick and thin of modern world. I do wish they were a little less blaring though.

Haven't times changed, I remember when Reebok and Nike were officially launched in India. I think that was way back in 1996-97. I had friends who wore these shoes before they were launched in India, courtesy their extended family in the western world. I remember the most inexpensive shoe by these companies was priced at Rs. 2500/-, these days you have a few shoes priced lesser than that. I'm talking about the time when the most expensive Indian sports shoe was a liberty Force-10 that was a full leather upper with a great rubber sole priced at around 400 bucks, compared to that, "air-bags in soles" was a alien idea that left jaws hanging. We'd heard about Michael Jordan as young basketball players, a few with Cable-TVs in their homes, and others at the former's homes, had watched him play. Those towering American basketball players wore shorts and vests that seemed affordable (or so we thought!) but we never missed those big sneakers while watching them dunk or dribble or anything. When I saw Jordan in a Nike Ad, I saw Jordan, then I saw the shoes and all the gimmicks that they were embellished with.

"Beautiful, I wonder what those feel like on the feet." I thought to myself while watching Jordan in an overtly aggressive pose ready to dunk the ball into the dungeon of eternity.

Rs. 300/- the price of an Action Shoe that was very popular for nearly a decade and a half till the Big-Feet stepped into India. Basketball is a high impact game for the joints especially when the only courts that we had were cemented and the only shoes that were all wore provided negligible cushioning, actually the rubber soles of a bathroom slipper would provide better cushioning than the shoes that we guys at the Sector-46 Stadium owned. Thankfully most of us were skinny 14year olds, not carrying too much weight to hurt out joints so bad. Action, a shoe my dad found overtly expensive and therefore would never buy me one.

Watching these cool phoren sneakers, Indian companies decided to give them a run for their money and came up with a brand called Tuffs. A pair of these Action priced shoes, looked like a Nike on display, it even felt comfortable (for a week or so), till it proved that cheap rexin couldn't match pure leather and that cheap soles actually mean cheap "souls" of the Indian manufacturer that could make you feel happy for a week then leave you in lurch staring at your sneakers, the beauty and comfort of which seemed to have sneaked away. So a month down the line of owning a pair of Tuffs, I stared at them in disbelief. My dad was finally convinced to buy me a pair...and they let me down. Two months down the line they looked like very funny and flaccid gunny bags with cream poured over them (that was the design) on my feet . I couldn't understand quite well back then that if the price of a Tuffs around one-tenth that of a Nike, they were actually supplying one-twentieth the quality. It didn't matter because quality-wise it wasn't in the league anywhere close to the international brands. They were just playing on the mind of the boy from a middle class family who couldn't afford Nikes but desperately wished to own one since everyone around him had them (for me my dad was the devil himself for not buying me those). In a way these shoes was some kind of a counterfeit, they looked like those to make you buy them but then they run flat before they've bedded your feet in. You can't play basketball wearing Tuffs without wearing them out in a jiffy.

Anyway, I grew up. Ma sent me money from the middle-east and I finally bought my first pair of truly international shoes: Adidas. They were beautiful and they were comfortable and they were good for me because I'd grown very fat and therefore my joints needed cushioning from my body-weight. Basketball days were long over but the appetite had grown. Adidas cushioned me very well and I grew fatter eating the phoren Kraft Cheese (oh! I could "down" a glass of that and still want more for the rest of my life) and Kit-Kats and Mars and Hersheys and whatnot. Ma wanted me to have everything that I yearned for and the more I had it, the more I yearned for it.

Nothing against the shoes, they were all great, the Reeboks, the Nikes, the Adidas that I bought from the money ma sent me. Dad would've had a fit if he ever knew the price of those shoes; if Rs 300/- was expensive, he would've made me wear the Rs 3500/- shoes in my hands, maybe even kept them on a display in the house. I just took the 300 odd bucks from him, put in another 3000 odd bucks and buy the shoes and tell him they were for 300. He never found out, he was least bothered so long as I didn't bug him to go shopping for them with him.

Only around 4 years ago did I watch on Discovery Chanel that extra cushioning in
shoes was actually bad for day to day use. Of course they were not talking about morbidly obese people or ones with joint condition and the likes. For a normal healthy human body, walking barefoot strengthens the muscles and tendons of the foot and the legs. It is now known that wearing extra cushioned shoes makes us place out body weight on the wrong side of the foot which is detrimental to the limb health and can even put unnecessary pressure at the wrong places in the spine.

I reckon that as much as it was about owning a pair of good-looking comfy shoes, it was more about "this is gonna make me look more acceptable to them" back then.
At 30, I do like owning a pair good shoes but I surely don't mind walking barefoot if I feel like, caring the least about what people would say, for me, that's been the best gift of growing up, to not care too much about superficial stuff...beyond a certain degree! ;)

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Bigots

I don't know how I landed up on the topic of Racism while looking for guitar lessons on youtube. I think the connection went something like this -> video guitar lessons -> America's got Talent -> America's Next top model -> Tyra Banks -> Tyra Bank's interview with incredible racist family. It was surely incredible watching the White-Supremacists talk about ridding America of all but white people and how they were ready to do "all it takes" for that.
Thoughts scampered about and I thought of racism in India. Not many fair skinned Indians in India understand that they too are not considered White. They’d hold the banner of the Indo Aryans and fight for their White right and claim it, at least in India. When they are discriminated against, they pick the banner or the Ancient Indian Mysticism and how we’re culturally and socially superior over any other civilization in the world.
People talk comfortably and openly about it about it as an accepted norm. Of course I know how hard it has been growing up dark skinned. MAN! It's merely been a decade since I've realized that I'm human too; before that I was convinced otherwise by the society. Mocking, laughing and joking about it are prevalent and jokes on skin color in standup comedy and cinema induces an unusually high tickle in the audience. At the end of the day, they blame the British for most things like the India-Pak tension, POK, racism etc. I can't say about POK but surely the British were not responsible for the development of the caste system in India. And of course the high caste being much fairer than the lower caste and the whole mythological concept of the different caste emerged from different body parts of Lord Bramha castes them into the dungeons of inequality forever. No offence to any religion, all religions have the “weird” element in them.
When it comes to color discrimination, the predominantly dark-skinned South Indians are no better. The Tam-Brahm (Tamil Brahmins) craze is quite obvious and I wonder if it’s a coincidence that they’re light skinned as well. I recently met a Tam-Brahm who works with the Merchant Navy (at a friend’s wedding) who was giving in depth details of how the Tam-Brahms are “white” to an intently curious North Indian friend’s mother. Ah! It was nice to know that they actually had a connection; they were all “White Indians”!
Growing up in Chandigarh in a mostly closed environment, with my parents never sensitizing me about it, the discrimination was very confusing. My mother’s north Indian so I neither felt alienated to a fair North Indian nor to a dark South Indian like my dad. When I was discriminated against— no sooner that I’d stepped outside the house, earliest memories go back to kindergarten— it was very confusing as to why people were being nasty to me because of my skin color; my fair mother loved me more than own self.
Growing up gifted me its own set of experiences. Meeting people brought up in Punjab, Haryana and Himachal (unlike ones that were brought up in Chandigarh who were a wee bit milder) was a revelation about the level of caste discrimination in conjunction with color discrimination. It was unbelievable initially and I found out that most guys liked me (frankly because I’d grown pretty big and fat back then and looked dangerous) but as soon as they’d find out that I’m a Christian, they’d step back and inquire if I was Scheduled Caste (of course from other friends of mine) and when they’d find out that I wasn’t, things would be hunky-dory and I befriended a lot of such people trying to gain acceptance in the "society". Had I belonged to the SC community, my life would’ve taken a very different course. So closed are their minds that they’d inadvertently discriminate when they go and meet destitute children and have that extra little liking and conversation with the lighter tones. Kids sense this very easily and so starts the vicious cycle all over again.
Joining PhD I thought I was over and done with meeting bigots of this kind but I was so wrong. Here I came across bigots that defended their bigotry with “logic”. These were educated and many of them, rich people. The Bigotry was of a level I hadn't heard of before and I realized I was living with these people, had grown up with them and though they loved me (I’d say that without doubt), I had just grown on them and if I were a stranger who would just cross their path, they’d have very different views about me if they happened to see me. It’s not in their DNA, it is taught early on, it is taught with accuracy and it’s taught with passion and it gets so deeply ingrained that they don’t even know they’re racists. For them it’s not racism, it is the right thing and they don’t even know that it is a representation of Right-Wing fascists.
Be it sophisticated Army officers to high class Bank managers and doctors at high positions, (and to some degree my own parents) all sing the songs of color and caste. The day-to-day conversations and jokes are insinuated with such “facts”. So is TV, so are advertisements, so is the cinema, all conjuring up and cementing the bigoted mindsets such that it always stays as a norm. It’s so damn acceptable that if you question them, they’ll start giving you reasons without compunctions.
So how come when these Superior Indians face racism outside, they don't come back to teach their buddies that this is all wrong? Well some of them do. I have seen one extreme racial bigot (who was a good friend of mine!) transform after staying for 8 years in Canada but true also is that fact that many don't. This Punjabi Jatt boy worked hard and struggled (doing odd jobs to make a living and battling drug addiction that he overcame) to finally make things work for himself and his bigoted views had changed. Of course when it came to marriage, the parental bride requirement was stereotypical to an extreme but what the heck, we all want “Good Things” for our children don’t we? It was a pleasant surprise to meet him and interact with him after those many years though. I wonder how many actually change like that.

There are definitely a handful few who have been liberated by education; friends that don’t talk and think like their parents. At least a few and I hope that there’s still hope.

Here’s link to the accepted bigotry that is well funded and well propagated by us, you can read most comments under the article to know how unaware people are while they are in the very act of bigotry:
http://www.internationalpoliticalwill.com/2010/01/indias-popular-fairness-cream-a-sign-of-deep-racism/

http://www.indianeye.org/2008/01/12/unfair-and-lowly-fairness-creams-and-racist-tones/comment-page-1/#comment-21726

http://www.topix.com/forum/world/india/TBI601AH1TDCQ34KA

Friday, October 08, 2010

this and that

I was watching a very interesting serial on skyscrapers on History Channel and was amazed at the inception of the concept. About how stone couldn't be used as a material to build very tall building owing to it's weight and about how steel and concrete revolutionized the heights to which a skyscraper could go. Also about how the mammoths are kept from sinking into the soil under their own weight, how cooling is achieved and how these buildings are made safe from the elements of high wind and earthquakes.

As I flipped the channel to Discovery, I got to watch "The Detonators" and saw the art and science of tearing down old big buildings by implosions (inward explosions).

Both the architects and the detonators talked about their subjects like there was nothing more to the world than their job; great to see the level of passion there.

Thursday, October 07, 2010

unending endings

Yeah, it's not the end.

Season of "mellow fruitlessness" will give way to winters soon. Soon the holiday season will be around the corner, soon there will be cake-making, drinking and eating and the emptiness covered with noises and carols and praise & worship; Jesus is born, let's eat, drink and make merry! I too will enter my thirty-first year of life soon.

Soon the day will start to lose the battle to the night which will become longer and colder and more silent. Staring out of the open window, there will be no creaking of the crickets and other insects, or even people strolling around, neither will there be the noises of the ACs and the fans to mask-out the deathly silence. My numb nose will smell nothing, the cold breeze will blow on my face bringing respite from the silence by shaking the leaves on those trees. Though there will hardly be any leaves left and every rustle will make a few more yellow and dying ones fall gently on a sea of others like itself.

Soon there will be weddings and the love of the cold will be wiped from the memories forever. Warmth and reassurance will lock the cold outside. Soon they'll have too much to stay indoors for than to step out in the arms of the echos of their footsteps that are so pronounced in the cold blistering foggy nights. While the cold peeps into the homes of those that don't welcome it, I'll open my door, embrace it and walk into it, like walking in a still picture cept for that mysterious owl that usually follows me and hoots, as if trying to converse; I've always wished I could talk to it.

Soon a new year will start, and just after the celebrations are over, it will get colder and when the fog descends, it will blur the reality which will appear surreal, beautiful and dream-like.

So much will appear and then end so soon. I will witness yet another change in the stillness of life.