and so it shall come to pass

from time immemorial, as far as back as the naked memory can reach; from the days that only the gods can recall; an annual rite of passage begins its dance.

it is as if, in the space of a millisecond, the geothermal molecules of the earth, inert and stable, are suddenly aroused from their winter slumber to scorch and roast the indian sub-continental landmass with a viciousness and wrath that is unimaginable.

as these climatic atoms agitate themselves into a frenzy of heat and dust, the temperate refuge of the winter solstice suddenly disappears giving way to an unforgiving envelope of primal heat and suffocating humidity.

in the instance of a nanosecond, the subcontinent starts baking.  The heat burns with an intensity so belligerent that only few men and even less beasts dare venture out without purpose or ordination.   both thirst.

this is the great indian summer, stifling all in its wake as it switches play in a prelude to the great southwest monsoon. 

then, before the pied-crested cuckoo, or monsoon bird announces the deluge of rains  that will quench the dying earth, appears the queen of all fruit in her seductive succulence:

the mango.

memorials to conflict

memorial day always appends a weekend.  it is the last monday in may when america, expectant in the rejuvenation of another summer, comes together and remembers its war dead.  men and women who have fallen in crusades for causes just, or otherwise; futile or foolhardy.

war fragments the soul of a nation.  principled or immoral, it shames the moral DNA from which a nation believes it has gestated.  in america, more than most, war usurps a professed code of behavior that implies a virtuous high ground.  america has always been the self-anointed crusader against tyranny and perceived evil.

vietnam was, peripherally, the war of my generation.  i skirted the boundary fences of this era as it tore america asunder.  a war, that in many ways, made for a new and emerging america.  the vietnam war was like a swivel stick, stirring an already volatile cocktail filled with the ingredients of social wrath, racial inequity, sexual emancipation and gender fury.

it was the war that influenced my age, the music i listened to, the politics i believed in; it became the barometer by which future wars were gauged.  it was the first direct media-managed war, watched on TV screens in the safety of living rooms across america, almost live as it happened.  it was the war which outraged our senses and blunted our empathy.

young men died and, for a time, remained forgotten as a nation wrestled in denial with its self induced tryst with an ideological war not won.  

the national mall in washington DC is a veritable map of american history, mythology, symbolism and power.  it also has spaces earmarked in dedication to those who have fallen in america’s multiple foreign crusades.

these are solemn spaces, neither trivial nor caricatured, capturing the essence of great conflicts framed by the history of those times: the great war to end all wars; the war of the pacific and that against hitler; the korean war; and yes, finally, a monument to those young (mostly) men who were carried away to the jungles of southeast asia never to return.

even with the wisdom and hindsight of its abortive tweak at history, i respect a nation that can come back and honor its fallen youth.  the pain of vietnam may have receded in the minds of many.  but the almost 60,0000 names etched on the cold, reflective, black granite walls sunk into to the earth are real, and dead.  they are visited today by fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and lovers tormented by the wasted promise of a generation.

in the bright sunshine of a warm mid-spring afternoon, it was a haunting and captivating moment of truth.

perhaps, one day, there will also be a memorial to the victims of the cold war; and to the unnamed and innocent fatalities of the unwelcome consequences of terror. 

photographs: the vietnam veterans memorial, the national mall, washington DC, may 2010.

it's that time of year again

it's heading up to V-day again!

14th february, that ubiquitous international day of organized commercial love sponsored by the card and chocolate people.

meanwhile, out in bombay (or mumbai) the sena bigots are getting ready for another annual day of mindless timewaste, bigotry and venom, all in an attempt to tear down the real or imagined western assault on the crystalline virtue of indian youth.

ah, what would we do without these self-annointed guardians and protectors of our 'way of life'? like saying "no sex please, we're british", the sena motto could well prescribe "no love please, we're mumbaikers first and indians second..."

robert kennedy, announcing the death of martin luther king and his fear of what lay ahead, makes a plea to "tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of the world." many have tried; they award nobel prizes for failure.

if vusumzi mcongo, interrogated, tortured and imprisoned on robben island for participating in the school boycotts of the mid 1970s can be sanguine about the mountain to conquer, so can we. "we cannot", he says, "live with broken hearts. in time we have to accept that these things have happened to us, that those years have been wasted. to stay with the past will only bring you into turmoil. no nation can survive without forgiveness."

no man (or woman) alive today can speak with greater moral authority than that wily and ancient warrior of reconciliation: nelson mandela once said,

"no one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. people must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."

so, as the wrath-driven mobs that are the sena hone their message of a new apartheid and sharpen their arrows of poison, gift them a card and a box of candy; for even the bitterness of dark chocolate is sweeter than hate.

give your kids the gear they need!

all my friends at the rather exclusive international school of geneva had their pocket monies indirectly funded by the vast network of resident united nations agencies or miscellaneous parental diplomatic and tax-free perquisites. mine had a variable component based on how many domestic chores were completed.

some of my classmates, progeny of the privileged elite of assorted third-world banana republics and tin pot monarchies, had unlimited expense accounts. children of secretive bankers, arms dealers and corporate honchos made up the rest of my junior school classes. tinker, tailor, solider, spy, there were all there and this was the place to be.

of course, we don’t pay for the sins of our fathers and mothers, and most of these kids seemed affable and decent enough. “don’t try and compete with your classmates, we cannot afford it” my parents warned me; “you are much richer in other ways”, they added, attempting to mitigate the already evolving inferiority complex of a 10 year old.

living in geneva in the the early 1970s on a father’s income who was, literally speaking, a man of the cloth, was a non-competitive proposition. if only my father was a real tailor instead of dealing in the vestments of faith!

at any age, switzerland is not a cool place to be poor. poverty of course being largely relative to the obscene wealth of the entitled. we were not badly off. we avoided the culinary narrowness of most rice-eating indians abroad and experimented; lived in an apartment with an unimpeded and majestic view of mont blanc on one side and the jet d’eau on the other. we even managed shoe-string budgeted holidays to greece, italy and yugoslavia.

by the age of 12, i’d seen michelangelo’s david, badly bruised myself in the minoan excavations of crete and gotten my first alcoholic high on crème de menthe within the secretive walls of the vatican. i’d even spent a summer alone in america. the ultimate boy fantasy. not a bad repertoire to have. i appeared to be happy, understanding this to be the “rich in other ways” condition of life, as my parents called it.

but parents always unintentionally contrive to come up short, usually in areas of critical importance. so, while we were fed with food for the soul and mind, we were clad in bargain basement steals and other best-buys, not to mention the odd hand-me-down. i suppose it was no accident that we spent a christmas in london, timed to make full use of the post festive season sales. it was not about style, my mother warned us, it’s about keeping warm and dry.

encouraged to blend in with the local, skiing classes were sanctioned. but, instead of state of the art geze snap-on bindings, rossignol fiberglass skis and nordica boots, it was generic spring clasp bindings, wooden skis and lace-up leather ski footwear for me. my humiliation on the weekend school ski trip was almost complete.

the icing on my sartorial cake, was the £ 20 duffle coat: a survivor of antiquity and the great war, 3/4 in length, hooded with a neck strap locked into place with a single button, two over sized pockets with flaps (great to stuff cheap chinese mittens), and all this held together with four wooden mini horn-like fasteners attached to simulated leather loops. it was the ultimate sack cloth. in an emerging age of high tech fiber and goose down, i looked like a camel trying to trek across the alps as my classmates whizzed airily down the pistes, scarcely able to conceal their derision.

i’m surprised i wasn’t scarred for life. as happy children tumbled out of the bus at the end of the excursion to be greeted by waiting chauffeurs and herded into warm, leather upholstered vehicles, my parents waited, bus schedule in hand. i was last out, embarrassed and close to tears. i’d peed in my pants, blame ascribed to the polyester and other synthetic fibers which failed to retain body heat. like they say, it’s all about the gear.

so, today, i make no excuses for my wardrobe. it’s a decent collection of top drawer designer labels. it gives me the sartorial confidence i so lacked in my adolescence. the RM williams boots substitute the embarrassment of knee-high latex wellingtons: “they will keep your feet dry”, mother said, never wondering why they didn’t ever show signs of wear (i hid them on my way out, slipping into a pair of more chic adidas sneakers instead).

i hear duffle coats have made a comeback and wellington boots are now called funky wellies, both on the cusp of high fashion. in new york, a duffle coat can set you back several hundred dollars. even clint eastwood, icon of masculinity, has been sighted in one.

my father once told me in the late 1970s, “if i’d kept my suits from the 40s, i’d be on the cutting edge of style”. perhaps if i knew then what i know now, i would have had a less sartorially traumatized childhood, a child ahead of his time.

i cannot disagree more with those that say that spending on childrens clothes is a waste of money. give them the gear they need, i say!

snapshots of my imagination

in between life, a whole lot of different things happen. some good, some less good, some fun, some more fictitious than others; all along a journey of volition, compunction or coercion.

but many of life’s most intriguing punctuations are those momentary encounters; fleeting exchanges or magical occasions which our imagination will not even invent. they happen, and when they are past we cannot be certain of their veracity.

it was warm, closer to sweltering, well past the noon hour and the sun was at its highest summer ferocity. the locals had done what locals do: retired for a regenerative siesta. dogs searched out sparse patches of shelter as the insane roamed the streets.

i was alone in the celestial gardens and fountains and trees and shade of a city as old as caesar, and i was as far from home as i was faint with thirst.

at that moment, a little boy and his sister appeared with a glass of ice cold water; they had been watching me. they were as beautiful as the water was pure.

they laughed with me, and disappeared. but not before they left with me with a smile to remember forever. it was not an apparition, my thirst had evaporated.

photograph: a boy & his sister. parque maria luisa, sevilla, spain, july, 1984.

give us this day our daily bread... or roti

india is many things to many people. countless wisdom mongers and scholars have helped paint the indian canvass in myriad hues to varying degrees of usefulness: the mystical; the magical; the geological; the anthropological; the incomprehensible; the theatrical and tantric; the scatological; and the apparent primordial seduction and profundity of it all. and so on, and so forth.

but, if there’s anything that really connects the dots, it has be the subcontinentals’ entrepreneurial free spirit fused with an insatiable appetite. indians love their food almost as much as their unrepressed urge to express an opinion. indians also love to turn a trick for a quick buck. nothing wrong with this at all; food and commerce, the twin pillars of modern civilization.

india is a lot of people. over a billion plus of them. and generally speaking, most of them are doing something or going somewhere, purposefully or otherwise, most of the time. an indian’s average day is punctuated by rote, ritual and routine. they are veritable creatures of instinctive habit, productively or otherwise.

but contrary to popular belief, indians are also a disciplined lot, focused and determined. they are clear about wanting to get some place and are constantly on the move. unfortunately, their karmic induced life-journeys have many pot holes, temptations, and real or imagined distractions. the seductive lure of a roadside chai and a love of food begs an opportunity to halt and engage in idle chat while gratifying the rumbling stomach and quenching an endless thirst.

at the lowest rungs of the gastronomical chain are the smallest units of culinary service providers. men on bicycles with flimsy plastic cup-lets offering syrupy sweet tea, flavored with a hint of cardamom from a stainless steel dispenser strapped to the rear of his vehicle. or, a vendor frying savories in a vat of boiling oil on a street corner under a tree. this is micro entrepreneurship at it’s smallest; human productivity and service at its best.

a sickle, a few straws and a mobile push cart is all the equipment needed by an ingenious vendor of tender coconuts. the product is as refreshing as it is safe as it is therapeutic. from all manner of rudimentary mobile sustenance, subsequent rungs of food chain offerings take on a look of greater permanence: small stalls one stage below the culinary evolutionary stepping stone to what we now call a restaurant.

these are the way stations of an indian life, indispensable to an endless cycle of life and rebirth and frustratingly disruptive to an organized mind with defined goals and objectives.

the only paradox i see in this equation is the marriage of unfettered risk with the reinforcement of the familiar: indians are most willing to take a punt on making a buck; yet, are notoriously unadventurous eaters.

photographs: the ubiquitous fixed & mobile food stalls and non-alcoholic cool bars which predominate the landscape of any indian city's thoroughfares. TTK road, chennai, the erstwhile madras, india, august 13th, 2009.

jobs people do ~ the cremation ash & bone collector man

from ashes to ashes and dust to dust, cremations are common and everyday experiences in india. since the country does have a population in excess of a billion and bit, the supply of people transitioning into the spiritual and post temporal world is regular and the numbers many. the business of death is as lucrative as it is recession proof. there’s a whole commerce of funeral merchandise, beginning with the choice of an appropriate urn. would uncle cast a spell if we chose an inappropriate receptacle? there are brass urns, cremation urns, funeral urns, pet urns, adult urns and memorial urns. even in death, the right choices need to be made.

most crematoria in india are not electric or mechanized.

all rather exotic and far away from the funeral homes of new jersey and the gothic cathedrals of paris, and for those whose goodbyes to the deceased are the rare visit to a cemetery where a tear is shed and a rose deposited. at least we don’t have a bone picking ceremony.

photographs: a man waiting with his implements for a pyre to burn through and cool so he can collect the ashes and return them to near and dear and the genuinely bereaved. goa, india, march, 2009.

jobs people do ~ the coconut tree cutter man

the coconut tree, or cocus nucifer, is a common sight across southern india. rather uninteresting to those in search of tropical floral beauty, it is one of the most dynamic of tress. the oil is used extensively for cooking; hair oil and shampoos are regularly applied if one prefers the greasy sultry lush, if not majestic look; the water of the tender variety offers refreshing respite from the high noon heat of a sweltering pre-monsoon day and hygienic hermetically sealed drink for the traveler on foot, by road or by train; its drink is empowered with an array of supposed medicinal properties, not the least, an excellent sun downer with vodka on the beaches of goa; it’s dried leaves woven together for thatching huts; the coir pith is made into rope, briquettes and is apparently a perfect organic manure for indoor plants.

all rather exotic and far away from the suburbs of new jersey, the manicured gardens of paris, the concrete pavement of tokyo and for those whose household shopping entails a bi-weekly trip to tescos.

photographs: from my bedroom balcony; a man perched 60 odd feet above the ground with nothing but a sickle and a prayer, no safety rope or helmet as he hacks down a back yard cocus nucifer. not pictured: several by-standers and associates proffering advice, direction and all mater of chatter. bangalore, india, june 30th, 2009.

the right choice

i’ve already had my say on slumdog millionaire, and mumbai. but that was before they won, everything. on oscar night, or oscar morning in india, eight statues is a bloody sweep!

slumdog millionaire is a story that echos the vortex of constant madness that is a place called mumbai. it is both a city of love and a city of hate, caught in the endless and very real aspirations of millions.

before the film, it was a city on everyone’s lips, horrified by events now slowly fading into the digital archives of TV news channels. real life lost, live on TV. events of random death in the midst of opulent hotel ballrooms, where millionaires are welcomed by a red carpet of entitlement; a city of ordinary people who never made it home, and are now forgotten by all expect those who loved them. that was after the terror, and before the film.

after the film, it was a city on every indian lip, and with an opinion to match. a city of extravagant hope where all comers are entertained; a city of celluloid ambition where the passport to promise is an unlikely walk on a red carpet in far way los angles. a dream where the city of angles meets the city of hope.

indians are a vicarious lot and will appropriate what is not rightfully theirs, even if tenuously indian by association. we love a winner, and generously welcome all pretenders. so, like all things indo-british, this film renewed the symbiotic and convoluted relationship of two histories intertwined.

while the british celebrated their sovereignty as independent film makers over the suzerainty of hollywood; millions in india, in different ways, celebrated some of their own, genuine talent known and talent latent.

but for mumbai, the final word goes to a r rahman, an indian, who won for best original score and song. in acceptance of his oscar he said, “all my life i had a choice between hate and love. i chose love, and i am here."

photogtaphs: the oscars, live on prime time breakfast TV, bangalore, india, february 23rd, 2009

fuzzy logic

i once did an undergraduate course in symbolic logic*, an example of which went something like this:

all men are sinners
jesus christ was a man
jesus christ was a sinner

by emerging consensus, the focus on addressing terror has now shifted away from afghanistan:

pakistan is the root of all evil
great britain created pakistan
great britain is the mother of all evil
obama should now attack great britain

and so, by extension:

i must be genius
i don't have a job
all geniuses are unemployed
the unemployed have no income
einstein was a genius
people without an income are hungry
the hungry often steal
most geniuses are thieves
thieves are criminals
einstein was an unemployed, hungry, thief...

and so on, and so forth, but i'll stop here.

*post scriptum: in anticipation of failure, i dropped the course

the ocean

my heart surges like the wrath of a wave
cascading a veil over unyielding truth.
my body resists like a forlorn cliff
fragmented by fissures and drowned in eternity.
my skin bubbles like the surface of the waters
parrying an indignant rain and wind and sun.
my heart beckons like the eye of a storm
seduced by promises of abiding tranquility.
my soul echos like the rhythm of the seas
patterned by the wisdom of time.

i am consumed by the tempest,
now frail of understanding and limp in reposte.
i ebb like a wave exhausted by travel,
a final tear dissolving in sand.
i return to creation awaiting my renascence,
a sentinel in the silence of the oceans.

photograph: hole in the wall, the transeki, south africa, december 2007

home of the brave and land of the free

“a nation of cowards”...? wo-ah eric, that’s pretty steep!

in a past age, a speech of this order would have been proscribed, banned, deemed un-american (read: damn communist), or perhaps, just ignored. as you might expect, it came from a black man. but not just any ole’ black man, it came from the attorney general of the united states, the nation’s chief law enforcement honcho.

arguably, america has been bequeathed a legacy of race and bigotry like no other people. parenthetically, as michelle obama observed, her new house was build by slaves. indeed, race, like blood, runs deep in the veins of america.

acculturation, assimilation, desegregation, affirmative action, are all among the many tags that come to mind as america has struggled to reconcile the ideal that “all men were created equal” with a judeo-christian heritage where god wasn’t color blind.

it has taken brave men and women in this young nation to address and try to break the chains of the racial divide, and america can be proud of its resilience and ability to move forward. america carries the heavy burden of race and hate better than most. however flawed.

unlike britain, or any other european colonial nation, the united states cannot stand accused of hypocrisy. it has done more than most to rectify an unjust legal framework and open its paramount institutions as vehicles for racial change.

the united states armed forces is a case in point. it would be impossible to imagine a general colin powell (incidentally, knight commander of the order of the bath and the son of a british subject) being able to go so far in the british army, much less a high representative statesman of her majesty’s government.

eric holder has not (re)ignited the racial debate. he is honest rather than angry; optimistic over incriminatory; brutal as opposed to inflammatory, all while trying to connect the dots of history.

neither his own position, nor the election of president obama can be seen as an end in this journey for true racial equality. if anything, it opens a new chapter of discourse, challenge and change.

in all of this, there has been one glaring omission: the forgotten history of those who were there first, the native american. wither their history and culture and races?

and finally, it’s not my call to agree or otherwise with eric holder. but when i think of cowardice today, i don’t need to look much further that a group bandits, thugs and scoundrels that call themselves the guardians of india’s constitution.

patrimony

legacy may be nothing more than an editable entry in wikipedia; a charitable obituary in the times of london; the eulogy of a teary-eyed and sniffing larry king, a-live; a midnight eve’s whisper in them old and bloodied cotton fields back home; man's obsessive belief in his own procreative prowess; or, is it just a random round of AK47 gunfire, echoing the cold of a kabul night, lost forever?

photograph: bhagavan gomateshwara bahubali (the world's tallest monolithic statue, 988 AD), shravanabelagola, karnataka state, india, january 2009

the city of my birth

the south indian city of bangalore was once a place of gardens and temperate climes. a city of civility and clean air. it exuded the graciousness of obsolete anglo-indian affectation; proffered the pleasant architecture of perceived grandeur; left one unthreatened by bridge playing retirees; and was mostly benign on the seven senses.

but that was then.

hey, hey yeddyurappa*, i wrote you a song
'bout a funny ol' town that's a-comin' along.
seems sick an' it's hungry, it's tired an' it's torn,
it looks like it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born.**

*yeddyurappa is the chief minister of the state of which bangalore is the capital city
** apologies to bob dylan & a song to woody

innocence saved

the ubiquitous digital camera records our images of holiday escapades for posterity. or, till our hard disks crash. in the meanwhile, i, the unsuspecting guest, am obliged to absorb these pixelated souvenirs when visiting friends, relatives or acquaintances.

i love traveling and photography but am careful to temper my enthusiasm to share, lest i too become the object of scorn and derision.

cambodia is slowly emerging from the shadows as an exhilarating destination to explore. it is a country rich in history, but ravaged by the residual scars of conflict and struggling to emerge from dislocation and poverty. tourists are coming and their hard dollars provide a desperately needed injection of liquidity.

but, there is a more sinister injection of fluids. cambodia is a destination of choice and a haven for pedophiles. crimes against the weakest and the most defenseless are never relative. but, sexual and physical atrocities against children are the most repugnant of all crimes. if there is any way we can contribute to eradicating this abomination, we have no choice but to act.

from his book, sacred vows, the cambodian poet u sam oeur writes:

may the boddhi tree be free to grow.
may the sugar palm be free from blame.
may the supernatural devils be banished from cambodia.
may peace be restored
to the people of this land.

photographs: cambodia, august 2005

quo vadis

the human journey is often depicted as epic. for most of us, it’s a practical quest to overcome the mundane tasks that ensure we can just get on with it.

we are schooled to seek directional assistance, both spiritual and temporal; signposts of life that speak with authority and which we do not question.

the threat of terrible punishment and eternal damnation defers our creative inclination to wander and speculate. religious texts and traffic signs are the most obvious everyday examples.

one of my favorite scenes from lawrence of arabia is the incredulous look on sherif ali’s face (omar sharif) as lawrence (peter o’toole) points across the vast expanse of the worst place that god created, the nefud desert, and says, aqaba is over there, it is only a matter of going...

> lacking courage, it’s a mantra i repeat whenever i see the woman of my imagination.

> at peril of life and limb, it’s a mantra i repeat every time i cross a street in india.

> at the risk of divorce, it’s a mantra i repeat every time i am required to socialize, involuntarily.

life is simple: it is only a matter of going...

photograph: ankor vat, siem reap, cambodia, august 2005

the cost of reality

picasso once said, everything you can imagine is real.

possibly. but still, these are challenging times. parking will set you back $18 and entry to the MOMA, assuming you’re an adult who needs a fix to indulge your imagination, another $20.

reading my blog is still free.

photographs: MOMA, NYC, summer 2008

of slumdog millionaires; and millionaire slumdogs

so then, what is the correct answer?

mumbai is a city of dreams. it’s where great wealth infuses with frightening poverty. it’s where the contradictions of modern india are locked in an epic battle, painted on a canvass of 230 odd square miles, peopled by 19 million souls. there are winners, and there are losers.

mumbai is a city of glitz. it’s where some of the world’s richest flaunt their wealth in an endless game of oneupmanship, sweltering between flashbulbs of the paparazzi, the extreme humidity (when not being chauffeured in an air conditioned bentley), and the constant challenge of keeping up in a look-at-me, look-at-me world.

mumbai is a city of commerce. the great corporate houses of india sit on some of the most expensive real estate known to humankind. there are the johnny-come-latelys whose wealth can write off the debt of zimbabwe; and there are the old, established businesses whose philanthropy dates back a century before the idea of corporate responsibility was invented.

mumbai is a city of hard workers. it’s strong ethic often rewards those who can sacrifice the lure of immediate gratification for the security of their progeny. it is a city which can reward and empower. it’s a place where the sex workers in one of the largest and most desolate red light districts of the world run their own bank in an attempt to break the bondage of pimps and money lenders.

mumbai is the city of bollywood. the film factory of the world where mediocrity largely rules over talent. where actors own cricket teams to live out their own dreams and delusions of grandeur. where the same actors endorse any product, if the money is right. and, when voices need to be heard, are (mostly) conspicuous and complicit by their silence. bollywood is also pissed-off that it wasn’t listed in the credits of a film, set in its very own backyard.

mumbai is a city that never ceases to amaze me. it is a city of self-belief and resilience, of tolerance and dignity, of fairy tail endings and tragedy; and yes, it is a city of great virtue in midst of greed, vice, violence and bigotry. it is a city of interdependence and mutual exclusivity. it is a city whose continued health lives on the very cancer that erodes it.

at the end of the day, mumbai is a city about its people. mumbai is india’s melting pot. and of course, everybody wants to become a millionaire!

and slumdog millionaire (the film) has got everybody hopping and hoping. hopping about an unjust portrayal of india. hopping in embarrassment about a space-age nation moving at bullock-cart pace. hopping at the stench of open drains behind glass paned skyscrapers. hoping that ‘india’ will sweep the oscars. hoping to join a party and become player in a hollywood story.

the film was my time and money well spent. it was engaging, as a work of mainstream provocation and creative expression should be. as an ‘aware indian’, it wasn’t particularly insightful. as someone who thinks he can laugh at indian idiosyncrasies, it was fun. but, in and amongst the portrayal of the soft underbelly of an emerging nation, we see the fundamentals of inequality which will destroy a vision of india, if not spoken of in honesty.

it’s likely that the social polarization of india will continue apace, hand in hand with economic growth. gandhi was as much about the myth of peaceful change and transition as he was an accurate narrator of india's fundamental weaknesses. the film, by the way, has a great narrative structure.

india is not fundamentally a non-violent society, and (i presume) the marginalized do not see themselves as the ‘children of god’ consigned to fate.

india is guilty of trying to find practical solutions in ignorance and semantics. there are two prime suspects: politicians of dubious legal standing and pedigree; and of course bollywood, culpable in the great post-independence hoax of creating an ethos of false aspiration.

if india is to take it's place (apparently, rightfully earned) on the high-table of world movers and shakers, it needs to grow up and shed it's inferiority complex by confronting its own disheartening realities.

india is neither an idea nor a metaphor for the poetry of hope. in its complexities we are confronted with some very simple truths:

india is an exceptionally beautiful and rich country in which there is great ugliness and horrid poverty; as diverse as it is parochial.

india is an ancient civilization of high culture in an advanced state of denial.

audacious is an adjective which we use when thinking outside the expected. audacity, be it either that of hope or change, propelled a man to go where he wasn’t welcome or indeed expected: be it the white house in washington DC; or a mansion on harbour road, mumbai.

oh, and by the way, the correct answer is, “D”: it is written.

not-so-high-voltage ~ london thru my own lens

i was never quite able to define what i thought was the 'quintessential london man'. on second thoughts, who cares...

photograph: local inhabitant, covent garden, london, summer 2006

high voltage ~ london thru my own lens

i was never quite able to define what i thought was the 'quintessential london woman'. it’s probably not even a good idea to try. with certainty, it’ll get me into trouble anyway, so why bother.

photograph: graffiti wall art, camden town, london, summer 2005

hell ~ london thru my own lens

i hate the tube. i always break into a cold sweat. i count seconds and yards in piston-tube-like dank darkness with only inches separating the metal housing of the speeding train and the concreted piping, exhaling only when i see the lights of the next station. bolt points into the light and fresh air.

call it an underground, the subway, a metro, or mass rapid transport systems, i measure a city’s progress by its ability to transport its masses quickly, quietly, efficiently and of course, safely.

singapore, tokyo, frankfurt all mitigate my urban commuter’s underground phobia by well-lit tunnels with emergency signage and clear escape routes. i am comforted by walking tracks all along these impermeable arteries. they assuage my insanity and diminish my exaggerated fears.

but what of those great cities in an advanced state of subterranean decay: new york, london ~ do i use a taxi or travel by bus?

drawn by the salacious innocence of roxy hart and her susceptibility, i am lured by temptacious promises of discovery. i stay underground and delay my search for a way out.

photographs: inside a tube station, london, summer 2005

envy ~ london thru my own lens

the immortal ghost, the silver ghost, the silver wraith , the silver shadow, the silver cloud, the silver spirit, the silver seraph, the phantom are not comic book super or anti-heroes. they are objects of desire. the rolls royce is not for everyone.

my understanding of a truly aspirational brand is vaguely related to a possessive desire to own something well outside the current elasticity of my purse strings, but reasonably within the realm of acquisition.

i interpret the luxe marketer’s message to me as neither belonging to the current consumer group, nor to a direct aspirational audience, but allow myself to be convinced that i am indeed, part of the larger, yet exclusive target audience. a nice idea that puts me closer to my roller than the far more amorphous 'exposure' group.

i’ll certainly want to think of myself as light years away from 'those' who see this creation as simply as an expensive car, or just a wraith, shadow, seraph, ghost or phantom.

i wonder why rolls royce never thought of a model called the grand delusion.

photograph: self portrait outside a roller showroom, mayfair, london, summer 2005

nescafé no es café; a cuppa coorg may be

i couldn’t, for the life of me, imagine why the tiny district of coorg in southern india has been likened to the scotland of india. i saw no men wearing kilts; didn’t hear the haunting echo of a lonely piper against a backdrop of craggy countryside pebbled by the stones of ancient castles; nor was i regaled with myths about monsters of the loch.

most significantly, i saw no evidence of the peaty soils that yield a fine a single malt***.

thru the ages, men have embarked on a futile search for an elixir of life. women, being more practical and less delusionary, haven’t wasted their time. but since my gender necessarily requires me to be off in pursuit of such, let me assert that a fine a single malt will always complement water and coffee on my elixir list.

just over 4,000 square kilometers, the district of coorg is only seven times the size of singapore. it finds tranquility in the lush western ghats of the southwest indian state of karnataka, kissing its better known neighbor, kerala. 

the rich soils, watered by the river cauvery and its veins, together with the shade of the offspring of ancient forests combine to produce one of the finest mild coffees, the world’s most traded commodity after oil.

coorg also produces exceptional pepper, cardamom and honey. here, where men are known for their martial bent and the women for their independence and beauty, success and achievement blend with a fair share of just getting by, off the generosity of the land. it is a place of magic.

being in a great coffee growing region does not alone make good coffee grow. foreplay impacts the final climax. a good planter must know the land and manage the interventions of the elements like you know your lover and his/her needs. great coffee is as much about the people who farm, manage and curate it, as it is about the complex processes of a growing cycle. it is a veritable labor of love.

i will continue my life-journey: opening with a 16 year-old lagavulin single malt; augment my entrée with a pure mineral water sourced from a spring titillated by thermal vapors; and drown in a coorg coffee, which like a woman, must be dark, hot, strong and steamy.

in age of instant gratification, there still is no such thing as instant coffee.

*** i did not tarry a moment to look closer. and there are indeed similarities between scotland and coorg: this wee piece will illustrate more.

photographs: coorg, karnataka, southern india, october 2008

teutonic identity & conflict resolution

an old german friend, not known even for a wisp of xenophobia, recently remarked: 

f*#king austrians, their singular achievement has been to convince the world that hitler was german and mozart was austrian.

an austrian-german euro 2008 football final would have settled the issue, once and for all. india, after all, continues to extract revenge on the english for colonial subjugation by sustained mastery over them on the cricket pitch. (but then, the english seem to be absolutely rubbish at anything they ever invented). the chinese have comprehensively proven to the world that they’ll take on all challengers, in any sport. cuba, every now and then, gets one over the USA in baseball.

USA v afghanistan in buzkashi?

conscience

ground zero has infiltrated our daily-life vocabulary: “yo man, it was like mayhem out there, i was buzzing in ground zero...” a carefree infusion of cataclysmic descriptors to absorb mundane moments of everyday gore: conflict at our grocery store check-out counter, angry navigation of road-raged traffic jams, domestic upheaval...

contrary to the widely held belief on main street, the term ground zero was not coined on or around the ninth of september 2001. it describes an event of far greater destructive magnitude and brutality. ground zero pinpointed that apocalyptic space of earth immediately beneath the exploding atomic bombs that destroyed hiroshima and nagasaki.

then, thermal and nuclear radiation killed several hundred thousand people in flash that changed our world forever. manhattan project, one. on 9/11, thousands of people died in multiple instances of apparent divinity inspired madness that changed our world forever. manhattan project, two.

tragedy can never be relative. in both occurrences, people were instantaneously vaporized and dissipated as if they just never existed. but, back in those days, several million people didn’t watch the manhattan project one live on prime time TV, and then relive it for an eternity on youtube.

clearly, if you own enough billboard space and bandwidth, you can swiftboat any memory for as long as you wish; contort good guys into bad ones; establish just cause for retribution, casus belli; and in extreme cases, even tweak established historical fact. the holocaust didn’t happen, for example. for many, manhattan project one has become an event recessed into history, depersonalized, and largely forgotten.

one warm, sunny, summer’s day in new york, circa 1982, i attended a huge demonstration protesting the deployment of cruise and pershing missiles in europe, ostensibly to shield us from the evil empire.

there, amongst the the sea of several hundred thousand sundry sloganeering revelers meandering past the UN towards a free concert in central park, was an aging japanese man quietly sitting on the curb quenching his thirst. he wore a simple yellow t-shirt emblazoned with the words: i survived hiroshima ~ never again!

from his textured face, pierced by radiation; his eyes, preserving that single instant of horror, shone a gentleness, compassion and gravitas i have neither seen before or since; nor ever found the words to capture.

it was a rare moment of pure conscience. i went home, troubled.

the caducity of words

the definitive oxford english dictionary lists 171,476 words in current usage. these do not include a plethora of inflections, derivative words, interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, or for that matter, distinct senses of nouns and adjectives, and hyphenation... ah! the beloved hyphen, but let’s not even go there!

in trying to ascertain a final word count for the english language, there are all sorts of claimants of dubious legitimacy: 84 million chemical substances; at least a million species of insects; and numbers ~ are they words too, and if so, wouldn’t that take us pretty close to infinity?

then there are all those other languages that have so seditiously crept into our everyday parlance. all this morphing and mating means that etymologists (or do we call them linguistic anthropologists) can be kept busy trying to distill the DNA of the english language.

how many words does the average english-speaking person need, or actually use, in life? how do we organize our wordbanks? like luxe stores, are there elegantly sumptuous words used exclusively for pick-up-plays, but not necessary to navigate a fresh vegetable market?

what are the linguistic lines of communicative competence between a haute couture practitioner of style, a molecular bio-geneticist and a marketing person like myself when we interact in a variety of life (or death) situations? are there exclusive and common buckets of language which we can engage at an instant? what the synaptic threads that build our own personal lexica of life?

does a language have a saturation point beyond which it cannot grow? what happens then? is the expansion of language inorganic? who invents new words? is there a panel of wizards who vote on new entrants? do they have a period of probationary usage?

i have more questions than i can answer; it is my search for the disambiguation of the english language.

but just in case there is indeed a finite space for words, every now and again the language oracles issue a pink slip to the under-utilized. here is a list, from the collins dictionary people, of words soon to be expunged:

abstergent: cleansing or scouring
grestic: rural; rustic; unpolished; uncouth
apodeictic: anquestionably true by virtue of demonstration
caducity: perishableness; senility
caliginosity: dimness; darkness
compossible: possible in coexistence with something else
embrangle: to confuse or entangle
exuviate: to shed (a skin or similar outer covering)
fatidical: prophetic
fubsy: short and stout; squat
griseous: streaked or mixed with grey; somewhat grey
malison: a curse
mansuetude: gentleness or mildness
muliebrity: the condition of being a woman
niddering: cowardly
nitid: bright: glistening
olid: foul-smelling
oppugnant: combative, antagonistic or contrary
periapt: a charm or amulet
recrement: waste matter; refuse; dross
roborant: tending to fortify or increase strength
skirr: a whirring or grating sound, as of the wings of birds in flight
vaticinate: to foretell; prophesy
vilipend: to treat or regard with contempt

instant gratification

a dear friend expressed his “ambivalence” about both facebook and blogs.  he is by no stretch of the imagination internet averse, and is one of the most informed people i know ~ on and offline. but i have taken issue with him.

personally, i believe, for better or worse, we are governed by an age of instant gratification and vicarious needs.  the internet fulfills both aspirations.  there is a profoundly adequate german verb that predates the internet: darstellungsbeduerfnis (approximately translated as: the need to project oneself) ~ which i find best captures the zeitgeist of our times.

facebook has allowed me to reconnect with many people, lost over time.  one of the articulating features of my own life has been a continuous state of transition and flux.  this transience has meant that from the age of eight, i have been permanently on the move across continents.  schools were never more that a three year sojourn and the friends of my youth have simply evaporated.

on the charge that facebook is more an "openbook": i manage my facebook page closely, allowing only controlled interface.  i share information with only a closed user group of "friends" ~ selected as such and according to my whim (my  prerogative). because it is open to only that group, lewd and inappropriate behavior is largely self-regulated. which good, no? it is text messages which have today become the preferred weapon of salacious solicitation!

politically, i find it interesting that the internet, in its various avatars, facebook and blogs included, hark back to a primordial (if flawed, idealistic and largely unattainable) form of direct participatory democracy ~ what the americans so euphemistically call townhalls.  this is best exemplified by what CNN calls i-reporters or i-reporting.  i don't i-report, but i have entered into dialogue with various news correspondents whose views have found resonance with me. the internet has also allowed me to engage authors of books i have read.  more often than not, they have responded, and this has lead to interesting conversations.

the biggest challenge in the internet space is deciding where you want to go.  if tattoos and harleys are not your thing, then you don't have to go there.  there is just too much stuff on the internet. it is your responsibility to decide how and where you expend your bandwidth and energy.

one of the most positive outcomes of the internet, info sharing, and immediate gratification is that it has allowed me to reconnect with friends long lost.  and while i may not be able to dialogue with these friends and former lovers over a single malt and gaze into their eyes, it entirely eliminates the need to compose letters and subsidize the royal mail, the US postal services or the indian posts and telegraphs!

for those who cannot strip in a sauna, there’s always the internet.

poverty, in a relative way

anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
james baldwin

photograph: central london, summer 2006