The Other Home

Was showing the following photos to my folks today. These are of my neighborhood back in Moscow, the tiny university town in the state of Idaho. Let me know what you think.

Expected Time of Arrival

After spending nearly five hundred days out of India, I am back for a month. To mislead my parents, I had told them that my date of arrival was going to be December 14. Instead, thanks to the immense cooperation from my sibling, numerous friends, and all my students, teachers, colleagues and supervisors, I was able to leave the US one week before semester actually got over and arrive in New Delhi on the night of December 7, that is, one whole week before my parents were expecting me.

I landed only twenty minutes late from the scheduled time of arrival, which isn’t too bad considering the fact that Idaho is in northwest USA, meaning that I had to travel halfway around the world to arrive here. My dear friend, Deepak, was there at the Indira Gandhi International Airport to pick me up, and all that I remember saying or doing for most of our drive through dusty Gurgaon was clutching his shoulder and shrieking, "D, I AM here!"

My brother was already in the loop, so when he walked us in to the house, I immediately went to wake up my parents. My father’s first words were, "Who? What?" and then "How? Suddenly?"

My mother’s reaction was far more dramatic, and to die for. Those five minutes were the entire reason behind this whole conspiracy. This is how it went:
1. Blinked eyes several times and said, "Who? How?"
2. Hugged me.
3. Let go.
4. Hugged again.
5. Let go.
6. Wept.
7. Asked the same questions again.
8. Hugged again.
9. Let go.
10. Touched my face.
11. Asked the same questions yet again.
12. Looked confused about life, her own existence, my arrival, why the earth revolves, Sudan’s problems, etc. And she wasn’t wearing her glasses, which added to the overall confusion even more.
13. Finally, she lamented, "But we couldn’t go to the airport!"
14. And eventually when it dawned that the greatest emotion to be derived from my arrival was not sorrow for not being able to drive to the airport in the middle of the night to pick me up, but instead happiness that I was finally here, she said, "Did your father know this all along? How could he not tell me?"

Conversation Partner

So, I decided to get rid of my offensive "About Me" on Orkut, the one where I said that people with moronic selves and spellings should not get in touch with me. This was two days ago. I promptly got rewarded for my efforts last night when Dharmesh requested for my friendship. This is his introductory message, "Hi, I am from Kanpur India, like to have conversation with u on any topic,u like.in Business."
I am considering accepting the offer since he will have conversation with me on any topic I like. I think I will start with existentialism in Kafka's Metamorphosis. Other suggestions?

On Living

It’s been three days and I am still haunted by him.

On Friday night, some of my friends took me to see Into the Wild. Based on Jon Krakauer’s book by the same name, the film traces the last two years of the life of Chris McCandless, an intense and smart young man who decided to give up a cushiony life and comfortable future for living it out in Alaska. All by himself and by the dint of what he could get off the landscape through hunting, fishing, and foraging. Like primordial men, far away from the glitter and dirt of civilization.

The book is not a work of fiction. Google Chris McCandless and Jon Kraukauer and you will be surprised by the number of entries and devotees this story has gathered. Which is interesting and tells you straight on that there must be something special in the whole saga. Still, before leaving for the film that night, and also because I hadn’t read the book, I was skeptical. I had already been told the plot and I was willing to dismiss the whole idea as bizarre and foolishly romantic.

But then, I saw the film. I saw Emile Hirsch play the character of Chris McCandless and do an excellent job of it. His rendition of a man haunted by inner demons, convinced of the power of dreams, and a passion for living on his terms stunned me in to disbelief. Although I did not become a convert to the cause, nor am I even toying with the idea of visiting Alaska for pleasure unless it’s in the peak of summer and in select areas because I hate snow and ice too much, I am convinced of the message McCandless transmitted, and that is, the need to live and not just exist.

It’s been three days and I cannot wipe McCandless away from my mind. Here are two things I have enjoyed, and maybe, so will you. The first is a link to the article Kraukauer wrote before writing the book. It is a fascinating and gripping piece of writing and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the entire article available for free online. The second is the link to one of the most perfect songs I have ever heard. It is by Eddie Vedder (from Pearl Jam). It is called Hard Sun, and it is my most favorite track from the wonderful music of this memorable film.

McCandless was twenty-four at the time of his death. And the heaviest load in his backpack was from a library of nine to ten books including Lenin and Thoreau.

Tenifs

So Deepti tagged me, and it is a very long tag. I am going to customize it to a length preferable to me, of course, after apologizing profusely to Deepti for not following the instructions completely. The reason I am doing this is because I don’t want to say predictable things that most people would guess or know any way about me. Such as if I were a tool, I would be a writing instrument. Or, if I were a color, I would be red. Yawn! I have said these things umpteen number of times on this blog...there is nothing original left in them anymore.

So it will be ten (hopefully new) things.

1. If I were a beginning, I would be: The first lines of A Tale of Two Cities “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.” The mark of a truly great writer, these lines are timeless.

2. If I were a month, I would be: Any month that lets me be productive.

3. If I were a season, I would be: Summers in Moscow/ Winters in Delhi

4. If I were a sin, I would be: All of them (except sloth) in lesser or greater degree -– pride, envy, lust, greed, gluttony, wrath. No sloth because if there is one thing I don’t do, that’s procrastinate.

5. If I were a question, I would be: How brilliantly stupid do people have to be to treat something as public as Orkut as a place for loud complaint about a third person who is not only on Orkut but in their Friends’ List as well?

6. If I were a piece of furniture, I would be: A couch. It’s comfortable and if used imaginatively, can be put to multiple purposes.

7. If I were a day of the week, I would be: Friday. Friday night. Do I even have to explain why?

8. If I were a tree, I would be: Septopus. And yes, this is the time you must consider reading the short stories of Satyajit Ray, if you haven’t already. This is a seriously kick-ass tree.

9. If I were a song, I would be: Javeed Bashir’s “Tere Jeha Hor Disda”. I discovered the song a week ago, and I love the timbre in Bashir’s voice. I am still looking for a version of this song minus all the techno-pop kind of musical arrangements, and would really appreciate if someone can help me find it.

10. If I were God, I would be: There

The Other

I am (finally) convinced that differences between man and man do not exist, in fact, these differences are myths. The world should not be divided between man and man, instead it should be divided in two equal halves one with men and the other with women.

Seriously, if one more man tells me that “He wants to lead a simple life and not complicate things”, I will throw up. And I mean it.

Sample the following two conversations, both of which occurred on the same day within a spate of four hours, so please find it in your heart to forgive my frustration which has resulted in this post.

The first one was with one of my dearest friends in the US. He had not come down to Moscow during the Celebrate Sayantani Carnival, which takes place every year to coincide with my birthday. He had let me know on Google Talk that he won’t be able to come because some work had come up. Fine, I understand. People have lives, other things to do, ignore me, etc. But at least he should have called, said “Happy Birthday” and slammed down the phone, or emailed a one-liner. But what does he do? Nothing! I don’t hear a single syllable from him. So I sit over this, fuming my brains, getting even more angry, and grinding my teeth more than I should. Finally, I can’t control myself anymore, and also because I (usually) do not let arbit, stupid incidents spoil great friendships, plus of course, I have to flaunt my newly bought phone...so I end up calling him. Here’s what happens:

Scene I
“M, are you alive?”
“Hey, it’s you! Where are you calling from? You got a phone?”
“Cut the crap. Are you alive?”
“Yeah.”
“You remember the event called MY BIRTHDAY?”
“Yeah.”
“You know you didn’t call or email, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Stop being a monosyllabic moron and tell me why you didn’t.”
“Because I knew you were mad at me.”
“Of course I was. I still am.”
(By this time, I can hear laughter from the other side.)
“Then why are you calling me?”
“To yell at you of course. The whole idea is that I yell at you, get it out of my system, you listen without a word, ok ok ok…maybe two or three words can be sanctioned to you. Then you apologize profusely, and we laugh over the whole thing, and become buddies again.”
“Sheesh...I just didn’t call because I knew you were mad at me and I didn’t want to get you to become madder. I just want to keep things simple and not have them get complicated, you know.”
“Ugh. Of course I know. You are such a man. And now we both know that you are a jackass of the first order as well.”

Laughter again. Friendship renewed. Conversation goes on for another 30 minutes. Life is good.

Scene II
This takes place later in the day when I am sitting in a café doing homework. A close friend calls. Here’s what happens then:
“What’s happening?”, he asks.
“Nothing much. At One World doing homework. You?”
“Feeling depressed.”
“Why?”
“You know why! I am still missing her. You know she was just so incredible….blah blah blah....”
(This goes on for five-seven minutes at least before I interrupt and say the following)
“Hmm...I am not her you know that, right?”
“Of course!”
“And we don’t love each other in that sense, you know that too, right?”
“Err...yeah!”
“Then why can you not disconnect this call and call her instead? We have talked about this whole thing before. You know already that I think it's your fault and you should give this one more decent attempt.”
“I don’t want to complicate things!”
“J, shut up. Disconnect. Call her. Or go and write poetry. I have homework to do.”
“Man, you are mean!”
“No sweetheart, I am just matter of fact.”

Really, ladies, it’s us versus them. Separate planet, anyone?

Killing Time

Time is a rare commodity you say? And I am supposed to believe you? Come on!
In spite of the following two items I read on Times of India.com today?

First, the council of ministers in Uttar Pradesh is going to run a probe on Orkut because some communities and individuals have been disrespectful towards the chief minister.
Second, the eight constables who shook hands with Sanjay Dutt outside the Yervada Jail in Pune are in big trouble. There will be an inquiry run on them. The ninth constable who hugged Dutt has already been suspended.

Now, here's your chance. Beat the examples I have given here. Tell me the most entertaining piece of news you have read recently. This free and fair contest is open to all and the winner will be announced a week from today.

To Mr. Alexander Graham Bell

Dear Mr. Bell
Thank you for your contribution in my life. After a gap of one year, I have recently become the proud owner of one of your inventions. It’s serving me very well. Making plans, keeping commitments, and maintaining relationships is so much easier now. Thank you!

Hope afterlife is treating you well.
Best regards,
Sayantani

Fabric

Try as I might, I cannot be a poet. That kind of grace and rhythm doesn't come to me. I have tried, especially today. But to no avail. That effortless style and pace will never be mine.

Why the need of a poem suddenly? Why today? Because it's been exactly a year since I left home, since I left Delhi. And what a year it has been, well,if not a poem, at least I can try making a list:
From journeying to the U.S. to across it,
From being rejected by every good job to finally getting a faculty appointment,
From learning to watch even trashy Hindi movies just so that I don't forget the language even by a syllable,
From cooking for one, two, to twelve people at a time,
From retaining friends back home to making new friends of new colors and nationalities,
From being homesick to knowing that I will miss America when the time comes to give her up,
From learning more about India now than ever before,
From telling the world that I miss my mother the most to bursting into tears the first time I hear my father's voice across the many miles of land and sea.

It's been...eventful.

Harry Grows Up

Yes, I know you have already read several Harry Potter reviews. But you haven't read anything that traces his growth, transformation, etc. etc. In other words, you haven't read THIS!

However, I am quite unhappy with the editing and the page lay-outing of the piece. But then again, one doesn't get published everyday. So, YOOOO HOOOO! And needless to say, lots of thanks to Praveen, my "literary agent" in Tehelka.

On Turning 28

It’s a badly concealed secret that I go semi-hysterical every year on the days leading up to July 19. I know that the world and its grandmother hope that some day I will finally get that doze of maturity which will prevent the following accidents from happening every year without fail:
1. Friends being reminded from a month in advance that my “happy birthday to me” is coming and so they should abandon everything else to just hold their breath and stare at the calendar and
2. The dilution of the twin feelings of impatience and loathsomeness towards July 18 and 20 that I undergo persistently and without remorse.

But trust me, there is a reason behind even this madness. You see, I have a list. As I am sure a lot of you do. Of “Things to Do in this Lifetime”. And I ponder over my list only at this time of the year. Somehow new year’s eve does not have that effect on me… my life didn’t start from 31st December, did it? It started six months ago! So every year as I manage to strike off things that are done, things that still need to be done, or things that should be added to the list because like a fool I didn’t think of them before…there is a sense of purpose and satisfaction. Although I must confess that there is also a parallel sense of frustration and loss…maybe over relationships weakened or lost forever or the job that I eyed and pursued and did not get or something totally different. But since I am “the cup is more full than empty” sort of a person, that sense almost always gets subjugated.

I remind myself nearly once every day that I have always been exceptionally lucky when it comes to friends. And that good fortune has tagged me from India to the US as well. So I have had three different birthday parties on three different evenings. And I am told there is one more in the pipeline. One of the parties was thrown by my friends Annie and Brittney. The venue was Annie’s house and she went berserk decorating the house, baking me a German chocolate cake, making an elaborate dinner, taking me out for a movie, getting me thoughtful gifts, and planting surprises in which she was helped by her three extremely good-looking and incredibly well-mannered sons of ages 12, 10, and 8. Another friend, Parul ,slaved a night away because she baked a gigantic chocolate cake and the world’s most sinful and delicious baklava and was the real in- charge of the party that took place in my house. A third set of friends made even July 20th appear beautiful and gorgeous and not merely “the day that comes after my birthday is over!” Some others took time out from their exceptionally busy schedules to sit and write conventional letters just because I love receiving them so much. Another friend, Andres, employed himself and his sister to bake a tall order of a cake, a traditional one from their native place Oaxaca, Mexico. Dan came, saw, and single handedly took over the entertainment factor for one of the parties. Jeff brought crates of iced tea and of a kind of beer called India Ale in order to “get into the mood of the birthday”. My closest friend for the last twenty-three years, Sas, called and we had a long chat except that this was the first time in our joint lives when I couldn’t tell her, “Achha total kitne gifts bhej rahi hain?” Even I couldn’t be that cruel. The funniest call I received was from Richa because for the first time I was struck by our role reversal...by the fact that it was she who was in the office and I who was at home, enjoying my summer vacations. But what made all these celebrations even more perfect was the work of three people who are physically far away from me right now yet their words boosted my spirit in a way that I cannot describe. My fellow bloggers Rohit, Aritro, and Sinjini, all wrote beautiful, exquisite and enormously personal posts on me or on our relationship and I cannot explain how much that meant.

To all of them and everyone else who wished -- through Orkut, Facebook, email, ecards, phone calls etc., a very big thank you. And who knows, I might just learn how to behave myself from next year.

Death. By Torture.

That’s it. I have had it up to my existence for the next several lives. I am frustrated, angry, embittered. And needless to say, I am ashamed of myself. Because I have a face and a profile that attracts by the dozens the most unique on the social networking site called Orkut.

Sample the first paragraph of my current “About Me”. It is nasty, rude, aggressive, and meant to put-off. It was written to ensure that my sanity remained where it should and that the moronic friendship requests that I was getting every day would lessen in number. So I wrote this:

“*Caution: I am extremely irritated by the fact that friendship requests from ultra dumb people are still reaching me for no fault of mine. So I am joining my hands and begging...DO NOT send me a friendship request without an introductory scrap or email. And if your profile is dull, insipid, inundated with grammatical errors, or it's just downright stupid, spare me and move along. I REALLY have better things to do with my time.*”

But to no avail. Because I still attract, rather I pull towards myself thanks to my devastating charm, samples such as the gentleman who sent a friendship request this morning and whose profile name is “Your Dream Boy”. Yes, of course! He would be my dream boy because his profile not only has a display photo of Emran Hashmi with a particularly jack-assish smile in place and who is SO the man I lust after, but his “About Me”, which I have copied and pasted to the last letter reads like this. “I am a Simple Boy. I Like make a good friends. and want to share all problum's with my friend's. i m allways happy. i think friendship is a Best relationship in the world.”

Why? Why? Why? Why me? Why in spite of the “Caution”? In spite of the rudeness, the aggression? What made the man think that I want to share all his “problum’s”? That I would be happy to be friends with someone who has to write Simple Boy using capital letters? That we would have profound and mentally-stimulating lengthy discussions on the two communities that he is a member of – “Hutch” and the “United States of Ropar”? How are either of them relevant to where I am right now and to what I am doing with my life?

Another a*hole wrote this the other day in his private message to me:
“Dear Madam, thank you for the opportunity to write to you!”
Yes, of course, I WAS interviewing him for a job after all.
“I am liking your attitude-ful introduction.”
!!!
“I am also liking your attitude.”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Therefore I am wanting friendship with you.”
Thank you. I am also wanting friendship with you. And I am also wanting you to die a slow and painful death. Are you not wanting that?

But the finest friendship request in the last few days has been from a person who had the balls to send me an email. He couldn’t be satisfied with mere scraps or messages. He wrote (again I am copying and pasting the exact words):
“How r u?I hope fine.......Anyways this is Vinayak & I am looking forward for friendship with u. Can i think of u as a friend of mine? Can we be friends?”
Yes, yes, please, please, pretty please. Do think of me as your friend, so what if your name means NOTHING to me?
“Your name is really very pretty & hope the same with u.”
Okay, Buddy. That's good to hear. But say it once again now, and this time make it in English please.
“I am waiting for ur reply & plz do feel comfortable.”
I will. I shall run right now like a breathless bird and remove the heavy weight of my brain from my head. Just the way you have in order to be comfortable.
“With Regards & Respect,
Vinayak”
In a semi-suicidal mode,
Sayantani

Wisdomous

On America’s Independence Day, among other decorations, streets are lined with their national flags. I find the American flag very beautiful (and not just because it has red!) but my friends here have admitted that learning to draw it as a child was an uphill task. Let us thank the powers that be for the Tricolor, shall we? Putting together saffron, white and green with a blue circle was one of the easiest things ever, remember?

My roommate is in the land of the Tricolor now. And every now and then, I either miss her or get homesick, particularly because Manasi will be meeting my family before I get a chance to do so myself. In her absence though, she is letting me use her phone, which is making meeting up with friends here incredibly easy. Hallelujah and lots of love to Manasi for her incredible generosity!

Yesterday, I got my first taste of America’s Independence Day and it was memorable. I attended a multi-course, delicious barbecue. (Seriously, where will I get such luscious beef when I return to Delhi?) I went for a fireworks display, which was incredible, but then I dig fireworks anywhere and everywhere. (I remember there was an extensive fireworks display in St. Stephen’s on the night of our graduation because we were the batch of 2000 AD, you know, the millennium batch. And while friends around me clutched handkerchiefs and hugs and I-will-miss-you tears, my life was perfect thanks to the fireworks. But I must hasten to add, lest anyone thinks of me as brave, that I did those things too, although after the fireworks.) Oh, and the American national anthem is really tough to sing. The people I was with started singing it in a fit of patriotism, and that made me nostalgic for Jana Gana Mana. I started humming it and then couldn’t get it out of my system because it kept going round and round in my head. Soon, I was asked to sing “whatever it is that you are humming”. Flush with “I am missing Delhi again” I sang both the national anthem and the national song. That felt appropriately ridiculous given the occasion but incredibly good nevertheless.

I had a house guest for the last two days. My friend, Mike, who got his MFA in Creative Writing this year had left Moscow in May to return to his hometown in North Idaho. He was down in this area for a boating trip at one of the many wild and curvaceous rivers that run through our picture perfect state and stayed at my house. So among several sessions of non-stop laughter and yelling at each other, we managed to avoid cerebral topics completely.

And finally, the reason why this post is titled so. I have heard two very profound sentences in the recent past and they have stuck themselves to my head. Let me share them with you:
“I know there are 10,000 Jewish men in New York City because I have dated every single one of them.”
-- A friend’s aunt
“A day without ice-cream is a day without sunshine.”
--Overheard at yesterday’s barbecue

Happy birthday, Dan!

For everyone’s information, I am writing this under duress as he sits in our house waiting for midnight to strike. He has just fed us dinner: hamburgers, fries, hotdogs, pork ribs, carrot cake. Post dinner, he has been demanding post after post since it is his birthday. To celebrate the grand occasion, Manasi, Parul, and I are teaching him Hindi. So far he has perfected “Kshama kijiye”, “Janemann”, “Saathiya”, “Humdum”, and he has christened each one of after the three affectionate words. Then he decided to learn some bad words which he then combined and the results were hilarious, partly accentuated by the fact that there is vodka and a variety of desserts overflowing in the house. One of the reasons he wants to learn Hindi is because he wants to marry Parminder Nagra (for those of you who have forgotten her already, she is the star from Bend it Like Beckham) and of course so that he can remain friends with the three of us forever. Now Manasi is teaching him “Oh humdum suniyo re” from the movie Saathiya.
More, when I recover from the ordeal. Pray that we may survive the night.

A Piece of My Heart

By most standards, my brother, who is eight years younger than me, has led a most brutalized and traumatized childhood. His arm still has a shadow of scars inflicted by me, his tooth was once knocked out because I was tutoring him and thought his handwriting that day was particularly bad, he was made to dress like a girl until the age of four every time I wanted us to play something dramatic, he was slapped because he couldn’t remember the spelling of China, he was fed coffee powder disguised as cocoa, he was woken up on days his annual results were to be declared by a strange whispering in his ear that said, “Wake up, today is the day you flunk”, and he was told every ridiculous story I could ever make up, and worse, he was forced to believe them. But he, Aritro to most of you, Riju to his family, and Rijua to me gave away from a very early age the steely determination and intelligence that he wasn’t ever going to crumble under this pressure.

There were two ways he went about it. First, for every thing that went wrong in his life, Riju knew whom to blame. The trend started when I was eleven years old and he was three and was passionately in love with vehicles – toys or otherwise. His toy car collection rivaled those of big shops from where our parents and miscellaneous loved ones bought the goodies to contribute towards his noble cause. Every morning and evening, Riju would require/demand to be taken downstairs to the parking lot of Nilgiri Apartments in Alaknanda, New Delhi, where we lived at that time, so that he could scrutinize the arrangement. He knew the names of all the brands and their colors. Riju would then come back home and arrange his cars in that exact way, right down to the last detail, customizing if he fell short of one car, or color, or make. He even replicated, say, the fifth car that had an awry tire, or the ninth one that was parked wrongly, or the fifteenth parked facing backwards. Or our own, slumbering, because our father had decided to go to work on his scooter. Riju's three-year old mind did not know how to count but he recognized patterns and he replicated them perfectly, every day, sometimes every hour, tirelessly and seamlessly.

But in this paradise of cars and their arrangements, there lived an ogre. She used to come back from school eagerly because there was always a human being at home waiting to be played with. Now, one of the first things the ogre did upon entering the house was pocket two or three of these cars, from mind you, a collection of at least a hundred similar sized contraptions. She hid them and covered her tracks well by obliterating the gaps caused. Sometimes, to play even more safe, she pocketed only one when there were three more of the same size, brand and make. But she was caught within two minutes of the deed every single time, simply because the victim was far smarter than most people she had ever played jokes on. So he would toddle back from wherever he was, walk over to his careful arrangement, scrutinize with his shiny black eyes while his silky thick hair fell all over his forehead and chubby pink cheeks, and either holler or speak quietly, “I know you have taken such and such car...from such and such row/column. It was representing the grey Contessa I saw in the parking lot this morning. Give it back.” I nearly always thought he did it by magic, today I know Riju does it because he has an astonishing kind of memory.

The second arrow in his quiver was and still is, his incredible sense of humor. When Riju decided to fall in love with Manchester United, initially for the first few months, I remember myself to have been supportive of this choice. But over time, he became obsessed and Man U became his sole reason to live. He began to read voraciously, he began to remember details of every match played in their history, every player ever recruited right down to his height, weight, total number of matches played, goals scored, number of times nose picked, armpit scratched...Riju knew it all, every single detail, which he of course needed to share with us, his family. So I had to retaliate. In the only way I could...because by then, he was becoming taller AND stronger. Much aggrieved and humiliated I began to spin long yarns -- of how Sir Alex was actually a goatherd in disguise, how Beckham got routinely beaten up by his wife and three sons, how ManU was the club of everyone who was illiterate in Britain, how Mrs. Ferguson washed every player’s clothes by hand because the club had no money.

I did this again last night, over our Internet telephony chat. And Riju bore it again, gracefully and with humor. By adding details that made these stories come alive even more. By making me laugh and laugh and laugh until the neighbors nearly called the police. By reminding me once again, as if I needed any more reminding, that however different we might be, as siblings we make perfect sense. We add up.

Leavenworth on CNN.com

Everyone! I am officially super excited! I had submitted ten photos on the CNN website at their "Road Trips" section. Seven of my photos got accepted and here is the link. Keep clicking on the "next" button for the photos. (They have been weirdly edited though, which is sad. I think my original work looked better.)

Now, they only need to publish some of my writings to really make me fall in love with them.

Kaleidoscope: Of Some of My Favorite Moments

I came across this wonderful website/tool through my friend Manu's blog. His blog is linked to mine and I would recommend a visit there in order to learn about cool Internet things that he chances upon every now and then. I am sure some of you will be tempted to try this out on your own blogs. Happy exploring!

Thoughts from a Cafe

I am sitting in a café I have just discovered in Moscow. It’s called Sisters’ Brew. The walls are red, orange and black. The floor is tiled and carpeted alternately. There are comfortable couches, cane chairs, and straight backed chairs with desks. There are Van Gogh-ish paintings on the walls, and focused as well as dim lighting around me. And there is a gigantic bookshelf packed with books. The overall ambience is one of ornate yet casual comfort. The best part is that just because it’s a Saturday and warm outside, there aren’t hordes of wanna-be-mod couples piled on top of each other. The staff knows what it is serving. (They certainly serve excellent chocolate cake and iced mocha. By the way, the mocha came in a gigantic beer mug.) I am on a green upholstered sofa myself, half sitting, half lazing. A local musician will be playing here in a few hours’ time. I am excited about that. Until then, I will blog, read a bit, work on one of the four pieces of writing I am currently involved with, touch base with a few friends, and maybe if really motivated…take a nap as well.

I saw several movies in the last ten days or so. Here is a quick list of them:
1. The Namesake: For the first time in my experience, the movie was almost as good as the book. Wonderful performances, the same joys and frustrations as in the book, a better understanding of what Ashima means when she says, “I don’t want to bring up my son in this lonely country”, and immense appreciation for Tabu’s very authentically Bengali looking hair, if you know what I mean.

2. Shrek 3: Super awesome, the best Shrek movie ever, the scriptwriters have such a wicked and sarcastic sense of humor, I bow my head to them. It’s a full 10/10 movie so no more to say about it, just watch it.

3. Bheja Fry: Hilarious. Nutty. Wonderfully fresh and new.

4. Tara Rum Pum Pum: Rani and Saif, aside from other stupidities in this movie, have two children as well. They are called Champ and Princess. WHO, really WHO, gives their children such pet dog like names?

5. Pirates of the Caribbean- The End of the World: So much for rushing to catch the first day first show given my obsession with the first part of this trilogy and my appreciation for the second part. But this one? I did not understand a word. It was confusing, it was silly, it was boring. I yawned and nearly dropped off to sleep at some points. My advice: Do NOT spend money on it.

I listened twice to my favorite piece of contemporary Hindi film poetry yesterday. It’s from Lage Raho Munnabhai, and this is the piece with which Vidya Balan makes her appearance (remember she is a radio jockey in the movie?). Not only are the lines beautiful, she narrates them so wonderfully that their beauty comes across even more effectively.

Sheher ki iss daur mein daur ke karna kya hain
Agar yahi jeena hain doston, to marna kya hain
Pehli barish mein train late hone ki fikr hain
Bhool gaye bhigte huye tehelna kya hain
Serial ke kirdaron ka saara haal hain maloom
Parr Ma ka haal poochhne ki phursat kahan hain
Ab reth mein nange paon tehelte kyon nahin
Ek sau aath hain channel par dil behelte kyon nahin
Internet pe duniye se to touch mein hain
Lekin pados mein kaun rehta hain jante tak nahin
Mobile, landline, sab ki bharmar hain
Lekin jigri dost tak pahunche aise taar kahan hain
Kab doobte huye sooraj ko dekha tha yaad hain
Kab jaana tha shaam ka guzarna kya hain
To shahr ki iss daur mein daur kar karna kya hain
Agar yahi jeena hain to marna kya hain?

Simple, easy to understand, and straight to the point, just the things that according to me make good writing. Now, if you will excuse me...I have an iced mocha to go back to.

One, Two, Three, Four

Picked up a tag from Richa’s blog. There were twenty questions, I skipped five to bring it down to fifteen. As with tags I have done before, answer at least one question here too. All the best!

1.Pick out a scar you have, and explain how you got it?
A spot on my right cheek thanks to chicken pox at the age of twelve.

2. What is on the walls in your room?
Posters of concerts and readings I have attended in Moscow, a silver ribbon from the first University of Idaho sporting event that I attended, and a couple of sketches made by me.

3. What does your phone look like?
The same as it used to in Delhi. Difference being that then it worked and now it doesn’t.

4. What music do you listen to?
Will listen to almost everything at least once. Currently, I am listening to a lot of Western Classical music.

5. What is your current desktop picture?
A National Geographic photograph of a tigress.

6. What do you want more than anything right now?
A ticket to Delhi, and the next Harry Potter book.

7. What time were you born?
Around 8 pm I am told.

8. What are you listening to right now?
Mozart’s Requiem.

9. What’s something people may not know about you?
That I recover my temper faster than I lose it.

10. The last person to make you cry?
Someone who reads this blog.

11. What is your favorite perfume?
Anything lemony.

12. What is your favorite pizza topping?
Ham and pineapple.

13. If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?
My mother’s jhinge posto.

14. Who was the last person you made mad?
My roommate, because I insisted this morning that Aishwarya Rai is beautiful and Abhishek Bachhan married right.

15. Is anyone in love with you right now?
That’s really not for me to answer, is it?

"The Return of the Native"

It’s been a month long hiatus and now I am back.
Was it an interesting month? One that I should tell everyone about?
Not particularly, but it was undoubtedly the busiest. There were these mountain loads of assignments to finish; a few cartloads of grading work to submit; last minute books to read, analyze and ponder over; some stuff to edit and proofread since the student council that I am a member of decided to bring out a newsletter and I was made its editor; friends to meet before they went off to their homes for summer vacation (and no I cannot come to Delhi simply because I can‘t afford to), and in the midst of all this business there was also an inability to blog and the words just seemed to dry up here (perhaps because I have to write so much in my daily, ordinary course of life anyway). Yeah, that doesn’t make sense to me either.

One of the finest things that happened last month was getting a handwritten, proper letter from my dearest friend Suvena. I came back home one cranky evening, hungry, homesick, and horribly tired only to open the letterbox and find an envelope for me marked in familiar writing. The letter and the gesture, they both made my day, no, actually they made my week and several days thereafter, just as Richa’s had in my second month in America. I really appreciate the effort that goes into writing letters these days given how all of us are so computer dependent. Thank you, ladies.

For one of the classes this semester, our teacher had chosen political memoirs for us to read. They were thus books seeped in tragedy and all against a backdrop of turbulence and political crisis. The places were therefore just as varied -- Cuba, Rhodesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Germany.
They were tough books to read, tougher to find faults with, and even tougher to return to when it came to doing assignments based on them and then reading them out loud in class so that fellow writers could analyze, discuss and rip apart every word that you held dear while writing it down in the first place. But they were incredibly fun and challenging as well. During one of our discussions, our teacher wanted us to think about a possible revolution in the exact surrounding that we were living in right now, that is our tiny university town, to which I countered by saying that revolutions weren’t possible anywhere in this country simply because it is such a lonely society. She said, “Convince me. Write it to convince me.” And that therefore is one of my projects for this summer vacation. Why revolutions cannot occur in lonely societies where there are just way too many boundaries between one person and another. Let’s see how that fares.

More later. And thanks to everyone who enquired about my disappearance and sent reminders via email, messengers, scraps, comments, etc. that I need to re-emerge, if not anywhere else, on Kirrin Island at least.

Tied to the Tricolor

There are days when my patriotism threatens to overwhelm me. I am just so proud of being an Indian that I want to scream from the rooftops in America, “Hello everyone! Do you know the glorious country I come from?” Case in point, today. When I woke up in the morning, made some coffee, sat down with the laptop, started going through news websites one after the other, and came across the detailed reporting in both Indian as well as international media about how the rich culture of the land has been offended by the fact that Richard Gere kissed Shilpa Shetty in an AIDS awareness function in NEW DELHI, the CAPITAL CITY of India. So much so that there have been protests from all over the country, including equally or more emancipated cities such as Mumbai. Americans are, thankfully enough and unlike most Indians, extremely demonstrative with their affection, as I am learning everyday. But that is not the point. The point is that something as trivial as this made people sacrifice their time and energy over things such as burning effigies of both the people in question, of asking them to apologize, and telling the non Indian to leave India and go back to his home. Of course kissing is not part of Indian culture! It’s such a sexual activity! Any kiss any where means getting undressed and jumping into bed! And we of course don’t know anything about those things because in our country, the second most populated country in the world by the way, children are born just by men and women looking into each other’s eyes. There is really no other activity involved! And all this when the same day’s news also includes the nexus between Dadua, the dreaded gangster from Uttar Pradesh, and Mulayam Singh Yadav, one of the most prominent politicians of the country. And the conversion of a thousand Hindus in Orissa to Buddhism because in spite of being Hindus they were denied access to temples in their own region owing to the fact that they were from lower castes.
Uff! My pride in my country knows no bounds today. I might as well tie the tricolor on my head and walk about the campus.
But then again, given today's events in the US, there are several things to be grateful for in India.

The Alive & The Dead

Five hours of non-stop work has given KirrinIsland a new look that has replaced her ghastly pink and white robe. She has been trimmed down, her face cleansed, and then re-made up. She is out to face the world with a more confident stride, or so her creator believes.

Moving on.

Can you please tell me the worst movie you have ever seen? No, seriously. I am doing some research on this topic right now. I have been motivated to do so since I saw Red last week. The one starring Aftab Shivdasani, Celina Jaitley, and Amrita Arora. Why did I watch it? Because sometimes the need to hear Hindi is so great that I succumb to any and every temptation. Anyway, I didn’t start watching the movie with any preconceived notion, I was determined to give its every scene a fair shot at survival.

So Red is a thriller. It was so edge of the seat and unpredictable that while it played, I went and washed my clothes, made some toast, took a ten minute nap, and yet managed to correctly guess who the killer was going to be.
Two things in particular sealed Red’s fate for me:
Firstly, the fact that Celina’s performance is so power packed that she makes Amrita Arora look as magnificent as Shabana Azmi.
Secondly, the imagination and dialogue that has gone into this movie is spectacular. Initially, we see Celine Jaitley as a grieving widow. Her best friend, Amrita Arora, wants to bring her back to normal life, so she does what any well meaning friend would do if you lose a loved one. Amrita calls Celina, who is named Anahita in this masterpiece, and says, “Hi Anahita. Chalo, chalo, aaj raat ko disco mein aa rahi ho na?”
Just the remedy to get over a trauma.

Falsafa

Rabbi Shergill, one of my most favorite contemporary musicians has sung a song on my most favorite city in the world.

Jaagegi raat bhar
Aur bhagegi saath parr
Kar dalegi belagam khayalon ko
Poochhegi yeh sawal
Aur mangegi yeh hisaab
Na sunegi tere jawabon ko
Yahan hain ek nadi
Aur wahan ek lal qila
Par kahan hain is shahar ka falsafa

I am keen to know who wrote the lyrics. Only someone who loves Delhi passionately could have described her as a tempestuous woman.

My Good Luck Charm

For seven glorious years of my life, I lived in Narmada Apartments, Alaknanda, New Delhi. That home of ours saw me graduate from school, college, university, experiment with summer and part time jobs -- all to earn some extra pocket money, then eventually it saw me get my first “proper” job. Several other good things of life happened during my stay in that house, which is why I will always remember it and the neighborhood it was situated in with a lot of affection and fondness.

One of the things that made Narmada Apartments memorable was the almost daily walk in the evening with Suvena. Suvena Bansal. A year senior to me from school, Suvena and I had initially rejected each other because to me she had appeared as “too unintelligent”, and because to her I appeared as “too arrogant”. So for all her years in school, we traveled from the same bus stop, in the same bus, stood always at the back (naturally ’coz sitting in the front of a bus and on a seat was something that behenjis did), talked to our respective friends, and almost rarely if ever acknowledged each other.

But all that changed the year Suvena graduated from school. I don’t remember what happened, when, or how, but we became friends. We swore lifelong commitment to each other based on our mad lust for Rhett Butler, our love for wicked women, books, hand written letters, men with good voices, chocolates, and the chemistry that we found between us. If not in each other’s house, then we were obviously out walking in the neighborhood, down the tree lined avenue within Narmada Apartments. The trees touched the skies while we went about our daily business of dissecting things that happened, people we met, our future plans, goals, everything.

Suvena’s most redeeming quality in my life was that she always knew how to make things better. You took a problem to her, man made or otherwise, and god knows that as a teenager there were tons of the former as compared to the latter, and she solved it for you. She didn’t get mad, she just chose to get even. You hurt her friend, you hurt her. Her brand of loyalty, clean heart, kickass intelligence, infectious enthusiasm, and the ability to know what was right for me although she was only a year older, made her one of the most wonderful things in my life.

Today, she is married. To a wonderful man, as also to her smart alec job -- the one she got after her IIM degree, (which only goes to demonstrate how utterly stupid my initial assessment of her intelligence was), and she is a mother. But to me she is not special for any of these achievements although they are all meritorious by themselves. To me she is special because she lets me be me with all my hundred imperfections and vanities, humiliations, heartbreaks, and defeats…things that I don’t admit to most others I know. Which is why she was with me when I went to check whether I have made it to St. Stephen’s because if the answer was no, I knew I would be able to deal with the rejection if I was with her. She made me smile, she cried with me, she made all my birthdays special, she found something to redeem my faith in myself every single time that I messed up, and I know how often that was the case.

Dear Bitch and a Half, I am missing you so much today. Don’t worry, all is well with my life here. I am working hard, I am living my dream, I am happy. But a bhelpuri and then coffee with you (for which you will insist on paying thanks to your ever present “Main badi hoon na” logic ) and after that, a long walk in the evening while our respective mothers shouted themselves hoarse from the balconies (“Will you ever come back home?”), would have done me a world of good. You are being missed, desperately.

Tell Akriti, she is a lucky princess, she has my good luck charm as her mother after all.

Love always,
Bitch and a Half

300

I saw the movie 300 last night. Based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel by the same name, the film is a visual delight provided larger than life, computer graphics are your cup of tea. And they better be, because this is it. This is the only selling point of the movie. Maybe by some stretch of generosity, even the music can be called interesting, since unconventional it certainly is. But then, that’s it. Nothing else is memorable neither in terms of performance, story nor characterization.

I am not sure from where to start ripping this movie into shreds. Perhaps from the fact that the director, Zack Snyder has actually said in an interview that historical details were purposefully changed so that they would look “cool“ and work better for movie purposes. Pick up a goddamn fairy tale then! Don’t go around telling history the way you want to.

Or perhaps from the fact that everything looks so fake that even when heads get chopped off, or arms get mutilated, nothing really happens to you inside. Contrast that with a particularly poignant scene in Saving Private Ryan where one of the soldiers searches in the debris for his arm that has been just been blown off by a grenade.

Or perhaps from the fact that the protagonists know only three ways of delivering the already poor beyond belief dialogues so much so that in the entire movie there is not one dialogue that evokes the same emotion as the one in Gladiator when Russell Crowe faces Joaquin Phoenix and says, “My name is Maximus…commander of the armies of the north…loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius, father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife, and I will have my vengeance in this life or the next.”

This is a war/ adventure film, but where is the tension, the gripping excitement, the edge of the seat thrill and fear that even the tamest of the scenes in Lord Of The Rings had? Nowhere, although 300 is one of the big blockbuster movies that Hollywood seems to be proud of this year.

More than anything else it is disgusting how the movie is all about the noble white man’s struggle and victory against the primitive Orient. The essential story of 300 is that Sparta and Greece have been challenged by the Persians. The Spartan king, Leonidas, is white, noble, heroic and someone every woman in the audience will find it very easy to fall in love with. Provided they don’t have backgrounds in history. By contrast, the Persian king, Xerxes is brown, primitive, and the kind of man very few will ever fantasize about. He lives in a harem, wears vulgar jewelry, is surrounded by naked women and other intoxications whereas the Spartan king is a good clean man, with no addictions, only noble heroic charms and of course he is staunchly monogamous. So the Asians have invaded Sparta with a million soldiers against whom only 300 of the Spartan army is available to fight. Now such unequal battles are part of history and have been fought countless times. My own brother who has got a supremely intelligent mind and memory for military history can write several essays to prove this right and so there is nothing shocking or alarming about the movie maker’s claim. But what is repulsive is how he brings his contemporary awareness and prejudices in to this film. His brand of Asians attack with strange monsters, magic and mumbo jumbo, disfigured men, and they demonstrate a passion for the weird, the brutal, and the savage. The Asian army is big, slow and rather incapable of war. The Spartans are methodical, disciplined, and swift. And of course the only person who defects to the Persian side is a grotesque man with severe disfigurements that make it impossible for him to fight from the Spartan side. So the implication is clear…you have to be totally wrong somewhere to take “their” side. Particularly telling is the last scene where the hero, King Leonidas is sprawled dead, his body pierced with arrows. From the way the camera moves over his body it immediately brings to mind images of crucifixion, and we know what parallels are being drawn between this celluloid hero and the other religious one. The suggestion of the battle between “good” versus “evil” and which side is which is too clear in the director’s head, and it is this black and white distinction that I am not comfortable with. There are too many grey cells protesting.

Look who is online!

And look at it here
There's a photosketch there, which the artist made after mutilating my photograph, and the resulting sketch makes me look neither 27 nor human...very sad indeed. So in case you cannot recognize me from that sketch, you shall be forgiven, and I shall live with that.
And by the way, according to the article, I am taking "a course in Creative Writing". Bah! I AM getting myself a second Master's degree for crying out loud, not a month long "course"!
God save us from certain editors!

Still, I am thankful...it's not every day that one gets published, and that too in such a platform. So, a big THANK YOU to everyone who made this possible, especially Praveen.

I await everyone's feedback.

A Weekend In Utah

Life is nothing more than a series of conversations, isn’t it? We go from one conversation to another, having retained what we had to and then moving on from there. Conversing is one of the few things that my mother says I do quite well. I certainly have shown tremendous appetite for it for several years of my life, except maybe for times such as when I was in class 3, when in my annual report card my class teacher wrote, “Very shy child. Needs to talk more.”

The weekend from March 1 to 4 was exceptionally fruitful in terms of such conversations. I was in one of the most beautiful states of the US, Utah, attending the Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference. The name Utah comes from the Ute Native American language, where it means "people of the mountains", and this is a state that is known for its geographical diversity…it’s got it all, right from snowcapped mountains to river valleys to barren deserts.

I left Moscow on March 1 with my friend Mike who drove me to our nearest big airport, Spokane, which is about two hours’ drive away. Barely fifteen minutes out of Moscow, the landscape begins to show rolling mountains and vast fields. Top that with a clear blue sky, and paradise itself will pale in comparison. After the non-stop conversation with Mike, I reached Spokane, where it was time for the necessary checking-ins, and then I sat down for an hour long wait armed with a Starbucks mocha and The Winshaw Legacy, an amazing novel that doubles as a political and social statement on the Britain of the 1980s and 90s. A minute into the book and the coffee, I hear, “Hi Sayantani!” or the American version of it, which is Sayan10e. I looked up to see a complete stranger, someone I have never met before. Intrigued, I nodded, and smiled tentatively. He smiled back, and said, “It’s ok if you don’t recognize me. We have never met officially. I teach in the English department at the University of Idaho.” A couple of meaningful conversations later, we parted…he to board a plane for Denver, and I for Salt Lake City, the capital of Utah.

Once I boarded and was still in the process of settling down, I saw a familiar face coming towards me. It was Matt, a friend of a friend, and wonder of wonders, his seat was just the very one next to me. We had hung out in the past and so another effortless conversation was waiting to take place. An hour and a half passed pleasantly, and we reached Salt Lake City, so called because it is situated around a lake by the same name, and even more spectacularly so, surrounded by the Rocky Mountains.

At the airport, I met Samantha, Sam for short. She had been sent from the venue of the conference, that is the Weber State University, to pick me up. The drive from the airport to the campus was pleasant, although marred for the driver because of heavy snowfall on the way. For the passenger, it was a new city, a new experience, lots to see, and lots to keep her eyes and ears open for.

When the name of a conference has Rocky Mountains in it, one expects to be able to see the mountains. What one is perhaps not prepared for is how much of it is there to see. It ran along my side of the road right from Salt Lake City to Ogden where the University is situated. I saw the Rockies from the window at my room in a motel in Ogden, and photographed it night and day. Ogden downtown has the Rockies for its background. The Weber State University campus is nestled within the Rockies. So, snow, sunshine, mountains…few things can match their beauty…provided your life is moving at a leisurely pace. I have plenty of snow and mountains even in Moscow, but here I hate it because snow slows me down, in every which way, and that makes me angry.

After dinner with Sam and some of the other students from the University, they dropped me off to my next destination, Motel 6. For any one of you headed towards Ogden, Motel 6 should be the last motel to stay in, in spite of its cleanliness and fabulous views. Why? Because the motel as such is managed and run by the dumbest people in the whole of North America. Sample the following three conversation, with three different people.

Sayantani: Hi, I am new in Ogden. Could you tell me stuff that I could do around here on my own without getting lost? Particularly because a snow storm is predicted within the next few hours.
Clerk 1: Umm…like, I don’t know.
Sayantani: You work here, probably live here as well, and you don’t know what one can do here?
Clerk 1: Umm…yeah, kinda.

Sayantani: Hi. Is there any way in which I can access wireless network inside the hotel?
Clerk 2: You could go to Starbucks.
Sayantani: But I don’t want coffee.
Clerk 2: No they have wireless.
Sayantani: You’re missing the point…I asked about wireless inside the motel.
Clerk 2: I don’t, like, I don’t know.

Sayantani: I need to book a cab please. Could you make sure that one is here at 9 am tomorrow?
Clerk 3: Umm, I don’t know how to do that. I can give you their number.
Sayantani: Yeah, do that so that I can call from my extra special gold plated phone, which will make them talk to me far more nicely than they would if you called them from your regular white colored phone.

The next afternoon, Sam took me to lunch at Rooster’s, a restaurant in downtown Ogden. Rooster’s is apparently one of the most important places to eat in Ogden, it certainly had awesome food. Then we went to Farr Better Ice Creams, a store that’s been around for more than fifty years and has a very traditional American feel to it. Not to mention, some amazing flavors that looked and tasted better than every sin in the world. After that I trooped around by myself in Ogden’s historic downtown section, took tons of photographs, visited the Union Station Railway Museum where I missed my dad tremendously…the sight of those shiny trains, both actuals as well as miniature models scurring around very realistic looking albeit minute landscapes would have made my dad fall in love with the place. I have experienced this before, there comes a time in each of my independent travels when I see something that reminds me of some one or the other in my life, and those are the only times when I wish I had company, or a cellphone at the very least, to at least call the person in question, and confess, “I miss you, I wish you were here.” But fortunately, that feeling doesn’t last for long…possibly I lack the gene that keeps people unhappy or depressed for long.

On Friday evening, it was the Weber State University again, where there was a poetry reading session, some music, basically an ice-breaker for all the fifteen-twenty universities that had come to attend the conference. I was the only one from the University of Idaho, which was nerve-wracking at times, but for the most part, quite interesting.

Saturday morning came with a flourish and also too soon. It was the day of the conference, the day of my presentation, the day of my telling the audience how it feels to work as a writing tutor in a university that is overwhelmingly American, and where I belong to the minority. All went off well, the butterflies in the stomach died a natural death once I started speaking, and eventually in the evening when the conference came to an end, and it was time to celebrate. With Sam and her boyfriend John. They took me to several unimaginably beautiful spots in Ogden and then to Salt Lake City. Notably, we went to Gateway, which is an outdoor mall, and to the Salt Lake Temple, which is the largest and best known place of worship of the Christian sect known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

After traipsing through these touristy things and lots of fun and laughter, I was dropped off at the motel, which I left next morning to return to Spokane airport, where Mike was waiting to pick me up. We ended up having a fair bit of fun at downtown Spokane…lunch, bookstores, monster milkshakes, and continuous conversations. And then finally home, with the sadness that comes after every memorable journey, the joy of being at home, and the excitement of asking yourself, “Ok, so what’s next?”

Office, Boss, Colleagues

Crunch

Ever eaten a grasshopper?
I just ate two during dinner, thanks to a Mexican friend -- Andres, who brought a whole bagful of them over to my house this evening. How do I describe the taste? Umm...salty, crunchy, the after taste is somewhat like amla, or Indian gooseberry.

This is what Wikipedia says about chapulines or the kind of grasshoppers we ate tonight:
Chapulines are considered a delicacy by many Mexicans. They are collected only at certain times of year. They are thoroughly cleaned and washed out, then fried withchillies, garlic and lemon juice, to create a sour-spicy-salty taste that is a good complement for beer. Chapulines are available only in certain parts of Mexico, the state and city of Oaxaca being best known. They are available in varying sizes, small to large. They are known to have been used as food for over 3000 years.

Thanks Andres!

What Life Said On February 22, 2007

When I first landed in the US, the first month saw me thinking to myself at least a dozen times every day, “Wow! This is blog material. Let me make a mental note, I am going to write about this as soon as possible.”

Nearly seven months later, I can sense that drive decreasing. I hope that that is only because I have never been more busy in my life than I am at present: I have never had to read more, I have never had to write more, I have never had to be more careful of what I say and do, I have never been more active in student groups than I am now, I have never had to learn so much, retain it and use it immediately. I have never craved more for a holiday, for home, for people to understand what I am saying and what I am actually trying to say.

I have also never enjoyed the experience of being a student more than I am at present.

But I hope I am actually not losing interest in blogging because that would be sad, I mean KI just celebrated her first birthday! It would be disastrous for her if I tell her tomorrow, “That’s it. I am deleting you now!” So much for the nurturing instincts of a mother!

Shoving aside that murderous thought…

Today was a good day because it reiterated to me why some people refuse to leave the world of academics, either as a teacher or a student. One of the young men I coached this morning was incredibly intelligent. There must be very few pleasures in the world that come close to the kind of satisfaction one derives from coming across an absolutely brilliant, untapped mind…the sort you instinctively recognize as capable of lots of good things.

And why do some people refuse to leave the status of a student? Because student-hood automatically implies a commitment to mischief. Such as passing notes during a lecture, because you and the person sitting next to you have just discovered and agreed on who fits the tag of “The Class Bore”. And what could be more enjoyable than passing notes to each other that discuss The Bore in more and more entertaining words, all the while trying to remain undetectable to the professor as well as to other classmates?

Dear G, it was good fun today. Thanks, let’s do this again in the next class, shall we?

Colors

On February 13, 2002, an angry article of mine got published in The Pioneer, New Delhi edition. In it I ripped apart everyone who ever celebrated Valentine’s Day. I called it nearly everything that Shiv Sena/VHP etc call it but with a difference. I insisted that I don’t need a day to tell someone I love that I love him. I will do it even without Archie’s and Hallmark breathing down my neck and Delhi Times splashing every conceivable “combo” option in my face. And I did just that, I told my then boyfriend quite frequently that I loved him. Neither of us waited for VDay’s permission to tell us how to behave with one another.

Five years later, I feel somewhat differently. Valentine’s Day doesn’t make me that angry anymore although I too have loved and lost several people. To me today, Valentine’s Day is a day of stocktaking. Of not just the romantic relationship one might or might not be in. It is a day of counting blessings, of appreciating those wonderful people I still have in my life from last year, and of those that I might not next year because of a million probable reasons: distance, lack of time or energy, maybe a huge fight over an important issue or non-issue, or worse, letting something like ego come in between and transform a regular human being into something that's cold, unapproachable, and with a I-couldn’t-be-bothered-about-whether-I-have-hurt-someone stance.

Yesterday, a chance surfing on Orkut took me to a friend’s page where she had uploaded one of her favorite songs and written alongside it something to the effect “I wonder why relationships change color and eventually become colorless”. To all those of you reading this, may none of your relationships ever lose color.
So, Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

Dilli Door Hain

The view from the balcony adjoining my room

Grandparents, my brother Aritro, and our cousin Sinjini



My parents on July 19, 2006

Splinters Of Your Soul

My favorite self analysis exercise over several years now has been to ask myself two questions at least once every day.
The first one is, “Who was the first person I thought of when I woke up this morning, and what does that mean?’ More than anything else, what this exercise achieves is that it unclutters my brain. It tells me exactly that in the ever widening sea of people I get to know, who are the ones I retain and why.

The second question is, “What would I rather be doing at this point of time?” Every time the answer is “This”, I am satisfied. But every time the answer is something else, I know I am not doing what I ought to be doing, or what I would rather be doing. That means, it’s time for change. It’s time for self evaluation, it’s time to go ahead and take steps to ensure that sooner than later I end up doing what I want to do. It helps set my priorities right.

The place where I ask this particular question to myself every nine seconds or so is a dance floor. Tell me to address a crowd, I will. Tell me to eat something that most people would think twice about, I will. Tell me to spend a night in an unknown, dark, big house, I will. But tell me to dance, and I will freeze. Not that I am this conscious on every dance floor. There are gradations of course. A close friend’s house, and I will be okay. Primarily because most of my close friends are not the dancing-gyrating types. Secondly, because at such houses, I will always have the option of glaring. Thirdly, even if I am forced to shake a leg, and I do end up doing so, they would find it in themselves to forgive me for that horrifying visual splendor and I will still be embraced with the same indulgence and love as before. But a dance floor that has strangers, or people I barely know makes me cringe and ask myself the question, “Where would I rather be at this point of time?” literally, as I said, every nine seconds. And the answer varies. It could range from the incredible “With Indiana Jones at the Temple of Doom”, to the peaceful “Inside the University of Idaho library”, to the exciting “Packing my bags to go to someplace new”, to the challenging “Debating over coffee about literature, religion, history, politics with some of the finest minds I know in Moscow”, to the excruciating “Writing a new story”, to the fun “Walking in Dilli Haat” , or the simple “Having a single, meaningful conversation that strikes a chord somewhere to become an indelible memory”.

Ask yourself these questions today, and I am assuming that you can share the answer of the second question at least, if not the first. Because I do want to know what you would rather be doing at this moment, instead of staring into your desktop/laptop, and answering a vague question on someone’s (equally vague?) blogpost.

I am waiting.

Crocodile Tears

So Shilpa Shetty gets paid an obscene amount of money for appearing in a foreign reality tv show and immediately her stock rises. Suddenly Indians in India and the rest of the world sit up and take notice of someone, who in all fairness hasn’t really been the most successful or commercially viable actress Bollywood has ever had. And what’s the game show all about? Nothing much really… just a bunch of B grade British celebrities that no one has ever heard about, or cared about, living together under one roof. I confess that my interest too was piqued, I wanted to see what all the hype was about, what was it that she was going to do, was she going to be in the game or get voted out, and like millions of my brethren I also said, “Yeah baby! Let’s have you win!”

So every day like a nice, loyal Indian I logged on to youtube to check her status. Fast forward a few episodes, and what do we have? Shilpa sheds a few tears, and the disgusting r word slips out from behind closed doors. “Britain is racist and so are the Brits” we cry foul, and Indians in India and in Britain rise up in arms. There are protest marches, there is campaigning and slogan-eering, the biggest sponsor of the show backs out, the issue is debated in the British Parliament, Shilpa cries some more tears and we scream, screech and protest in anger, indignation, hatred because she has been discriminated against thanks to her color. But coolly she soon drops all charges and there is much fanfare and hugging. Everyone is back to being happy because the show gets the kind of publicity it could have only hoped for.

My reaction to the whole thing was WHOA. We have some audacity to accuse another country and another people of racism when by far, we are the most racist people that the earth has probably ever seen. You know where I have faced the maximum number of racist comments? Not in a foreign country but in India itself. In the various cities where I haven’t really "belonged". I am always the passionate Delhi-ite, and have always been, but how do I discount the number of times it’s been assumed that of course I cannot have a home in Delhi because I am a Bengali. So Calcutta is where I belong, or where I should belong. Does that mean I feel perfectly at home in Calcutta? No, simply because my accent gives away the fact that I haven’t had as much practice with Bangla as maybe I should have had. Or the assumption that I am not going to be able to eat fish with finesse because I am from the north. I am a Delhiite, how would I know which bone to pluck from where? Balls. Or say my initial months in Chandigarh, when understanding Punjabi was still a bit of a problem. Did the head of our department with seventy odd people under her, think that she was being politically incorrect every time she broke into Punjabi, which was often enough? No. Did friends and other colleagues think for an instant before lapsing in to Punjabi with each other as to how would Sayantani understand? No. The assumption was that now that you are here, if you want to survive baby, and be one of us, learn our language. Or go and suck an egg. As are the horror stories I hear from other people…those that have lived in one part of the country all their life and shifted to another, and have suddenly had to reconcile themselves to the fact that they are going to be friendless for a while simply because they do not know the majority’s language. Do we leave our language related prejudices behind when we leave the country and come to foreign shores? You would think!

Why the hell are we bothered about a person who by all standards is completely unaware of what it means to represent your country in a foreign land. First of all, wasn’t she supposed to go with at least some understanding of who she is and where she is from. And not with half baked theories that think that Feng Shui is “a Hindu thing”? Yes, I saw this one episode wherein Shetty asks one of the women to give up her bed so that she can sleep there with her feet facing a particular direction because it’s “a Feng Shui …a Hindu thing”. Does she even know where Feng Shui originated? And that there is really no way that Feng Shui can be “a Hindu thing”?

As if this kind of public display of intelligence was not enough, she needed to go a step further. So there was one episode wherein she sat bleaching her skin ostensibly to become fairer, and when asked what she was doing, she went about telling her housemates that fair skin is considered desirable in India. Yes, so it is. By stupid prejudiced people who assume that color has something to do with your worth as a human being. But you have a choice in this matter, you don’t have to give in to every kind of stupidity just because you are in the public eye. Or even if you have to, maybe you can refrain from it for a few days considering that you are in a “white” house where your attempt to become fair will appear to them “Look, what a wannabe! She is desperate to become White, she wants to be one of us. Why shouldn’t I make fun of someone who is not proud of who she is? And instead wants to become one of us?”

Wouldn’t YOU make fun of someone like that?
I know I would. I would make it a nightmare, a complete living hell.

Happy Birthday KI!

Happy birthday baby!
You are one-year-old today, and I am excited.
Let’s party!

As promised I will adhere to all the suggestions made about the birthday post. Right from
Manasi’s which said that I should write about her and how my life has changed after meeting her, to D who wants me to acknowledge the person who made me shift from yahoo 360 and come to Blogger, to Minerva who asked me to list my favorite posts, to Komal who wants me to tell the world about my most favorite and least favorite posts, to Dan who wants me to write about my supercool friends (meaning him and only him) to Chitrangada who wants me to talk about my favorite blogging partner, to Shweta who wants me to dedicate a few lines to my readers. Those that I am working towards finding a resolution for are ideas by Burf (that I should provide return gifts to every visitor), Richa (that I should change the template) and Rohit (that I should throw a rum and beer party for all the readers). The request that is impossible to keep is Subhadip’s. He wants me to sing a song, record it, and then host it here. (No KirrinIsland, baby, I can’t do that to you. I write with a passion, yes, but I cannot force my singing on your tender one-year-old shoulders, and then expect visitors to sit through that torture. Noh! Not at all. Let’s forgive Subhadip, shall we? Just because he sings like dream, doesn’t mean the rest of us who croak can be expected to karaoke along!)

So here goes, all the manageable requests, one after the other:

Manasi’s request
About Manasi: She is the same age as me, with very definite ideas of what she likes and does not like, makes excellent shrimps, studies fish reproduction for her PhD, her students love her, and I am the one she has entrusted with the task of taking photographs when she and Shardul get married.

How My Life Has Changed After Meeting Manasi: Swearing is ok at home; “bitch” can be a form of address; apparently I am never ever to use words such as timid and shy when describing myself; the awareness that if, as and when I have children they would need a fairly disciplined Dad because I am incapable of teaching anything but mischief, reading habits, fairly neat handwriting, and a sense of humor (and none of these things really count!); that we cannot and shall not talk about the people she does not like in our house…so much for democracy!

D’s request
So who made me shift to Blogger?
Deepak did. He made me shift from Yahoo 360 to Blogger. And I must say that it was a smart move. The number of readers grew exponentially, I met some of my most loyal readers here, who eventually became friends, and it’s been a wonderful ride. Thank you D.

Minerva’s request
My Favorite Posts (Month-wise)
February 2006
Chandigarhhh: Travelogue cum reminisces about my life there, and my friends.
When Love and Hate Collide: About my bro.

March 2006
What If: If you haven’t played this game yet, either online on my blog, or in real life with a friend, you need to take a serious look at yourself.

April 2006
Why Cows Don’t Kiss: Explanatory enough
Kasauling and Simlaing: Travelogue
Never Say Never: On Orkut

May 2006
10e’s 10: The things that my mind was obsessed with in May. And how some of those points can still make me smile.
The Jalebi Lover’s Story: About my dad.
Real Gold: The story of my grandparents’ romance.

June 2006
Now Lucknow: Travelogue

July 2006
48 Hours of Fun: About some of my closest friends in Delhi.
OG: About one of the bestest bosses ever.

August 2006
Fifty Observations: My first observations about America

September 2006
We: About us, the students of the University of Idaho

October 2006
Ramlal: My dearest shelled friend in America

November 2006
With An Apology to Every American I Love: With 40 comments in all, this was the blogpost that was read the most.
Love Letter: Written to my mother.

December 2006
Scribbles: Points on cross country America travel.

Komal’s request
My Most Favorite Post is Love Letter. In my letter to my mother, I gave the most of myself.
The One I Wish I Hadn’t Written:None

Dan’s request
My Supercool Friends: Dan only wants his reference here. So…all those of you in India, please get him a girlfriend. He is particularly keen to have an Indian girlfriend at this point of time. And Moscow has very limited opportunities in that respect. The man’s selling points are his amazing sense of humor, his height (he can touch the ceiling), and his wonderful rendition of the Piggy Piggy song (that’s what he thought the Bheegi Bheegi song from Gangster was all about!).

Chitrangada’s request
My favorite blogging partner is my cousin Butterfly, although she is a baby in our world. She is my favorite because I see the real power of a blog in her work, in her love for it, in the way she waits breathlessly through the whole week, just so she can blog on Friday. That kind of one minded devotion and discipline towards anything is exemplary. I admire the spirit with which she blogs, and earnestly pray that this will stay with her for ever.

Shweta’s request
Lines To My Readers (I hope this part doesn’t come out sounding hypocritical, or arrogant or presumptuous)
I value every reader here. I know there are quite a few who read every post but never leave any comments. Some do so because they couldn’t care less, others because they were feeling lazy, and yet others because they feel shy about commenting openly and therefore write me emails instead. What do I want from my readers? Opinions for one. Or at least a record of the fact that you visited. I am not writing with the idea of getting comments for sure, but I am not just writing to tell my story. I am writing because to me my blog is a platform of exchange. A place where we meet and talk.
Monologues are for dictators, conversations are for the rest of us.