newsmakers

A friend of mine, in a blog that she wrote, referred to the mns and the shiv sena as those whom ‘we love to hate’. I thougth about what she said, and I wondered… is it that we love to hate them, or need to hate them? The question was in my head for quite a while, till it evetually drifted away.

The news paper this morning brought the question back in my head. “‘Constructive violence’ is his tool to keep BMC under Shiv Sena,” said the headlines on the bottom of the first page of Mumbai Newsline, with reference to MLA Subhash Desai’s statement in a recent interview.

“We still back violence but it has to be constructive,” he said. “We will continue to be aggresive and raise issues and our voice against injustice”. Statements like these always put me off track, leading me to wonder whether all this is a well calculated threatening strategy or a genuine intent!

One thing is for sure, these guys end up attracting a lot of media attention, and we end up giving it to them. It’s true, as most of us know it, that antics such as those are deeply woven into the ever-so-obvious ploy of constantly being in the public view, and carving a more than substantial place in that view.

Sigh! Newsmakers…

as time grows a year old

The front page of today’s Mumbai Newsline had a photo of the repairs going on at the Taj. The caption reads “A year after 26/11, renovation work at Taj Mahal Hotel on Sunday”.

10 days to go till the 26-28 november attacks date exactly a year old. Strangely, I found myself thinking what I’ll be doing on 26th of this month. Will I be forwarding reminder emails? Will I revisit the ebbs in my memory by thinking back and reflecting on what transpired?

The event is a part of my history, now. It’s something that is a part of my past, but still very pertinent to my present and my future. I must choose whether to hold on to it and drag with me into my future – neither to forgive, nor to forget – or to leave it behind and walk away. It is not as if I was completely unaffected, for I feel a loss that was not mine but was close to me. It was not ‘my’ city, it was not my family; but it was something that went horribly wrong where I living. It’s thus become a part of my history.

When I think of remembering those few days last november, I’m reminded of the Holocaust Museum. I’ve never seen it in real life, but only in Resnais’ documentary Night and Fog. That was enough to chill my bones. But the only other thought that came to me, was. Why not obliterate a past so severe, rather than to constantly remind yourself of the atrocities committed against you? Why hold that close to yourself, and harbour a hate so severe?

Forgive, I feel, but don’t forget. In Hiroshima Mon Amour, the woman never tells anybody her story for fear of forgetting her past. She holds on to her secrets and carries on with the misery, only to realise later the importance of holding it so close to herself that it becomes a wound. Isak, in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, does the other thing by never revisiting his memories to understand his present. An existentialist contextualisation, the importance of which Bergman tries continually to bring out in his film. A similar quest in Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, where the director’s memory is at a loss and he cannot understand anything of his present, till he revisits that past.

Between these two ends of the spectrum, I find a solution to all my questions. I feel the need to not forget the unpleasantness that passed, for it brought along with itself a lot many things. The need to understand the intent and not the act itself. To learn to forgive the act and mend the reason. To resist the urge to harbour a loathing that my find it’s place to stay.

News Today

11th of November, it was.. day before yesterday. I reached office and was waiting to start work. While I was waiting, i picked up the newspaper… Indian Express. What a shock I had when I picked up the paper. The front page was a full page advertisement. I wouldn’t have been so shocked, was it any other paper, but this was Indian Express – a paper that had avoided any advertisements on the front page for a brilliantly long time. Well, I think it was disappointment more than shock.

Add to that, there was the Times of India which I picked up on the way back home along with a copy of Indian Express. The front page was a full-page ad of Volkswagen. That’s okay, I didn’t mind that too much, since ToI always ends up being a front-page-ad paper 6 times out of 10. But obviously, there was more to this one. There were almost 9 pages of Volkswagen ads, apart from other advertisements. And they were franchisee ads, not the company ads. Wow.

I was left wondering… which of the two was a bigger sellout – ToI or Indian Express.
I still can’t figure out. Can you?

Train of Thought

Thoughts are like a current. They flow non-stop, and it’s only a moment that you need to get right to grasp them.

But what happens when you let go of every moment that presents itself before you, and then watch it fly out of the window?

Sometimes I find myself holding on to a few thoughts with all my mind because I don’t want to let go. (Ok, this is not some sort of ‘I can’t get over my ex-boyfriend’ kind of sop story). It’s just a sudden lack of time that I’m feeling. The days are longer, yes, but primarily because they start much earlier than they did otherwise, for me. All of a sudden I find myself living a routine that involves very little consideration to my thought processes. Holding on to thoughts, to write about them, becomes a lot more important to me. My last proper entry being some time in July, I believe, when I actually wrote something.

It’s strange how I find myself thinking back to a particular thought or idea that crossed my mind several days back. I keep thinking… what was it? I know it was something really interesting… My solution: Carry always a notebook and a pen, and jot down. Elaborate later.

:)

Ma Home (one out of many…)

Everything’s just been pending on the blog ever since I’ve moved into my own place this August. It’s quite a crazy experience for me, since it’s the first time I’m completely out of a protected environment; from home to a hostel, where everything is provided for, to my aunt’s place, no less than home at any cost, to living on my own with a couple of friends. The first thing I learnt was that you can just move your stuff into a room and call it ‘home’… It totally doesn’t work that way. The only challenge was how to make this place home? Et voila! That’s when I decided to put academics to use… Mood lighting! :) I learnt about that in college. So I went-a-shopping and got these really pretty looking lights that filled the entire room and also gave it a nice cozy character… :)

That’s my cozy corner in the house – my laptop, my roommate’s speakers, a wall and them pretty lights! :)

Next up on the list was ‘doing up the room’ – which included bed covers et al. What better than a crazy black and white stripes? My guitar liked it too!

And this is the view I get while sitting on the bed on a lazy afternoon…

Child’s Play

My recent visit to my niece and nephew when I went back to Delhi this June…

That day she came up to me and said, “Sruti didi, I also want to wear hairband and tie my hair like you”. So I sat and did up her hair just like mine. I don’t know how great she looked, but she seemed pretty happy. And I had my dose of ‘Barbie-doll-games’ at age 21!

Activity-filled that day was. Surya was showing off his new pets to me – lovebirds – and of course showing me that it’s okay to pet the bird. “I’ll show you. No! No! I’ll hold him, otherwise he’ll get scared. You’re a new person; he knows that I’m just playing”. But then he was kind enough to teach me how to hold the bird… which I very apprehensively did. He sat me down and explained the temperament of each bird – there were four – and told me of stories of all of them. :)

My niece’s friend, this girl seemed like the star that afternoon. It was quite a show she put up that afternoon, with all her madness – most delightfully entertaining! While my niece and nephew were a little more than just conscious of my new camera, she just swayed callously across the room as though there was no camera! :)

The sole goal of all games that afternoon was to prevent the brother – the enemy – from climbing the top bunk and throwing tidbits to the floor. Sigh! :)
But in vain, it seemed..

Battling the Rain

This year it’s my first proper encounter with the rain, as opposed to last year where I was in the hostel most of the time in Town – where it hardly ever rained as much as it did in the suburbs. Now that I’m the ’suburban mumbaikar’, I see how people keep the rain off, at home. It’s obvious that you sohuldn’t step out when it’s pissing down, but that’s not where it ends. Totally safe from the rain is when you’re home with windows shut and dirty blue or black plastic sheets put on the outside of the windows so that the rainwater doesn’t come in.

So we mounted acrylic sheets on the grill. And now we just sit by the window sil and enjoy the view! :)

Of Money and Violence

“I am the only kid who steals dollar bills from his mom’s wallet”, he proudly claimed. When I asked why he said, “So that I can buy a lot of violent toys. I keep collecting lots of dollar bills so that I can buy loads of violent toys with them”.
Earlier that day his mum asked him what ‘violent’ means. “Fighting and bashing up”, he replied promptly with a big smile on his face.

It was at that point that I was wondering how creepy it is. If it were just that once that he’d mentioned the ‘violent toys’, I guess I wouldn’t have been that freaked out. The whole day, he kept harping about violent toys and how he loves fighting and making his toys fight. So I asked him, “What about stuff like Lego? Don’t you like playing with Lego?”  His reply pleased me till he actually went on to elaborate on it. “Of course,” he said. “I love playing with Lego. But only the fighting figures – the guns and stuff. The other stuff is really boring”.

We try so hard to keep our kids away from ‘bad company’ and buy them toys so they can pass their time, as opposed to ‘mingling with the wrong crowd’. But the violence does seep in somehow, doesn’t it? Especially at a time like today where we find ourselves surrounded by in-your-face terror attacks. It’s all the more reason to unaccustom the children to the violence, I thought. But obviously, that’s not so. With toys and games aiming at an obsessive destruction, we’re making violence an everyday event.Maybe it’s just my paranoia that sees it as such a big problem, but the ‘fight’ bit of things just finds its way everywhere, especially in the lives of children. From cartoons to toys to glorification of victorious war stories in history books.

Television content is just so violent for children. It’s amazing to see small children glued to television watching something that defines a hero who readily bashes up the bad guy. The ‘hero’ is obviously stronger and armed with the better weapons, or equipped with better super powers. The bad guy is bad because he has a gun. But the good guy is better because he has a bigger gun to kill the bad guy with. What kind of twisted logic is that? If I were to merely transport this logic into the context of today, does it translate to ‘the guys with the ak-47s and grenades are bad, but the ones with the nuclear weapons are good’… So what if both are weapons of destruction!

We were heading back home and I took the stairs. He was waiting for the elevator – he had just begun to go in an elevator all by himself and jumped at any opportunity to use the elevator. The elevator was taking pretty long to come down and he was getting a little restless and impatient. He started kicking the wall and punching the elevator switch saying, “So you think you’re pretty strong, eh!” I was completely taken aback.

I guess it was partly because I’d been thinking about it all day yesterday. But it’s not completely untrue, right? After all, he’s just 6 years old!

Flights and Karma

Flights have this tendency to get delayed. This delay is often conspiratorially proportional to your urgency – the bigger the urgency, the more the delay.

My previous episode of a delayed flight timed itself such that at every stage of progress towards home, there was a postponement that kept telling me, “You should’ve just taken a train to Delhi”. Now I’m all set to rush to Bombay for a meeting on Thursday evening and I say, “Ok. Let’s not rush this one, and I’ll reach Bombay on Wednesday night”. But delay jumped out from behind the corner at a time when the flight was just about to take off. We moved from the bay to the runway and a while after waiting to take off, we find ourselves heading back to bay. A few minutes later, the ground staff is seen flashing lights at the wing of the airplane. And the stewardess announces,”Kingfisher regrets the delay caused. One of the passengers has spotted birds in the wing of the airplane and we had to head back to bay”.

I guess it doesn’t matter what airlines you take. Last time it was Indigo and this time it was Kingfisher. It’s just luck that determines how late you’re going to get. Maybe there’s some karmic understanding between the urgency and the delay which translates itself into flight schedules. Who knows!

But at least this delay was for a good cause. And the birds flew happily ever after.

Good Morning!

The last 2-3 days, Aj and I were busy clicking photographs at home with some really good results!