LifeTUNE: Life, The Universe N Everything

Skins, Sticky and Seared - Conclusion

2010-10-11T08:27:00.000-07:00

Read Part I first

Read Part II first

Read Part III first

”Damn it!” , he heard her voice from somewhere below him. “Fucking tree!”

Kabir’s whole face was on fire. As he’d twisted in the air trying to catch hold of something, anything, he’d bounced the back of his head against a drain-pipe and immediately plunged into darkness. Apparently he hadn’t died yet – he seemed to have fallen through the cherry tree before hitting one of it's boughs so hard that he felt several ribs crack. But the bough also broke his fall. He was in shock, as much from Veronica’s bewildering betrayal as from his plunge.

“Veronica?” He started coughing up what he could only assume was blood from a punctured lung.

It sounded like she was beginning to climb the tree. Somehow he doubted it was to bring him down to safety and tend his wounds. He tried to shift his weight around but even a tiny movement sent an intense pain shooting through through his chest.

“I suppose you want to know why.”, she said as she heaved herself onto the next branch. “Very simply, you’re a boy-wonder playing in a grown-up’s world. Your product designs have made a lot of powerful guys really annoyed. So they made me a very generous offer to see if I could take you out and help them out too." He could feel her contempt coming at him in searing waves. "You were so easy. You gave me your whole heart for a smile. And for a few cheesy wake-up songs, you gave me access to your email and all your work.”

“Like I said, a boy.” She snorted in disgust. She was only a few feet away. “I was waiting for you to finish the bloody concepts. When they were done, we were done.”

He heard her panting inches away from him. She grabbed hold of a hand. “This won’t hurt at all – an empty air bubble in your blood stream. It will put you right out of your misery. Believe me, you don’t want to go on with the kind of injuries you have.” He raised his head from its resting place on the branch and looked at her with unseeing eyes. He started coughing even before he could get the first word out.

“I loved you.”

************************************************************************

Kabir awoke before the hypodermic syringe pierced his skin; chest heaving, heart pounding. Drenched in sweat. He felt so choked with emotion – pain, love, shock, fear - it was difficult to breathe. Just then the docked music player – that he’d designed, to great acclaim and that he’d failed to follow-up with a next act, to great shame - came alive with its wake-up song chosen, not by design, but randomly. As the baritone started singing “Besame Mucho”, he started crying.

He was alive. And he was still divorced from Karen.

For the last two years, he’d been trapped in a vicious, seemingly infinite loop – a creative block that filled him with frustration which in turn suppressed the few creative impulses that he might have had. She put up with months of him being wracked by self-doubt and diving daily into deep pools of self-pity. But once he started taking out his frustration on the people in his life, on her, she’d left. He’d hurt her - his one true love - he knew that. But she’d hurt him more by leaving him when he most needed her. I loved you, he sobbed to himself.

Reality was crowding quickly into his mind and he could feel the dream slipping away. He reached across to the pad and pencil lying on his side table. With a shaking hand he scrawled “iSkin” at the top of the page. “Dot microphone”. “Dot earphones”. He started sketching, crying all the while, from grief and sheer relief.

Skins, Sticky and Seared - Part III

2010-10-08T11:40:00.000-07:00

Read Part I here

Read Part II here

They were at a dimly lit wine bar in the City’s gay district. It was Thursday when the bar owner took a weekly risk by having a live music group perform without a license. That night a Spanish guitar quartet occupied one end of the bar filling the room with soft strumming. It was a long, narrow room – warm, brown leather couches lined one wall that had been painted deep burgundy. The facing wall was covered by wooden barrels and racks holding dozens of dark hued bottles. The bar prided itself on its (truly rather impressive) collection of moderately priced yet good tasting red wine from all over the world. They had picked the couch closest to the band and over the last hour had been making their way through a bottle of a Portuguese red – one that didn’t fall into the category of port. Veronica was leaning forward – chin cupped in her hands – entranced by the music. Kabir twirled her curls in his fingers. It was only their fourth date but he felt a connection with her, one as beautiful as the one between his fingers and her curls. And as tenuous. Slippery. The thought sent a frisson of panic through him that made him tighten his hold. Veronica felt a soft tug on her hair and let herself fall back slowly to the backrest – her head coming to rest in the crook of his arm. Kabir felt choked up and had to clear his throat before he could speak. “Do you want to go back to my place for a coffee or a night-cap?”, he said. She turned the her brilliant green-eyed gaze towards him. He could see a spark of mischief in her eyes that fanned the embers of his own desire. She smiled.

They were at a tango-jazz fusion performance in the intimate basement space of the local jazz school. The room held maybe forty other patrons. As Veronica got up to get some more wine for her and coffee for him, the Argentine singer introduced her next song – dedicating it to those who’d been hurt in love – so they might find the courage, she said to “always, always, always say yes again, the next time love comes back into their lives”. Kabir felt his senses freeze with only her words filtering through. It felt like she was speaking directly to him. As Volonte started singing, he blinked back into full consciousness. “Listen.” He whispered. “Download.” The iSkin and its vast music library in the cloud would obey. And deliver. It always did. He turned in his seat to look at Veronica. She was standing with her back to him at the makeshift bar that had been housed in one of the school’s glassed-in administrative offices. Just then she turned around as well and her face lit up when she saw that he was looking at her. She gestured with her hands – placing one palm a short distance above the other and then raising it higher. Twice. There was just enough light in the bar area for him to make out that she wanted to know what size coffee he wanted. He replayed her gesture but with his right hand placed as high as he could above the left one. Very large. He was hoping it would be a long night. She laughed as he’d hoped she would. He liked seeing - and making - her laugh. The entire scene was bathed in colours from the red end of the spectrum; textured, bordered and hemmed in with shadows. Volonte’s sultry, soft voice filled the room. “Almodovar should’ve been here with his crew.”, thought Kabir. “Or maybe he already was.” The anemic light from the two incandescent bulbs above the bar counter played on Veronica’s shoulder-length, brown curls giving them a caramel glow that seemed to warm his very soul.

They were asleep in Kabir’s bed, their bodies wrapped around each other in a perfect fit. The iSkin music alarm piped up precisely at seven. Kabir groaned at the song. This was positively cruel! This was supposed to be a make-or-break work week for him. He could barely think of making it to Tuesday, let alone Friday.

A month ago, Veronica had asked to add her voice to his iSkin’s voice control. And since then she’d ever so often change the wake-up song on his Skin when he wasn’t watching. It was usually a funny or sweet surprise. She’d picked Maroon 5’s ‘Wake Up Call’ once. Pink Floyd’s ‘Coming back to life’ another time. And his favourite – Kelly Clarkson’s ‘My Life Would Suck Without You’. She’d picked “I Can’t Wait for the Weekend to Begin” as the song to begin that Monday with. He flipped around to give her a mock annoyed look. She’d woken up at the same time, since they’d taken to wearing one earphone each from his Skin each night, that they might share a morning alarm. “Good morning darling.” , She smiled mischievously. “Grrr!” was his only answer.

He rented a fourth floor walk-up in an old Victorian in one of the City’s oldest neighbourhoods. The master bedroom was right below the building’s sloping roof. It had a large terrace leading off from the room's four French-windows that provided a colourful vista of the roofs, chimneys and pediments of the neighbourhood’s majestic homes– many painted in psychedelic colours – purple and gold; hot pink bordered with lime green. Veronica rented her own apartment in one of the neighbourhoods by the sea, where some mornings she said, she was woken up not by the Skin’s music alarm but by the raucous sounds of parrots on her window-sill. But she’d said that sloping roofs had always been a fascination for her and so Kabir’s apartment had quickly become their default pad for stay-overs. Perhaps, he’d thought, it might not be too much longer before he could ask her to move in permanently.

He stood a couple of feet from the terrace railing ingesting his first fix of caffeine for the day. The wrought iron railing was practically a period piece from a decade where aesthetics sometimes over-rode safety and so were only three feet high. He’d always felt it wasn’t high enough for someone with his 6’ frame. Showered and dressed, he wanted to savour the last moments of quiet in the cool, stillness of the City’s morning, before he had to head out to the day’s craziness. Veronica stepped out, still wearing her negligee. A short purple, silk, thing that ended way above her knees. He loved its contrast with her porcelain legs. She hugged him from behind and kissed his ear. Then, as was her wont, intrepidly stepped to the railing to look down.

“Oh look!”, She cried.

“What is it?”, Kabir asked coming to stand by her. He looked down to see what she was pointing at – a cherry tree in the backyard, that he didn’t remember seeing - seemed to have exploded into colour while he was busy not seeing it. Veronica turned to him, her eyes shining with happiness. No, it was more than that. There was an energy in them he couldn’t quite describe. “Isn’t it beautiful?!”

“Yes it is.” He agreed.

“I think you should give work a miss today. Stay with me!”, She said, clasping his shoulder with both her hands. “It’s a beautiful day. The cherry trees are in blossom and it’s our five and a quarter month anniversary.”

“Yeah, right”, he laughed at the mere thought. Then turned to look at her to make sure she was joking, “Darling, the final design concepts are due today for the next generation devices. You know. I told you, remember? I’ve finally made a break-through. You inspired me.” He paused. “And now I finally have something fantastic for show everyone. I’ve kept it from the whole team because I wanted to build it up. It’s going to be huge.”

She pouted. “I know. But..”

Kabir interrupted her, “Darling, I’d have to have a really good excuse for calling in sick today.”

“Well…”, Veronica smiled coquettishly at him. He loved that look on her. And in that instant he knew, he loved her. “That could be arranged.”

Then, moving one hand to the small of his back and sliding her other hand down to the wrist of his free hand, she ripped off the iSkin that he’d wrapped on there, twisted his hand behind him, and shoved him with all her might.

By the time he let go of the coffee mug in his other hand, he was already too far over the edge to use it to grab hold of the railing.

To be continued

Skins, Sticky and Seared - Part II

2010-10-07T15:29:00.000-07:00

Read Part I first

Kabir walked into the book-store –he liked reading book titles in a book store whenever he had time to kill. There weren’t many people in the Almost Corner Book Store that late in the afternoon, so named because a grocery store separated it from the block’s corner. Piles of daily newspapers lay depleted to varying degrees by the entrance. The New York Times’ pile had suffered particularly in that Sunday’s weekly attack of the brunch-people. He ignored the piles of the morning papers, walking straight over to the Red Rack.

Books in the Almost Corner Book Store were primarily organized by spine colour and secondarily by height. If you didn’t know what the book looked like, you could end up spending a long time in the store. The owner, a silver-haired gentleman named Oscar Vasquez, was a retired dermatologist who’d grown up in an impoverished family in a hardscrabble town in small-town Mexico and who had taught himself to read English. Fascinated by English literature, he’d devoured every book of English fiction he could find starting from the Canterbury Tales to The Devil Wears Prada. Other people’s rather narrow-ranging reading habits constantly disappointed him. The legions of fellow book lovers he had met, who’d never read Walter Scott, or worse, hadn’t even heard of him, for example, shocked him. And so when he gave up his lucrative practice curing psoriasis by telling people to go vacation in Madeira, he decided to open a book-store that would help people expand their reading horizons. He told anyone who complained about the difficulty of finding books in his store – that the arrangement forced people to stumble across books and authors they would otherwise never even consider reading – and that if they couldn’t find the book they wanted, perhaps the universe was telling them to take a chance on a new writer, say for example Sir Walter Scott. Senor Vasquez knew every book’s colour and if you had a particular book in mind, usually the fastest way to find it in the store was to first ask him what colour it was. Several people left exasperated, never to come back. Others stayed, intrigued. And over time the Almost Corner Bookstore had acquired a cachet for the quirkiness of its experience in a city that treasured quirkiness – whether in its streets or its people.

Kabir liked the Almost Corner Bookstore –visiting it was a bit of a weekend routine for him. The rather unique method of organization actually helped his title-browsing hobby since it broke the monotony that could set in, in a traditionally organized book-store, if you ran into a prolific writer who liked following a theme in naming her books. Possession, he read. The Lost Language of Cranes. The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. Unicorns in the Heather. Perfect Music Match. Wait, he thought. That wasn’t his inner reading voice. He looked down at the iSkin wrapped around his wrist. Not for the first time, its ability to mimic his voice had interrupted his thoughts seamlessly. He called it his iVoice in jest – I have MyVoice but the one that matters most is my iVoice, he’d joked to a friend once. He tweaked the device into rectangularity. The graphic on the screen showed two trumpets joining together to form a heart shape. The message “94% music match” was emblazoned below the graphic. The device had detected someone in his vicinity with tastes in music very closely aligned with his. It didn’t mean they had the same songs just that they liked similar sounding stuff. Browsing book titles was a calming hobby for him. Discovering new music that he liked, was a joy. A thrill, even. He looked around. The other customer had shared some of her playlists publicly – just like he had. Kabir’s pulse quickened as he flicked through her song collection. Several of his favourites were there but there were many more that he’d never heard. He looked around to see if he could spot the owner, who had to be within a few dozen meters because he’d set a distance limit on his playlist-sharing. There was no sense finding a treasure trove only to not know who had it and being able to talk to them. He turned around and caught his breath. There was only one other customer in the store. And she was beautiful. She was a vision. And she had Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun on her iSkin. That was such a guy song. (In fact, hardly any of his mates in the City knew the band let alone the song.) She was also looking at him – alerted, doubtless, by her iVoice about a kindred spirit being in proximity.

Not remembering to be his normal shy self, he walked over to her – blushing a little as she raised a delicious eyebrow at his approach. He noticed that her transluscent blue ear-studs were actually the Dot ear-phones from her Skin. She’d stuck them to her earlobes. He’d never seen anyone do that before. His were the regular silver ones and he wore them stuck inside each ear from where he rarely ever had to take them out. “I don’t mean to be presumptuous.” he said as he came to a stop before her. “But, ummm, I just wanted to tell you, that you have a beautiful…”, at this he found himself unable to prevent his eyes from scanning her from toe to top, where he saw that both her eyebrows were now arched. He stumbled over his words, “uh…a beautiful song collection.”

She smiled, amused.

Defying maybe eight different laws of physics, the sun suddenly shone through the store’s ceiling.

Read Skins, Sticky and Seared Part III

Skins, Sticky and Seared

2010-10-06T23:46:00.000-07:00

Kabir stepped off the treadmill and peeled the iSkin off his bicep. He winced a little, anticipating the pain as the slim slab of translucent polymer came off. The workout had left his skin covered with a sheen of sweat, which intensified the hold of the special moisture activated adhesive that coated the iSkin’s back, it also made it trickier to take it off. He felt a little frustrated. The run hadn’t relaxed him as it usually did - he just hadn’t been able to hit the “zone”, that wonderful mental state of rhythm-infused calm that once attained, left you simultaneously exhausted and refreshed at the end of a long run. He’d particularly been looking forward to it today. Fridays were usually a day he gave himself off from his daily dose of treadmill torture but after the stress of the last week it had seemed like a good idea to try and unwind with a run.

Kabir glared down at the device lying limply in his palm…as if it were somehow to blame for it all. Not for the first time, the way the polymer molded itself to the contours of his palm, with a bottom corner kind of dripping off the outer curve of his thumb, reminded him of a Dali painting. He tweaked the top right corner to bring it back to a stiff rectangular shape and put it into his shorts’ pocket. “Switch to Soothing” he said half under his breath which was loud enough for the hyper-sensitive, hyper-micro-phone, on the iSkin, no larger in circumference than the end of a cigarette, to pick up his command. The device obediently switched playlists. As the music changed from Beyonce’s latest breathless hit to a calming Sade crooning “By Your Side”, he felt his shoulders finally begin to relax and some of the tension start leaking from his body. He was in dire need of some inspiration.

Finished with his 45 minutes of daily exercise, the most that his lazy self could tolerate on a regular basis, Kabir walked towards the locker room, stopping by the water cooler for a quick few re-hydrating gulps. He peeled off the Dot micro-phone from the side of his neck and pasted it into the circular slot at the back of the iSkin.

The fingers of his right hand, unconsciously rubbed his left bicep, now iSkin-less, a habit he’d first acquired after purchasing the latest generation device a year back. It had started with him being curious to see if it was true that the device really could power itself by soaking up body warmth and attach itself post-it-like to any surface that offered up even a hint of moisture – in this case sweat buds. The patch of skin, that had been covered by the Skin felt cooler and drier than the rest of the arm. He made a mental note to apply an extra dab of moisturizer on the area. He started walking tiredly up the City’s main drag towards the tram car stop a couple of blocks up. A movement across the road caught his eye. A couple was standing there – the man had been pointing in his direction. Kabir turned to look back and saw he was standing in front of the a storefront-size, unclad Abercrombie and Fitch model. That was probably what the couple had been looking at. He walked on.

Read Skins, Sticky and Seared - Part II

The Daily Dish Needs to Serve Up a Recantation

2010-08-24T05:39:00.000-07:00

When the California Supreme Court upheld Prop 8, prominent, gay, conservative blogger who prides himself on constantly trying to see what's in front of his nose, wrote in a post titled: Prop8 Ruling: The Right Call that it was a "perfect decision" since "It would have been dreadful if voters were retroactively told their valid vote was somehow null and void - it would have felt like a bait and switch and provoked a horrible backlash." Sullivan's a blogger I read quite often. He's always passionately opinionated - right on many issues, badly wrong on a few very important ones like the Iraq War (which he backed vociferously and then, to his credit, apologised for) and just plain, egregiously nasty on some - like his support for removing the transgender community from ENDA.

He's a bit of a lapsed conservative who clambered onto the Obama's bandwagon early on - at least partly because of his apparently deep detest for the Clintons - but his roots show every now and then, as in his reaction to the California SC Prop 8 ruling, which harks back to the ridiculous position of many conservatives in the US that people's will must supersede the courts' even on a question related to fundamental rights. The post surprised me because if nothing else Sullivan claims to be a keen observer and advocate of democracy (witness his vigorous and useful support for the Green Revolution in Iran last year and his posts in support of the "Ground Zero Mosque")- apparently he sat through only half the civics 101 lesson related to democracy being about the rule of the majority while skipping the part about minority rights being guaranteed.

Having ecstatically welcomed both the initial gay marriage ruling by the California SC and then in a more muted way Judge Walker's recent ruling invalidating Prop 8 - Sullivan should really be admitting to being wrong - in welcoming the ruling that upheld prop 8 and wrong in his understanding of how a democracy should work. You can't be the most prominent conservative, gay blogger on the internets writing primarily on politics and policy and be so wrong without admitting it, if you are to retain your credibility. And if doesn't think he was wrong, then it would be a great idea to state that as well and have his reader's debate him on the merits of his position.

Appending his original statement welcoming Prop 8 being upheld to his recantation would be a great idea. I've linked to it in case he has trouble locating it in the prolific archives of the Daily Dish.

The Newly Type B Kids on the Block

2010-08-23T05:54:00.000-07:00

So many flowers to smell, so little time

In an interesting article, a Japanese professor argues that there might be a sociological explanation for Japan's twenty years of economic stagnation - beyond a compulsive savings nature that is after all common to many other Asian societies. He posits a novel idea: that Japan is becoming a society that has outgrown growth; where the young, growing up in an aging, shrinking society and a warming world are increasingly frugal non-consumers and if that means that they end up being a smaller (though very prosperous) power, then that's just fine with them. And in any case, its slowly shrinking population could lift Japan's GDP per capita, already sky-high, even with no actual growth. In a sense he's saying Japan is transforming into a Type B personality quite distinct from Type A countries like the US, China or India or even its own relatively recent, hyper-competitive past. Instead it may be on its way to becoming, sociologically speaking, the Eastern-most member of Western Europe - several of whose nation states have also come to peace, in the last decade, with marginal growth rates (albeit at very high GDP per capita levels) and stable to shrinking populations. Western European nations don't seem to see GDP growth as a validation of a self-important self-image or an expression of their suppressed martial urges but as a means to providing their populations with a higher standard of living. Beyond a point, several have chosen to give their workers more paid days off in a year than increase productivity and GDP growth rates. Seen this way, Japan isn't suffering from a twenty year malaise but has simply opted out of the rat race, having gotten where it needed to get to. So they're trading in yen they could get in the future for some more zen in the present. It's an intriguing argument - can an entire society give up greed - and in doing so, collectively find greater inner peace?

Whether the writer is right or not about Japan, I suspect he is correct in his lateral suggestion that outgrowing growth might be the only sustainable option "in a world whose limits are increasingly apparent".

A Very Long Engagement

2010-08-17T01:14:00.000-07:00

And A Very Long Post. :( I did try to shorten it, I promise I did

What’s in a name, the Bard famously asked a couple of centuries ago. And today that refrain has been taken up by those members of the religious right who just cannot understand why domestic partnerships or civil unions in states like California or New Jersey aren’t good enough for the gay community. Why do they need to horn in on an institution that for eons and in nearly every civilization known to man, has undeniably involved a commitment between a man and a woman. Some of my straight friends, all liberal, have asked me the same question. And when I first moved to the US from India, fresh out of the closet, I kind of agreed with them. I didn’t think it was really important to call a domestic partnership a marriage. Let me explain.

It took me some time to fully absorb the fact that I’d moved to a place where virtually nobody cared about your sexual orientation – unless they were sizing you up for a date or a hook-up. It first hit me that I wasn't in Kanpur anymore, when after a full day of apartment-hunting, I found one that I loved: a fourth floor walk-up with warm,worn hardwood floors, no dish-washer and a view of the Golden Gate. As we walked down the four floors, I told the realtor that I wanted to rent it. Then I told her was gay and asked her if this was something we needed to reveal to the apartment-owner in case he didn’t want to rent to gay people, since I’d hate to star in an eviction drama on local news. My coming out did not faze her a bit, but my question clearly took her aback. When she recovered, she told me, firmly, that my being gay was none of the landlord’s business and that anyway there were anti-discrimination laws that prevented him from refusing to rent the apartment to me. Over time as I learned of all the other protections, and the freedoms – no – the Freedom, available to me to live like any other person, in California, it just seemed greedy to quibble over whether two lovers’ union should be called marriage or domestic partnership – specially when all the benefits were the same.

I was OK with joining up with the folks demanding gay marriage because to me it was a civil rights issue. I could see that the opposition, despite the welter of rational-sounding irrational reasons they put forward, really just felt that heterosexuals were better than homosexuals and wanted to validation for their feelings in the form of a discriminatory marriage law. It made sense to oppose such bullying, just as it makes sense to oppose attempts to block a mosque near Ground Zero. Despite being in favour of same-sex marriage, I didn’t really think it made a difference to me personally. My (over?)-healthy self-esteem, I felt, allowed me to not care what the opposition thought of domestic partnerships. As I saw it, when I found the right guy, we could probably have any kind of religious or secular ceremony we wanted; I was blessed with family and friends who would still attend and who would consider it as important a wedding as theirs; and the only thing that would be different would be a few words on a document that we’d never look at, after the day of.

That started changing when the first decision legalizing gay marriage was handed down by the California Supreme Court. I remember whooping with joy as goose-bumps clambered up and down my back. But I also suddenly felt scared. I was quite ready for a domestic partnership but somehow marriage seemed to have a whole lot more responsibility associated with it; something I hadn't felt until I was given access to it. It was a small shock to learn that I had the same attitude vis-a-vis marriage and domestic partnerships as the conservatives on the other side. I realized that while I understood marriage viscerally - having grown up in it and with it - I only had an intellectual understanding of a DP.

Yes, legally a California DP is exactly the same as a marriage where state law is concerned – but we don’t live in courts. We live in condominiums. In class-rooms and cafes. In all those places, we grow up laughing, talking, crying and learning about love and marriage, not love and DPs. Whether we accept or reject marriage as an institution, we involuntarily absorb and come to understand the value that society places on marriage. My self-esteem hadn't immunised me to social conditioning. My brain still told me that a DP was exactly the same as a marriage - at least at the state level. But that did not ring true for me anymore. Much as I disliked admitting it - marriage, to me, was a more important, more serious commitment. I knew it because my gut told me so.

A few months ago, bereft again of the option to marry, post-Prop8, I found out that my friends, liberals like me, have the same opinion-versus-attitude dissonance as I did. And are unaware of it just as I was. I was at a dinner at one of my closest friend’s house. He’d recently fallen in love with a wonderful girl. I haven’t known her for long but you can tell she’s not just good people. She’s very good people. He is Indian (let’s call him Ritesh) and she is American (let’s call her Angela). Both are as liberal as they come. As the party broke up, they saw us off to the door and as we were saying goodbyes, one of them happened to mention that they’d gone to City Hall that morning and become domestic partners. Astonished by the news and delighted for my friend, I instantly congratulated them on this huge step in their relationship. And then asked why they hadn’t said anything till then, and why we hadn’t celebrated the event. Ritesh shrugged. It was really just to help Angela get on his health plan, he said.

It took a few moments for this to compute. He was saying it didn’t necessarily mark a new step in their relationship – it was more like letting a girl-friend use your car when hers breaks down. I don't think they noticed - but I felt my face redden - I felt embarrassed and foolish. Embarrassed for having thought that their relationship was further along (effectively married!) - than it was. Foolish because, while for me entering into a DP was still a very significant commitment, for them it was less consequential than getting a driver’s license (something that would have merited a mention and a high-five, way earlier in the evening). I felt a bit like an colonial era African chief who, having happily settled for important-looking, colourful beads in exchange for his lands, steps out to find the polite settler kids playing a game of marbles with beads just like his.

When I asked Ritesh if he’d told his parents, he said he had but they hadn’t quite understood what a DP was, and so he told them it was like getting engaged. I didn't point out that it was considerably less than an engagement, really, since it was sans rings, celebrations or excited descriptions of the moment the proposal was made. Hell, it was sans a proposal! But I did think that he was in the right ball-park about a DP's visceral importance relative to marriage, for many, many people. It's really just an engagement.

Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, the first LGBT couple married by Mayor Newsom in 2004, were together for 53 years. As any woman would attest and many men will admit - that is a very long engagement.

And not something that anyone - gay or straight, American or Indian or Aleutian - would want for themselves. Or put up with.

Strumming Her Pain into My Fingers

2010-08-15T18:53:00.000-07:00

A Paean to a Plaintive Melody

I stumbled into Sheryl Crow four years ago in Macy's at Union Square. The sorrow in her voice in "The First Cut is the Deepest" scythed through the mall chatter and into my consciousness. It took a few more moments for the lyrics to register and then suddenly I couldn't focus on deciding between three different, equally unimaginative towel collections. I remember turning around and looking up at the ceiling from where the music was being piped into the room. Being smart-phone-less at the time I had to memorise some of the lyrics and it was only after I got home that I was able to google them, discover the artist and fully hear the song that had had the effect of an acupuncturist's needle being tapped into a sore spot - producing sharp pain followed by a throbbing relief. I captured it forever onto my iPod. I began to research Sheryl Crow - that is, I looked up her profile on wikipedia - and came across more songs that I grew to love. The effervescent "Soak up the Sun" quickly became a standard accompaniment to a sunny mood while the mournful strumming and despair infused lyrics of "My Favorite Mistake" somehow seemed to make it perfect for quiet walks back home on cold, low sky-ed, foggy nights. Finding out that a song is self-referential generally endears it to me. The First Cut is the Deepest didn't seem to have much of a back-story but I discovered that Eric Clapton was Crow's favourite mistake. And that meant that the song quickly became the most played one in my ballads playlist.

It doesn't take much for me to love an artist and start sifting through her repertoire for treasure. Three good songs and an interesting (read loss or pain edged) life-story are pretty much all it takes. Having found three songs that I loved, I fast-tracked through a whole host of songs from Crow's past deemed worth listening to, by her Wikipedia profile, but nothing more caught my ear. What surprised me was that though she did pain, loss, sorrow, loneliness and other sad emotions more consistently and better than anyone else I'd heard, melancholy was missing from her music. Until, four years into liking her, I finally listened to "Strong Enough" without multi-tasking through it. It had resided on my iPod for some time without making its way into one of my playlists. Which meant I'd only heard it a couple of times. Its one of her more prominent hits and so I have no idea why I hadn't paid attention to it before.

The song is suffused with plaintiveness - you can hear it in Crow's voice, read it in the lyrics and feel it in the strumming. You might have noticed, dear reader, until last week I hadn't written for almost a year. For months there had been not a single sentence twisting around in my barren mindscape. More recently, there had been a few fragments - but they just never joined up to form a complete thought - no matter how long or how often I played my melancholy playlist. That playlist, you might remember, usually does the trick when I'm trying to write. It hadn't been doing its magic these past months. Last week as I listened to Strong Enough, I saw tendrils begin to emerge from the lonesome fragments - my very own green shoots of (literary) recovery - that began to hook together as the fragments coiled past each other. Those few sentences were enough for me to sit down and start typing in time to Crow's pain-stoked, pain-soaked chords - typing out a composition. Not a very good one and not my best, but a composition nonetheless. After almost a year.

So now Sheryl Crow is one of my favourite artists, Strong Enough my favourite song and neglecting to notice its true beauty until I really needed it, my favourite mistake.

PS: Lest anyone read between the lines -- it was the tone of the song that appealed to me not the lyrics specifically ;)

Global Politics' Unsung Booster Dose of Estrogen

2010-08-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

You may not have noticed - but 2010 has already been a banner year for women in high office. Through the 20th and 21st centuries - 110 years with scores and scores of power transitions in more than 150 countries - the world has seen only 69 women presidents and prime ministers. The list includes women who've won direct elections as in the case of Angela Merkel in Germany or been appointed as in the case of Pratibha Patil, who became President of India through an indirect election. Of these, 17 are currently serving in 2010 and another 4 served for part of the year. That is to say that 30% of all women heads of state or government that have ever served in the modern age - have held power in 2010. Women leaders have popped up in unexpectedly and in unexpected places - from Costa Rica's first woman President Laura Chinchilla who won in a landslide to Australia's new Prime Minister Julia Gillard who took power in a surprise constitutional coup, to Kyrghyzstan's (yes Kyrghyzstan has a woman president!) Roza Otunbayeva (pictured above) who did so in an actual coup. Finland, Slovakia, Croatia and Iceland all elected women Prime Ministers this year. And Brazil looks likely to elect its first female president in a couple of months. Something is clearly underfoot and one would have thought it would have caused more news by now.

What's happening - or what I hope is happening: A gathering trend of women gaining more confidence across the world and demanding their fair share of power combined with populations slowly shedding centuries of patriarchy -- is not just worthy of making news but really of celebration. Not because of the reasons that are often put forward in casual conversation. That more women at the helm of world's nations will lead to greater democracy, lesser corruption, fewer wars, and in general better (if not good) government. Or to governments that are more liberal or care more for their minorities and disadvantaged classes .

There are women leaders who have proved each of those statements true - Aug San Suu Kyi has kept democracy's flickering embers alight in Burma for more than two decades. Phillipine's Corazon Aquino led that country out of the Marcos' dictatorship; Chandrika Kumaratunge reduced the police and militia excesses in Sri Lanka, and devolved more power to the Tamil North-east, Michelle Bachelet's two terms saw Chile's poverty rate fall to first-world levels and Iceland's Johanna Sigurdardottir legalized gay marriage (admittedly a little self-servingly given she's gay herself) as did Argentina's Kristina Fernandez.

But a broader scan of past and present women leaders shows that none of those assertions are truisms. For those who would like to believe that having women in power automatically leads to strengthening of democracy - I have two words: Indira Gandhi. Or maybe three - Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the two-term Filipino president who was accused of rigging her second election and who certainly had no lasting impact on her country's corruption. For every liberal Johanna Sigurdardottir, there's a Laura Chinchilla who firmly opposes abortion, separation of church and state(!) and gay marriage. Virtually nobody would accuse Margaret Thatcher of a surfeit of sympathy for the downtrodden masses. And it is doubtful Ukraine's narcissistic ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko cares for anyone other than herself. The Goldilocked leader's multiple terms in office brought as much drama and disarray as the fairy tale character did to the house of the Three Bears. (To be fair to her, she had a lot of help from the Ukraine's male leaders.)

The fact is, positive stereotypes can be as wrong and as misleading as negative ones. And can cause a fair amount of damage specially when they concern minority candidates in office. For when the candidate belies one or more positive stereotype and proves to be just like any other politician - and why shouldn't he, she, they? - what arguments are left to elect the second woman or black or gay president?

No, the trend needs to be celebrated, I believe, because there are other undeniable effects of increasing gender diversity in a country's leadership. More women in power makes government more representative. Women in government may not necessarily focus on better issues than male counterparts, but are likely to focus on (at least some) different issues that haven't received as much attention under decades of male leadership - simply because they bring a different set of life experiences to bear on the job. Tak rape (a global scourge that overwhelmingly finds female versus male victims), as an exemplar - How many men would have been in a position to understand the impact of rape on its victims better than Liberia's President Ellen Sirleaf who narrowly escaped that fate when imprisoned by Samuel Doe's government. Not surprisingly the first law she enacted as President was to make rape a non-bailable offence.

But most importantly, by giving women equal access to power, nations immediately double the size of the pool from which a good - or if they're very lucky, a great - leader can rise from. Finding great leaders who can transform a country for the better is incredibly hard and incredibly important. The difference between having a good leader versus a bad one could determine whether you end up as present-day Colombia or Venezuela, both imperfect societies but on very different paths with respect to improving human rights, civil liberties and economic conditions. The difference between having a series of average prime-ministers to a series of poor ones can determine whether you end up as Netherlands or Greece. And the difference between having a great, transformational President versus an average one can determine whether a new country descends into chaos like Russia did under Yeltsin or comes together despite decades of hatred and suspicion as South Africa did under Mandela.

Anything that improves the chances of seeing more Mandelas and Suu Kyis is something I want to throw my full - and falling (now that I'm going to the gym) - weight behind. Even if that means having to live with the Mayawatis and Margaret Thatchers who may also be churned up. And even if that means applauding Sarah Palin who is going to be responsible for South Carolina, Oklahoma and probably Georgia and Wyoming welcoming their first women governors in November.

Soul Ache

2010-06-04T00:37:00.000-07:00

A somewhat complete limerick in Hinglish

Tha Ek Soul
Uspe Pada Life Ka Sole
Ek Baar Nahin Do
Ache, Ache, Ache

Indecent Proposition

2009-10-27T20:13:00.000-07:00

Belated Bemoaning of a Bad Decision

This May, just a couple of days after the anniversary of the White Night riots in San Francisco, the California Supreme Court delivered its judgement on the constitutionality of Proposition 8. Perhaps fittingly, the verdict was another miscarriage of justice. A mean-spirited proposition that sought to take away hard won marriage rights from same-sex couples has ended up vitiating California’s constitution and stained the California Supreme Court’s otherwise immaculate record as a bulwark against minority discrimination.

The question before the court was fairly simple. In layman’s language, the court
was asked to rule whether Proposition 8, which amended the constitution to ban
gay-marriage, represented such a significant change to the constitution that it
needed to first be passed by the California legislature before being put on the ballot for a popular referendum—something that stood not a whit of a chance in the
Democrat-dominated body.

In its landmark ruling in May 2008, the court had legalized gay marriage on the
grounds that marriage was a fundamental right under the state’s constitution and
that the LGBT community was a “suspect” class; a term that essentially classified them as a minority that has been or is being discriminated against.

Yet, only twelve months after their historic verdict in favour of gay marriage
on the grounds of fundamental rights to equality guaranteed by the constitution,
the judges came to the conclusion that the changes wrought by the Proposition were
not significant enough as to cause them to overturn it.

This writer was not surprised by this ruling: the judges had betrayed their direction
during the legal hearings in the case in March. Judge Joyce Kennard, who ruled in
favour of gay marriage in the 5-4 verdict, for example, commented that there was
just no precedent for overturning a proposition. But one doesn’t have to be gay or member of a minority to find their conclusion dangerously flawed when taken together with their May 8 ruling.

Flawed, because Proposition 8 is unique in the way it has changed the California constitution. It is the first time that something the court termed discriminatory has been written into the document. In that sense it is unprecedented. By passing Proposition 8 California voters were not fine-tuning the constitution but, perhaps unwittingly for many, shredding it’s guarantee of minority rights. In this layperson’s view, that seems like a pretty darn big change to the document in question.

Dangerous, because having upheld Proposition 8, the court has opened the door for
other anti-minority amendments to be put on future popular ballots. For example, a
future ballot could take the Mormon community’s right to marriage away. This may
sound far-fetched, but the Mormons are an even smaller minority than the LGBT
community; and the conservative Christian organizations that were a key proponent
of Proposition 8 are often as prejudiced against the “Mormon cult” as they
are against “the gays.” It wasn’t just a sense of solidarity that drove other minority organizations like NAACP to petition the court to overturn Proposition 8.

After the court upheld Proposition 8, some commentators and activists on both sides of the issue (including prominent gay blogger Andrew Sullivan) came to the conclusion
that having won in a electoral fight, fair and square, democratic principles required
that Proposition 8 be allowed to stand instead of being overturned by an ‘activist’
court. They are wrong.

The view that the ultimate arbiter of laws in a democracy is the electorate betrays a
shallow understanding. Democracy is not defined solely by majority rule. Rather, it is majority rule accompanied by a guarantee of minority rights. This guarantee is not
provided by the electoral process, but by the judiciary. The judiciary exists not because it is practical—to substitute for referendums whenever a law’s constitutionality is brought into question—but because it is necessary to place a check on a majority’s power.

The judges, all steeped in decades of legal practice, could hardly have missed
the implications of what they were doing. So what could have prompted such a
decision? The answer perhaps lies in the fact that in California judges are not just
judges; they are also politicians. California voters periodically decide whether or not California Supreme Court judges will be retained—and several judges were threatened with electoral challenges if they dared
to overturn the “will of the people.” In July 2008, in a case that surprisingly did
not make a splash at the time, the court was asked to disallow Proposition 8 from
being placed on the ballot on the same grounds. This was way before the election
and just after the court’s legalization of gay marriage. The hearings on that case
were held in camera—that is, they were not open to the public—unlike any of the
other hearings in cases related to the issue. The court’s brief decision to dismiss the petition was announced within a few days.In essence, the judges upheld the validity of Proposition 8 in the middle of last year with no elaboration. On the same question, the judges took more than three months to come to the same conclusion this year and wrote reams of justifications. In May 2008, the court went out on a limb by being brave enough to overturn the law banning gay marriage that had been passed in 2000 by more than 60% of the California voters. The furtive way in which July 8 verdict was pronounced compels speculation that the court was hoping (and expecting like many liberals) to get popular validation for their historic decision, assuming that sufficient Californians had changed their minds since 2000.

Having shown their fidelity to their judicial responsibilities, the judges then flirted with popular approval by allowing Proposition 8 to be placed on the November 2008 ballot—a decision that blew up in their faces. Like Demi Moore’s character in the 1993 movie, Indecent Proposal, the judges lost both objects of their desire—their judicial integrity as well as popular respect (the Left is disappointed and embarrassed by the court; and no court can ever be non-activist enough to please the Right unless they rule themselves out of existence). Meanwhile, an abhorrent proposition is now writ into a once-proud state’s constitution. There is little doubt in my mind that a subsequent election on this issue will reverse the law in favour of same-sex marriage, perhaps as early as 2010. But I would rather that the Proposition 8 decision be reversed in the courts, not in the electoral arena as the unlikely pair, Theodore B. Olson and David Boies, are now trying to do by challenging the California Prop 8 decision in Federal courts.

Most LGBT advocacy groups are against the move for fear of ultimately losing in the
conservative-leaning US Supreme Court. However, it is critical to win this case in the courts, because the primacy of the judiciary in safeguarding minority rights and its role as a check on majority rule needs to be reestablished, not weakened further.

And because the only thing more indecent than the Proposition’s intent in this whole affair, has been the California Supreme Court’s dalliance with its political instincts.

Emptinesst - Part II

2009-09-18T06:32:00.000-07:00

“Tell me more about what you liked about it?”

“The first time I saw the house on a sunny Sunday afternoon I knew it was something special. Or at least something special for me. I loved how open it was – nothing hidden, no dark corners. It had large windows in every room. The rooms were spacious and bright – it wasn’t the most polished, the best finished house I’d seen that day but it had the most character. We connected…the house and I. Its difficult to explain. Specially since I didn’t really think much of it when I first saw it online. I first saw it online, you know – on Zillow. It came up in a search with 40-50 other houses listed for sale. It wasn’t photographed from the most flattering angles. But I thought, what the heck, doesn’t hurt to do a quick 10 minute visit. I ended up spending nearly an hour – walking through the rooms again and again. Checking out the deck. Imagining myself lying on the shared lawn on a lazy weekend afternoon. It was fun.”

“So you made a bid on it that day?”

“Well…No I didn’t. I’d only been house hunting for a couple of weeks. And though I really liked it, it wasn’t quite my dream house, you know, the kind that you walk in and feel like it’s everything you’ve always wanted? And everyone told me I should keep looking. That it was too early to settle on one house. So I spent another two weeks during which I searched endlessly online and attended another 20 or so open houses. But none of the other houses were as open, bright and welcoming. None had a sun-room like that one. I remember chatting with an agent showing one pretty decent house in the Castro. I quite liked the unit but it too wasn’t perfect…you know how it is…there’s something missing in every one. He asked me what else I’d seen that I’d liked and I enthusiastically started telling him about the Noe St house and why I liked it. Five minutes into my description he told me I had a good sense of what I wanted and should go for it. Two days later I made a bid on the house.”

“But wouldn’t you know, it turned out it wasn’t really as available as it seemed. The house was a short sale. Which meant that the owner was almost in foreclosure – but not quite. So the price had to be negotiated with the bank rather than the owner and could take up to 5 months or even more. With regular homes, you can finalize the whole deal in 2-4 weeks. My friends told me it was a waste of time. There were plenty of fish in the sea –ha! – or for-sale homes in the city. They were just looking out for me. I researched it - short sales often don’t work out. There’s also the danger that even after the bank has agreed on a price, someone else can come with a higher, better bid and walk away with the house at the last minute. So it seemed like a bit of a risk to set my heart on Noe st.

I thought about it for two weeks as I continued to look…After the encounter in Castro, I decided to at least make a bid…I could after all keep looking while I waited for the bank to respond. I decided I liked it enough to wait for five months if needed.

Of course, once I’d made the bid, I’d compare any new house I saw with Noe St, in all cases unfavorably. I was da…seeing other houses… but not seriously. When I thought of Noe St, I somehow felt it would be a port in a storm - a refuge for me to go back to after the day’s battles. I instinctively knew I’d find peace in that house.”

“Looks like the wait paid off. It was worth it?”

“More than you can imagine…and the best thing was that it only took 6 weeks for the bank to agree on a price – it was almost like it was meant to be. It had been on the market for more than 8 months but once I made an offer, everything moved at amazing speed.”

“…”

“It was meant to be…and then I sold it a year back…I had had it for nearly seven years. I was a little bored. Restless. The rooms all looked the same – I knew them too well – it seemed like even if I redid a room I could visualize what it would look like and feel like. And so I didn’t even try to change things around much. One day I just happened to do an online search for sale listings. And somehow there seemed to be many, many really attractive looking houses. So I started looking more seriously. And within two months I’d found this really beautiful home in…the Marina. Single family home, with beautiful bay views, and even one of the Golden Gate from a side window. It took me less than a month to make an offer and move in.”

“And now you miss Noe St? Don’t you like the new house?”

“The new house is exactly what I thought it was going to be. Polished, beautiful, elegant, exciting. Great to show off to friends…but there’s no connection. Maybe its my imagination, but when it rains, it seems to rain harder in the Marina. Harsher. Watching it from the bay windows of my new house I don’t feel soothed at all. I can’t watch it splatter on the concrete pavement outside. I have to turn away and draw the drapes. It makes me claustrophobic. I’m in the wrong house…I’m in the wrong house.”

“Could it just be that you’re taking some time to get used to the new house. To the change? Perhaps over time you’ll grow to love this house too?”

“No doctor. You don’t understand. I’ve thought of nothing else the last two days – sitting as far away from the windows as possible. All this time I kept thinking it was a good fit for me but not everything I’d dreamed of. That’s why I moved on – to see what else was out there – to finally find my dream house. But all this time…he was the one…It was the one.”

“Junaid, there’re some tissues on the table next to your chair if you need one.”

“…Thank you…I’m sorry. I can’t seem to help myself.”

“Don’t worry – let it out.”…”Have you…er…tried to get…er…it back?”

“There’s no hope. The new owner loves it. He’ll never give it up. And I don’t deserve… to get it back anyway. I’ll just have to find a way of going on alone. Without it.”

“Things might seem hopeless right now; but remember what you said earlier – there’s a lot of houses for sale in the city. Look, we’re almost at the hour here and I do have another client coming in right after you. But I would really like to have you come back. I think we made some great progress today. I can help you – I want you to come back next week. Ok?”

“…OK.”

“And Junaid, remember, everything you tell me is kept completely confidential. Even the fact that you’re coming to see me professionally is completely confidential. I cannot legally repeat any of this – not even to a good friend like Jamshed. So you can tell me anything. OK?“

“…Yes doctor.”

“Great. So I’ll see you next week. Come I’ll walk you out and make sure you get a cab. My next patient seems to be running a little late.”

“Thank you, doctor.”

“Look there’s a cab – Ok its heading over now. Take care and I’ll see you next week. ”

“Thank you doctor. Good bye.”

“You OK, mate? Where do you need to go?”

“Yes, thanks…Can we go to Noe st and 30^th st please?”

Emptinesst

2009-09-18T06:22:00.000-07:00

“Come in, Junaid. Its good to see you again”

“Thank you doctor.”

“I thought you might not come in today, after what you said about attitudes toward therapy in your culture, in our last session. I thought you might not be ready for a second session just yet.”

“Its…been difficult. In my culture, we just don’t go to therapy and tell strangers our problems– only crazy people do. We tell our family or closest friends our problems. But…I don’t think my family would really understand what I’m going through… and since you’re friends with Jamshed Uncle, you’re not a complete stranger. I have to talk to someone...If I see you now maybe I won’t need to see a psychiatrist who might eventually have to prescribe me something. In which case, everyone will really think I’m crazy. But I haven’t been able to tell anyone that I need therapy…”

“I understand. You’re doing the right thing. There’s no judgment here about anything. And anyway, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’ve only had one session but I can tell you, you’re not crazy. And if it comes to that, taking medication for your troubles will also not mean you’re crazy. It will just mean that you’re unwell and need to be taken care of medically.”

“Now, you’re looking rather down today. Is everything alright?”

“I’m doing fine, doctor. Thank you for asking”…”Actually that’s not true. Its this rain. Its been raining for two days now. Non-stop raining. Dank, dark, grey, gloomy skies. Its only September for Chrissakes.”

“Yes the downpour is rather unseasonal. So the weather is getting you down? Here why don’t you make yourself comfortable on the couch.”

“I’d prefer to sit here, in this poor, handicapped chair, if you don’t mind, doctor. Its new isn’t it? Why is it missing an arm?”

“Yes it’s new. It has only one arm because they charged me the other arm. They wanted to charge me a leg too but I put my foot down.”

“…Bad joke. Forgive me. Its meant to be stylish, I think. I find it’s two sides form a rather cozy rest. Why don’t you curl up. Put up your feet. Here, take this throw – you look cold. And maybe if you warm up you’ll forget the cold rain for a bit.”

“ I used to love the rain. Cold or Warm. It only used to rain in the summer where I grew up. We used to put on our oldest clothes and sneak out and play – really just run around getting wet - in the rain, when the first showers came. We’d go home soaked and get a royal scolding from Mom – and a dose of brandy before being packed off to bed. I remember listening to November Rain in college and thinking it must feel miserable – you wouldn’t be able to play in freezing rain, right? And you’d probably fall ill if you did, brandy or no brandy…But then… I moved here and grew to love the cold rain too. I’d wait for November. I especially loved the nights when the sky seemed so low - you know how the clouds form a silver-grey cover over the city. Its like the city has been wrapped up in soaked cotton wool. I loved walking around in the quiet streets even more deserted because of the cold drizzle – no umbrella - feeling weirdly cozy – even though the temperature would be in the 40s.”

“So why is it upsetting you today, Junaid?”

“… … I don’t like cold rain anymore. It’s depressing. ”

“It makes me think about things.”

“Go on.”

“I…I miss…I miss my house.”

“…”

“I had this wonderful house. In Noe Valley. It had this sun room with a transluscent fibre-glass sheet for a roof. One whole wall was covered with long, wide windows looking onto these lush, beautifully landscaped gardens of the neighbouring houses. And when it rained at night, I’d sit in the sun-room, in a comfy loveseat, with a hot cup of tea – hearing the rain’s quiet patter on the roof – it felt like it could come through the roof any time – like I was out there in the rain but warm and dry at the same time. I’d stare out the windows at the rain drench the gardens for hours. The rain here falls so gently. It seemed to lazily drift down –noiselessly - as if not wanting to disturb the quiet of the gardens. I’d imagine floating down on a droplet and settling on a blade of grass, slide slowly down the blade’s slope onto the ground made soft by the water. I know it sounds silly when I say it out loud – I guess the rain and the quiet brought out the lapsed poet in me. I would have just a small candle to provide some light. But really, more to provide some shadows. I felt at such peace at those times…”

End of Part 1

Practically in Love

2009-08-20T18:15:00.000-07:00

Suddenly the long-distance relationship (with relationship being loosely defined) is everywhere I turn. More than one Friend is anticipating entering into them – reluctantly. At least one has happily jumped into a long distance ‘flying-for-dates-but-not-dating’ romantic situation (see previous parenthetic caveat). Others have negotiated the sometimes treacherous terrain of an LDR to reach a happy destination – just with someone different from who they started with…or alone. Still others, including certain occasional bloggers that shall remain unnamed, are in long-distance limbo. Like I said, the long distance relationship is everywhere.

Even the Hindi film industry – not famous for its deft handling of nuance in relationships of any kind – is insisting on talking intelligently about them in the context of modern relationships (or the subset of LDRs that involve the globalized South Asian). I’m talking, of course, of You’ve got SMS with a Punjabi Ringtone or as the film-makers insisted on calling it, Love Aaj Kal. (At least half a percent point in the unemployment rate, by the way, is because of hundreds of love-note-carrying carrier pigeons being laid off from that vital job in Bollywood in LAK’s aftermath). LAK proved that when it comes to romancing on screen, texting is just as dull and tiresome as sending emails…especially when compared to the cinematic potential of the avian alternative. You can after all show – to great effect –brave pigeons flying a gauntlet of predatory hawks and eagles. Viruses attacking an email as it makes its way through an undersea router or AT&T’s patchy network failing to deliver a critical SMS simply doesn’t have the same sense of drama.

But if you can get past the LAK’s dismaying break from cinema’s hallowed tradition of exploiting fauna, the film captures really well, the impact modern social and economic trends may be having on long-distance relationships: Increasing the number of such relationships while at the same time decreasing the rate at which they succeed.

Two inexorable and related trends, I believe, are driving the increasing number of LDRs. The magnitude of inter-continental distances in everywoman’s perception is shrinking while global opportunities available to the 20/30 something college-educated (South Asians included) expand. The first throws people together (virtually or physically) while the latter can move them physically apart (or if they’re already virtual and very lucky; together). More and more people are finding themselves in situations where the calling of their mind takes them in a different direction from the passion of their heart – ergo the ubiquity of LDRs.

Then there’s the creeping, seeping sense that can come with age – that even if there is only one true soul-mate for each person; there are potentially multiple people who can come pretty close. That even if you give a potential soul-mate a go-bye because of relationship teething troubles, there’s still a pretty good chance of ending up happy. That there’s not just one Mr. Right out there but a potential horde of Almost Mr. Rights you can fall almost in love with, in case Mr. Right gets transferred to Billings, Montana. Accessing this group is hardly an issue any more in the age of Facebook and 24/7 chat engines. In a simpler, less globalized, less connected world, even if the number of Almost Mr. Rights was similarly high, one didn’t really have easy access to them. With fewer options, people would, I think try extra hard to make even an arduous LDR work.

But, the number of Almost Mr./Ms. Rights per capita have also increased – mainly because a soul-mate’s job description is less demanding than ever before. The Walmart model of looking to fulfill one’s physical, emotional, mental, and any and all other types of needs from just one person is in rapid decline. As a New York Times’ article reported, city-dwelling 30-somethings have embraced the Crate-and-Barrel model instead – they surround themselves with multiple friends, each of who satisfy one critical need. There’s the Economist and NYT reading All-Things-Politics Pal; there’s Sailing Sarah with her handy boat whenever you need to indulge your adventure loving self and of course the Bar-Hopping Buddy for a weekend’s night out. So pretty much all that a (almost) soul-mate needs to do is whisper the right kind of sweet-nothings in your ear, make love well and take out the trash regularly. In any decent sized city full of lovely singletons of all ages, races and sexual orientations, there are probably dozens of people who could make the cut for any person. Every night of the week – instead of 4 times a year. Hence fewer and fewer people feel the drive to make, or live up to the “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” kind of promises.

I recently met this attractive, interesting guy who moved into the city a few months back and who seems to have some kind of LDR karma. He told me, with tears in his eyes, of a guy he’d met just before he moved here; dated for a bit and fallen for really, really hard. And how, recently, another guy visiting from India, had taken his breath away. A third guy he’d met even before the other two and fallen also happened to live across the country from him. However in each case he was quite clear that it made no sense to start or continue the relationship long distance. It wasn’t practical for him – he wanted someone to hold and cuddle every night. And he was sure by November he’d find someone else just as nice as any of the other three.

Someone that he could love - practically - in more ways than one.

Learning Elvish

2009-08-15T13:58:00.001-07:00

DECIPHER THIS
The worst thing about going through one of those phases, which I could call writer’s block if I felt qualified to claim the title of writer, is that it’s not like the thoughts and ideas stop striking you. Or that the urge to write stops bugging you (though it bugs you less often). It’s that the words and sentences don’t flow into your mind – they tumble their way into it. I have no idea what the creative writing process looks like for other writers – but I tend to think in terms of sentences that I tap out on the keyboard not thoughts to convert into sentences that I then put down. Usually a spigot, that gets its word feed from elves living in the gamma wave reaches of my mind, opens up and starts letting words already arranged in fully formed sentences flow onto a mental teleprompter screen. So when my elves go on strike for lack of leisure time they start torturing me by turning the spigot off. Or if they’re terribly annoyed with me, by turning it on but sending through a welter of words – a jumbled mass of proto-sentences that can look like a hopeless, mangled, tangle of wool instead of the lovely, silvery, wavy thread of type that I usually see.

You may wonder, dear reader, why I bother to write at all in those phases? I usually don’t. But the blocks seem to come more often and last longer. Since writing is one of the things that makes me happy I’m trying to actively find a way past them. One way is to become better at untangling wool…something that, taking the adage Practice makes Perfect to heart, I’m hoping to do by just writing more regularly. Over time I shall hopefully be able to write passably, even when my creative (s)elves are speaking gibberish…umm Elvish… to me. Those damn elves are almost certainly as moody as I am and even if I gave in to their demand for a better health plan today (e.g., more quiet time)*, they would find a new reason to be miffed every now and then.

So you may see more posts, some of which may not meet your high standards for what can be classified as an interesting read. Indulge me, dear reader, and blame those – at least in the medium term - on the fact that I’m still learning Elvish – and while I’m learning, something is bound to be lost in translation.

Going Nowhere Fast

2009-08-11T19:06:00.000-07:00

My mind is powerpoint addled. Every day is a fantastically productive blur marked by unbroken chains of conference calls and conversations mostly unleavened by creativity. Most evenings I spend equally actively. Running to a showing of Pink Floyd's The Wall in the Castro theater or a farewell cum birthday cum Michael Jackson tribute party in a SoMa loft for a dear friend going away. A home showing followed by a sushi dinner. Faux-Walks for real causes in parks. Declined invites to a meteor shower viewing and weekend afternoon concerts because of prior commitments or dire exhaustion.

And amidst all this crazy-busyness somehow the growing sense that life is increasingly sluggish. Calls to Spanish tutorial schools and Writing courses never get placed. The realization of having missed gym again seems to hit only after I step out of the shower. Skipped Meditation sessions in favour of hops. Neglected blogs.

There were times when writing cleared the mind. I could try it again. Then again, an automated car wash couldn't wash away that cobweb that still clings to my Prius' side mirror.

A sign?

Sometimes One Good Revolution Deserves Another

2009-06-14T19:50:00.000-07:00

TO PERSIA WITH LOVE

How's this for 'Change'? From Hope to Disillusionment

I’m not qualified to write about Iran and the political developments there. But I feel compelled to do so…because through my very limited first hand and more extensive second hand exposure, I’ve developed a deep fondness for Iran. Not the regime but the people.

My earliest exposure to Iran came in the late eighties (I think I was 12 years old) through a Reader’s Digest story about the horrors of the Islamic regime. The anecdote from that article that remains stuck in my mind till today, was about a woman who had her lips cut off for wearing lipstick. Still new to the ways of the world I remember being horrified by the brutality of the action and asking my father if this and the other things the story said were true. His reply was that this was mostly American propaganda. The truth I’m sure, as it usually is, was somewhere in the middle. Despite my dad's dismissal of the article, for years I carried a picture of Iran as a country full of closed-minded, hostile religious fundamentalists who were opposed to most modern freedoms. I didn't distinguish between the regime and the people.

But during a short 3 day business trip to Tehran a few years back, all this changed for me. I landed in Tehran after trips to the UAE (Dubai, Sharjah, Ras al Khaimah and Abu Dhabi) and Muscat and it was quite a shock to discover that in many ways Iran seemed more liberal (at the time) than the Arab societies in those cities (except perhaps for Dubai) In Muscat for example, all my business meetings were with men; where women were present they were usually Indian and usually in the role of assistants. In the main market in Muscat maybe one in ten of the people milling about were women; all were in full length, head to toe black burkhas, with a veil covering their face leaving only a slit for the eyes. In Tehran over 2-3 days in six or seven meetings I met at least 3 women executives; there was the usual ‘healthy’ mix of men and women in the streets; you saw women driving cars alone late at night (something they would not be able to do in Saudi Arabia any time of the day). I was being guided through the different meetings by a woman sales representative and the meeting dynamics between her and her male counterparts in the companies we visited were no different than they would be in India. The women all wore hijabs of course, as did my host, but they were of many colours; the head scarves were usually colourful, the faces were not veiled for the most part and yes – many women wore lipstick. This is not to say that the country wasn’t a conservative Islamic society – it clearly was. But it wasn’t any more so (and in some ways was less so) than some of the other countries in the region that gain much less notoriety per capita oppression that they impose of their people.

The other thing that made Tehran fascinating was to witness the hundreds of small ways in which the people were choosing to rebel. Combined with the sophistication of the people I met, these signs of rebellion endeared the Iranian people to me, forever. For I’m nothing if not a romantic. The signs were everywhere you looked: the short knee-length capes that the younger women wore to reveal their fashionable jeans; the head scarves that were allowed to slip back to reveal most of the hair; the wry, self-deprecating comments that several people made to me about the government (one of them asked me what I thought about the Islamic republic of Iran, coming from India as I did, placing an emphasis on “Islamic” in a way that made it clear that he didn’t think much of it at all); Michael Jackson’s Thriller blaring out of a car racing by even though all forms of non-Islamic music are banned in the country; being offered an alcohol free malt beer by another procurement manager who said he escaped to India several times a year and was an admirer of Bhagwan Rajneesh; the young couple holding hands in an intimate corner of a trendy restaurant in broad afternoon-light. The lady who hosted me in Tehran told me that a lot of these small grabs at freedom had become increasingly common since Khatami came to power. She told me how people had satellite dishes at home, all the latest CDs and books that were officially banned. Of raucous house parties that substituted for late night bars and clubs that were conspicuous by their absence.

It was Khatami’s second term, a time when hopes of rapid social liberalization were fading. Despite that the impression you gained was of a society that assumed change would occur, if only more slowly than many people wanted. That the change could come from within the system which provided the “safety valve” of an elected president. That safety valve provided a degree of legitimacy to the regime in the eyes of the people. It also provided the strongest threat to the survival of the theocratic state as it stands today. The presidency in Iran only has limited power and can put progressive change into only the first or second gears. But slow change is still change and the Iranian regime wouldn’t be the first one to resort to naked theft to prevent pesky reformists from getting their hands on the levers of power. Mousavi is widely described as being a reformist in quotes. No one is sure that he would bring a lot of reform to the system…but he is for example, clearly comfortable with an expanded, more independent role of women, going by the role his wife played in the election campaign. That itself is probably anathema to the core beliefs of the conservative old guard. I don’t think this is about Mousavi alone though. 70% of Iran is younger than 30 and following Khatami’s two landslide victories, and the way that Mousavi’s campaign caught fire in just 4 weeks; the religious conservatives probably realized that left to themselves, Iranians would elect progressive, reformist presidents in perpetuity. The system has to be destroyed to save the system. And that’s what Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have done. They’d have probably done this in 2005 if the reformist voters hadn’t largely boycotted the polls obviating the need to do so.

I can understand their motives. The margin of victory is so incredible, the rigging so blatant, that it makes one think that they didn’t just want to cheat but also wanted to let the population know that they could and would cheat. That they are serious about not allowing reform and that anyone who really wants change will have to fight for it. Khamenei and company are betting that the people won’t put up much of a fight. Though the legitimacy of the regime has been blown to smithereens in the eyes of its people, the street protests that have happened till now won’t necessarily mean the beginning of the end of the regime. Michael Elliott has written a great article about this in Time...he mentions the 1968 Prague Spring, the 1956 Hungarian uprising and Tiananmen Square in 1989: flashpoint protests that were quelled by regimes that then continued for 20-40 more years. Burma is another example. If they succed today, over the next few years it’s quite likely that the conservatives will use power to entrench themselves further and intimidate dissidents once the initial furor has died down and the attention of the world has shifted.

On the other hand, from the vantage point of my armchair, this seems a particularly propitious time to fight for change in Iran. The betrayal is farm-fresh in people’s minds. In Mousavi and his wife and in Khatami they have dissident leaders around who the opposition can rally around; not just the reformist forces but also those conservatives who are coming out to reject an illegitimate power-grab. These leaders will probably be neutralized over time. On the other hand, the Islamic regime’s bogeyman, America, has a president who can differentiate between a regime and its people and who understands nuance and subtlety. That somewhat neutralizes the conservatives’ traditional rallying point. Right now the fight can be simply for a presidential election annulment …something that can be achieved in a face-saving way through the Guardian council’s decision. After this the reformists’ will probably have to mount a full-scale revolution which is much more difficult. Freedom comes at a cost and the Iranian people will have to pay it either today by persisting in their protests in face of the inevitable violent crackdown or over time by suffering a more violent and more conservative regime for the next several decades. I hope they choose to pay it today in the form of persistent and escalating protests across the country, even if there's intimidation. It has after all, worked once before in 1979.

My lovely host was in her mid-to-late thirties when I met her and had grown up in the most conservative decades of the Islamic regime, suffering dire restrictions on her freedom. I will always remember, her telling me with unqualified sadness, that she belonged to the "lost generation of Iran". Let's pray that her’s is the last one.

When Life is Like a Song

2009-05-25T15:20:00.000-07:00

Or why I love San Francisco (and the surrounding area)

Three weekends back P, H, P and I decided we’d spend a Friday night chilling out at a bar rather than in the midst of a frenzied crowd at a club. We picked this bar called Van Kleef (or something like that) in Oakland. It had an attitude all its own – a long narrow corridor that ran along the bar, opened into a wider seating area at the back. The seating area was circumscribed by a high raised stage stacked with musical instruments – trumpets, guitars, even a piano. Dim, intimate lighting, high ceilings, and burgundy walls covered with somehow-Gothic but mostly themeless (to my admittedly untrained eye) paraphernalia rounded out the bar’s look. It all worked improbably well in creating a cosy, laid-back ambience even though the chairs were distinctly non-lounge-y: cushion-less, narrow and straight-backed.

It took us a while to find cocktails that the bar actually was able to make and beers that they stocked but once we did, we were able to spend a comfortable couple of hours solving the world’s problems. Having brought Kim Jong Il to his senses, we’d just started working on the vexed question of the Golan Heights when the bar began to fill up with people who looked like they’d all got the wrong address. They were decked up in ballroom fashions from the 1940s/50s. Men and some very butch looking women in tuxedos and bow ties. The women and perhaps some men in drag in lovely, brightly coloured gowns, high heels and wide-brimmed hats. We watched in fascination (and mounting embarrassment at our own t-shirt and jeans attire) as each new person glided out of the ballroom scenes in The Aviator and into the space in front the stage.

It turned out that the bar was hosting a themed birthday party for a transgender male-to-female (MTF) cabaret singer. The crowd was really diverse as perhaps only a crowd in SF or NYC or London can be. There were men, women, MTFs and FTMs. Gay men and lesbians and straight people. White people and black people. There may have been people of East Asian extraction. There were probably a couple of Hispanics sprinkled in. But if not, our table provided representation for brown-hued humanity – (unwitting) gatecrashers as is sometimes our race's wont to be. The birthday girl herself was dressed in something that made her look delicate and pretty – though I'm not quite sure what colour. My alcohol-addled mind was on sensory overload by then. You know how sometimes you miss the woods for the trees? Well I was doing the opposite. I was pretty much focused on the tableau (of glammahrous dresses) rather than the individuals wearing them. It was a little surreal.

But then of course, since we now had showbiz people in the same space as a stage stacked high with musical instruments, members of the party got up on stage one by one to sing to the birthday girl. One guy took the piano and sang a Monroesque Happy Birthday. His piano playing was way better than his singing from what I remember and happily it was not long before other members of the group divested him of the task of keeping the evening sounding mellifluous. For me the highlight of the evening came when a traditionally built black woman got in front of the microphone. She looked fabulous in a fire-engine red gown (I don’t use the word gratuitously here, this was one of those occasions where the adjective really did fit). She seemed to exude good humour and nice-ness. You just knew she was going to be a good singer. She had a bit of a Mata Amritanandmayi air to her - I had this irresistible urge to be hugged by her. Her face glowed with her inherent goodness or maybe with the reflection of the overhead light. She said she was going to sing the song that she had sung at the her friend's (the birthday girl) wedding. That’s when the husband walked over – dapper in black tie. He was also transgender – Female to Male. He held his hand out to his seated wife and she rose to meet him. And as he drew her close, the lady in red started singing. She sang what’s become one of my favourite songs since the Obama inauguration, At Last. She sang

At Last My love has come along
My lonely days are gone
And life is like a song…

I knew we'd stumbled into a magical moment. In a world that venerates love but then, often does all it can to keep its definition strait-jacketed or thwart it in favour of tradition or 'normality', these two had been improbably successful in finding themselves and then each other. And then even more improbably, a group of friends who celebrated them and their love.

Life can be beautiful sometimes.

A Billion Denied Daughters

2009-04-12T23:37:00.000-07:00

Last spring, strapped in my Economy Plus seat with little to do but munch on 5 cent pretzel packets (yes that’s how much airlines spend on pretzel packets – who doesn’t think emulsified cardboard has to be an ingredient at those prices?) and play Risk on my laptop until the battery died, I first read Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns and then days later on a trip to the motherland, I finished Barbara Kingsolver's master-piece - The Poisonwood Bible.

Hosseini's better known for The Kite-Runner, a book that touched and saddened me - and that I loved because it ended on a hopeful note. The half smile on the kid's face at the end of the book (if I remember correctly) - was like seeing a brief burst of sunshine during the dreary weeks of cloudiness that sometimes accompany San Francisco winters - enough to remind you that there are sunny days ahead and sometimes enough to drive away any incipient Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)-ness.

A Thousand Splendid Suns, has the same setting - Kabul, and similar story elements as the Kite-Runner - brief happiness, quick disillusionment and despair, sadness, extreme loss and devastation and thankfully, ultimate redemption. But its a book worth reading in its own right - because it has two crucial plot-lines that were not there in Hosseini's first book - firstly, the main protagonists remain in Kabul throughout the three decades of death and devastation from the late 70s to the mid-2000s instead of leaving it somewhere at the start of the civil war as happened in the Kite-Runner. And secondly, the protagonists are two women - Mariam and Leila - and not two men/boys. That makes a big difference - because as the book makes clear, while every Afghan, male or female, faced years of violence; for the women the impact was much greater because it was accompanied by a complete loss of social and civil liberties. While no one in the West seems to ever talk about the Communist regime in Afghanistan having any redeeming qualities - the fact was that the Communist era was also the most liberated period for Afghan women – who were encouraged to shun the conditioned prison of the burqa and come out of the house - to study, participate in government and academia, even join the military. Once Najibullah's government fell, and even before the Taliban stormed to power, women were quickly stripped off most of their short-lived freedoms and dressed up once again in their age-old head-to-toe garments. A good way to compare the varying impact on the two sexes, would be two juxtapose two of the many repressive laws introduced by the Taliban that made it to Indian newspapers at the time - The men were forbidden to shave; the women were forbidden to be seen anywhere in public without a man.

The book traces the impact of the turmoil in the country on the lives of the two women protagonists effectively imprisoned in their home by the tyrant they're both married to, who seems to hit them as easily as - and more often than - you or I would swat a pesky fly. As I read the book I was initially surprised by how much time was spent detailing the lives of the two women in their modest two-story domestic prison and comparatively how little time in talking about the repeated rape of Kabul through those years. Until it struck me that perhaps Hosseini was using the women's plight - their rapid descent from the early hope of youth into a hellish triple decade, from relatively healthy beings into bruised, battered, mentally scarred women looking much older than their years as a metaphor for what happened to Kabul. Just as they were imprisoned in their home, Kabul was besieged for years by the Mujahideen and then the Taliban. Just as they were battered repeatedly by their husband, so was Kabul pounded almost daily by mortar and bombs, entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. Just as they were left helpless by the medieval laws imposed by the conservative fighters - so were thousands of children orphaned and left to fend for themselves in bombed out shelters, as often abused as they were cared for. The fate of Kabul and its women followed the same terrible trajectory.

I have to admit that I couldn't wait for the book to end. The pace is fast enough - but it felt excruciatingly slow. I was silently begging for an end to the daily trauma being inflicted on these women by their husband. I wanted one of the women to just stab the bastard in his sleep and be done with it. They couldn't, for if the man of the house died, the rest of the household would starve too: Without a man the women could not go to the grocery store to buy food…and they wouldn’t be served even if they managed to risk going alone.

I’ve written about The Poisonwood Bible before – a saga of a woman and her 4 daughters led into 1960s Congo by her husband, an evangelical priest convinced that converting the teeming heathen masses in the Congo was his life’s calling. Because I read it just days after Hosseini's book I was struck by the common thread running through the lives of Orleanna and her four daughters to that of Mariam and Leila even though they were set worlds and decades apart. It didn't matter that she was an American woman living in the Sixties, considered a fairly modern time in that country's history, Orleanna felt just as helpless as the two Afghan women in opposing her husband's will. She failed to stop a cruel man she detested from dragging her and her daughters to a place she couldn’t have cared less about and which she considered wild and dangerous. Orleanna's failure to stand up to her husband eventually led to a tragedy that tore her family apart. In the book Orleanna is also unable, to the end, to explain her helplessness. But the writer leaves no one in doubt, that the reason is centuries of social conditioning that delegated until recently, a secondary status to women and a sense of complete entitlement to men. A social conditioning that was common to the vast majority of societies and countries through the ages.

There are many countries today where the grossest gender inequities have been eliminated. Being aware of them and being the optimistic liberal that I am, for a long time I’ve assumed the gender equality battle to have been won in much of the West as well as in urban pockets of developing countries like India. Oh I knew that in scores of nations women are still just plain oppressed and are prevented from reaching anywhere close to their potential. But even there I assumed it was just a matter of time.

Hosseini and Kingsolver’s novels read in quick succession were a twin epiphany for me: that, according a subordinate position to women seems to be an instinct built into human societies and for this reason, no progress on gender equality can be taken for granted. For when you take a harder look, women strive on a daily basis to establish their credibility, dignity and equality in ways large and small, with family and friends, colleagues at work and society in general. They face legal and cultural humiliations not just in medieval societies like Saudi Arabia (not being able to venture out unless accompanied by a man), but also in moderately conservative ones like India (the dowry system) or relatively modern ones like the US (Upto 30% less pay compared to male workers for equal work).

My friend P told me - in a rather non-dramatic, very matter-of-fact tone, while debating the relative merits of Obama and Clinton last year - that I just couldn't understand what it was like, to be a woman in a man's world and that she felt compelled in almost a visceral way to support Clinton. That visceral instinct for a visible demonstration of full equality in many of Clinton’s supporters sustained her campaign way past its sell-by date. It is also that instinct which will sustain the feminist movement over the decades of struggle that are necessary to ensure that billions of women across the world are no longer denied a shot at a free and fulfilled life. So mock not that instinct, dear reader. For what is truly past its sell-by date, is the patriarchal system that has mistreated the world's largest and longest minority.

How Appropriate

2009-03-06T22:46:00.000-08:00

Your rainbow is shaded orange.

What is says about you: You are a strong person. You appreciate a challenge. Others are amazed at how you don't give up.

Find the colors of your rainbow at spacefem.com.

My rainbow it seems, is shaded orange, which is also my favourite colour. And I did NOT game the quiz at all. This is so cool - maybe there's something subliminal in my liking orange as much as I do.

Winds of Change Reach New Zealand As Oppressed Majority Finds a Compelling New Voice

2009-02-25T19:26:00.000-08:00

FAKE NEWS ALERT

Might the meek Inherit New Zealand?

The winds of change that swept the United States of America last November have finally reached the shores of a placid, beautiful island country half-way across the world that has become the beachhead of a nascent organization that many human rights experts are calling the beginning of a comprehensive global sentient being rights movement. New Zealand’s sheep have a new leader and his name is BalRam Obaabaa.

New Zealand’s long oppressed ovine population today elected Mr. Obaabaa as leader of an new organization that will spear-head the efforts to improve the living conditions of the sheep in New Zealand. Mr. Obaabaa is exceptionally young for the responsibility he now assumes – he is only 135 years old in human terms or about 35 sheep years (1 human year is equal to 0.2593 sheep years. Sheep age more slowly than humans due to their low cholesterol vegan diet; daily ambles in the country-side and perennially placid personalities). The election of Mr. Obaabaa was by acclamation in a voice vote that was not publicized amongst the country’s human population for fear of disruptions caused by ovinophobes. He owed his unanimous election in some ways to the activities of those same ovino-phobes. Mr. Obaabaa’s principal rival had to withdraw from the race after suggesting a new term for female sheep could be formed by combining the words “she” with “ewe”. His support collapsed when it was revealed that he had joked that a possible way of combining the two words could be “Sh(e)rewe”. The campaign to find a new name for ewes has has widespread support in the female sheep community, many of who dislike being called ewes. They say it is degrading to female sheep since many ovinophobic humans deliberately pronounce the word as “Ewww!” when referring to them.

The sound of the vote resounded through the tiny island – setting off two small avalanches in the higher mountain slopes on North Island and shattering some shop windows in Christchurch where the area’s ewes have long been known for the rather high pitch of their bleats.

In recent years, New Zealand’s minorities including the indigenous Maoris have made some important strides towards winning equal rights and recognition of their unique culture and way of life. However the country’s sheep, which form the country’s largest sentient group and a massive majority, numbering by some counts at 64 per capita or about 128 million, have languished with little change in their deplorable living conditions over the years. Mr. Obaabaa’s election is expected to change that. The sudden developments surprised local observers since the sheep are known for being almost pathologically poor at organization. Sheep dogs (and in at least one instance on an Australian farm, a pig) are employed on a daily basis to keep members of even small herds moving in the same direction - even when it is to the other side where the grass is greener.

Ovine experts are crediting the fact of the election and Mr. Obaabaa’s victory to the news of the US election results in Nov 2008 that put a black man in the President’s office for the first time. “Mr. Obama’s victory has given great hope to oppressed sentient beings everywhere” said Mr. Raymond Cairns an Auckland based human expert in the relatively new field of sentient rights, “There is no doubt that the inspiration from his victory provided the spark that has ignited the fight for their rights by this long, dormant majority.

Local political observers point out that Mr. Obaabaa has many similarities with the new American president. Like Mr. Obama, the new ovine leader is of mixed stock – he has some Indian blood in him from a great-great-great aunt. This similarity is a little tenous since, as genealogists point out, the Indian ancestry has long been diluted down to where Mr. Obaabaa looks and is basically white. He himself identifies as white instead of mixed-stock. However in his early 90s he was widely considered a black sheep by his family for refusing to allow himself to be shorn by his human handlers during the annual shearing season on the grounds that as a sentient being he had full rights to decide when to be shorn and to determine how the wool was then used. Consequently he gained a shaggy appearance and a reputation as a radical; one that was hardened by his open mastication of marijuana leaves whenever he came across a bush growing wild. His close friends, who affectionately call him Ram, say that Mr. Obaabaa, like the US President has moderated his views over time while proving that he can bring change: last year he struck a deal with his human handlers agreeing to being shorn annually albeit at a time of his own choosing. He also won the right to benefit from nearly 40% of the proceeds from the sale of his wool.

Recently more and more sheep have been coming around to the view that they deserve better living conditions including more grazing time and Mr. Obaabaa has benefited from having been one of the very first to voice these demands at a time when they were very unpopular among all kinds of sentients.

The White House refused to comment on the news of Mr. Obaabaa’s election and the role that Mr. Obama’s victory might have played in bringing it about, perhaps in deference to the close relationship between the human leaders of the US and New Zealand. New Zealand’s Conservative Prime Minister, himself newly elected, would only say that he looked forward to holding the ovine leader to his pledge of leading a peaceful and dignified rights movement. He added that defecating in city streets in protest as some ovine radicals have suggested would not meet that bar.

In other moos, it seems Mr. Obaabaa’s election has generated some concerns in the island’s bovine population. Some cows are concerned about the treatment they might receive under a future ovine led government which would be the logical endgame of the newfound sheep rights movement even if its years away. A Jersey cow in the South Island lowed at reporters saying that this was something that the bovine community definitely had to think about and develop a response to. She said that she would get to chewing over it as soon as she figured out which of her four stomachs she’d put the morning’s breakfast in.

Of Monkeys, Kiwis and Avian Inhabitants of Eden

2009-02-25T02:11:00.000-08:00

So I watched a cricket match after more than 5 years - the first India-New Zealand 20-20 match in which India got soundly thrashed by the Kiwis. Some things never change huh :) I watched it on a large screen in an English pub with B and R and three beers to help soften the pain...OK I admit I'd have had the beers even if we were winning.

Anyway, the Indian team, with their lack-lustre bowling attack (for want of a better word), might want to think about visiting the local temple, (or mosque or church for that matter) to seek divine intervention to ward off an impending series white-wash. But if they do, they'd be well-advised to NOT wear their new uniform to the temple - the one being modelled so proudly by Dhoni in this embedded video.

Especially NOT the new sweat-pants which have that rather intriguing orange/red patch on the ass (partly visible in its infinite majesty when poor Dhoni turns around on the ramp). People might pelt them with stones mistaking them for mistake them for human-kind's pesky, distant cousins (pictured below) who often inhabit temple environs and harass hapless worshipers.

However, I do think there's a designer somewhere who does need to be given a one-way ticket - perhaps on one of the old Sahara Airlines planes - to the Okavango where his talents can be much better utilized designing winter-wear for pet macaques.

Speaking of fauna - R. enticed me to get off my couch and go watch India be routed on a big-screen by telling me about how good looking, the New Zealand team members are. And he was right, case in point being the wicket keeper Brendon McCullum...
Someone tell me why they're called the Kiwis again? I think Birds of Paradise might be a more appropriate appellation.

Why I Love San Francisco

2009-01-21T08:58:00.001-08:00

Bush Street in San Francisco is now Obama street! Someone should start a Facebook group to petition the city to actually make the change formal. What say?

Saving Starfish...One at a Time

2009-01-18T18:45:00.000-08:00

THE POWER OF THINKING SMALL

Barack Obama is apparently going to call for a new age of responsibility in his inaugural address on Tuesday. If anyone can make responsibility cool again its probably him. Obama has proven that he can move millions…hopefully to do the right thing…with just a speech. And he will, I believe - and pray – continue to do so over the next few years.

But what I truly liked about Obama and his campaign was his emphasis on individual action. On his repetition of the cliché – We are the ones we’re looking for. Its apparently an old Navajo saying. And Paulo Coelho allegedly said the same thing (allegedly because I haven’t read the book) in his popularly acclaimed book The Alchemist. Millions of people, inspired by this slogan, amongst others voted Obama in. However I suspect, no matter how many times Obama tells us we need to look within ourselves to find a solution, the truth is that most people will continue to believe that he and only he is the solution.

Here’s the issue. Real leaders are hard to come by. And when they do come around, every other decade or four, they generally focus on inspiring great achievements or finding great solutions to big problems - like landing on the moon. Until the time they depart; whence most societies fall back into a stupor of mediocrity or worse. Fact is, great leaders can paralyze as much as inspire, emasculate as much as they empower. Take landing on the moon for example. The problem with inspiring people to landing on the moon or joining the Peace Corps is that you can only fit so many people in a space-craft and there’s only so many people adventurous and passionate and tie-less enough to head off to war-torn Darfur for the foreseeable future. The vast majority of people find themselves unable to find a role for themselves in these great enterprises of the human spirit and don’t participate in them beyond feeling vaguely inspired. That’s a lot of sparks extinguished; a lot of inspiration gone waste.

People don’t believe the average Joe can drive big changes and so most people don’t try. They just wait around for another inspiring leader to come on by to do it for them. Kennedy gave a fiery inaugural address in which he demanded that every American ask what he/she can do for their country. And though the speech outlived him by decades, the spark he ignited mostly died with him. He was followed by the sixties counter-culture, Vietnam and Nixon – and eventually the ascendance, over the last three decades, of the idea that the pursuit of an individual’s own happiness is the key to prosperity for all. Similarly, Nehru was followed by his dynasty simply because people didn’t really believe they could continue to be the kind of nation they were, without someone like him at the helm.

So how about a leader who demands that everyone, individually, do one or two really small things that make a difference however small, to whichever issue they’re passionate about. Malcolm Gladwell in his brilliant book, The Tipping Point, describes how Mayor Giuliani and a small team reduced crime in New York by nearly 60% in just a few years – “simply” by changing the context in which people dwelled. They cracked down on the smallest of crimes and the “offenders” committing them – panhandlers, graffiti artists, drunks creating a nuisance, people using the subway without a ticket. By making it difficult and costly to commit small crimes, they sent a subliminal signal throughout the city that there was someone in charge and that betting on impunity was a bad idea. In providing a (negative) incentive for each person to be more law-abiding in general they engendered a cultural change that reversed a seemingly irreversible crime wave.

I think we could begin to build a lasting culture of empowerment, if we had great leaders who demanded that every single person – no matter how poor, or unfortunate - pick a cause every year, dear to them, and do something small towards it. They could grow their hair long enough to donate to charities that make free wigs for cancer patients who cannot afford them. They could decide to fight corruption in a small way by resolving to always pay the full traffic fine versus a bribe, or the black market by always paying the sales tax on an item they purchase. They could let a less fortunate neighbour borrow their tool-set so they can get a construction job a la Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. Or if they are the less fortunate neighbour, they could invite the lonely rich guy next door over to family gatherings. When finding ways of making a positive difference, small or large, becomes a habit, that’s when we may no longer need the occasional inspiring leader to come along to solve our big problems – or maybe we’ll just find that we have many more of them (leaders that is, not problems) - because now millions (instead of thousands) of people believe in themselves and think beyond themselves.

It might seem a little wishy-washy to say that if everyone did small good deeds, that in itself could solve the really complex problems in the world. But think back to how we learn a new language in school. We start with learning the alphabet and then each year we learn how to construct ever larger words and express ever more complex thoughts in sentences. A few people go on to become great writers and orators. But those who don't become great writers/orators - pretty much everyone really - still learn how to do really important and complex things with the language they’ve learned: order a tall, non-fat, caramel macchiato at a Starbucks, tell a joke to a friend needing cheering up, or express their love for those they care for. We take our ability to communicate for granted. But if you think about it, it’s a very complex human achievement. It looks simple, because making magic – mundane or exotic – with words becomes a habit for us. Whats to say, the same thing wouldn’t happen with solving world problems?

A friend related this parable to me recently…A man finds hundreds of starfish stranded and dying on a beach at low tide and moved by their plight starts throwing them into the ocean, one by one. Along comes a fellow and seeing what he’s doing says – “There’s hundreds of them here…you’re never going to make a difference by yourself.” The guy throws one more starfish into the sea and says “I made a difference to that one.” In an ideal world, the other guy would be inspired and join him in throwing the starfish back into the ocean. But even if no more help came, the fact is that there would be fewer needlessly dead starfish because of just the one guy and that would be a good thing (assuming you like starfish, of course).

So you and I can hope, dear reader, that Obama will be the kind of leader who encourages people to do small good deeds as well as inspiring them to large achievements. Or if you buy this theory, perhaps you won’t wait for Obama to do it. Perhaps you could make it a point to tell other people to find a starfish, just one, to throw back into the sea.

The Pros and Cons of Shiny Elbows

2009-01-05T18:38:00.001-08:00

And you thought he found this fire-fly lit path that no one knew about?

So the other day on a cold beach in the Big Sur or maybe it was San Diego, my friend 3D commented on how dirty my elbows were. As you might expect, it led to a bit of an indignant exchange between us which ended with the others being brought into the conversation to help us compare whose elbows were cleaner. Turns out, 3D beat everyone hollow - not because he has cleaner elbows, but simply because a life-time's worth of scrubbing them in the shower has produced a pair of preternaturally shiny elbows on him. The appearance of the shiny pink elbows sparked off a bit of a debate on whether these provided a net advantage for their possessor or a net disadvantage. While we didn't have sufficient time that particular day to fully discuss the merits or lack there-of of unnaturally shiny elbows, I've had time since then to carry out fairly extensive and diligent research and also put some thought into it. Its valuable to spend some time understanding this subject not simply because there are some great career ideas for OSEs but also because of its impact on the debate about evolution. (For sake of brevity I shall refer to the owner of the shiny elbows as OSEs in the remainder of this post)

Pros of Exceedingly Shiny Elbows:
a) You don't need to carry torches when exploring the caves of La Jolla in kayaks...The OSE can simply lead the way
b) If your breaklights fail, a friendly OSE can be installed in the rear seat of the car and requested to sit with shoulders spread along the back-rest, elbows pointing backwards and out of the rear wind-screen
c) When lost flint-less in the woods, the OSE can use his/her elbows to concentrate sunlight on kindling and light a fire to roast the assorted snails that've been caught. The game-show Survivor is believed to have rules prohibiting known OSEs from participating in it - due to the unfair advantage that they gain from an OCD(Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)-level propensity to scrub.
d) A throng of salaried OSEs hiding in bushes lining a winding path, elbows pointing outwards, can help create a beautiful, romantic back-drop for a Valentine-night stroll when fire-flies are in short supply. Creating and managing OSE-lit events could very well be the next sunrise industry - except they'd be most effective at sunset.
e) When lost at sea, OSEs can use their elbows to send out SOS signals using Morse code - intimating passing ships about their where-abouts. For this reason, OSEs are known to survive in greater numbers during ship-wrecks than those not blessed with super-shiny elbows.

Cons of Especially Shiny Elbows:
Given the multiple substantial benefits that shiny elbows seem to provide, one would expect, assuming that Darwin was correct, that there would be a much higher number of people obsessively scrubbing elbows in showers or (for the lazy ones amongst us) rubbing phosphorus onto them. The reason that is not so, I believe, is due to the even greater drawbacks that unusually shiny elbows have.

Anthropologists and ethnographers estimate that the OSE population probably peaked in the Palaeolithic age when fire had been discovered but means of making it were not easily available. Shiny elbows were considered an asset for a short period due to their utility in starting a fire to cook the day’s hunt. However scrubbing while showering quickly declined as a practice once it became clear that, once the fire was out and darkness had rolled back in; significantly shiny elbows helped mammoths and saber-toothed tigers find much-needed nourishment.

In modern times, the absence of laws against smoking-while-driving are responsible for maintaining an evolutionary check on OSE populations. Sitting in the car with the windows rolled down and smoking a cigarette has been known to cause many an accident due to the temporary blinding effect of the elbows on drivers in the vehicles traveling behind the OSE. The low numbers of OSEs therefore actually provide backing, rather than a challenge, for the theory of evolution.

In these times of religious intolerance where the existence of the Flying Sphaggeti Monster is disputed and the validity of the theory of evolution challenged on a daily basis; every piece of evidence that can be brought to bear on the side of science is an invaluable addition to the side of rationality and tolerance. So while by themselves scarily shiny elbows might not be an asset to their owners, they do provide, by their very existence, a net benefit to society.

Non-PC Joke of the Year

2008-12-30T01:39:00.000-08:00

Q: How do you tell a Bangladeshi man from an Indian or Pakistani man?
A: He's the one wearing a life-jacket just in case a flood comes along

Love in the Time of Maximum Controlled-Chaos

2008-12-23T01:32:00.000-08:00

Here’s a piece of advice – if you’re planning to watch Slumdog Millionaire, the indie-sleeper-smash-hit of the year – don’t read this review. Or any other. This is a film that you’ll enjoy thoroughly even if you’ve just seen it the day before (I did) – but watching it with no knowledge of what it is about is a pleasure of a different level. For those not convinced by mere effusive (if non-specific) praise, read on and I shall do my best to get you interested in the movie without revealing too much about the plot’s highlights.

Three minutes in, Slumdog Millionaire will literally shock you into paying attention. Paying attention with your mind that is, because chances are good that you would have already averted your eyes from the screen in horror. Then faster than you can say Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the film takes off, starting with a break-neck chase through the permanent dusk of Dharavi’s gutter-alleys. In a giddy romp, exhilarating and horrifying in turn, and lasting nearly two hours and several film-years – the movie tracks the lives of three slum kids Jamal (Dev Patel), the love of his life, Latika (Freida Pinto), and his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal)– as those lives intersect, then diverge, then intersect again. And no, its nothing like Salaam Bombay.

As the three protagonists collectively jump over slum-walls and into open septic pits, escape marauding rioters in dhobi-ghaats, climb up hills one would never want to scale and fall off train roofs; take in an open-air opera in Agra before busting a nascent mujra back in Bombay; fall in with the mob, fall out with each other – director Danny Boyle reveals life in modern India as might be experienced by her marginalized masses. The film shines the light on the country’s newfound but still fragile promise and its often brutal beauty (Think of a view of the Taj Mahal with homeless kids playing on the dried-up Yamuna bed in the foreground). Boyle manages to do so without succumbing either to Hollywood’s impulse to exoticise the Orient or to Bollywood’s impulse to filter a reality that can be truly difficult to see.

Slumdog reveals every piece of grit under modern Bombay’s beautifully painted finger-nails. Dharavi looks like nothing you’ve seen before, perhaps because the film was shot in Dharavi and not on a set resembling it. Two of the child actors are actually from the slums. Yes, it leaves you in a bit of despair. But even more than that, in awe and a strange pride at the slum-dwelling Mumbaikar’s ability to love and laugh and her ability to dream in circumstances where one might perhaps imagine being able to cling to one’s humanity – but only by a thread. And it warms your heart at her ability to feel happy for someone else when they are close to winning a million bucks and a ticket out of the underclass’ collective misery.

That ticket is the million dollar jackpot available to the winner of the Indian version of the game-show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Jamal’s getting on to the show sets the story into motion and the question-answer interludes provide the only relief from the sensory overload of the three musketeers’ adventures. The interludes last only long enough to let the host, Anil Kapoor (doing a great job of channeling Amitabh, the host of the original show) take unseemly pleasure in making fun of the Jamal’s humble origins and light of his chances. The reason behind Jamal’s presence on the show and the secrets behind his success in answering the increasingly difficult questions, power the story through to its ultimately crowd-pleasing denouement.

Slumdog is perhaps the first, and certainly the best cinematic offspring yet, of globalization. Englishman Danny Boyle who gained fame with the gritty cult hit Trainspotting led a largely non-Indian production crew to create a film set mainly in Bombay and with an ensemble cast that’s wholly of South Asian extraction. Beyond that, Boyle manages to mesh the best traditions of Hollywood – use of innovative scripts, taut drama, and slick production values - with those of Bollywood – controlled melodrama, fantastic musical score, and an ability to unabashedly tell a story about true and truly star-crossed love. Screen-writer Simon Beaufoy and composer A. R. Rahman along with Boyle have deservedly won Golden Globe nominations.

This might seem like heresy when Milk is still playing in the theaters – but if there’s only one movie you can squeeze into your packed Holiday calendar – it should be Slumdog Millionaire.

Simply Put

2008-12-11T22:30:00.000-08:00

Sourced from a Facebook profile

Find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot,
who calls you back when you hang up on him,
who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat,
or will stay awake just to watch you sleep...

A Prayer for Beloved Bombay

2008-12-01T23:13:00.001-08:00

Children in Ahmedabad offer a Candle Light Vigil for the Victims of the Bombay Terrorist Atrocity (boston.com)

The Silent Sunset and The Strange Symmetry of The Three Signs

2008-12-01T20:53:00.000-08:00

TONGUE SOMEWHAT IN CHEEK

I want to take you back, dear reader to a past tale from my time at the Jikoji Silent Meditation Retreat way back in June. You might remember, that we left off with me walking at a rather determined pace up a forest trail that led to the top of a ridge, diligently meditating all the while, trying to catch up with the rest of the group. I've been meaning to tell you about what happened after that for some time now but never quite got around to it. So here's the rather curious tale.

As I mentioned, I kind of ran meditatively up the trail. But partly due to the uphill climb and partly because I couldn't convince myself that running and meditating really went together, I slowed down soon enough. And as I slowed down, the silence in its varying degrees, became noticeable. There was the muted crunch of the dew-damp fallen leaves under my slippers. The whispering of a gentle, still-warm breeze as it weaved its way through the upper layers of the forest canopy that fully sheltered the trail from the setting sun. The sound of a deer's half-step - as it stopped momentarily upon spying me coming up the path and then placidly rustled its way away through the shrubbery. The sunlight only filtered through a couple of feet through the leaves - turning the upper layer an early autumnal red-brown and the lower layers a deepening, darkening shade of green. I felt the calm seep into me...even the rather meditatively-unhelpful sign warning about itinerant mountain lions only caused a momentary flutter in my pulse. My steps slowed further.

Three quarters of the way up the hill, I stepped into the sun, as the canopy gave way to knee-high sun-dried grass glowing warmly golden-brown in the sun. With another few steps I turned a corner so that the crest of the hill lay directly behind and above me. A vunderful (Yes I'm Indian and proud that I economise on my v/w sounds) vista opened up before my eyes. A grassland stretched lazily rampant across the landscape, covering rolling hills and dipping valleys - besieging the occasional clump of trees before itself being restrained in its reach by the forest that formed its irregular border. An Olympian discus-thrower's stone's throw away from the freeway - I had reached a sanctuary seemingly untouched by civilization. The quiet of the surroundings stilled my thoughts. I spied the dark-tan silhouette of a deer against the grass on the opposite slope - his antlered head turned towards me. Still. Unmoving. Which is when I saw the first sign - of civilization. A weather beaten bench just the right shade of dark brown - the kind that one would pay quite a handsome sum for in Crate n' Barrel. Placed at the center of the ridge - capable of seating up to three (Vegan...read malnourished) meditators - it was placed at just the right angle for watching the sun as it set in the western sky.

I sat down and as I turned to look at the great big ball of fire in the sky - that had obligingly hung around despite my tardiness - I saw a slow-moving, red-bellied SouthWest Airline plane making its way to San Jose airport. I continued to contemplate deeply about nothing and sometimes about whether this was the wrong ridge - because I couldn't see anyone else there. Soon the rest of the group file silently into view. It seemed, I had beaten them to the top. The realization, that they must have had a short meditation session in the zen temple before starting up the path, wafted into my conciousness. There were more than 20 people in the walking meditation procession. None of them acknowledged my presence. Each one silently found a vantage point from where to see the sun finally set. Some sank into the inviting grass. Others joined me on the bench. Others still, stood scattered across the slope. Look, I wanted to say - Isn't that setting sun beautiful. But I held back. Look there, I wanted to point, at that unmoving deer - providing the relieving speck of fauna to the flora-rich landscape. My hand stayed by my side. Gathered together on that ridge - each one alone - we watched as the sun completed its descent below the distant horizon. I'm guessing some of the others saw the deer and some didn't. I'm guessing some of them saw every change in colour that the section of the sky hugging the horizon went through. While others missed some of the transitions because no one pointed them out.

Let me ask you, dear reader, is a sunset beautiful if no one watching it says it is? The answer I realized that evening is of course, a definite maybe. The twenty of us watched a beautiful, beautiful sun set without once commenting on how beautiful it was. How purple the sky was right at the end. How, the unnaturally still deer, looked more like a shadow in an Indonesian puppet show than a living, breathing being. Or how the landscape, brown grass and green trees, took on a deep cool blue hue once the sun had set. It was a bit of a strange, and strangely fulfilling, experience.

Without a word or a sign to one another, we started our way back down the trail. I felt engorged and sluggish with all the beauty I had taken in. As I savoured this new way of feeling full - I spied the third sign - a white plastic bag - caught in the upper branches of a tree - fluttering noisily in the cold breeze that had now started blowing. I hadn't truly linked the bench and the plane in my mind beyond making the connection that they were the two man-made things in that otherwise natural scene. But seeing the bag - brought me another realization. This one didn't waft through - more like rushed in and screeched to a halt in my mind. I realized that the three signs were not a coincidence. That I had gone beyond communing with nature - to communicating with nature. The signs - in their weird symmetry - contained a message. Just for me. For only I had seen all three - the Southwest flight having disappeared before the others arrived.

I understood what the elements, the powers that inhabit the ether, were trying to tell me - I was neither the well-grounded bench nor the crimson aeroplane that had already attained soaring heights. I was the plastic bag caught in a limbo - struggling to rise sky-high but in just as much danger of falling into the mud below. What finally happened to me would depend on whether I was able to figure out what the branches of the tree represented - for that was what was restraining me. And what I did to free myself. I had another day of silent meditation to do that. I was thrilled at having had Mom Nature or other higher beings take it upon herself/themselves to personally deliver a piece of zen enlightenment to me. And that she was sophisticated enough to use a riddle that needed to solving versus an akaashwani that spelled it all out. (Plus I wouldn't have understood Sanskrit anyway!)

We were back under the canopy on our way back to the lodge. The air was considerably cooler now that the sun had fully set. I saw the T-shirt clad guy ahead of me shiver slightly in the breeze. I hadn't noticed the cold myself - warmed as I was by the cloak of narcissism that had fallen lightly over my shoulders.

The Light At the End of the Tunnel?

2008-10-09T19:28:00.001-07:00

I never thought that three weeks away from the election Obama would already have such a large lead that would have nearly everyone predicting a landslide. It almost makes you wonder whether we might actually be seeing the light at the end of a long tunnel.

You might think its a funny thing to say when the financial system is crashing down around your ears and the number of issues being described in Presidential Debates as "one of the most significant challenges that faces our country" now officially runs into at least a half-dozen - the credit crisis, disappearing jobs, disastrous state of healthcare, global warming, failing war effort in Afghanistan, crippling energy costs (happily, the credit crisis might solve this issue for everyone - oil has fallen below $90/bbl). Even the Apocalypse only has four horsemen!

Note that this does not even include issues like the Iraq War and the attendant condoning of torture or immigration or crumbling infrastructure or falling education standards - each of which has been raised by various commentators and even by the candidates as being of singular importance. So yes, it does look like we're entering the dark maw of a very long tunnel - one that we may not trundle out anytime soon - rather than coming out of one.

In the last few days, the only ray of hope - seems to be that of a victory, potentially in a landslide, for Obama. But the same days have also seen the attacks from the Republican side change from being downright dishonest (ho-hum, its a political campaign, you might say) to downright dangerous. McCain and Palin cannot not know what the potential consequences are - of rallying a base by calling the other guy a terrorist sympathiser, directly and indirectly implying treasonous behaviour. A base that by many, many reports contains innumerable nut-jobs looking for an excuse to do something, anything, about the uppity black man who increasingly looks likely to lead the country in the very near future. Well how about saving your country from a man who pals around with terrorists for an excuse? This is being done so blatantly its not even a dog-whistle. As even conservative commentator Kathleen Parker says "words can have more serious consequences than lost votes". Combining the increasing demagoguery on one side with rising, if still a little unbelieving, euphoria on the other, seems to me, to yield a brew fit for sending an unbent individual on a nasty bender.

So I worry that that light at the end of the tunnel that many of us think we're seeing is a high-speed train hurtling towards us while the media is too busy playing the driver-too-busy-texting-to-watch-the-tracks and see the other train thats broken down on the tracks. We know how that turned out only three weeks back.

Will someone tell the driver to get the hell back on the job before its too late? There are some that are standing by the tracks and shouting at the top of their voices, doing their best to alert the damn driver. Will it have an effect? I wouldn't bet on it - the McCain-Campaign-Raising-Ayers story is still new - still worth days of debate - and no new story can die until a newnew one comes along.

Even though all other events seem to indicate that that rabbit foot we've been carrying all along is likely to have belonged to a hare fallen on hard times - perhaps on this one latest game of catch with a grenade, unlike all the other recent ones - we'll all get really lucky. If so, all we'll have is a narrower election on Nov 4 than is currently predicted. I'll take that - even a narrow defeat for Obama (bitterly I might add). But if thats all that happens - it will be no thanks to the media. Or the John "Country First" McCain campaign.

First Cuts Run Deep

2008-09-19T19:17:00.000-07:00

WARNING: RAW EMOTIONS ON NAKED DISPLAY

The other night I wandered into the Edge, one of the Castro’s more decrepit bars. It’s a not-very-popular leather bar – more dark and dingy than edgy. As usual it was mostly empty – and I would’ve left, having spent all of 5 seconds in the bar which is about how long I usually spend there – except that they were playing Wish You Were Here.

Wish You Were Here. Pink Floyd’s impossibly beautiful ballad to ex-band member Syd Barrett - who like Icarus had crashed and burned having flown too high and too close – not to the sun – but to a Lucyous diamond encrusted night-sky. It was an improbable choice of song for the bar and for a Thursday night. Its also a song that never fails to reach into my memory bank, pull out and play back, in my mind’s eye, videos of my most deeply buried, beautiful memories of my first relationship; my first love.

Wish You Were Here was the first Pink Floyd song I liked. And Pink Floyd was the band that I discovered and came to love because I had to listen to their songs for hours everynight and for large parts of the day everyday, for nearly three years…lying next to the man I loved. (He was a card-carrying member of the Pink Floyd Fan Cult in my engineering school - that pretty much included everyone who wasn’t deaf. And I use the word cult instead of club advisedly).

If life has a sound-track, and long stretches of mine do; then Pink Floyd, The Doors, Nirvana and others – but mainly Pink Floyd – provided the sound-track to those three too-short years. I continued to listen to those songs for quite some time after our parting of ways…just to re-watch and re-feel; relive the best moments of those days:

Lying in bed together at night, each of us reading a book – he, something along the lines of Sartre; me, something along the lines of Stephen King. Watching the latest Bollywood blockbuster on-screen – reluctantly on his part – and just knowing exactly why the on-screen, in-love pair was singing; because my heart seemed perpetually filled with song too. Dedicating a song at the MTV booth during the college festival to the only girl in the branch because I just had to, had to!, dedicate a song...and couldn’t really dedicate it to the person I wanted to openly. Spending the entire day away from each other in different classes and loving it; savouring the anticipation of meeting up again in the evening. Nestling in the crook of his arm throughout one night on a train when a severe case of sinusitis made it difficult for me to sleep without having my head propped up…never hearing a comment about how that benumbed his shoulder. Having him meet my family and seeing how well he got along with all of them – how much they grew to like him. Being introduced to and coming to love a whole new genre of music and of literature – Tolkien and Golding; Pratchett and Kundera.

During the good moments, you really couldn’t have found anyone happier than me. I’ve been in relationships since – some in which I cared deeply for, even loved, the other person. But never like that first time. Never did I agonize even years later about their failure. And never truly did the memories from that first time fade or become like silent home videos from someone else’s life that I could watch dispassionately when they switched themselves on.

Wonderful as it was, I’d always assumed that the relationship was doomed – that we would go our separate ways once we left college. He would find someone lovely and marry her (he did) and I would try my best to become straight (I did). When that actually started coming true – it just seemed to prove that I was good at analysis and forecast, even when it came to life events. I did make some clumsy, incoherent attempts at saving our relationship. But in the two years that I spent in silent and bitter self-congratulation on how accurate I’d been about the future course of the relationship, I never once believed I had any real chance at succeeding. If I had believed I did (have a chance), I might have done some things differently. My pal RD told me once, after hearing how it all ended, that perhaps I hadn’t tried hard enough to save it. I don't think he realized that his words sent me into a minor panic...because it hit me suddenly that he might be right. And then RD wondered why I spent so much of the rest of the ride reading the Economist instead of talking to him. :)

For several years after we were together no more, I was just grateful to have had the love I had, abruptly truncated though it was. That feeling has dissipated over time. Three years of being in love no longer seem sufficient to sustain me through the rest of my lifetime, especially when my financial advisor tells me I have at least another 60 to go and should be planning for them. What has attenuated too (somewhat), is the intensity of the emotional mini-orchestra that strikes up every time I hear a familiar rock melody from my engineering days. But it's still strong enough to stop me mid-thought most times.

Nine years since the relationship ended, why does a Pink Floyd tune affect me like it does – giving me a hollowed out, sinking feeling every single time; causing me to buy a beer in a bar I don’t like? Have I not moved on? Or maybe I have but not fully? Or maybe I’m over him fully but am now an abject case of once burned, twice shy. Is that why I’m pretty much a perennial singleton? Do I need some kind of – (gag alert) – closure? Did I really fritter away my chances of saving the relationship through a lack of faith? Or am I just falling prey to the very-American pastime of self-indulgent navel-gazing (That one’s easy, right? ;).

To tell you the truth, I don’t know. If there's one thing I've learned about relationships - its that they can be very complicated. So I don't know – whether I should’ve tried harder; whether it would have made a difference; whether we’d still be together if it had. If I had to take a guess, I'd say: I could have done with better closure, there probably was an element of once-burned-twice-shy in my relationships that followed and I likely am being self-indulgent. I'd also venture to say I’m pretty sure I’m over him. What I’m not over, is the happiness that I had when I was with him. I want those same or similar feelings back; I want to be in love again. And thats probably what Pink Floyd's abiding hold on me is about.

People tell me that first love is more about rampant hormones than real, true feelings and that the intensity is impossible to replicate. But just when I find myself thinking that that might be true; by a strange coincidence I’ll find myself in a theatre watching a movie like Dan in Real Life. Or on Youtube watching Joe Biden (yes, really) get all teary-eyed as he recounts how his second wife told him she wanted to marry him because his deep love for his first wife, who died in an accident, made her certain he could come to love her very strongly too.

So I still know hope. I also know, as I finish this post listening to the somber, mellow, achingly familiar tunes from Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell, that damn, Sheryl “The First Cut is The Deepest” Crow knows what she’s singing about.

Whats in Front of Your Nose?

2008-09-06T09:06:00.000-07:00

One of the blog's that I read almost on a daily basis is Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish - I often disagree with him but I find him to be in interesting guy because he has so several unpredictable dimensions to him - he is a Conservative but a lapsed Republican, a Clinton-hater (there's really no other way to put it) and a repentant supporter of the Iraq War, a man of faith and gay. However one of the things that's stayed with me ever since I started reading his blog is the quote from George Orwell that serves as his blog's motto/slogan - "To See What Is In Front of One's Nose Needs a Constant Struggle." If you're not quite sure what that really means beyond sounding clever - here's an example of a statement reflective of someone who's managed to peer through the propanganda put out in the Republican Convention in the last week and the Right's embrace of Sarah Palin -

"If you are biracial and born in a state not connected to the lower 48, America needs darn near 2 years and 3 major speeches to "get to know you." If you're white and from a state not connected to the lower 48, America needs 36 minutes and 38 seconds worth of an acceptance speech to know you're "one of us." If you spend 18 months building a campaign around the theme of "Change," it's just "empty rhetoric." If one week before your party's national convention you suddenly make your candidacy about "Change," that's "red meat." "

From John Ridley's Guide to the Conservative Palinguage - The People's Edition

Small Mercies

2008-07-25T21:06:00.000-07:00

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"I found my father's legs two years ago, and two weeks ago I found his head"

Avdo Suljic, 35, an unemployed Bosnian Muslim who lost 200 relatives at Srebrenica in 1995 - on what has eased his pain since the mass murders 13 years ago. He was responding to a question on whether Radovan Karadzic's capture had provided him solace. Before talking about what truly brings some peace - namely being able to lay his relatives' remains to rest, - he said "Karadzic is an old man. Nothing with his arrest has changed for me."

Karadzic was the leader of the Bosnian Serb army that laid siege to Srebrenica for three and a half years and massacred 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men over just 5 terrible days in July 1995. He was arrested this week after hiding in plain sight in Bosnia and Serbia for the last 13 years

Pink, Punk, Rock, Pop

2008-07-24T22:12:00.000-07:00

SONG OF THE WEEK

I'd heard this song played scores of times on the radio without knowing who the artist was - I assumed it was a one-hit singer. Whoever it was, she'd managed to convey deep angst through a soft-rock hard-pop melody that was as easy on the ears as harsh the sharp-edged lyrics were on the psyche. I wondered how much of the lyrics were autobiographical - and whether putting the pain to music had helped alleviate it at all. I discovered after several weeks of hearing it on the radio - that the song was called "Don't Let Me Get Me" and the singer was Pink (Yes the same artist who impressed me a few months back with her ability to turn an angry emasculating "You And Your Hand" into a monster club-hit).

I think the lyrics to Don't Let Me Get Me are beautiful - not beautiful in the manner of Corinne Bailey Rae's "Put Your Records On" which leaves you soothed, suffused with a summery glow with its dulcet tones, pretty words and prettier imagery. Dont Let Me Get isn't beautiful in that way at all. But in the willingness of the singer to express one's deepest, rawest emotions. I'd urge you dear reader, to google and read the full lyrics, but here are my favourite lines:

LA told me, "You'll be a pop star,
All you have to change is everything you are."
Tired of being compared to damn Britney Spears
She's so pretty, that just ain't me

Doctor, doctor won't you please prescribe me
somethin
A day in the life of someone else?
Cuz I'm a hazard to myself

Don't let me get me
I'm my own worst enemy
Its bad when you annoy yourself
So irritating
Don't wanna be my friend no more
I wanna be somebody else

The funny thing is, that while the lyrics are angst-ridden, the music that they've been set to isn't dark and at no point does Pink allow her voice to stray into the anger zone. Instead she's sung it for the most part in a light-hearted monotone, with only a faint plaintive inflection creeping in when she sings the chorus lines. There was oodles more anger in "You And Your Hand".

The discovery that she'd sung Dont Let Me Get Me, added to my growing admiration of Pink's skills as a lyricist and of her ability to straddle the alternative (Dear Mr. President), rock (You and your hand) and pop (Get The Party Started) worlds with seeming ease. She's often called a punk artist and she is one - but all of that punkishness seems to be expressed through her personality, get-up and most-of-all through her usually memorable lyrics. She writes and sings, not for Everyman but for Everypunk and still manages to connect with the likes of me. Of course that could mean that she has broad reach or it could mean that there's a punk inside of me that I haven't yet met. But until I colour my hair blazing-vertical-orange I'm going to go with the first option

You Know You're Addicted When...

2008-07-22T22:35:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back I was reading a newspaper…or maybe it was a magazine…and came across, as one does so often these days, a reference to a young blogger who apparently was gaining a lot of readership for the things he was writing about and the interesting way in which he was writing about them. An Indian blogger based in the US.

Finding a fresh, new blog with its own unique mix of topics that the blogger’s chosen to write about, is, I now find, very similar to discovering an author that you’ve never read before. Except that a blog unlike most good books generally go on and on without end, and if you’re lucky will be updated, multiple times, on a daily basis. I made a note of the website address and later that evening I typed in the blog’s address and with a short pause designed to heighten the anticipation, hit enter.

The browser page rolled itself up, held its breath for a couple of seconds and then unfurled a new look…The virginal white expanse of the google page replaced by a page with two broad blue borders and a white center with words running across it in neat black type. I don’t quite remember all that I read and saw on the page, but I do distinctly remember liking the writing style, finding the choice of subjects eclectic and the overall aesthetics restful on the eye. Some of the posts were accompanied by photographs…and were all so clear, they looked like someone had taken a scrubbing brush to them…so clear that the edges seemed to have a faint glow around them.

One particular photo-post caught my attention. The title said simply, “My Brother”. It showed a curly haired guy sitting intently at a desk, in front of a computer. He wore specs and was smiling…something on the screen was evidently funny. It was a pleasant smile. The brother. There was another guy standing to his right, leaning in towards the screen, one hand on the edge of the desk, the other on the chair that the first guy was sitting on. Also smiling. While the post didn’t say so it seemed clear that the guy standing was the blogger himself. His features are vague in my mind.

Even weeks later the picture is fresh in my mind, though I’ve forgotten virtually everything else that I saw and read on that site. For two reasons, primarily. One, There seemed to be an easy camaraderie between the two brothers. It had a rather cosy feel to it. You wanted to get to know these guys…you kind of knew they’d make good friends. The second reason was the caption. It said: 48. Kill at 48. I saw the caption before I saw the picture because I had started reading the blog from the earlier posts and was scrolling up the site versus down. The caption sent a chill down my spine…and the lack of congruity with the picture itself was puzzling. Even more than that, it was disturbing. Suddenly I became aware that night had fallen outside…that I was now sitting in the dark leavened only by the glow from the laptop screen. I looked at the picture for a long time…trying to figure out whether the caption was a joke or a declaration of malicious intent…trying to get my rising dread to settle back down.

That’s when I woke up…with a start...and an aspirated "phew!". I’d been holding my breath in my sleep out of sheer tension. I was back in the log-cabin-like living room of the Jikoji Zen Temple and Retreat Center, at the bottom of a valley in the Santa Cruz mountains…having fallen asleep helped in equal measures by enervating heat, a surprisingly sumptuous lunch of marinated and baked tofu squares sprinkled with crunchy sunflower seeds.

I was on a two day silent retreat – having committed to not speaking during that period in addition to not reading, writing, watching TV, listening to music, surfing the web or doing anything that might distract me from my conversation with myself. Sleeping, however, was acceptable and I’d managed to do a lot of it that first day. And apparently the withdrawal symptoms from not having web-surfed for a full 24 hours had, unbeknownst to me, so ravaged my subconscious in that short time, that my superego had given into my id and manufactured a fantasy blog for me to read in a place where no Ethernet port had gone before.

Dusk was falling outside – just as it had in my dream and that told me that I had missed the mid-afternoon meditation session, on top of the mid-morning one – both due to the soporific nature of my internal conversations. It looked like I was already late for the final session of the day – a walking meditation that was supposed to take the group up a dirt-path to the top of a nearby ridge to watch the sun set. I scrambled up from the couch; wondering what I could do to redeem myself – my fellow retreat-ers couldn’t scold me without breaking their vow of silence but they were still allowed to glare. Seeing the sun was still hanging around on the horizon – I decided to try and catch up with the rest of the group- of course to truly redeem myself, I’d have to meditate my way up (versus just run up) to the ridge-top and hope the sun hadn’t set by then. The philosophical riddle (wikipedia’s description, not mine) – If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound – seemed particularly apt in this situation. Perhaps if I was quiet enough no one would notice that I hadn’t already been there when they arrived – and that would make me not-late.

So, I started up the hill at a determined trot, meditating furiously all the while.

A Quote for the Ages

2008-07-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

"Its like a pterodactyl out of a gay Jurassic Park"

- Tim Gunn, host of Project Runway on Episode 2, Season 5, on a pink dress, that wasn't fully shown, but which I'm guessing has a rather 'innovative' silhouette.

The poor designer is probably now wishing he'd taken that trip to the remote Costa Rican island that housed Crichton's creations and taken his chances with Velociraptors devouring him; instead of coming on Project Runway. Or maybe that Gunn had. :)

Apparently this is Gunn's last season...He's going to be sorely missed.

Plus Ca Change...

2008-07-09T21:03:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been finding inspiration for a lot of my posts in art - well music and literature anyway. The only youtube video that I ever added to my favourites list is this cover version of the Beatles' Across the Universe by Rufus Wainwright. RW is apparently a fairly well known singer though I'd never heard of him until a blog pointed me to this video. I liked this even more than the original Beatles' version - I know - Sacrilege!! :)

As you can guess I love the haunting quality of the song and of the video - fits right into a certain mood of mine :) - but also love it for the laidback way in which the song has been sung - almost lazily accompanied with a big dollop of sensuality. I can just feel my muscles all begin to loosen up, the knots begin to dissolve, stress beging to seep away. The little girl in the video is also just adorable.,,no she's actually mesmerisingly pretty. I had a feeling of deja vu as I watched her...and then a quick google search told me why...she's Dakota Fanning who played Tom Cruise's daughter in the War of the Worlds in which aliens invade the earth and massacre tons of people in sight. (Some Iraqis probably think that's contemporary history, not a film - And just so we're clear, I'm referring to the initiators of the war here not the soldiers who're just doing their duty). On a different note, I also just realized that there's a certain symmetry in using Dakota Fanning in a video called Across the Universe, given one of her most prominent roles has been in an alien movie.

I wonder if this video somehow or in some way is inspired by the 1956 French movie by Albert Lamorisse’s “The Red Balloon,” about a young boy and the talismanic sphere that follows him through the gray streets of Paris like a dog, a lover, a ghost". That movie partly also inspired a 2007 film called "Flight of the Red Balloon"

Anyway, as I played the song on an impulse today, after months, I was a little surprised by a new reaction I had to the refrain,

"Nothing's going to change my world
Nothing's going to change my world
Nothing's going to change my world
Nothing's going to change my world"

It felt like the lyrics were referring to how I felt about the vote on the Warrantless Wiretapping bill passed today by the Democratic party-controlled Senate...A deep disappointment in the political process in general. The fact that this happened when the Democrats controlled both the houses of Congress seems to say we'd be foolish to expect any big changes even if they win the Presidency in November; a fact emphasized by the Barack "Change-you-can-believe-in" Obama's oh-so-conventional capitulation in voting in favour of the bill. In a delicious irony Hillary Clinton sided with the liberals (like me) who opposed her in the primary, and voted against the bill that destroys most protections against electronic spying by the government on residents and citizens of the US.

I worry that even if the Republicans lose, it will be their slogan and not Obama's that will win out in the end. They briefly talked about bringing "Change you Deserve" to the country before it was discovered that an anti-depressant has the same tag-line (In my view, this makes it totally inappropriate for the Republicans to use the slogan - though not because of copyright issues. If the medication in question was a "downer" rather than mood "upper" the slogan-theft would make perfect sense)!

My fear is that the Wiretapping bill is a signal that given the passive resistance that this country has put up to 8 years of a corrupt, violent and inequitous government, perhaps we don't deserve much of a change at all, and that is what we might get come November and beyond.

Stop-And-Smell-the-Flowers Thought for the Week

2008-06-08T20:12:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed how green grass in a park, shimmers on a sunny day when a light breeze is blowing? It looks beautiful. Almost makes you want to put up electric-powered outdoor-fans all over the place just to be able to see that effect . Kind of like these guys have done. :)

Voicing the Vanquished's Version of History

2008-06-08T19:01:00.000-07:00

What do you know about President Eisenhower? I didn't really know much except that history recognizes him as one of

USA

’s greatest Presidents. A quick look at wikipedia informs one that:

"Eisenhower was a five-star general of the US Army who served as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe...1944-45....As President, he oversaw the cease-fire of the Korean War, kept up the pressure on the Soviet Union during the Cold War made nuclear weapons a higher defense priority, launched the Space Race, enlarged the Social Security program, and began the Interstate Highway System."

Sounds like quite an accomplished guy, huh? I had never read anything very critical about Eisenhower until I read The Poisonwood Bible by Barabara Kingsolver. The book is truly, in my average-joe-reader opinion, a master-piece of literature, of story-telling, of creating multiple (6 in number) full-blooded, sharply etched, distinct protagonists and of using writing to establish a record of history from the point of view of the vanquished instead of the victor, of using writing to deliver a moral rebuke, a sharp awakening slap, to the powerful and empowered who, blinded by a sense of their own moral superiority, act to oppress thousands in the garb of salvaging their lives and souls.

Written in the late 90s and set in the 60s during the struggle for Congo's independence; the Poisonwood Bible has 6 protagonists - 1 woman and mother, 4 pre-teen to teenaged daughters and The Congo, the heart of the Dark Continent. The five female characters are ruled by the family patriarch, a born-again evangelical priest who, convinced of his sacred mission to save the heathen Congolese tribes by converting them Christianity, moves his entire unwilling family from Bethlehem, Georgia to a small village in the darkest depths of the African equatorial forest.

Most of the book is dedicated to the hapless family's tribulations but Kingsolver seamlessly weaves in the emerging turmoil in the Congo. The Congo was Belgium’s only colony and bore the full brunt of its colonial master’s attentions. The atrocities on the native Congolese were legend, and are well documented by history – they included chopping off rubber plantation workers’ hands if they worked too slowly on a particular day. The independence struggle was led by Patrice Lumumba, a postal worker, who was Congo's equivalent of Nehru. Like Nehru, Lumumba was also a Socialist, an anti-colonialist and showed signs of being non-aligned in the cold war. However in Lumumba’s case all of those turned out to be fatal mistakes. As Kingsolver puts it in the book…

“In 1975…a group of senators called The Church Committee… found notes from secret meetings of the National Security Council and President Eisenhower. In their locked room, these men had put their heads together and proclaimed Patrice Lumumba a danger to the safety of the world. The same Patrice Lumumba, mind you, who washed his face each morning from a dented tin bowl, relieved himself in a carefully chosen bush and went out to seek the faces of his nation. Imagine if he could have heard those words – a danger to the safety of the world! – from a roomful of white men who held in their manicured hands the disposition of armies and atomic bombs, the power to extinguish every life on earth…And President Eisenhower was right then sending orders to take over the Congo…he’d made up his mind about things. He’d given Lumumba a chance he felt. The Congo had been independent for fifty-one days.”

After 51 days in power, Lumumba was overthrown by the army led by Mobutu Sese-Seko who was backed by the CIA and Belgium. Lumumba was first imprisoned and then beaten to death. There were many other parts to the plot including a Belgian-incited rebellion in Katanga, the most mineral rich province, but they seem to have been side-shows staged to create the chaos that would justify or at least enable a coup to happen. Once Mobutu was in power, the Katanga rebellion seemed to die down. Mobutu then effectively went on to rule Zaire for 37 years, brutalized its citizens and plundered its treasury. His departure was followed by years of civil war that has still not completely ended and in which thousands of women have been raped.

Its difficult to describe how angry and sad I felt at reading what had been done to the Congo in the guise of saving it from Communism. The Poisonwood Bible reminded me again of the argument I made in Blasted Into Agnosticism? that extremists succeed too often in sowing misery and chaos - for decades - for at least me to confidently continue to believe in God. It also reminded me that history is often just an account written from the victor's perspective. And sometimes it might make sense to put in that extra effort as Kingsolver did to dig up and voice the vanquished's account too. For it might hold valuable information about true culpability (The Eisenhower name will just not have the vaguely positive resonance for me that it did till recently). Vanquished's accounts can also hold valuable lessons - for example - that the current administration's policy of "You're with us or against us" is not something that was invented 8 years back but has a much older and hallowed tradition.

We might have given George Bush too much credit...even on perhaps the best articulated doctrine of his Presidency. For once that discovery makes me sad.

Picture Worth a Thousand Strides?

2008-05-07T22:50:00.000-07:00

A few months back I ran a marathon on a lot of Ibuprofen and...determination. Several runners carried cameras on themselves during the run, strapped to their upper arm and ended up with several memorable pictures. I only have this one picture to remember the whole experience by. Its a list of all the registered marathon participants that one had to go and check one's name against. Even though I'd been training for the marathon over a six month period by the time I got in front of this list in Florence, this was what made it feel real. That I was really going to try and run a marathon. I felt a thrill run down my spine when I spotted my name on this page - and had to capture it - using my phone camera for the purpose. I've blocked out my name to keep the anonymity on this blog that I just know you've all come to like and prize so much, dear readers (Ok its really me who prizes it ;) . But thats my name behind that white rectangle. In plain black print. Its kinda cool, huh?

Melancholia Lapping At My Feet

2008-05-07T22:09:00.000-07:00

It started as Monday morning blues that began on Sunday afternoons…not long after I woke up, late, often after two consecutive weekend nights of merriment. Ironically, on the day of the Sabbath I would take my deeply irreligious self into a short hibernation…hiding behind the Sunday newspapers, complemented with steaming hot coffee and maybe a piece of cake or a sandwich at a Starbucks or in the early days, at a Barista. I’d ignore calls from friends and from Global Telelink’s irrepressible telemarketers. I’d check emails with an unblinking red Stop sign on my chat client. I’d lie on the grass by the Marina tennis courts, eyes shaded from the sun but also from the glances of over-friendly passersby or picnickers who might try to strike up a conversation, book open but unread by my side. Sometimes I’d sit in the outdoor section of the diner in Ghirardelli Square, my chair turned towards the broad sea-view and away from other patrons, actually reading a book. Only smiling politely at the waitress refilling the coffee, but otherwise keeping to myself. Other times I’d stay at home and watch TV and surf the net until there was nothing to see and nothing to read…and then I’d read some more and watch some more. After five weeks’ worth of a sane person’s talking squeezed into a regular work week and a couple of nights of catching up with friends, Sunday was My day. It was the day that I let the melancholia in.

I only put a word to the mood a couple of years back. Until then it was…as I mentioned…it was just an early onset of Monday morning blues. But even when work was good or not stressful, I’d still find myself slipping into the warm, cozy, misty, floaty sense where I was shut off from the world in a daydreamland of my own. Its difficult to describe the feeling. Its not a happy feeling, nor a sad one. Its not an intense feeling of any kind. Vaguely soothing is the best way to describe it, I guess. I’ve never really looked up the meaning of the word melancholia – always just worked with a vague sense of what it meant and the emo-picture it conveyed to me. But once I verbalized it as what I was feeling – it just felt completely right. And so now that’s my word.

Often the mood comes unbidden if I’m alone but I can summon it too by listening to the right songs (I have a playlist called Melancholia on my iPod). Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here will do it every time. So will George Michael’s Older, Corey Crowder’s Here’s Looking at You Kid, or Michael Buble’s Home. I can just as easily chase it away by putting on my Club playlist or calling a friend or just putting on a Will & Grace rerun.

For a short period back there, I wasn’t feeling melancholic any more. My life was full of activity every day of the week. At work and outside. On Sundays the closest that I could come to it, was feeling mellow. A nice feeling but not the same. The first few weeks I actually found it refreshing that I’d somehow found a way to charge my batteries without a periodic bout of semi-isolation. That was also the period that some of you may have noticed, dear readers, that I wasn’t posting very often. But then as more weeks passed and there was still no sign of the bloody mood (or of a post), I found, to my surprise, that I was missing it. Missing melancholia…It sounded silly even to myself. I mean its not like I liked being melancholic did I?

The truth is, I actually like my bouts of melancholia – its when I usually end up writing…and I like writing quite a lot now. Once I’m done watching TV, browsing sites, lazing in the sun, driving aimlessly and there’s nothing more to do…that’s when I find I can clear my mind and let the words spill into the void, words that I’ve been watching form themselves into fragments of sentences in the back of my mind…for days, sometimes weeks and months. My friend Cheery Cynic during his short Bay Area interlude would sometimes ask me, if I told him I’d been out on a drive through the Presidio or at a movie alone, whether “I was depressed again?”. “I wasn’t” I would tell him “I’m melancholic. There’s a difference.” There is. Ask the Irish.

I think its my way of resting up – recharging my batteries so I can go out and feel ecstatic and crushed and sad and smiley and social all over again. Perhaps it has to do with my Piscean nature – per Linda Goodman, we’re condemned to be constantly torn in two directions (hence the symbol of two fish facing in opposite directions), one part, full of life and vitality wanting to jump headlong into the surf of life, the other seeking comfort and escape from the rigors of it, even if for a short period.

Whatever the explanation, I have come to realize two things. One – I like my regular melancholia time-outs. Two – this is not something that everyone can understand easily without also worrying if you’re perhaps a nascent manic depressive. But one of the great things about growing older is that you get to understanding yourself better, your likes and dislikes, and you generally start being kinder to yourself. So; just as a waist-watching foodie will over time allow herself that extra helping of pineapple upside-down cake, so will I let myself regularly have dreamy lie-ins on a phantasmic beach, letting soothing waves of melancholy break gently around me.

Cheesy Romantic Refuge

2008-05-03T19:52:00.000-07:00

PLAYING ON MY IPOD

OK I know I'm probably going to be ragged no end for admitting to this...but, I love listening to this song when I'm feeling tired - physically or mentally...Though its no masterpiece, the simple school-yardish innocence of its lyrics and mellow mood, never fail to have a revivifying effect. There's something really romantic about a pretty girl with a guitar sweetly and openly serenading you. It would've helped if Kareena had shown some ability to simulate even holding a guitar properly. But maybe thats asking for too much.

Irony of the Week...maybe Month!

2008-04-20T18:26:00.000-07:00

My friend going to a social event organized by a group called "Actively Out" and giving his pseudonym to people during introductions! To his great credit though, he saw the irony and the humour in the situation ;)

I think Alanis Morissette might have made something of this a few years back.

Choosing Beauty

2008-04-20T17:42:00.000-07:00

This one’s for you P.

Are you one of those wonderfully grounded people? You know – the kind who know exactly what is possible and practical and what is not, and don’t have a lot of patience for the latter? Who tend to take every major decision based on a careful analysis of multiple criteria chosen with a view to maximizing comfort? Who might often have an air of levity about them but almost never one of levitation? Well, if you are, I want to put on my philosopher cap and talk to you about bringing beauty into your life.

Now don’t get defensive…Gentle those hackles down. I’m not saying that you don’t recognize beauty or that you don't understand that it has many forms – from the stunning genius (and hot, muscled men) of the Sistine Chapel to a blazing orange-red-pink-purple hued sunset off the waters of Key West to the oratory of an inspirational leader, to the love of a nurturing, perhaps unhandsome, life-partner. I'm ready to accept that you recognize beauty, understand it and appreciate and enjoy it, that you value it and make place for it in your life.

I just think the amount of beauty in one’s life is a direct result of choices we make. And that too many people, specially if they have always had both feet solidly planted on earth, pick beauty too seldom. That when there is a choice to be made between beauty and comfort and/or security, many of us pick comfort and security. Even though we would like to pick the beautiful option. And we do it because we don’t realize the full extent of what we might be giving up.

Lets take how people choose homes as a way to illustrate what I mean. For example, one may choose to live in a window-less studio in downtown instead of an apartment with a view because it is 15 minutes further away from the freeway. Some people may pick a character-less apartment-box closer to office versus a pretty suburb with picket fences and manicured lawns (if that’s your thing) since it would add 40 minutes to the daily commute. Some may even decide not to rent an old Victorian house that totally charms them because it comes without a dish-washer and involves walking up four flights of stairs. Well of course, you say, all those decisions make sense on the face of it. Its just a question of what you value more…

It is. But I think in making these decisions one may not be doing all the right calculations. Have you thought that perhaps, being 15 minutes further from the freeway could put you 15 minutes closer to a daily walk on the beach, giving you a lifetime of splendid sunsets instead of just a couple of vacations’ worth of it. That it might increase the prospects of being woken up by itinerant parrots perched on your window-sill. It could mean the difference between needing a shrink and having a natural stress valve built into your home. Living in a pretty tree-lined green-grassed suburb might mean having your children grow up with a greater appreciation for the environment and a desire to protect and preserve it. Hell – it might make the difference between them making a movie about global warming…or claiming that it’s a hoax. And who knows what epiphanies might strike you while washing dishes at the sink – as a result of the confluence of the happy state induced by just being present in that charming Victorian and the soothing calm that repetitive simple manual labour brings. I mean, there’s gotta be a reason for why artists over the ages flocked to cities like Paris and Rome instead of say…Baltimore.

I feel that beauty inspires and works in ways that we may not fathom fully – and perhaps we should take a chance on it. More often that not.

A Second Coming

2008-04-20T17:29:00.000-07:00

Yes I’m back, dear reader, after a too-long hiatus. The reasons for which I might divulge in a future post once I fully figure them out myself, and if at that point they seem even remotely interesting (to me ☺)

I can tell you right now, that the reason was not that I haven’t found anything interesting to write about in the last two months. In fact, I’ve had fragments of six or seven posts swirling around in my head in a very distracting manner over the last few weeks. I’m going to try and get some of them down before the next melancholectomy (I wouldn't trouble myself looking that up in a dictionary).

I want to ask for your indulgence though. I feel out of practice. So do factor that in as you read the next few posts, specially if the words in the sentences stumble over each other instead of flowing together; and if the thoughts seem patched together like parts of a badly knitted sweater with horrendous numbers of dropped stitches. Like an out-of-practice marathoner it will probably take a few practice runs before I find your favor again with a polished post.

I also think I should stop now - before you (and I) overdose on mixed metaphors.

Just wanted to let you know I'm back.

The Young Museum

2008-02-24T16:18:00.000-08:00

ADVENTURES IN FOG CITY - SOMEPLACE COOL

One of Forrest Gump's enduring lines for me, was how his Mom described life to him as being like a box of chocolates - "you never really know what you gonna get". That line apparently has now been immortalized on wikipedia here. Anyway, thats how I feel about San Francisco - After three years of living in what is really quite a small city, I regularly get surprised by discovering something new, someplace cool, some gem hidden, someone true.

Last Friday evening, I wandered into this short free, live concert by a 1980s band I'd never heard of before, called Sid Luscious and The Pants at the city's famed De Young Museum. Nestling in the Golden Gate Park, the Museum building itself is a work of art with a wonderful outdoor sculpture garden - I like the De Young because I think they try hard to make art accessible to relative philistines like me and (perhaps) you. I especially love its sculpture garden which I've visited multiple times while venturing inside just once. Mostly as a result of the Museum's efforts, on any given weekend day or night, you'll find it run over by people of all age groups and interests that gives it a cool buzz and a youthful vibe.

Anyway, the band was playing in the museum's large interior court thats dominated by a huge, memorable, piece of artwork named Strontium - an electron microscope image of the crystal lattice of Strontium Titanate. Not everyone likes it, but I felt it was the perfect backdrop for the band which was, gratifyingly, pretty good. C and I caught only the last 20 minutes of the band ...but the novelty of the experience - of seeing a raucous (in a good way) band merrily rip the usual near-reverent near-silence of a museum - seemed to me, a harbinger of a fun-filled weekend.

Out-of-the-Bottle Thinking?

2008-02-22T19:32:00.000-08:00

As if the loss of market share and pre-eminent status to Toyota wasn't enough humiliation for Detroit's Big Three. Here's further proof that the world's largest car-makers - who've enjoyed iconic status in pop-culture and in industry for decades - are in danger of forever being relegated to the scrapheap of un-coolness.

The car on the left is the Loremo (Hat-tip to Caderageous) - a "green"vehicle in race-car disguise. Apparently it can get 145 miles (and multiple exclamation marks!!!) per gallon. And its going to be available not 20 or 10 or 5 years from now. Its hitting the markets next year. And it costs only about $22,000 - not that much more than a fully loaded Honda Civic and several thousand dollars cheaper than what my Prius cost me. Click here to learn more about the car.

The Detroit Three can't even complain of being left behind by disruptive new technology - the Loremo is NOT a hybrid (though a hybrid version may be in development). Its NOT a hydrogen car. It runs on diesel - you know that high-tech new-fangled fuel thats powered trucks and tractors for eons. The efficiency comes from "engine efficiency, low weight, and minimal drag to boost the fuel-efficiency". Wow - who would've thought that those things could ever work.

The power of the Loremo is really in the breaking of the mental barrier around fuel-efficiency, the barrier which said that 45mpg was about as good as it gets. The Loremo could be the Roger Bannister of the automotive industry. Now that one car has gotten more than 100mpg - I wouldn't be surprised if every automaker worth their salt comes up with several more super-high efficiency models like this.

Of course, the other potential loser in this case in the long run is the oil industry. While this isn't disruptive technology, its impact could definitely be disruptive. Whats going to happen to all those billions of dollars being spent by the oil industry on exploration and millions of tons of new refining capacity? You'd be surprised how quickly car populations can get replaced in cost-conscious countries - which includes nearly every nation from the US to India and China. The days of ExxonMobil's $40bn in profits might soon be over - a quintupling of fuel-efficiency would definitely slow or reduce oil demand and prices.

Of course - its much too early to celebrate the end of oil (or the arrival of a powerful tool in the fight against global warming) - the Loremo may yet mysteriously develop design flaws or have safety concerns raised about it, or it may be bought out by competitors who may or may not deem it to be a viable project to pursue. But heck - its Friday evening - always a good time to pick up that beer-stein and cheer on an idea that has taken way too much time to arrive.

And one that seems to be the outcome of some great out-of-the-bottle thinking :)

The Joy of Lying to Small Kids

2008-01-22T22:58:00.000-08:00

Browsing in a book-store in Florence a couple of months back I came across a laugh-out loud book of cartoons named "Great Lies to Tell Small Kids" by one Andy Riley (also author of The Bunny Suicides as the blurb helpfully told me). The book has one lie per page accompanied by a funny illustration - its laugh riot!

As someone who thoroughly enjoys making up elaborate, unbelievable fabrications in response to irritating questions from kids and sending them happily on their way, I felt I'd found a kindred spirit. I also admired the ingenuity of the author for having found a way to make money out of an activity that I'd always just seen as a lazy hobby. I immediately bought the book for my precocious seven (or is it six) year old niece who was wandering through the bookshop with me, and we had a great time going through it.

Partly in tribute to Andy's genius and partly to further the cause of confusing annoying kids, here's a few more lies I came up with that I think might be good to put out there. Feel free to use any and all of them on any unsuspecting brats that cross your path, dear reader. Also - of course - feel free to contribute.

Moths are actually very old butterflies who are too proud to use hair dye
The Romans were great environmentalists who fed people to lions to keep them from eating deer (Bambi!) instead
Babies come when two people send a jointly signed letter to Santa asking for a boy or a girl. Meanwhile Mom starts eating a lot of food and becoming really fat so she can produce milk for the baby when the stork finally brings it over.
There is no such thing as the moon - its just the sun at very low power, recharging itself until its time to go to school again.
Sea water is salty, because the United Nations decided to mix all the salt in the sea since there was no other place to put it
You never hear that Red Riding Hood lived happily ever after because the wood-cutter who killed the wolf was really an axe-murderer...
Have you heard? Santa won't be coming this year because his elves formed a union, went on strike and no toys have been made. You might as well have stolen that last biscuit from the jar!
Microwaves make things hot by piping heat in from the Sahara Desert
Lightning never strikes the same place twice because Indra/Zeus has really bad aim
Giraffes have two or more bumps on their heads depending on how many coconuts have fallen on them while trying to eat the coconut tree's leaves

The Surprising Similarities Between Vampires and Bisexuals

2008-01-16T19:20:00.000-08:00

TONGUE FIRMLY EMBEDDED IN CHEEK

A few weeks back I found myself in an animated discussion on a now-forgotten subject with a couple of my friends who’re avowed bisexuals. I saw avowed because really, I only have their word that they’re bisexual for proof. All the time I’ve spent with them each has tended to show a marked preference for persons of their own gender. Sure they claim to have slept with members of the opposite sex but have little evidence to show to back up their claims. And no P, being married to someone for 5 years does not automatically mean that you had carnal relations with them – in fact, the case is often the contrary. And there are thousands of nuns, wedded to The One True Saviour, out there who will tell you I’m right.

For some reason that conversation took a turn into how I never see my bisexual friends, specially M, in daylight. Its almost always at night, sometimes on cloudy days or indoors. At that point M did come up with an instance where I’d met him under the glaring sun. But by then, the train of that particular thought had already left the station in the direction of the common ground uniting vampires and bisexuals.

Having given it not a lot of thought, I’m convinced that there are undeniable similarities between bisexuals and vampires. For example, both demographic groups are equally happy partaking of their pleasure with men or women. And then there’s that common tendency to involuntarily co-opt the rest of humanity into their respective groups. Vampires, as we know, have a rather lamentable ability to sign you up to lifetime membership of their club with just a caress of their canines. Bi-sexuals, try to do the same thing using, The Kinsey Scale and fallacious reasoning as weapons of choice, to considerably less success, I should add.

“Sit yourself down Mr/Ms. of professedly mono-sexual persuasion”, your bisexual friend/acquaintance will tell you if they sense you’re in a moment of faltering logic, “And let me tell you why you’re not straight/gay at all.”

This is when the Kinsey work will be brandished, “The Great Kinsey spake thus:

‘Males (ed: insert MCP alert here) do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories... The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.’ ”

Followed by the astute use of fallacy:

“And so it must be that everyone’s bisexual. How bisexual they are depends on where they fall on the Kinsey Scale that runs from 0 to 6 with 3 being actively (as opposed to avowedly) bisexual.”

To me it’s a bit like saying there are no primary colours, no red, blue or green, only the colour white. I actually believe in the Kinsey scale and in the existence of a continuum of sexual orientations, but to me the fact that there’s a scale means that it has ends and the Kinsey scale is book-ended by Straights (0) and Gays (6). However, try telling that to an avowed bisexual, and you might very well find yourself staring at bared – hopefully blunt – canines.

Finally, and this is a curious similarity: The existence of both demographic groups is doubted by large sections of the population. There are many, many gay, straight and bisexual people who believe that there’s no such thing as a vampire – that they don’t exist. And similarly there are tons of people (straight or gay, though likely not bisexual) who are more likely to believe in the existence of a unicorn-capable-of-healing-wounds-in-a-twinkle-with-pixie-dust than in the existence of an actual bisexual person. Within every bisexual person, they will say, is a confused gay man/woman. I should point out that as a convert to the Kinsey scale I’m not one of the bisexual-sceptics. I am, though, a vampire sceptic. Which is good, otherwise the fact - that I believe in the existence of both groups - would be a fourth (and surely damning!) point of similarity!

So what does this all mean? What of it? After all, similarity does not imply sameness. It does not. And so for me, this analysis has little utility. But if one is not a vampire-sceptic and not a vampire-wannabe, then the curious commonality between bisexuals and vampires would suggest that checking if one's bisexual friends sleep on (in?) box beds or not, might be a very good idea.

Blasted into Agnosticism? By Believers.

2007-12-27T16:17:00.000-08:00

Here's a headline for you - The Daughter of the East has fallen victim to the regions' time honoured tradition of filicide. Benazir Bhutto assassinated by bullets and bombs at a fateful Rawalpindi rally pictured to the left...with the word Shahid chillingly emblazoned below her in a fitting final shot...rendering captions superfluous.

I'm surprised by how sad I feel. I never thought much of Benazir after her two failed prime ministerships. She made a mess out of two precious opportunities that her countrymen gave her - discredited democracy for several years along with her inept alter ego, Nawaz Sharif - and made it easy for the military establishment to take over her country each time. So much so that its taken 7 years of an incompetent, though largely benevolent, dictatorship to bring democracy back in fashion in Pakistan.

But Benazir first came to power around the time that I first started following politics and so she's been part of the political world as I've known it, forever. She was like a slightly crazy aunt that I'd gotten used to having around, periodically noisy but largely irrelevant. Her 15 minutes up, she seemed destined to live out her years in affluence in London...seemingly delusional about her achievements and importance and seemingly paranoid about how just about everyone was out to get her.

Well today, I guess this can be said - She was important and They were out to get her. And though she was an imperfect leader. Though she was smug and self-important. Though she was corrupt. She was also Pakistan's only real liberal, moderate, secular voice of any importance. She was also, I think, courageous. Of all the condolences that poured out on the news, I think Italy's Prime Minister Romano Prodi was the one that really put that into perspective for me. He said, she was "a woman who chose to fight her battle until the end with a single weapon - the one of dialogue and political debate." And whatever else she was, that is true of Benazir and I think given the way things are in Pakistan today, using only dialog and debate is immensely courageous. I think she came back despite the danger, to get one last chance to redeem herself and with her courage and in her martyrdom, I think she succeeded.

The sad thing is that her attackers have probably succeeded not just in her murder but also in their wider objective of driving Pakistan in a more Islamist direction. An assassination is such a horrible thing. All the possibilities and hopes eliminated just like that in a flash - I hate assassinations. Among other things, I think they're responsible for the rise of rampant right-wing Republicanism in the US (JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King) and of the end of the Israel-Palestine peace process (Rabin)...and the sad thing is its always the extremists who assassinate the moderates because by definition moderates won't do such things. Those unable to win the debate with ideas and inspiration have often succeeded in winning the debate with assassinations. And in causing so much more misery for thousands, even millions of people for years and even decades, before another leader comes along to show the way out.

Through the course of the day, I found my thoughts veering in directions agnostic. I should say first, that I've always believed in God(s). Always. Even as I turned completely, vehemently away from religion, I continued to believe in God and to pray to Him/Her/Them. But today as I thought about assassinations and their intolerable effectiveness, I wondered. Would God, if he exists, really choose to test us by allowing these things to happen? Would he, like a bad soap opera script-writer who builds up a beautiful romance and then kills off one of the audience-beloved pair, manipulate our emotions just to keep us interested in him? And even if he allowed assassinations to happen, wouldn't he make sure that the vision of the fallen leader was miraculously realized? Wouldn't that be the best way to teach a lesson to those b***ards out there - Instead of deepening the misery of the largely-innocent?

Going by history, I have little hope that Benazir's killing will not lead to more turmoil in Pakistan and a move away from a modern liberal path...leading either to years of violence or years of suppression under a tyrannical military or theological regime.

I pray it won't happen. But I'm increasingly not very confident that there's some non-denominational being or beings out there listening.

Rainbows in the Moonlight

2007-12-10T18:17:00.000-08:00

POSTCARDS FROM ITALY

UMBRELLAS THAT LIGHT UP THE NIGHT

Of all the words that I wouldn't have expected to find in the title of a rip-roaring pop-hit (or the topic of a blog-post), 'umbrella' would be pretty high up in the list. And when I first heard Rihanna's Umbrella I was mightily unimpressed. I found it slow and difficult to dance to...I found the ella-ella-ellaing in the song juvenile and irritating...and I didn't really know much about the singer (Rihanna) or her previous work.

And then, on an aimless melancholia-fueled drive through a fogged-up Presidio one cold September night, I heard the song play out on Energy (my favourite FM station here). There's something wonderfully isolating and peaceful about the Presidio at night. For those who don't know, the Presidio is a densely cypress-populated oasis of greenery that occupies a generous patch of ground between San Francsico and the Golden Gate. It was once an army base with pretty military style bungalows that now rent out for as much as $30k per month. With many more trees than houses, its a great neighbourhood to drive through when one is looking to get away from the bustle of the city without crossing water.

I bring up the Presidio because, I think it was its quiet, deepened by the fog that allowed me to focus on Rihanna's tone rather than the lyrics...I heard the way she belted out the lines - starting with a slight dip right at the beginning before letting her voice rise through the rest of the line and then leaving it hanging at the top of a crest without letting it actually fall...as if she were letting the words float away from her. Somehow the way the lines were sung, made the rather simplistic lyrics and the promise embedded in them ("You have my heart...And we'll never be worlds apart) feel more sincere, more real. Hooked, I downloaded the song and listened to it more attentively - discovering that what had irritated earlier turned out to be disarming with repetition - awkward lyrics, genius-like sing-along chorus, the warm-welcome -on-a-rainy-night of the last lines "Its Pouring Rain, You can always come into me".

A convert to the song's fanbase since then, I've spent many a happy night chorusing "ella, ella, ella" along with friends in clubs, at house parties and on the streets after last call. In fact its a great yard-stick to judge new-found friends by - if someone can sing-along to Umbrella in public, I'm almost certain I've found a kindred spirit. At least on one occasion the song might have served as a kind of mating call ;) . I now think that the "ella-ing" in the song was a stroke of pop-genius...that assured the song a kind of cult status - so much so that even stodgy old Time magazine rated it in the Top 10 songs of the year (Hmm...Actually thats almost a negative in some ways).

I also think that it was because Rihanna opened my senses to the secret possibilities of the 'umble umbrella that on my second day in Rome - a cold, blustery, miserable wet one - I was able to keep my spirits up...despite the dreary weather and an aching knee injury. That day, I'd planned to see both the Vatican and the Roman ruins around the Colosseum. This being Italy, both the subway and the cabs were on strike...so walking was the only way to see the sights. Hobbled by my knee and distracted by bad weather, good cappuccino, souvenir hunting opportunities and running-group friends with less ambitious sight-seeing plans, I made very little progress.

By six I'd written the day off and decided to check out the Trevi Fountain and then call it a night. It was at the Fountain where I first noticed the quiet riot of colours that the streets had become as the persistent rain forced people to open up their umbrellas. There were hordes of tourists and locals at the Fountain and most carried umbrellas. Almost to the last one, the umbrellas had been dyed in bright solid single colours - that stood out in the rapidly darkening streets. This wasn't like Mumbai or London or even San Francisco - where the rain brings out a funereal procession of black umbrellas. Rome's streets looked like someone had shredded a rainbow and sent its pieces chaotically winding their way through them. Orange, taxicab yellow, red, mauve, blue, lemon green, olive green etc etc - an umbrella of a different colour swirled into sight every other second and then streaked away - running after that over-loaded public bus that was probably the only way its owner had of getting home that night. There were some patterned, multi-coloured umbrellas but too few to distract from the luminous tableau created by the single-toned ones. Such a simple way to brighten up a bad weather day. Its a wonder other cities haven't thought of it!

All jazzed up by the unexpected Technicolour high, I snapped a lot of blurred umbrella pictures with my phone and went back to the hotel - happy to have seen a Roman sight that I hadn't planned on or read about in the guide books.

How One Euro Can Win You Over

2007-11-29T17:10:00.001-08:00

POSTCARDS FROM ITALY - STILL IN ROMA TERMINI (Well I was stuck there for 3 hours)

Here’s another piece of advice to potential travelers to Italy from outside the Eurozone. You want to change some money into Euros as fast as you can. Here's why.

After following rest-room signs half-way across the station, up an elevator, through the main section of a crowded restaurant and around a corner I finally found myself in front of…a ladies’ rest-room sign. There were a couple of other confused men standing there. On a hunch I lugged my bags around another corner and lo…there it was…the men’s rest-room sign. Before I could dash in, however, I was stopped by a lady sitting outside. Apparently you had to cough up 70 euro cents to use the rest-room. And not having changed my money yet I was only able to cough up green-backs. She wasn’t very impressed. I didn't blame her. After all a dollar is about five cents less than 70 Euro cents today...and thats without counting the commission that a currency exchange company would charge her.

But, I really had to go. I mean really. It was a bad situation. Let me give you an analogy to help you understand how bad it was. It was like crawling miles across the Sahara to an oasis, dragging three pieces of luggage, throat parched with thirst, oilskin bottles all having run out of water three days before. And when you finally got to the oasis, you found that the pool had been drained of all its water, that had then been packaged into prettily labeled plastic bottles being retailed by the local Bedouin tribe for 70 Euro cents. And thats when you realized that you only had deeply depreciated dollars in your pocket. It was exactly like that…except with the liquid flows reversed. You get the picture, don't you?

Back to the problem of the gated rest-room. I repeated my question about whether a dollar note would do, in the hope that asking again might magically change the answer. But the woman had already started talking to the next customer. It looked like I’d have to trudge back down with my luggage to find an ATM. At that moment I felt a visceral hatred towards my bags. I wanted someone to rid me of them. Just take them away…Oh and maybe give me 70 Euro cents? I just didn't think I could successfully hunt down an ATM and get back without an embarrassing mishap.

It was at that point that I came to another in my series of idle in-transit generalizations about Italy…specifically about Italian commuters. It goes thus: Italian commuters are a generous angelic group of people, blessed by the grace of the almighty (if there be one).

My epiphany happened because I heard the guy, who'd been behind me in the queue, say “Here’s another Euro for this gentleman.” This Farishta (or "angel" for the non-South Asian readers, if there be any) had obviously seen the dismay on my face and perhaps having sensed my pent-up "stress", decided to do his good deed for the day. The lady at the door let me in with a rather sour expression - no doubt annoyed at having played even a small part in delivering customer-delight. I had this resistible urge to go down to the Illy cafe stall and apply for a waiter's position, just so I would have a chance, some day, to do nasty things to her cappuccino before serving it to her.

However I had more pressing issues to deal with. Five minutes later – yeah I told you it was like being without water for three days except just the reverse – I walked out lighter in body and spirit and wearing rose-tinted glasses vis-a-vis Roman commuters, that stayed on for the rest of the hiatus at Roma Termini. Those rose-tinted lens made everyone at the station look great...except the lady outside the rest-room.

But you kind of guessed that already didn't you?

Minor Adventures in Roma Termini

2007-11-29T16:41:00.000-08:00

POSTCARDS FROM ITALY

Recently, over Arabic mint tea (love it) and miniature feta cheese pies, I got into a debate over whether it makes sense for me to send postcards while I’m in Italy. I mean really. Who writes post-cards anymore? I never wrote or sent post-cards or other forms of snail mail even when it wasn’t considered slow. So to me its really is an almost alien thing to do. But its important for certain people that I care about. And so, here goes, a virtual post-card all the way from Italy…If I can get myself to sit down again, I might write some more…and might post a couple more.

A large part of my first day in Italy was spent in Rome’s main railway station – Roma Termini. Not exactly a tourist hot-spot. But a good place to observe a slice of daily Italian life and make sweeping generalizations (always a great way of passing in-transit hours, by the way).

I liked what I saw of Italy in Roma Termini. It seems like a fun, quixotic place...can be exasperating if you're in a hurry to get anything done...but if you have all the time in the world then you'll probably be happy to get swept up in its first world chaos.

I was able to pick up a few rules of engagement quite quickly. For example, no customer service query can be resolved without the person actively engaging at least three of his/her colleagues in voluble conversation first. Unless of course, the answer is a no. In which case it is delivered without hesitation or explanation…leaving very little room for negotiation or question. As in,

Passenger: “Can I leave by an earlier train so I can stop lugging three pieces of luggage across the length and breadth of the station, causing multiple near-accidents, sending my shoulders on their way to untimely dislocations and spending my money on intestine corroding coffee; given that the trains seem to leave every 15 minutes and are half-empty anyway?”

Ticketing attendant: “No.”

Passenger: “Oh OK. By the way could you tell me how much a new ticket to Florence would cost.”

Ticketing Attendant: “For sure. Let me just interrupt my bella colleagues over there who’re serving other customers, and confer with them to make sure I don’t give you the wrong price. And while I’m at it I’ll also find out for you how you could go about making mortadella cheese at home, just in case you’re interested.”

The conversation didn’t quite go like that – but it very well could have. Like I said, Italy can be great fun – if you’re on vacation. Which brings me to Rule Number One –

Go to Italy - if going on vacation. And if you go on a business trip, Don't!. Or at least, pack an extra set of worry beads.

Reading Escalators

2007-11-29T16:18:00.000-08:00

I have a theory. One that I’ve validated by my time-tested method of making sweeping generalizations based on anecdotal data and unscientific sample sizes. That method was last used with great effectiveness with my theory on tattoos and marrying men.

I think that you can tell the pace of life in a city or country from the speed of their escalators. The most reliable predictors are escalators in the public transport network – the ones in airports and railway stations. In department stores and corporate buildings, escalator speeds can be influenced by the organization’s dynamism and therefore create noise in the sample set. I take special note of the escalator speeds every time I go to a new city. Come to think of it, it might even be verging on a scientific sample size by now. Because thanks to my itinerant work I’ve been able to build up quite a large set of data points.

In New York the escalators move at speeds that would get you speeding tickets in Billings, Montana (Full disclosure – I’ve never been to Montana so I could be wrong about this). In Paris, they move at a leisurely pace meant to ensure lovers - or even plain strangers who’ve just bumped into each other - get at least a few minutes of passionate kissing in, before its time to walk again. In London, if they work, it’s a brisk professional pace much as it is in Bombay, though both are slower than NYC’s. Escalators are zippy in Taipei and in Tokyo and slow down in balmy Barcelona.

In Rome, where I got my latest proof-point, it was clear from the escalators at the airport, that this is a country that likes its siesta. Jet-lagged and exhausted by your 24 hour multiple-stop trip? Exhausted by a late night spent partying? Hell, just clamber aboard an escalator in Rome and get a power nap while it oozes – umm rolls - towards its destination. I'm pretty sure the cartoon on the left was thought up by a manic depressive denizen of Rome.

OK, I exaggerate. Escalators in Rome will get you to where you need to go in a shorter time than walking. Just about. But hey, whats the hurry – Take time to smell the flowers. Or, if you’re on an escalator in the airport, to read the billboards slowly sliding by. Who knows they might actually tell you something useful.

No such luck in Rome though. The billboards spaces were all blank.

So I read a book instead.

PS: It’s the latest piece of non-fiction by Tom Brokaw – called Boom! – about the sixties. Its Pretty Darn Good.

Why Larry Craig Doesn't Deserve the Gay Card

2007-10-13T11:45:00.000-07:00

POLITICALLY INCORRECT POST ALERT

So the media storm over Larry Craig’s arrest seems like such an ineffective tempest in a toilet-bowl: it raised a mighty stink but when it ended, still left something unpleasant hanging around. And as far as I can see, the hapless guy was hounded mercilessly into non-resigning, for no good reason. His crimes allegedly being that he is gay, a hypocrite (he's a family-values politician!) and behaved immorally in a public place (sleazy at worst, really).

The part of the controversy that does worry me is that we’re faced with the prospect of having Craig labeled as being part of the LGBT community. Make no mistake, I thoroughly enjoyed the homophobic Craig’s humiliating public repudiation by his own party, on the assumption that he is gay. But now that that’s been achieved, I’d much rather have him stay classified straight, alien or whatever else - as long as its also not-gay. The good news is that he is still denying that he’s gay (thats really what he was trying to tell that cop in Morse Code). So I think we should seize the moment and actively support him in his claim. (btw you can find more Darly Cagle cartoons here)
Frankly, for me the best reason for doing so is that anyone who doesn’t want to be gay shouldn’t have to be and that we shouldn’t want them to be part of our community either. But for many people that’s not always a convincing enough reason. So here’s 5 (no less) other good reasons why we should not give Craig the coveted gay card:

a) He’s a nasty bad naughty role model: This guy’s been shown to be a coward, a hypocrite, a cheater, a sleaze-bag etc etc. At this point he probably wouldn’t be admitted even to Walmart’s Sam’s Club membership program. Why should we be so keen to give him entrée into our fabulous fests, chic clubs and swinging street fairs?
b) He’s from Idaho: I know that’s neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to deny him membership. I mean his being born an Idahiot is like being born gay. He couldn’t help it. I agree. But taken in conjunction with the first point – I think its grounds for rejection of his application (assuming there ever is one).
c) He’s from Idaho: AND didn’t have the sense to move states despite having the cash and the opportunity to do so. Again, sensibility or the lack of it, should not normally be a criteria for issuing laminated rainbow cards. But what if the guy himself is giving us an option? Like Craig is. It would be like the US giving a resident permit to someone who has no demonstrably useful skills, lists multiple criminal convictions in their home country, and refuses to apply for political asylum despite potentially qualifying for it. I have no doubt that USIS would happily reject the application.
d) Its for his own good and we’re a compassionate crowd: This guy has more baggage than Imelda Marcos packing for a long trip - a likely-soon-to-be-ex wife, five – count them, five - kids, a mug shot and a history of infidelity. And, the guy is old enough to be a contemporary of the Jurassic Age dinosaurs. He has zero chance of finding someone in the gay world who would fall into a relationship with him...unless it also involved being written a check at the end of each night. Craig might not be satisfied in his current marriage but at least its something that he has had a few decades to get used to. Continuing to be straight-classified might save him from being lonely for the rest of his life. And it will definitely be easier on his ego and lighter on his pocket-book. So lets give the guy a break.
e) He doesn’t know how to treat a Fag Hag: For those who didn’t spend the last seven years watching Will and Grace – a fag hag is a gay man’s best friend. She’s typically a woman, usually straight, who gives her fag unconditional love, holds his hand when one-night-stands don’t stand the test of daylight, acts as his beard at office functions if he works for ExxonMobil and basically does everything for him except perhaps change his diapers. And I think at the height of the AIDS crisis some of them even did that. No kidding. In other words the fag/fag-hag relationship is a sacred one. In return all they seem to expect is an album full of happy memories at the end of it. Oh and that when you do leave them alone in a gay club to go home with that one-night-stand that they helped you land in the first place, you’ll at least buy them a drink first.

The only charitable explanation for the longevity of the Craigs’ marriage is that there was/is real companionship between them. If Craig had been ‘out’, his wife would have been his Fag Hag. And if Suzanne really did not know of Craig’s rest-room exploits, she’s likely to spend a good chunk of her remaining lifetime regurgitating memories from the last 24 years and trying to figure out which of those were real involving real emotions. Questioning each romantic holiday, gesture, touch…that happened over a 24 year period. I have a feeling not many happy memories will survive that scrutiny. If the Senator from Idaho maintained his deception over 24 years with his soul-mate, someone who probably cared deeply for him, then he really should not be given the privilege of admittance to our community. Many of us are bitchy and shallow and self-serving, but given an extended period of time, any gay man (or woman) worth his (her) salt will do right by his (her) fag hag (fag stag).

In closing let me just refer to what one of the Senator’s sons said as the controversy was cresting. He said he believed his (step)-father was not gay but that even if he was, it would be OK. It was a wonderful statement of love, support and unconditional acceptance. And showed that Craig got at least some things right in his life. But his son’s statement probably also depressed the Senator like hell. Because it must have brought home to him, that he's spent an entire tortured lifetime suppressing his true self for a bunch of idiots in his home state and in his party who didn’t really care for him and who disowned him faster than you can say 'faggot' when the pants…err chips…were down. While at the same time deceiving the people who actually did care for him and who might’ve accepted him for what he was anyway...if only he'd chosen to be honest with them anytime in the last three decades.

Sadly, I think Larry Craig is right. Through his life, he may have been nominally homosexual, but he’s probably never been gay in any sense of the word. And likely never will be.

I say, hold the lamination presses.

The WalMartization of Liberty

2007-10-01T04:42:00.000-07:00

OCCASIONAL RANTINGS OF AN ANGRY ARM CHAIR ACTIVIST
For some reason I’ve been fascinated by democracy for as long as I can remember. Democracy is one, and probably the only, ‘ism’ that I believe in. Yeah OK I know its not an ism 'ism' but you know what I mean. I don’t ‘believe’ in it in the sense of the Neocons who would take democracy to everyone at the point of a sword or (to use a contemporary metaphor) the multiple, deadly tips of a cluster bomb. But in the sense of believing that it is the best system of governance available and given a chance, over time, has a real power to transform societies into better versions of themselves. And since democracy is one of the few things I consider sacred, I’ve watched with extreme frustration and deepening anger as the system in the US has been subverted steadily over the last few years. By the very people who profess to want to spread it across the world.

Over the last few years, so many freedoms and rights taken for granted for decades have been taken away/given up so easily. Suspension of habeas corpus, removal of the protection from institutional torture and randomly mandated virtually no-holds-barred surveillance of private citizens, are a few of the more egregious examples of the infringement of civil liberties by the Bush Administration. The administration has successfully defined the debate on collective safety vs. personal freedoms in terms of a Walmart-like “Always Low Prices” approach. The price in this case being civilian fatalities caused by terrorist acts. After 9/11 the Administration sold the American public on a promise to keep fatalities low as long as it was given a relatively free hand in dealing with the terrorists. And for a long time no one dared ask whether that was necessarily the right metric to aim for. Nor did many people bother to dig up and read the caveat emptor clause that came with the promise of safety. Even now few people seem to be able to do so with the 20/20 vision that should cause them to raise a rip-roaring ruckus.

Walmart’s always-low-priced flat-screen TVs came with several hidden costs – falling quality standards, job losses, and worsening working conditions and protections for its non-unionized workers (The company at one point considered reducing health care costs by making obese workers who were at a higher health risk, leave the company voluntarily by deliberately giving them tasks that were difficult for them to do). While the costs of Walmart’s business model took a couple of decades to become clear, those of Bush’s approach became apparent within a few years – perhaps reflecting how egregiously high the hidden costs are: Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, loss of America’s credibility as a leader on human rights issues, increased spying on own citizens, renditions of non-citizens to countries that then merrily tortured them…

The erosion of civil liberties has continued even after the Republicans lost last year’s elections. And the reason it has continued, I believe, is because of the Bourne Ultimatum Syndrome. Don’t get me wrong – I liked the movie a lot and applaud its motives. Its makers seem to have a better grasp of whats involved in preserving a democracy than the Bush Administration. (Now there's a scary thought) The lost freedoms the film picked to highlight included surveillance of private citizens to a degree that would have made Orwell proud, and the loss of the protections against the use of torture. However, it did so in a rather round-about way. Its central argument really is that it is unacceptable for the government to kill American citizens suspected of being terrorists without due process of law. I think it was a clever choice of issues because that is a relatively black-and-white issue for most Americans – at least on an intellectual level. If polled, I'm pretty sure most Americans would oppose it. Whereas if they were asked if torturing terrorists to get information is OK, I think the poll results are likely to be less predictably on the film-makers’ side. So instead of condemning torture (epitomized by Matt Damon being water-boarded during his training) and Big Brother-esque surveillance directly, the makers tried to stigmatize both by associating them with the bad guys (‘overzealous’ CIA operatives) who were killing American citizens (not foreign residents, please note, since that also doesn’t inspire sufficient outrage in the US these days).

While the film-makers’ collective heart is in the right place, their circuitous approach, I believe, is partly responsible for the neocons’ ability to continue their war on civil liberties. The Bush administration has taken a clear, consistent stand that infringements on some freedoms are necessary to make sure that America doesn’t lose any more civilian lives. The response of the liberal left has been to say that these infringements are not good because they don't make Americans safer. That they don't work. In fact, it’s the Left’s argument that has not worked...because the Doesn’t-Work argument isn’t backed by real conviction.

Take the torture issue for example. Its just not sufficient to say we shouldn’t torture because torture is ineffective in extracting truthful information from terrorists. Even a lefty liberal like me can’t help thinking that sometimes you might actually get right information from torturing a terrorist and might in fact save some lives. Most democracies (at least officially) outlaw torture not because its ineffective, but because its just plain wrong. And we need leaders who have the clarity of vision and courage of conviction to put it as simply as that. Because, as the Economist said a couple of issues back, society would over time become inured to the use of torture (or enhanced interrogation methods in Bush-speak) – and then slalom down a slippery slope where using torture in other contexts and against an increasing number of people would seem sensible – why not also torture a paedophile suspected of kidnapping and holding a child in a secret place to find out its location?

The fact is, the real metric for measuring victory against the terrorists should be America’s and other democratic societies’ ability to retain their way of life, and the rights and freedoms that their citizens have won for themselves over the ages. Not how many civilians and soldiers die protecting it. Democratic freedoms are too valuable, for those who want them and those who would take them away, to be gained or retained at discounted prices. Ask the scores of Romanians who died trying to overthrow Ceaucescu and succeeded. Or the Burmese who failed in 1988 because 3000 lives was as high a price as they were willing to pay.

The Economist, in the same issue where it so wonderfully articulated its stand against torture, said it best:

“Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.”

Amen.

One night in KW: Vagina Monologues, 3G calls in Khartoum and the Devil's own role preferences!

2007-08-14T23:09:00.000-07:00

REPRISED FROM A PAST BLOG...SINCE I SEEM TO BE ON A TRAVELOGUE TRIP.

Feel free to skip if you've already seen this.

So I had a great day in Key West yday. I'm beginning to see why people like it so much. Its like Vegas in a Caribbean setting without the casinos. Its like San Francisco without the fog and lots more palm trees. Its like Memphis without...actually its not a bit like Memphis :) Life in Key West is a little surreal...and thats why I like it.

If I'd written this blog at midnight yday night I'd have said, after two days in KW, the closest embrace I've had to a living being is with a female python - double ugh - just kidding :) (about both). Here's something I discovered, a python/boa's skin feels like a really expensive leather purse...really it does. And I'm not kidding about that.

Because everything in KW is open till 4:00am - even when there's a total of 20 tourists on the island - like right now - I did not end up posting at midnight. And instead got to meet a veritable real-life celebrity - this nice French guy who set up and made the first 3G call in Khartoum (and all of Sudan). Yes, they have 3G in Sudan! - after all what's the point of carrying out a genocide if you can't swap videos of it with your friends! Save Darfur!!

Before that happened though I was fortunate enough to take in two really great back-to-back drag shows, Key West style. I'll upload the video from one if I can - it had one whole song dedicated to extolling the different varieties of vaginas. Very educational for novitiates like me. The highlight of the second one was the insight it provided into the devil's role preferences. They handed out DVDs of a p*** video...in which apparently, three poor guys get sucked (pun unintended) into Hell through a kinda vortex and get an audience with Satan himself. Petrified, one of them asks if the Devil is going to sc*** them to which the reply is - "No. The Devil is a Bottom". Not surprisingly the DVD is titled The Devil is a Bottom :)

Cape Town: A Home At The End of The World

2007-08-11T23:52:00.000-07:00

CITIES I’VE SEEN. CITIES I’VE FELT

The Sights

Despite the many blessings I’ve enjoyed all along - wonderful family, surfeit of friends, book shops in every city my dad was transferred to, and an education system that played perfectly to my, now rusty, ability to learn anything by rote – by 26 I’d still managed to make a pretty good mess of my life. Even if it wasn’t apparent to most people around me. So much so, that when I flew into Cape Town on a sunny December afternoon in 2003, it was a flight from my life in India in more ways than one. My stay in Cape Town marked the beginning of an ~18 month period when everything seemed to go right in my life – with such little contribution from me – that I went from being a non-believer in all things providential to a mere sceptic. Five of those wonderful months were spent in Cape Town.

That summer in Cape Town is pretty close to as good as its ever got for me. I was happily surprised by its very European vibe…and infrastructure…at decidedly African prices. It was the first time I was going to spend a decent length of time in a foreign city when I didn’t have either of the two problems that had bedeviled me previously – no money (destitute exchange student in Paris), or no understanding of the local language (isolated intern in Tokyo). In addition, for once, sunsets at nine o’clock occurred after work-days set at around five or six. And so I had a lot of time to kill and fortunately Cape Town provided a lot of ways to kill it.

Landing in Cape Town, the first thing I noticed was Table Mountain. Not just because it’s a permanent, massive presence looming (benignly, a little like a pet plateau) over the city but also because it is on every other picture post-card, shop name and hotel billboard advertisement. 'Rooms with a view of the Table Mountain' the billboards boasted, as if there could be any that didn’t. Over the following months, Table Mountain did justify this obsession – mostly thanx to its schizophrenic relationship with the local cloud community. Embracing and rejecting the cloud cover randomly on a daily basis, it yielded beautiful ever-varying views...that I never got bored of. It also provided endless opportunities for small talk with strangers in bars...that unfortunately I never made use of.

Gazing at Table Mountain's was only one of the ways of killing time in the city. Lazing on any one of several spectacular beaches that nature has so thoughtfully hewn out of the cliffs that line the Cape’s coast, gobbled up many of my weekend afternoons. Tourist quick-tip - Mornings in the Cape summer are windy. Windy enough to blow away beach umbrellas along with that contented sun-facing closed-eyed look that one gets on the beach. So its better to just club till four in the morning, sleep till noon and then head to the beach to get your tan going.

Late afternoons or evenings, back from the beach, I’d head over to the V&A Waterfront to watch the hordes of street performers or grab an early dinner at one the many seafood restaurants. For those of you who saw Blood Diamonds and cried at the contrived ending (How could you?!) – the Waterfront is where Jennifer Connolly was dining when Di Caprio called to bid her farewell (Spoiler alert! I guess). I had tears in my eyes too – but only because I had an urgent craving to jump onto the next flight to Cape Town and couldn’t since I’m still ad-less on this blog and so have to hold down a job that expects me to give advance notice of vacations.

The City had scads of cafes and restaurants to while time away in. The variety of cuisines and the number of good restaurants to choose from was such, that deciding on where to eat took up a good chunk of time too. I’m pretty sure Zagat food reviewers flying to Cape Town, keep their return dates open - there’s just no knowing how long it would take to do justice to the city’s restaurant scene. The range of cuisines was particularly gratifying to my greedy, easily-bored, foodie self. There was game meat to try out – a culinary safari available at your fork-tips - the menus boasted of items like Boar cutlets, zebra and free-range ostrich steaks, or crocodile tail. I gamely (pun unintended) tried nearly everything except warthog; crocodile tail in case you wanted to know, tastes like chicken. For eating something tamer you still could choose from a range spanning African and European cuisines from multiple countries and every fusion variant in between. One of my favourite restaurants was a pan-African one. It served dishes purportedly from all over Africa…from Zambia to Egypt, and from Senegal to Ethiopia. Hobbled by a single entry South African visa, there was no way for me to use a weekend fly-back to one of those countries to confirm the authenticity of the dishes...but somehow I was OK with taking the restaurant at its word. Instead, I reveled in feeling wonderfully cosmopolitan by just reading the menu.

Other weekends were spent driving or ferrying myself around the Cape where there was tons more to do and see. One particular weekend stands out. It involved driving through the wine-country, less than an hour outside the city: rolling green hills covered with vine-rows, charming old estates you could stay in over the weekend if you had lots of money, and lots of wine to guzzle while pretending you’re only swizzling it. The perfect day was marred somewhat when my then partner R, who’d flown in for a couple of weeks, scolded me for refusing to try most red wines on the philistinic grounds of preferring whites. It quickly became alright again when we lunched at a restaurant whose name I forget, situated on a sun-drenched slope with a fantastic view of the surrounding vineyards. We had to wait despite having reservations – because you really couldn’t expect people to hurry through their gourmet courses, could you? But I didn’t really mind because it gave me more time to laze on the grassy slope and soak in the view. Yeah, lazing was quite a theme with me in those five months…still is actually.

What else do I remember fondly? Well, there was the day spent walking along the winding elevated plank-paths on Boulder Beach. Cute, largely mute African penguins on both sides - huddling in their hole-in-the-ground nests or waddling around companionably with a friend or sometimes just standing still in groups at the water’s edge.

And there was the day spent on Robben Island, Cape Town's Alcatraz - accessible by ferry - where Mandela was imprisoned for decades. The most chilling part of the visit was not the prison itself but the quarry that the prisoners had to work in – breaking stone all day, every day only to have it carted away and dumped in a different part of the island. The quarried stone was never used for anything. The idea apparently was to break the prisoners’ not just physically by making them do back-breaking work but also mentally, by making them do superfluous back-breaking work. Robben Island has the second largest penguin colony after Boulder Beach. Predictably, the prisoners were also not allowed to go anywhere from where they could view the penguins, lest they derive some simple pleasure from it. Talk about a petty, perverted system.

And finally the day spent standing at the southern edge of Africa at the Cape of Good Hope (have loved that name since childhood) trying to tell the waters of the Atlantic from those of the Indian Ocean. There’s some other spot which is actually a little further to the south, but its further away and more difficult to get to from Cape Town. And so, both tourists and locals alike are happy treating Cape of Good Hope as the point at which all roads lead northwards. The topography at the Cape was breath-taking. The land didn’t end in a gentle beach sloping into a gentle sea; but rose up forming high cliffs that plunged into the crashing waves below. A strong, sometimes howling, wind was blowing that day, bending the proteas (natives shrubs after which the cricket team is named), every which way. Coming down from the main cliff, you could see a couple of ostriches, generally hanging out on the small beach. They were accompanied by a couple of representatives of some species of very large rats and a large porcupine with a very impressive quiver. All in all, the scene had a wild, untamed quality to it. There it was. Finally. A visual that at least partly fit my conception of Africa.

Interrogation Under Pressure

2007-07-30T21:39:00.000-07:00

No, Its not about how the US does not torture anyone, Anywhere.

So I cannot for the life of me decide, dear reader, whether the best way to refer to my pal Robin RedBreast in any future posts is Robin R. or R. RedBreast. You remember Robin (Mile High Vipassana). He, of the chirpy demeanour, who when sitting across you at a restaurant table, cracking a joke and shaking with laughter brings to mind a brightly hued songbird hopping happily on a branch outside your bedroom window. Think of that picture and tell me, whats the more fitting appellation?

Robin R. might be more appropriate given that he's from South India, all the way from Thammizh Naadh in fact. Please note the high levels of PC - phonetic correctness - achieved by this blog just then. But then RedBreast is just a qualifier not the name of his village-well. So I guess that can't be the source of his last initial.

So maybe R. RedBreast is better? It has the advantage of following a naming convention familiar to both Western and Indian readers and also fits the criteria of maintaining a degree of anonymity, which is a rather inconsistently observed piece of blogging etiquette. I think its also more visually evocative of that brightly hued bird I was talking about. Hmmm... So unless there's a massive demand for using Robin R. with a similarly well thought out rationale behind it, R. RedBreast it shall be.

And in case you're wondering what caused me to inflict this perhaps surprising question on you...feel free to claim all credit for yourselves, dear demanding reader. In the past few weeks I've been gratified to have received many more comments about my posts, than I usually do. Both on and off the blog. Of course some of these have been actually by me responding to other comments. But then, hamaare Bihar main, ballot-box stuffing is a time-honoured ritual.

But some of you have been rather demanding..."Where's Tokyo Take II" asked someone. "Do another city", said another, briefly giving me visions of being expected to change my name to Debbie and booking the next SouthWest flight to Texas.

This tells you a few things about me -
a) I like getting comments about my posts (on the blog is better than off it, though I'll take whatever I can get :)
b) I'm easily pleased and have a very American attitude where feeling successful about my blog is concerned. (If my readership goes from 1 to 2, well then, I just doubled my readership! Random House here I come.)
c) I sometimes babble under stress

Stress? You ask.

Uhuh. I fully intended to write a Take II on Tokyo and about other cities that have affected me - almost universally positively (probably a function of lowered expectations due to our celebrated Metropolis In The East). However the last couple of days when I've sat down to compose a coda to Cape Town or a panegyric to Paris, my synapses have refused to fire.

Yes. I'm forced to confess. I have a block...not a writer's block for I do not deserve (yet?) to suffer from that lofty aspirational affliction. Just a simple block. And while I've tried to fight it the last couple of days, to write something that might satisfy your ravenous hunger for all things written by me, it doesn't work...The thoughts and feelings refuse to morph into prose. And so I have decided, I shall wait for it to dissolve. By itself. In the meantime, do excuse me while I go listen to Queen vocalizing my distress.

Sappy Sentiment of the month

2007-07-23T00:30:00.000-07:00

PLAYING ON MY IPOD

The last couple of weeks, the song thats been playing most on my IPod is Nickelback's If Everyone Cared...I've only recently started listening to Nickelback but really like several of their songs. A lot has to do with the rock-y-without-being-noisy feel of their music and the powerful, testosterone-fueled raspy voice of the lead singer (whoever he is). But this specific song I liked because of its sappy, almost cheesy sentiment that I'd have expected a rock band to shy away from expressing openly :) Its almost venturing into boy band territory. The innocence, almost simpleness of the emotion expressed by the lyrics is rescued by the hard edge in the singer's voice, the muscular guitaring and the assertive rather than plaintive tone in which its been sung.

The refrain which I love for its retro-sixties sentiment goes as follows:

If everyone cared and nobody cried
If everyone loved and nobody lied
If everyone shared and swallowed their pride
Then we'd see the day, when nobody died

When I initially heard the song, I thought the last line was framed as a question, "Would we see the day, when nobody died?" I still think thats more appropriate and accurate - I'm pretty sure, honesty, humility, and love alone won't end conflicts...but maybe thats just the beleaguered cynic in me...winning out for once.

Tokyo Take I - A Spring Underneath A Fly-over

2007-07-17T20:06:00.000-07:00

CITIES I'VE SEEN. CITIES I'VE FELT.

I love cities. Love them. Specially those cities which have been around long enough and have been successful enough to have climbed from the bottom rung of Maslow's Need Hierarchy ladder to a point where they are not just about making money or just getting by but also about something more - something that characterizes them and gives them a personality of their own. I've been lucky enough to have spent time - months, years or even just days in some of nicest ones...and some of the not-so-nice ones. And then there's Tokyo - a city that I've had a bit of a love-hate relationship with, for several years.

Tokyo was the first city outside India that I saw way back in a different century - in the spring of 2000. And Tokyo dazzled me. Everything was new and shiny (the buildings built during the real estate bubble were still pretty young), the airport bus seemed to whizz through the night without a sound. The roads were super-smooth, the people extremely polite, the cabs had doors that opened and close on their own (Woe betide the tourist who touched the door handle; you'd wilt under the drivers' glare like a cherry blossom under the attack of the Monilinia Laxa fungus). Tokyo seemed to give the impression of nature having been comprehensively conquered by man. At least in Roppongi where I lived, everything seemed to have been tamed. Nearly every surface had been covered by concrete and where natural soil was visible, it was buried under small, well tended patches of shrubbery or trees. Perhaps the crowning achievement in my eyes was the infinitely complex flyover system - which were sometimes as high as six or seven storeys, usually had multiple layers and crested and dipped multiple times without touching ground before they got you to your destination.

Roppongi is the main expatriate district in Tokyo, where the gaijin (foreigners) tend to cluster. I lived a block off the main street linking Roppongi with Akasaka, a staid business district where my office was located. I'd been put up in a respectable sized service apartment where the only thing they didn't do was take care of the laundry (loved it).

Roppongi is famous for its raucous night life - sleazy (and some classy) strip clubs, hostess bars and just plain-sex joints - abutting expensive sushi bars, the odd McDonald's and Hard Rock Cafe, and high end clubs like The Lexington - favorite haunt of the hot expat models in the city (They really are pretty hot...I know cos I went there in keeping with my hot-blooded straight male disguise :).

Akasaka was only a 20 minute walk from Roppongi. In the evenings, walking back home from work across Roppongi's main drag, it was pretty common to be accosted by a bouncer (often the only black man on the street), shown a racy photograph and asked in plain hearing of the expats crowding the sidewalks - "Want some hot p***y?" It could really be as simple as that. And many men - including several on my trading desk - took advantage of what was on offer. (Un?)Fortunately my appetites didn't drive me in that particular direction.

In some ways though, I had an easier time with menu choices than my other three vegetarian batch-mates who spent nearly the entire two months eating veggie Subways for lunch and curd rice for dinner - not daring to buy much from grocery shops, where no one seemed to know English and where all the labeling was in Japanese; petrified that what tasted like tofu could just as well be dried sea urchin.

Tokyo also intimidated me...an admission it took me some time to make. In many ways it was too ordered and too strange for me. I found it hard not to cross the street at 3:00am at night when the pedestrian light was red. Or not to count the change that the cabbie gave me (Its considered insulting - though he always seemed to count mine!) Or to not poke some of those dang slippery sashimi pieces with chop-sticks (also considered rude). I remember being especially freaked out the first (and only) time I tried to use the Tokyo Metro and found people standing in neat queues on the platform to get in. The Bombayite in me couldn't handle the concept. I never went back. And growing up in multi-lingual India had not prepared me for Japan's monocultural experience. If you didn't know the language and couldn't read Kanji there was few people you could speak to and few things you could read. It was a curiously isolating , even numbing experience - to walk around in the crowded streets, people chattering, neon signs blazing and still not be able to absorb 95% of it (except usually for street signs). Laptops and the internet - the lonely traveler's saviours - were not ubiquitous then and I certainly did not have access to them.

Finally...Tokyo annoyed me. I found Japan perplexingly difficult to get a handle on - partly I'm sure, because of the language barrier. Maybe people were just being their reserved selves, but the system at times seemed hostile to foreigners in a passive-aggressive way. I spied that hostility in several isolated things - In the fact that at Tokyo Tower they charged tourists more than what they charged locals (yes they do the same at the Taj but then India wasn't the second largest economy in the world at the time). In the way they did not have any English or foreign language signage at this beautiful temple outside Tokyo that I went to with my friends. In Mayor Ishihara's massive popularity and repeated ability to get re-elected when he was known to have isolationist tendencies (7 years later he is still mayor)...Or in the fact that multiple-generation Koreans born in Japan were not automatically given citizenship because their ancestry cannot be traced back to a Japanese lineage. And then there was the widely recognised and accepted chauvinism in Japanese society. One of the Indian swap traders I worked with, joked about how the culture fit him well since it was even more chauvinistic than India.

Why did I care? I don't know - But I decided to snub Tokyo - I withdrew to what was most familiar in a foreign country - no not the local Indian restaurant - but, ironically, the representative symbols of HollywoodLand. So I ate at Subway and the New York Diner, hung out at the Hard Rock Cafe and rented English movie videos to watch, nearly every night. That time spent wasn't a complete waste, btw - I saw some really good movies in really clear video prints for once. I didn't venture out once to electric Akihabara or glitzy Ginza. Apart from one-off visits to Shibuya and Shinjuku and the wonderful Ueno zoo I pretty much stayed in Roppongi.

So at the end of my two months in Tokyo, having not strolled by a single blooming cherry tree, I left, rather gratefully for India. My lasting impression of Tokyo was one of mild claustrophobia caused by feeling hemmed in by the multiple-storey high, multi-layer flyover that ran the entire distance between Roponggi and Akasaka. The flyover blocked out the sun along the entire route and, given that most of my time outdoors was spent walking from home to office and back, left me with a rather industrial cast-in-concrete memory of the city. Not surprisingly I was in no hurry to go back.

Spot the Oxymoron

2007-07-16T22:04:00.000-07:00

"There's a very nice Middle-Eastern restaurant in downtown Sunnyvale"

For those unsure of what an oxymoron is - here's a helpful primer - The picture below depicts one.

Is it the Fourth of July Again?

2007-07-12T00:29:00.001-07:00

Forget flip-flops, tis the time for drag-heels

My downstairs neighbour who's really a terrific guy (and I'm ready to take on whoever says he isn't) was kind enough to let me know that he was going out to town for a few days. More than a week! May the Travel Gods continue to smile on him.

So I've already taken advantage of the situation in several ways - after my usual curfew of eleven o'clock:
a) Tapped my feet on the floor while sprawling on the bed playing Risk on my computer
b) Sang out loud to the tune of Dido's "Thank You" while washing up for the night
c) Trundled my suitcase loudly through the doorway instead of hefting it over the threshold in my arms like the proverbial new bride
d) Wore my noisy slippers and went click-click CLACK-CLACK all over the house
e) Resolved to wake up at least once in the middle of the night to go, make sure to flush noisily and then thump heavily (oh yeah!) over to the kitchen through the bedroom for a glass of water, rather than tip-toeing through the corridor.

That freak gust of wind you saw blow off the leaves on that tree was me letting out my breath.
Independence Day came a week late - but whats that they say about being better late than never?

PS: Also, decided to drop something heavy at least once each night to make sure the law of averages stays on my side once he's back

Mile-High Vipassana

2007-07-07T10:18:00.000-07:00

My friend Robin RedBreast who's as feather-footed as the name implies told me recently that he doesn't read my blog much because its not personal enough for him. So this post is also for him.

I recently flew to Japan - only my third international flight since about July last year - (believe me I'm not complaining about not travelling cattle class more often). On the flight out to Tokyo, I realised that these long flights can have an unintended side effect which can be salutary or stressful, depending on one's relationship with the truth about oneselves. They can create the conditions for a (sometimes involuntary) bout of introspection.

On a ten hour flight, once you've been forced to switch off the phone, the movies are ones you've already seen or - if its United - ones you wouldn't ever want to, when the laptop battery runs out having lasted only half as long as you thought it should and when you've run through that wonderfully interesting book twice as fast as you hoped you would, there really isn't much to do other than switch on your thoughts. Some people can get lost in music (the iPod's battery can generally last an entire flight) but I find I do a lot of my thinking when the only distraction is music.

There are other uses of an iPod too of course. I use mine to ward off surprise attacks from your friendly-neighbourhood-seat-extroverts. You know. Those people who think that nothing could be better than to have perfect strangers belted into place next to them for hours on end. All the better to get to know them and make-new-friends! Yay! Don't get me wrong, I'm mostly a friendly guy but I find starting a conversation with strangers on flights is rather like the Chinese saying about a rescuer becoming responsible for a rescuee for life. Most people assume that because you said "Hi" to them at the beginning you've effectively promised to engage them in conversation through the rest of the flight. So having been burned by such strangely social souls a few times, I now board planes with my earphones in place and keep them firmly plugged in for the duration even if the iPod isn't on.

Given that the iPod doesn't help me prevent one-ness with my thoughts, I've had a couple of fairly big epiphanies on my international flights. Last year after a 10 day stretch of flying London-SF-London-Singapore-London-SF I found myself sitting up in my business class sleeper bed, staring into space and realising that I needed time off to think about what to do about my job and the absence of any life in my life. Sometimes weekend long clubbing just isn't enough :) It led me to taking 3 months off from work and eventually changing jobs.

This time when my computer unhelpfully died within the first hour and the latest installment of the Tales of the City novels proved to be a fast and slightly disappointing read, I was again left with nothing to do but switch to my iPod...and my thoughts. Thankfully my life's a little more interesting right now so the conversation with myself didn't involve as much of a scolding as last time. The result of the enforced introspection was that as I stepped out at Tokyo's Narita airport I was resolved on a few things...I won't tell you what conclusions I came to about myself and what I needed to change...thats way too personal for me...but will leave you to deduce what you may, dear reader, from the resolutions. My three mid-year resolutions are to force myself to sit down to write even if the story is not clear in my mind (waiting for it to reveal itself has led to a 8 month hiatus!)...to buy myself a silver thumb ring to wear sometimes without waiting for someone to buy one for me...and to start making plans to visit all those places that I want to go to but have been putting off for when I have someone special to see them with. Nothing life changing - thankfully. Of course that may be a sign that the flight-enforced self-discovery needed to go on longer...but for now I'll just take it as a sign that I'm no longer cursed with an interesting life and its attendant melodramatic subscripts.

But Yeah. It is funny how my introspections seem to lead me towards more vacations. :)
Maybe I should take a more serious look at one of those Vipassana courses - the voluntary, on-ground kind...?

What Lies Beneath

2007-06-14T01:16:00.000-07:00

So it was a beautiful evening that I was spending with several of my closest friends in San Francisco on the terrace of the new flat I’d just moved into. We had a couple of bottles of wine open and were clearly heading towards Merryville. However it was still early in the evening – the summer sun was still hanging around just above the horizon – so we really weren’t being too noisy for that time of the day.

I went in to get the last bottle of wine from the kitchen, when, hearing a voice, I opened the kitchen door. It opened into the back stairwell and some five floors down, there was this guy leaning over the balustrade, peering up at me…”He’s back. And now you’ve had it with all the noise you’re making.” He said, in a distinctly unpleasant way. I don’t know why, but it raised goosebumps all down my back. Following some atavistic instinct for self-preservation I ran to the terrace to warn my friends…not sure about exactly what. There was no one there…so I ran back into the house and into the living room and that’s where everyone was. They were gathered in a semi-circle in the middle of the room looking at a small group of people who were standing in the front doorway. I don’t quite recall what they looked like, but there was a general air of menace hanging over the room. One man was clearly in command and I just knew that this was the guy the lower-floor neighbour had been referring to.

“You’ve just arrived and are already creating a nuisance.”, the man said – or something to that effect. “Well I live right beneath you and I’m going to show you why that’s a bad idea.”

I wasn’t sure where this was heading…but it wasn’t to Merryville for sure. My friends were standing there seemingly paralyzed. I said something like “you can’t barge in here. I’m going to call 911 if you don’t get out now.” Only to find I didn’t have my mobile phone on me. I looked around a little panicked, it wasn’t anywhere to be seen in the living room. I hissed at my friends with rising fear and frustration, “Guys can one of you give me your mobile phone?” They looked at me dumbly and one of them piped up, “We don’t have them.”

“What? Why not” , I asked through clenched teeth, trying hard to stay calm.

“He asked to see what they were like and so we gave them to him. And now he won't give them back.”, said my friend.

I looked at the guy from downstairs to see that he did indeed have several phones in his hands.

I could hardly believe it. “How could you guys be so dumb!”. I yelled...abandoning my attempt to hide my panic. And the goose-bumps? Well they were more like goose-mole-hills now. From the way my heart-beat had accelerated, I knew this was really bad news and that it was going to get a lot worse.

That’s when, thankfully…I woke up. Sweating. Heart beat racing. All goose-bumpy.

Anyone who’s come to stay with me or even visited me, knows that I’m a little paranoid about my downstairs neighbour. Almost unfailingly when I have guests staying over, or even just friends at home for dinner, he will come up. A quiet really very unassuming knock announcing his arrival, he will proceed to complain about how much disturbance we’re causing. He usually sports this disheveled, massively harassed look, designed to show me how much trauma has been inflicted on him.

And his complaints can border on the bizarre. “Sometimes when I’m sitting and trying to read in the evenings and you walk heavily, it disturbs my train of thought.” He told me one day. He also complains about his downstairs neighbour playing the TV too loud, so I’m pretty sure I’m not really the one who’s the problem here.

Wanting to be the good immigrant neighbour, I’ve ended up tip-toeing around the house in bare feet, harassing any friends/guests to do the same, making sure to speak in low voices after 9:00pm and generally avoided inviting people over for dinner (my courage usually holds up for lunch).

This was the first time though, that he’d invaded my house in my dreams. Make that nightmares. Funnily, its happened at a time when I thought I was making progress with standing up to him – I recently told him he shouldn’t expect me to walk quietly in the house between 8:00am to 11:00pm. I felt proud about that for several days after that.

Obviously though, living in fear of disturbing my neighbour has affected me in some really insidious, subliminal ways. Neighbours inspiring nightmares can’t be healthy in the long run.

As I see it, I have a few choices:
a) I could move away – but that would mean giving up the view of the Golden Gate
b) I could give him my Bose noice cancellation head-phones to help him concentrate better when he’s reading and sleep deeper when’s he in bed – But I’ve lost my I-Pod head-phones and that would leave me head-phone-less and therefore I-Pod-less; certainly a fate worse than insomnia
c) I could buy him a lifetime’s supply of Ambien to help him sleep better – but then he might start sleep-walking (like many Ambien consumers seem to do) and binge-eating (also a side-effect). Worse he could try to sleep-walk into my kitchen and that would really be my nightmare come to life…except for the move from the living room to the kitchen

So for now I’m left with no good choices. Like the the beautiful lake-house in “What Lies Beneath” that hid the source of much mental anguish for its new residents, my rather charming rent-controlled apartment has proved to be rather less fun to live in than it promised. Of course having said that, I would probably complain less if J looked more like Harrison Ford…thirty years back. He doesn't.

In the mean-time, I’m going to hold on to my cell-phone. And keep it charged. And if you do come to visit – please remember to tread softly.

The Mother of All Put-Downs

2007-05-31T19:46:00.000-07:00

Umm...Mom, feel free to skip this post :)

I'm constantly surprised by the number of people who haven't heard Pink's new club-hit called "You and Your Hand". And thats when I have to remind myself that not everyone spends every free minute on weekend nights dancing in their town's hottest clubs. That, not everyone likes to spend hours gyrating with abandon to the latest amazing beats, crushed between a gaggle of gorgeous toned bodies, the alcohol buzz just loud enough to drown out the voice telling you that your dancing sucks, body thrumming as one with the all the rest on the dance-floor, collectively generating a heat-wave that overwhelms the air-conditioning and leaches out those apple-martini imbibed calories into abs-crunching dance-moves. I've never understood why.

OK I romanticise a little bit. Yeah...the beats can usually be more accurately described as brain-numbing, the bodies are often sweaty, please-put-your-shirt-back-on kind. That voice in your head - the one valiantly trying to tell you your dancing sucks? Its right...and you're better off not drowning it out. And there's no space to move in a self-respecting club let alone let loose with abs-crunches. But on the whole, clubbing is a ton of fun. It is!

Anyway getting back to the main point...a lot of people don't seem to have heard about Pink's latest club-hit called "You and Your Hand"

I love the song - its very very danceable - specially in the remix version thats played almost daily on Energy. Energy, to give you some context, is my favorite Bay Area FM station (energy927fm.com). They play hard core dance tracks 24/7 with a wonderful lack of irony. For example, they'll play "I can't wait for the weekend to begin" on Monday mornings, just when you're stuck in a traffic jam on Highway 101, on the way to work.

Again, back to Pink's song. The reason I really love it is because the lyrics are steeped in a huge vat of pure, wonderfully unchecked sarcasm with the power to eviscerate any and all dopes in bars who find themselves at the receiving end of the song.

Here's the refrain:

I'm not here for your entertainment
You don't really wanna mess with me tonight
Just stop and take a second
I was fine before you walked into my life
Cause you know it's over
Before it began
Keep your drink, just gimme the money
It's just you and your hand tonight

Its the last line that elevates this song, in my mind, to the title of the Mother of All Put-Downs. Its pure unadulterated, pithy, sarcastic genius. Saddam Hussein, who coined the term "Mother of All..."and who was sarcastic till the very end, wryly questioning the bravery of the mob who taunted him as he walked to the gallows, would've approved. I think.

Of course if you're one of those people who do spend every free weekend night minute in clubs - you might appreciate the rather sad irony of singing along to the lyrics.

If you're there. Every weekend night. In that club. Then, you probably can't afford to sing it like you mean it. :)

Not unless you're Pink, anyway

The Blessing of an Impermanent Smile

2007-05-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

If you’ve read the Kite Runner – you might remember that the eponymous character, a preteen Afghan servant-boy was born with a cleft lip; a permanent smile as the book put it. I read the book relatively recently at the urging of my Mom. Though initially not very interested in the book, I found I couldn’t put it down once I’d started and was rather disappointed when it ended. I wish it had been a few hundred pages longer. It’s a story spanning several years spent in pre and mid-civil-war Kabul and in San Francisco.

One of the most heart-warming passages in the book for me – and the book had many heart-warming as well as heart-breaking ones L - was when the protagonist’s father, a rich Afghan Pathan, at whose house the Kite-Runner worked and lived, flew in a doctor from India on the Kite Runner’s birthday to perform surgery on him to fix the cleft lip. And in doing so, gave him the gift, no a blessing, of smiling only when he wanted to, only when his smile could also reach his eyes.

It wasn’t long after I finished reading the book and perhaps because it was on my mind, I came across an ad in the newspaper by an organization called the TheSmileTrain. I think it was the organization’s name that first caught my eye…it brought a vision of train bogies full of happy, smiling, sunny faces to mind. I read the ad – something I don’t usually do – and then checked out their website too. Feel free to do the same by clicking on anywhere that TheSmileTrain’s name is mentioned in this post. Beware – before you click - you might find yourself compelled to make a donation. TheSmileTrain is an organization dedicated to performing the simple surgery to fix cleft lips on kids all across the world. That’s all they do. In countries like India, Brazil, Uganda, these surgeries cost as little as $250 and have the ability to transform the lives of these kids. Since 2000, they’ve helped more than 200,000 children, many of them in India.

In TheSmileTrain’s words millions of children suffering... with unrepaired clefts...cannot eat or speak properly. Aren’t allowed to attend school or hold a job. And face very difficult lives filled with shame and isolation, pain and heartache. Many are also abandoned by their parents at birth. Think about it, when was the last time you saw someone with a cleft lip in a position of power or eminence. Families suffer too. A friend of mine who was looking at the web-site with me, told me about a friend who didn’t want to share pictures of her new-born baby with any of her friends and relatives. The mother privately told my friend, that the baby had a cleft lip and the parents, who I’m sure loved their child, did not want to show him off until the surgery that they were lucky enough to be able to afford.

There are so many things in life that we should not take for granted. A voluntary smile, I think, is something everyone should be able to. Here’s to TheSmileTrain for working to extend that privilege and blessing to more and more people everyday.

Paris Hilton Hospitalized After Alarming Spike in IQ

2007-05-22T23:00:00.000-07:00

FAKE NEWS ALERT! ALSO PUBLISHED AT SISTER SITE DAILY NEWS PARALYSIS

Leading socialite and hotel heiress Paris Hilton (ageless) was today rushed to Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles after doctors measured a sudden spike in her IQ during a fitness check. An intern at the doctor’s office, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that the occasional songstress’ condition was “serious but stable”. Paris who has recently been going through a particularly stressful period due to being awarded a jail sentence for driving on a suspended license, was not available for comment and was said to be under sedation to help calm the unusual amount of brain activity that was caught “just in time” according to the intern, who admitted to being an ardent Paris Hilton fan.

“There’s just no one better than Paris when it comes to posing endlessly in front cameras at all times of the day. Anyone else might have easily died of boredom from mindlessly repeating the same poses in 8 different dresses each day.”, she said. “But Paris’ has been doing a yeoman’s job over the last decade or so. She’s my hero!”

Dr. Ridge Waters, a celebrity Hollywood psychologist, said the IQ spike was probably caused by the large amounts of time the actress was spending in recent days in figuring out ingenious ways to stay out of jail. Just last week she hit upon the brilliant idea of starting a MySpace petition to Governor Schwaznegger of California through a friend, fired her lawyer and generally spent enormous amounts of time brain-storming ideas with friends. According to Dr. Waters such high levels of mental stimulation in individuals unused to it, can be especially detrimental to the brain’s long-term ability to handle daily mind-numbing tasks. Such a development could spell disaster for the 24/7 socialite.

A friend of Ms. Hilton, who rushed to the hospital when she heard the news, tearfully said she’d been afraid something like this might happen since last Friday when Paris claimed to be feeling “discombobulated by the legal terms used by lawyers.” It was reportedly only the second time that the often-time model is known to have used a word with more than three syllables. The first instance being when she addressed noted fashion designer Ermenegildo Zegna by his first name at a party. Her friends explained at the time, that she usually calls him ‘Erm’ but didn’t want to sound like she was clearing her throat when so many microphones were present.

Sources close to Ms. Hilton have hotly denied claims by some bloggers that there had been other such instances, saying that “Yves Saint-Laurent” does not count since it is really three words not one. The sources also dismissed that this would have any long-term effects on Ms. Hilton’s ability to fulfill her many endorsement deals, in an attempt to calm nervous media buyers. However in a sign of things to come, stocks of several tabloids fell sharply in late trading on NYSE on worries that the IQ spike might be persistent and could sharply reduce Ms. Hilton’s poses-per-day average. Meanwhile, dismayed fans of Ms. Hilton had started gathering outside the hospital by late evening, holding placards saying “We love you Paris” and “Stop! You had us at Disco…”