Ouch!

Harry Reid on Paul Ryan's Arithmetic Skills:

Being questioned by the press he said he ran that in about two hours and 50 minutes. That's pretty fast. I'd like to take a minute and apply the Ryan math to my marathon times. I'll just pick one marathon time. I ran the Boston marathon. And using the Ryan math, my time would not have been a world's record, but within minutes -- minutes -- of a world record. I could have made the Olympic team. Using Ryan math, I would have been superb. Well, Ryan's math doesn't work in marathons because you know what, Mr. President, you can always check someone's math and his math doesn't work for running a marathon or anything else. The Ryan math doesn't work with his budgets, it doesn't work with Medicare. It doesn't work with his tax plan. It doesn't work with anything that he's suggested and opined about.

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/reid-knocks-paul-ryans-math-on-marathons-everything

Lance Armstrong: Prince of Thieves

For the longest time Armstrong was pretty much the only cyclist I knew by name and the only I cared to know about. He almost single-handedly popularised cycling as a sport - there may be five people in the world outside France and the cycling fraternity who heard the words Tour de France for the first time, without also hearing his name in the same breath. His life-story was heroic - a near-fatal battle with cancer, a record-breaking, epic-making come-back to the sport he loved and a devotion to the cause of finding a cure for cancer for which he raised millions and millions of dollars. No one's ever accused me of being a sports-addict and even for me he raised the bar for what a single human was capable of in life. An unbeatable, indefatigable champion of sport and for the afflicted. Unfortunately - it looks like he was beatable and defatigable, at least in his sport. If you still needed proof that drugs fuelled Armstrong's performance (and this writer doesn't here's apparently a book to end your illusions. The book is told through Armstrong's former team-mate Tyler Hamilton but nine other former Postal teammates cooperated with him to corroborate his account.  Count them. Nine.

As Christopher Keyes' article, reviewing the book, says:

The drugs are everywhere, and as Hamilton explains, Armstrong was not just another cyclist caught in the middle of an established drug culture—he was a pioneer pushing into uncharted territory. In this sense, the book destroys another myth: that everyone was doing it, so Armstrong was, in a weird way, just competing on a level playing field. There was no level playing field. With his connections to Michele Ferrari, the best dishonest doctor in the business, Armstrong was always “two years ahead of what everybody else was doing,” Hamilton writes. Even on the Postal squad there was a pecking order. Armstrong got the superior treatments.

So Armstrong was a champion at cheating and gaming the system as well.

I guess I'll go back to worshipping at the altar of Howard Roark. (And no Paul Ryan, this does not mean that you get my vote.)

The Politics of Inclusion

Its rather thrilling to witness the Democratic Party's unabashed embrace of the LGBT community and their rights. Every single speaker, including Michelle Obama seemed to mention gay marriage either directly or euphemistically. At moments like this, you realise that you don't have to feel excluded to feel not-included. And that inclusion is a nice, toasty state of being.

Home is where the Hearth is?

My partner left home two months ago. And I know not when he will return. When I might next see him sitting on the couch watching grossly graphic medical programs on TV, while the dog fights his Macbook Air for real-estate on his lap. Filling up any available storage space in the bathroom with ever more exotically scented products from The Body Shop. Wafting the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee through the house each morning while getting me used to the privilege of having tea magically appear bed-side everyday. Engulfing me in his warm embrace every night. The hearth to complete our home.

He left because the system made it untenable to live at home with dignity. Climbing up Maslow's ladder of needs - physiological well-being, financial security, love, self-esteem and self-actualization - is an impossibly slippery task if you're an immigrant in the US looking to establish a career in an H1B-poor profession and if you happen to love someone of the same sex*. To have a loved one attempt the climb under those circumstances is to bear witness to the following.

To see him forced to stop working in the field he loves - and because of that, in this country have his access to healthcare severely restricted. To see him battle dozens of small everyday humiliations; small enough to be invisible to others but sharp enough to shred self-esteem. Like being unable to drive legally, in a country hostile to public transport and therefore becoming dependent on others for many of your transportation needs. Or having to hear care-less (hyphen intended), spiteful remarks made within hearing range by thoughtless acquaintances. To hear him describe what his self-actualized life would look like and then watch him chafe daily at not being allowed to start on that journey. To find yourself powerless to pull your partner onto firm immigration ground based on your own immigration/citizenship status to ensure his or her continued loving presence in your home*. To feel him silently, unhappily count down the days to his departure but know that he was already gone. To watch your home turn into a house.

I know what must happen now. But moving on, when you stayed put, is difficult. Surrounded by missing Minis and un-adopted brindled quadrupeds; unoperated coffee-makers, unvisited theaters, Body Shops.

My partner left our home two months ago. I'm afraid I know when he will return.

-----
*Straight couples with discordant immigration statuses can sponsor their partner's visa through marriage which is recognised by the federal government. Gay couples are not as fortunate since the 1998 Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA) prevents the US federal government from recognising same-sex marriages for any purpose including spousal immigration.

Skins, Sticky and Seared - Conclusion

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

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.

Read the Conclusion

Skins, Sticky and Seared - Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A somewhat complete limerick in Hinglish

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

Indecent Proposition

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.

Practically in Love

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

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

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

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

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.