Happy republic days

We fought with country made pistols, underground printing presses, refusal to eat their salt, and inquilab shaiyari of starving poets. We fought with men and women who did not marry and shunned parents till the land was free. We belonged to the land more than demanding that land beling to us. From torn khadi dresses and hand made caps, to uprisings of peasents and village folk..we fought with what was undoubtedly the greatest, organized, imperialistic machinery on earth then. Bricks and mashals and crude nitrate bombs and khadi clad apostle of peace over canon balls and .303s. Oh my land! If you would remember our guys more often than on designated days. Happy republic day, my friends!

mujhae pasand hain (a poem)

mujhae pasand hain (a poem)

office imaraton ke kidkiyon sae hamey
muyayana karte kabootaron ka samuh
kaheen koi muflee ho,
kaheen girtae hon ungliyon sae kisi paglae kae, bajrae ki jharee see ladee koi

fadfadaati chidiya kae allad kuch pank
reshmi asman sae, kate patang sae mauj mae
hadbadatee beed ke kaandhom par utartae,

dundhlae suraj ki kiran sae jagmagati gili sadak par
peepal kae ek patta, uski nason par chadkar daudtee
kuch bhukee chintiyan

atah duk chehrae par liyae beek mangtae bacchae
signal badalnae par haath pakadkar paar kartae
chehrae badltae hansee aur kel ki mastee mae

The good life - 1

The good life - writing about Satyajit ray's movie "jalsaghar" and comparing shelley"s "ozymandias" poem, listening to " hirak rajar deshe" in mandolin, and reading of eccentric naturalist frank buckland at Oxford in " Oxford book of books"

For Widows of Vrindavan

For Widows of Vrindavan

the sky, for years, was white,
the hues, the walls, the food, the prayers,
all white - without depth or frame or reference

or relevance..

and then this year

the splash of holi
coloring our widowhood
with myriad of colors

like a rain starved earth filled with showers

colors on our white canvass

dripping
dripping to color even the space
between fingers of our legs...

Ray's Jalsagar

His son will not make it back from the trip? How does the old zamindar intuite into this? The lamps in his jalsaghar are going off; thunder and rain razes through the half open door; surrounded by friends in the mehfil, amidst laughter and good music, an insect struggles on his drink. The renditions of miyan ki malhar this stormy night is full of tragic connotations: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9eXZ0ocCjQ&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0-houccc2_dfYnZI6TA-o_IY766tNIWPPq7cJa1_Znzt4M1qxvN-GTV8Y


...and what does the singer sing? "Jyun jyun aawat ghor badariya, mori ankiyan barsein" - loosely "as dark clouds gather, its my eyes that shower".. it constantly amazes me how Ray left so much subtext of the impending disaster.. its like the tragedy is bestowed upon a man and whole knows and conspires to keep it secret from him "

DTEA- School days

1. One day, in 8th class, I asked Shantha maam "what is the volume of a semi-hemisphere?" not knowing that hemi itself means adha.
2. I always hated the park-gravel based mensuration sums - they were not straight forward (and thus tested real abilities). Kuch kuch calculate kiya, and then you come to know ki you missed a slanted gravel plane and hence zero to your total.
3. One day, in 8th class Chemistry practical, I got zero because I forgot to mention the "salt number of the packet" though I identified the salt correctly doing those Acid-Basic radical tests.
4. Whenever we were doing some stuff in Bio lab (cheek cell, potato cell, mitosis and that crazy, scary skeleton in cupboard that was so undigestible for someone just starting to appreciate femal anatomy), i would sneak to the edge of the lab and see from its windows out to the ground - who is playing cricket in the stage.

What days, man..

new books

New books on shelf - authors talking of their favourite bookstores.. Sharon butala on what it means to live in the wild..Le Clezio classic on the crazy day of Adam Pollo roaming streets and imagining as animals and inanimate objects..Bernd heinrich celebrating and probing the animal way of death and how they survive winter (fascinating illustrations)...the story of the rare blue bear in arctic ...and the classic african memoir by Alexandra Fuller. If you thought the earlier Africa was hard farm work and enchanted lands, you are in for awe..

New Books

New books on shelf - authors talking of their favourite bookstores.. Sharon butala on what it means to live in the wild..Le Clezio classic on the crazy day of Adam Pollo roaming streets and imagining as animals and inanimate objects..Bernd heinrich celebrating and probing the animal way of death and how they survive winter (fascinating illustrations)...the story of the rare blue bear in arctic ...and the classic african memoir by Alexandra Fuller. If you thought the earlier Africa was hard farm work and enchanted lands, you are in for awe..

Edward Hopper's paintings

The exhilaration of isolation in Edward Hopper's paintings. The door is flung open to paint, the macintosh carelessly tossed off. She had to nudge away from steering wheel. With mountains of Wyoming all around, she is still all by herself..

Old Ruskin - 2

There is a particular set of tumbling rocks at Harsil. The mighty bhagirathi river faces the tiny obstacle of a tree stump that has securely angled itself over these rocks. Such that you can sit on it and watch the miraculous river tumbling through the mountains.

That my dear friends is the place for reading dear Ruskin's journey of life.

..Journey of the river, mountains, the man who came back to himalayas because in the rolling hills of english countryside ( where he went to work as a young man) he could not hear the howling of the hedges in the wind at night- all he could hear was the slurp with which pinecones are extinguished in late evening cooking in remote mountain villages...

Poor Old Ruskin

Ruskin describes how a poor writer found accommodation at Maple cottage that endured years of solitude ...how an old Miss Mckenzie ("the last of my generation") took pity on a poor old fool, who left comforts of London to try his luck as a writer in the hills of Dehra.

This is how they wrote. Like Poirot enjoying Belgian chocolates on cold christmas nights (tucked warm in blanket with his fav stories), these words gave solace for years.

Harsil trip

Harsil is 25 km before Gangotri. The mighty Bhagirathi is a muddy, ice cold trickle at this time but will be a roaring angry river soon as monsoon surges in.

The sheeps by the river bank slowly chewing pine grass will move up the mountains then. The 1000 year old calcite rocks smoothened to pebble will submerge then. The gurgling streams from mountains near Dharali will join a mighty partner called Ganges then. The sheep dogs loittering and wagging their tail in idled spectre now will stand by the bank and bark at their floating shadows then. The apple orchards by river bank will blossom to cold wind then.

Till then, i will content with stormy wind that blizzards up at view point. Till then, the river pebbles, the sun, the swaying grass fields, the whispers of cicadas and blue berry bird (my naming) all shall sing that one song of nature to us. It would not matter even then to river log picking birds and creepers on pine trees and squirrels what thy name be - for you are the life flow that ebbs in their veins.. .. but it will matter to tired travellers like us from plains and cities looking for one eternal place ceaselessly ... to call home.

There is a bowl of apples next to my laptop

There is a bowl of apples next to my laptop. I have never eaten anything – apples, chocolates, apple strudels at Wengers - none. I went there and I had time with friends, and I paid and all. But I never just went there or just hanged out with friends or just ate. Always a gap – a mind wandering skelter..

In movies, when a father talks to his son at basketball net, or a mother cooks a hot platter and puts that up at the dinner table and rattles her son’s hair and asks about the school, they are there – and talking and doing nothing else. Their mind is not multi tasking about office, or next activity, or the sitcom to come (I wonder how they will show the divided mind). I wonder if it is true.

Is multi-tasking even true (or worth it)? Never the taste of only apples in my mouth – the texture of juicy bits crushed amidst a machinery of calcium and tongue, the spurt of juices like the thrashing of sugarcane in fields, the last winter a poor farmer in Himachal sowing the seed – all that ripening of the apple on earth’s womb – all that travel for me alone .. a primary key embedded in my name in the seed’s DNA.

I notice the ceramic bowl holding the serving began as sand and dust and chemicals in China. Hmm.

Russian books

One of favorite memories of childhood - the Russian Cultural Center visit at Ferozeshah Road; the fantastic Russian science and physics and popular tech books at USSR book center - the Mir and Raduga publishers of the world; picking a book on Lvov to see where my brother studies and what place it is; the beautiful russian books and art pamphlets we receuved in school annual day prizes; the Durga Pujas when I did not know who celebrate it and why, but knew that Russuan books await me there....

To that world that can never come back and that can never be taken apart from us either...

Chod de sari Duniys - Hindi song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFW6dBHPcTo


It is that beautiful winter in Delhi - just beginning. The Raat ki Raani flowers are spewing perfume, the air is cold and fresh in morning, - today, I saw an auto rickshaw with 6 kids - all uniformly red and then one lad wearing a Ravana Moustache and a flash gorden pink pastel mask - and completely at ease. At Ram mandir near the house, the Dushera celebrations have begun - Time also for people to stuff themselves silly (in terms of calories) in the name of "fast". I love these winters. Indian Classical Music festival begins at Kamani tomorrow - imagine the Winter chill walk to Metro at 10 pm after getting treated to the melodious Jugalbindi of Pt.Shiv and Hari ji..all the world getting colder and being warmed slowly to the roasting taste of their flutes and Santoor - the magical realism of winter in Delhi..

Winter in Delhi

It is that beautiful winter in Delhi - just beginning. The Raat ki Raani flowers are spewing perfume, the air is cold and fresh in morning, - today, I saw an auto rickshaw with 6 kids - all uniformly red and then one lad wearing a Ravana Moustache and a flash gorden pink pastel mask - and completely at ease. At Ram mandir near the house, the Dushera celebrations have begun - Time also for people to stuff themselves silly (in terms of calories) in the name of "fast". I love these winters. Indian Classical Music festival begins at Kamani tomorrow - imagine the Winter chill walk to Metro at 10 pm after getting treated to the melodious Jugalbindi of Pt.Shiv and Hari ji..all the world getting colder and being warmed slowly to the roasting taste of their flutes and Santoor - the magical realism of winter in Delhi..

Thje Russian books

The new books in.. Gorky about Antomonovs “he walked tall as though the church bells toll for him” ; Pushkin in poetry saying goodbye to eternal world “ while i will decay, the oak tree will flourish “ his only regret is not death, but he will not be around to see children play and new born sheep jumping in greenish meadows in spring and that the crimson yellow of the autumn maple will never reflect his shadow.

We are alive and have this and now. Engage. The amazing world of Soviet writers.

Materialism

For years (in fact, all life), it was an illegitimate thought in your mind - why should I run forever behind materialism? Why are people doing this all the time, and claiming all the time they are not doing it, or they are not doing it all the time, or worse, talking about spirituality as their goal (and doing the run for gold and security all this time)?

If body is perishable, and before perishing it suffers due to illnesses (that needs treatment), and if our children should grow up with education and travel the world, and absorb cultural assimilations, and other such reasons that we give (and think as the only reasons – as apostle of sacrifice and responsibility) for this ” mad rush, then what about our fear of health, death, poverty, starvation, and “standing in society” as reasons? Do they not exist? Did we never felt them, or felt them all the time and hide? Did we not hide our “sinful” thoughts, all the while claiming indifference to the society that categorizes what “sin” is and what it is not?

What happens when what you actually want to do cannot earn you money? What if you want to hear birds sing, live like a savage, or live like a nomad trekker like Christopher McCandless or Everett Ruess? What if you can quit money like Daniel Suelo? Or leave the cog wheel of capitalism behind like Helen and Scott Nearing did? Or teach like Vandana shiva, to preserve local culture, land, and seeds? We do not do it (though we may want to), because we are Smart – defined as the ability to swim with “best of the times, and avoiding the risk or cost that goes with it.”

It’s the dawn of time, and you have not even started. If God asks you “ What did you do, you idiot? I gave you brain, compassion, and support infrastructure to facilitate inference of where you should drive your life, and you blew it?”

Why did you not scatter the seeds far and wide, as requested?

Years of suppression, rationalization, and dragging has not killed that original thought – Are we not from the “Sunflower forest” (of Loren Eiseley)? Should we not see work-life balance as compassion to animals, teaching children in villages, spending a joyful moment with our parents before they ebb away, rejoice with gratitude on all mental facilities bestowed on as “gift”, deserved or not?

Should we not seek return? Why renunciate in the last stages of life (as Fakirs, Gurus, and others advise), when each moment is seeking your joyous participation in the fabric of life? The moon light is out today – walk in it. The children are laughing uncontrollable on a joke – close your eyes and hear the chuckling, the continuousness, the coherence of their voices. Go to your childhood and complete the circle of togetherness. In Vigyan Bhairava Tantra, Shiva advises “the Subject and Object are one, when focus happens.”

It is time to try, and well worth it.

Maple in Book Space

Maple in Book Space

They do not forget
..this land, its shrubs, the concave earth’s glittering shine

Colors - from green to crimson rusty red to the fading yellow of a warbler…

Blades – from crested mountain edges to dull rounded in Winter…

Midribs – from muddy Delta wiggles to fading estuary paths…

In the enclosed dark space of well-lit books
In this enclosure of closing edges, this abandoned leaf..
…my my! She has kept pace with the seasons outside,

Shining with the Sun and whispering with the wind
and perching with the twig and demising with the humus
..all by her little sweet self…

Sunderdhunga Trekt to Maktouli

Sunderdhunga Trekt to Maktouli Glacier Top - two years back - I wish we never had to come back. Now, I see how those hill folks, who come to cities to work, 3 or 5 years down the line, decide to go back - and be guides or drive Sumos. The streams and the mountains of the psyche keep calling them, and they decide to take a turn back to sure shot poverty. As though a person can do only what he or she is destined - in the grasslands of the subconscious, there is this eternal call of the mountains. Heck, I was born in Delhi - and they call me - forget the poor folks.

The Harsil Boy

(At Harsil near Gangotri) - This is childhood, innocence, and poverty. He was playing with a ragged cloth dipping it in the might Bhagirathi flowing outside his hut. He had a sharp eye for details and the winter November is so cold that the family has another shag at Utterkashi (to which they climb down).

World of Books

My observation on books...

The world of books

The world of Books is dense and visually rich for the initiated….

Among the ordained literati of such nature is the belief that this world of symbols and interrelated metaphors is a code that speaks only to them…(not true)
…and only for them (not necessarily)

..and once in a while, for a novice wanderer in the bibliophile land, (the notion held is that) a tweaked ray of words and gestures seeps in and he or she is transported for a brief moment into the complex, albeit delightful, twinings of the Book forest.

..that it is chance that illuminates the pitiful minds of the neo-illiterate, who won’t read.

..not true again.

What bibliophiles need in such trying times is humbleness..
Humbleness to realize that the writing world looks actively for the uninitiated novices
(and if I may add) not for people like they..

The wheel of literary world is oiled and kept churning in longingness for the Amateur and uninitiated – for the glare avoiders of the Sunforest world, for people who do not want to be even near books lest they catch an evil shadow of the falling words..

What forever-readers should know is that these are the people, the torch bearers to the Book world and that they themselves were one, when they began the journey..

The Book land held their hands when they had none..

The twist of this fleeting world (is) – the longer you linger in this world and absorb it, the more amateurish you become.

The book world is for the brave and the illiterate, who can be swayed by one glow or glimpse of a profound observation – for people, who, in an opportune moment in life, opened the book and found a line or quote in the myriad labyrinth of pages and letters – a phrase that set their world on fire.

Welcome to the uninitiated – welcome to the first book that you picked up – thank you for doing that.

It is for you that the word exists and not for well-entrenched, socialite well-read bore.

Please wander as a Nomad and feel free to close the pages..Keep the walks alive into these galleries of imagination.

Be Nomad in the Sun-baked land of books…

Time-Money Paradigm (in 10 sentences; ok 12)

Time-Money Paradigm (in 10 sentences; ok 12)

1. Money is an asset because it is a master template to buy all things you must have.
2. Time is an asset because it is a master template to do all things you want to do.
3. If I reduce my things to buy, I can stretch the money - and thus free the time (otherwise needed to earn more money to sustain myself).
4. How to use money is easy. How to use time is a more difficult question - because we do not know what to do with this life (and money saved us - we picked any one profession since we must have money - and thus never had to ask "what do I want to do actually?").
5. How to use time is also a difficult question because usually the additional time you freed up is funded by the opportunity loss of money you could have earned instead.
6. So, you would want the "time earned" by "losing money" (or spending money) to "matter". Well, the language of "it should matter" is the language of "return of investment:.
7. What can be the RoI of time (not as a function of money, but as tasks fulfilled")?
8. This question itself will trigger the equation of money and how you were a fool to barter it for extra time. So, “smart” people do not downshift. (”what would I do with the extra time” and “How do I pay the for bills coming out of my ears each month”?)
9. Meanwhile, trees live at tree pace in "tree time" (that cannot be compartmentalized or rushed as "human time" can be) - Spring comes and grass grows by itself.
10. Meanwhile, squirrels and barking deers come to drink water at Garud taal, and pups laze around and play and starve and eat as they get or please. Beavers are on an endless dam-building spree. Damn!
11. In an parallel, non-axiomatic world, thus, meanwhile, animals and plants and Northern Lights and Pine trees coexist with us "unresonating" continuously with our worries of time and money.
12. Tolkien and CS Lewis and Louis Lamour and Terry Pretchett and Ray Bradbury invented parallel universes fell flat, before what plants and trees and animals lived with.

A Random Seed Pod

A random seed pod i found on the way ...

• The seed , like mind, is sub optimal. Flowering is an assimilation of external environment, inner obsession, and nature of things as they spurt or dry up
• The top cone of the flower holding buds is a bit like a Vietnamese farmers conical cap; they ploughing hard the womb of earth, the seed holding the fruits of germination. I had been though Mathematics in 8th class that the volume of a cone to be one-third of pi-R square h; I was never told that this volume holds life ad infinitum.
• When the top covering cone of the seed was removed, I was surprised to see so many tightly-packed buds. What I assumed innocently to be a pod was already teeming alive inside with life – so many while dry cotton like structures, fragile and concentrically swaying around a central dome. The multitude of ways nature asserts its life force with..

DTEA- Sarojini teacher

DTEA- Sarojini teacher

Our favorite English teacher at School, Sarojini maam, is no more, but it still feels like yesterday when all these events happened..

Some memories of dear "Sarojini maam":

• 8th Class, 1986 – Today, Sarojini maam delighted us in the morning class. She delights us anyway by her presence – she is non-judgmental, patient with our deeds, not easily shackled by our cleverly designed irritations (“if he/she is rattled, we will harass that teacher” syndrome), and takes time to laugh with us. Whoever loves us, laughs with us simple. Anyway, she purposefully hid the back in a backbencher’s desk and then nonchalantly walked around “looking for her bag” and then claps. Yes, claps. And Voila!! – the bag beeps and leads her to the desk. I was 13 and mesmerized.

• 10th class, 1988 - An unusual lyrical Ballad for its era (“Lucy gray” by William Wordsworth – 1799). Sarojini maam comes to the class (her usual daily routine period class) and we do too (usual post prayer, chattering us). The day is different. We enacted in the crumbling edifice of the DTEA Lodhi estate class upstairs - lucy gray lost in a thunderstorm, guiding weary passengers lost in storm to safety. It’s not lucy but us – struggling in the storm. “And sings a solitary song; That whistles in the wind.” Yeah – that’s what she did. 

• 2012 – trek to Roopkund- 10000 feet - the highest pre-alpine meadows of rhodendron forest in snow here – the way at Bagua Bhasa is littered in snow and a thunderstorm howls – the guide holding our bags and running next to me holding my hand – we must reach that protective crevice. Face numbed to snow, legs slipping in hardened glaze of snow- Lucy’s voice comes to mind – singing hauntingly a memory that was heard 24 years back from my favorite, beloved English teacher. Singling pleading guiding to safety…lest you lose the way home like me..
From the poem:
“The marks were still the same;
They tracked them on, nor ever lost,
And to the Bridge they came.
They followed from the snowy bank
The footmarks, one by one,
Into the middle of the plank,
And further there were none.”

• 12th class – 1990 – year of farewells to close friends – year of saying “I love you” to all fantasized girls that one never had guts to say, and there is no time. Sarojini maam is no longer my class teacher, but we are enacting “King Lear” with J.Padma in lead role with her eloquent English (Bless her soul). And there, in that practical lab auditorium, with one of ma’am’s old students (Shelly) dangling precariously on the ledge with a Torch in hand, and Lear telling Shylock what a loved daughter she is, the Jester laughing, the auditorium in dark, flashes of light on Padma’s anguished face – the narrator voice of maam slowly dissipating the tragedy.

• 2010 – Tenkasi – Maam’s home – I and Sushma and my mom (Muthulakshmi teacher) visiting her. Showing their garden with exotic plants, maam quips “ this Tenkaasi climate…this soil..you throw anything on this land – it breathes life then and there” – her face silhouetted by the evening twilight of the beaming sun. My last visual memory of her, but thank god this memory that she lives forever in.

The land she nourished and stood by, the people she loved, the children she taught - where is she but in them and us. Sometimes, I sit and think about the futility of words, their inept hollowness in expressing a deep grief or their "falling short" in expressing a deep happiness.

I will remember how she was so kind and loving and compassionate to a poor, confused, and shallow boy like me, and to many others like us; and I will always remember how DTEA, and its salary, and its petty politics of an operational school etc never came in the way of her motivation and love for us; It could be a private US school, it could be an airconditioned Art and Literature appreciation class in a fancy school of Goenkas or Ambanis, and yet, (and even when it was not and it was my poor, dear DTEA, Lodhi Estate, who mustered all she could as resources and helped us thrive), the quality of her teaching and the love that emanated from her appreciation of reading those chapters or pages never waved.

If I read Loren Eiseley's excavation notes as an archaeologist, I thank her; if I read of Shiva sutras or Wordsworth poems or the twisted world's Le Clezio created in his stories, I remember her.. out there, hopefully glowing like a Star out there, happy that she could bring deep Joy in our lives, despite some immense sadness she went through...happy that immortality lives like effervescence in each life she touched..

Book Review - The Roving Shadows

Pascal Quignard is cryptic - so many associations and incidents. Chapters (long and so short) begin as meditative quotes and then you are held by your hand and walked through a thicket of words and incidents and semantics – and across this path lies lush green pastures sometimes, sometimes more complex curves – as though you are travelling in the topological sub-manifolds of a Euclidean world.
You do not understand it all, you do not feel associations. Many feelings come to mind – all at once. Trash. Profound. Non associative but meditative. “He begins with

out apologies or context – does he write for himself alone?” “Did I miss this or the world?”….Hmm. Why interject nun’s child speaking in latin with medieval punishments, how does apology work in nature, dark blue clouds pierce through the sky and a swarm of butterflies have invaded the earth. Wait a minute – were we not in the middle of a treatise on how past cleverly hides in every cloaked amulet present tense throws on?

You do not know where you are going, when he will untangle his grip on your senses, but you like you are being led. You like the nowhere you will walk unaware. It is addictive – like waves slowly splashing on your dry sole by seashore – now touching now withdrawing enticingly. What will the next wave of words bring on? Who would associate shadows with eating by candle light and then end that synopsis with shadows as memories that transcend description. Tankzaki preferring Japanese, old wooden lavatories over puritan glazed ceramic – rubbing preface with Jesus sounding out betrayal in John 15:9.

the art of pausing

On the art of Pausing...

So, a few things on “Pausing to see”:

- After Monday Sabjee market, in today’s morning walk, flakes of onions dry skin suddenly sweep up to the sky, as a van passes by. Sushma – “Achanaak unko zariya mil gaya udnae ka” (Sudden the opportunity to raise).

- Uber share goes to Khan market rather than CP (to drop someone else first). After the U-turn, right next to Asia’s richest market, by the pavement tree – in a small hole- one squirrel emerges and then another (view from my backseat).

- By a neem tree, while walking back home, in the midday heat, you look up and notice the underbelly of a small chidiya (bird) – all plain and she looking up somewhere.

- At the 8 pm Metro, a guy sitting on the steel sitting – facing opposite side, I sat and said “Peela Gulaab” and he said “sorry?”; I said “that’s what the code waord was when Madan puri bartered smuggling in 70s movies”. We both had a laugh (this happened).

- In the park, a Dog had one ear flap up and one down. Will someone teach him the ways of the rational world please?Jesus!!

- By the park are residential apartments with big perimeter walls. A dog sitting and looking up the wall – at a blank space – the cat on the wall is atleast 5 meters to the right. What is he looking at?

- Drying autumn eaves swirl and slowly fall on spider webs.