So when do you know that this is it?

They say it’s still too soon. That it’s only been a while, give or take a few days. That you’re only just caught in the first giddy flush of whirlwind.

So when, or how do you know that this is it?

Maybe when this little space in the midst of the chaos of everything else, feels ‘just right’. When you wonder how you could have been anywhere else, but with this one here. That every other might have had its charm, but this, this right here, is it. And you finally get what all the fuss is about. Sure, you might still not know all of it, but this much is good enough, at least for now.

Still don’t know whether I should call you Bombay or Mumbai, but when you finally know it’s love, what’s in a name, you beautifully wild city. You already have my heart, so let’s make the rest of this work, shall we? :)

Hey India’s daughters, why loiter?

Why indeed should I have the right to simply walk down the street in nonchalance, at any given time of the day or night that I please, without my intestines being yanked out?

Don’t you know? I’m a box of sweets. I’m a diamond. I’m a goddess. I’m the treasure chest of everyone’s sense of honour. And the wolves and dogs are frantically scratching their nails on the door that leads to the streets outside. So shhh.. stay in girl, and stay quiet.

Of course taali ek haath se nahi bajti. Why would I wander in remote or crowded places if I didn’t like being followed or pinched and groped? Clap your hands in delight and pray, tell us girl, you actually enjoyed it, didn’t you? *wink*

Surely, if I choose to wear that piece of clothing it means I like being leered and whistled at? Boys will be boys yaar, how can you not pause every morning in front of your closet and contemplate if a scrap of cloth might offend someone’s sensibilities?

Of course I deserve to get petrol flung at me and be set on fire in front of the extended family because hey, pre-marital jaunts means I’m a slut, dummy. And yes certainly, why do you keep asking? I will continue to stand by this statement of mine even years later as well.

You see, only 20% of the girls these days can be classified as ‘good’. The rest are on a mission to wander on the street and just excite drunk men, who’re driving around freely at any hour and wherever they please in the city. If I belong to the latter bracket of girls, I need to be taught a lesson, obviously. Oh and of course I’m taking notes: If I don’t struggle and put up a fight, I might just get away with only a beating. See, I’m expressing quite candidly here, there is no place for a woman in Indian culture, didn’t you get the memo?

But wait, hold on a second miss, why’re YOU complaining? You’re a privileged girl. You were lucky enough to be educated. To be fed just the same as a boy and brought up with love and affection. *Gasp* your parents even allowed you the freedom to move to the big, bad ‘rape capital’ of the country two months after ‘the gangrape that shook the country’. Or travel often to any place you have the money to earn and afford.

Oh stop screaming aloud on Facebook status messages already, you’re the fortunate one who could wake up and stream the ‘banned’ documentary on an internet connection. And really, was it even a flawless one anyway? Let’s waste our breath by talking about the peripherals – the technicalities of procedure and permissions and how a rapist could be interviewed. Of why these white feminists come and make a ‘false’ film about India just to make us look bad. *weep*

Why don’t they make a film on their own problems instead? This is our problem, and we know the best way to discuss and solve the issue. So let’s be an editor of a popular news channel and start a viral hashtag against the documentary. Let’s drum up sentiments and rage endlessly about a competitor’s TRP-hungry appetite, because THAT’s the battle we want to fight and use our valuable airtime for, without even watching the documentary. Let’s rally support to ban it because please, it certainly doesn’t have the potential to spark meaningful conversations about the issue. Obviously understanding the mind of a rapist won’t help us introspect and find a solution to tackle the root of the problem. Let’s stop having a two-way dialogue about the issue at all and leave the rapists to mob justice. Let the crowd lynch and murder them and post thrilled pictures of it on Twitter because hey, that’s how we’re going to civilize our society.

But then again, maybe I could just save everyone the trouble and do everyone a favour and not loiter out on the streets at all?

(Hah sorry to rudely burst your bubble, but *stretch* it’s 9.30pm and screw you, I’m stepping out for a walk.)

Ordinary love

Somewhere below a pointless flyover in one of Punjab’s haphazardly growing cities, two girls with backpacks were doing something that anyone hardened by years of big city life is adept at. They were trying to hail an auto-rickshaw. Unfazed by a few who quoted inflated fares, they stood their ground until an old man driving one of those white-coloured, share-autos nodded and told them to hop in.

N and me resumed the non-stop conversation we’d been having since the previous day. This morning, intense urban design discussions had given way to deliberating upon the complex history of the place we were in. We picked up the thread about Operation Bluestar and the ‘84 riots that we’d been dissecting at breakfast and launched into it anew, only to be interrupted by a traffic cop a few metres ahead. This king-of-the-road-jungle was abruptly waving the oncoming traffic to take a U-turn in the opposite direction. If you’ve grown up in India, you pretty much get used to arbitrary road diversions and one-ways that crop up overnight or (seemingly in this case) right in front of you. Like every Indian, you will typically, also make a last ditch effort at some jugaad to make your way around impossible situations. The auto driver looked at us in the rear view mirror and said, “Try telling him that you’ve come from a really faraway place to visit? Maybe he’ll let us pass then.” In response, the cop gave us a deadpan look and waved us away distractedly like particularly annoying flies. The whole functioning chaos of the situation riled me up immensely that morning for some reason, and I fumed in sudden anger. That’s when the auto driver turned his turbaned head around and held up his hand to tell us reassuringly, that he knew an alternate, albeit longer route. That’s also the first time I noticed his fingers. Or the lack of them. “The ’84 riots”, he said calmly, in response to our shocked silence. “That’s when I lost my fingers.”

I felt the air around me shift perceptibly, quickly evaporating any hint of that sudden anger two seconds ago.  With barely three half-fingers and two thumbs to account for his two hands, we watched as he took that U-turn with ease and navigated through the maze of animals, cycle rickshaws, cars and motorbikes. “So.. you’re not from around here?” I ask hesitantly. He’d spent his childhood and youth in Delhi, he said, before being forced to flee in the aftermath of the riots. Opening up a little on his own accord, he recounted a few graphic and disturbing scenes of how he had managed to hide for days and survive the ordeal. “It’s difficult to talk about it too much,” he says finally, with a slight faraway look. “Even as I speak of it, some of those scenes flash before my eyes, hauntingly. They never really leave.”

You would think that someone who has survived so much trauma would hold a severely bitter and bleak outlook about humanity. But this was one of those times when you’re glad to be proved wrong. As we stopped to have chai in the sprawling campus which had pioneered the green revolution in the country, Bedi paaji spoke about life, family-bonds and the wonder of serendipity. A little wrong timing here and there, with or without the traffic cop’s intervention, and we could have missed having this long conversation we’re having now, he said happily.

Unperturbed by the ‘storm’ raging in television studios a few days ago in response to the much hyped (but dud) “biggest interview of 2014,” he shrugged when I asked him about his political views. “You can’t expect this leader to do what essentially, the previous ones should have done,” he said. But what about justice, I pressed on. “What about it? I’ve already lost what I did. It’s done. Nothing can get it back.” he said simply. Although he hadn’t returned to Delhi ever since, he said he had moved on, and didn’t hold on to any bitterness.

Sometimes, the best conversations about life, love and meaning take place with complete strangers. Somewhere along the way, engrossed in talk, we had become the sole passengers in what was meant to be a shared auto-rickshaw. For the remainder of the day, Bedi paaji drove us around town with keen interest, pointing out the sights and the many new malls springing up.

If you’re waiting for a twist, there’s none in this tale. He didn’t take us for a ride or trick us. Instead, he smiled while the two girls trooped through a green field peppered with yellow or stood below uncertainly while they clambered up on a war tank to take a picture. Having turned around what was supposed to have been just another faceless, 10-minute auto ride, he had also somehow managed to embody things that no diabetic “inspirational” quote could ever encapsulate.

As evening came, the time to move onward on our journey arrived and we were dropped off safely, without a hitch. Plain and simple. Just before he bid goodbye though, he wrote down his name and number, with his not-so-perfect hands and not-so-perfect handwriting and handed it to us to wrap around quite a perfect day. Sometimes, ordinary love is the best kind. Come to think of it, it’s pretty darn extraordinary that it still exists.

To the only grandfather I’ve known

The jarring buzz of 4.30 am calls are hardly ever harbingers of good news. It’s difficult to decide whether to attribute the sudden, teeth-clattering shiver, to the Delhi winter raging outside your up-until-then warm blanket, or to what you’re being told over the phone.

The only grandfather I’ve known in my life, was no more.

You think you know how you’re going to react when death comes knocking on the family’s front veranda. Or atleast you imagine you do. What you don’t expect, is to be buried under the weight of the cold, numb reality of being (what feels like) a planet away from everyone you’ve ever cared about, when it happens. Of being stuck in a place far removed, in an inexplicable situation that you can’t get out of, until it’s too late.

You try to repeat to yourself later, that there was no way you could have made it back home in time, to see him for the very last time. Ever. You try to stop thinking about the fact that just the night before, while you were grudgingly packing till 2am to (yet again) move houses, there he was, moving on forever. The void that sets in when your mind suddenly clouds over with a hundred unasked and unanswered questions, is difficult to explain. Like, I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t sat down and asked him more details about his life — about his passion for theatre or how he felt performing on stage. About the book he published and how he went about doing it. About when, why and what really made him take the decision to move, back in the day, to the city I have grown to call home. Or how he prepared that tea he always made for us, the minute we went to visit. How was mom really like, growing up?

You feel you’ve heard some parts of these stories at some young point in time, so you desperately search your memory to clutch at the details of tiny slivers of long-forgotten anecdotes. Or try to bottle and store in your mind, the tenor of his booming voice filling the room at didi’s engagement ceremony. Frail from a heart attack a few months ago, he told me on my home-to-recover-from-dengue trip last month that he was worried sick about the idea of me living in the Delhi he read about in the newspapers. I might have held his trembling hand reassuringly for a longer time, if I’d known that was the last time I would ever be holding it.

Death tends to lend you the sharpest pair of perspective-glasses that you’ll ever blink and attempt to see through. All my professional and personal catastrophes (real or imagined) over the last few weeks (and year), abruptly seemed blurry. On the steps near the boarding gate that evening, I couldn’t even begin to imagine the dilemma of a mother sandwiched between the terrible anguish of just losing a parent and the absolute happiness over her daughter’s wedding in barely two weeks. When you’ve grown up watching the man unofficially direct proceedings at almost every wedding in the community, the fact that he wouldn’t be able to do so for his first grandchild, feels like a terribly unfair script of fate. Heartbreaking even, when you hear accounts of him having enquired repeatedly, every hour in the last few days, of how many days away the big day was. Making his son promise to take him for it, even if he had to sit in a wheelchair to make it there.

Sometimes, we’re so bent on trying to be our own solitary source of strength, that we forget we can make it easier by drawing strength from each other. From your grandmother, who has always had nerves of steel. From your aunts and uncles and cousins and even a 94-year-old man who made it a point to make the trip and come all the way to offer his condolences. Looking around, you cannot help but wonder about the sheer number of people he inspired faith in, all through the years.

At the Alandi ghats, four now-grown-up siblings, are sitting before an earthen pot of their father’s ashes, along with their mother and the families that each of them have built. It’s a surreal moment – three generations of people blink back a million memories and hold on to each other as the last of the prayers are chanted and murmur a silent, final goodbye. Rest in peace, Mutacha. You’re going to be terribly missed.

NKR Menon (1930 – 7 December 2013)

Through the looking glass

A dilapidated white and blue house in the distance. The girl standing at its partially broken down balcony, gazes absently at the train hurtling past in front of her. She catches your eye for a split instant. You have one second to wonder what she dreams about, before the image zips past you.

Cut to stalks of alternating green and brown now, swaying in the not-so-distant countryside, catching the wind as you snake past. You marvel for the hundredth time at how many different shades of green, nature has had the patience to conjure. Then, intriguing people at obscure railway crossings wait impatiently for you to pass. If you’re lucky, one of them will flash you a petulant look.

Men playing cards. Men scratching their crotch. Horses tied to a post, clicking their hooves sadly. Hobos at non-descript station platforms, squinting vacantly into the great abyss. You wonder what pictures their glazed eyes see. Definitely something that you do not, you decide firmly, not wanting to project your own vision of them, to them.

Meanwhile, yellow fields of flowers peppered like happy dots in the midst of green meadows have shifted into focus. Dusty small towns and tiny unnamed villages. Men and women pass red dust bricks to each other and go about constructing houses. A child digs her fingernails into the mini-hillock of sand piled nearby. You try to follow the trail of water bodies keeping up with you. A glassy mirrored surface of endless blue. A farmer’s white dhoti, stands in sharp contrast against the rich brown of a freshly ploughed field. Images rush by too fast and hurt your eyes. Like a rapidly changing kaleidoscope.

Silhouettes of scarecrows in the distance now. Birds flying in pairs in a twilight streaked sky. All the while, the therapeutic landscape takes no notice of you. Plugged inspiration splutters and bursts forth. Somewhere in your earphones, Cerejo’s Banjara has fused into Mumford’s Hopeless Wanderer. It’s what prods you to step out in mock bravado to sip a chai alone at Ratlam station, while trying not to take notice of a few who seem adept at the Indian art of openly staring. It’s also what prompts you to part the curtains to glimpse a groggy Godhra station hiss past silently, in the flickering blue lights of midnight. To wonder if every station that flits past has as chilling a history. What stories would these mute spaces choose to tell if they could talk? Some semblance of truth, perhaps. But would that change anything? Ofcourse, depends if you’re wearing saffron tinted glasses or talking to a hand.

You tear yourself from the conundrum outside, to the one inside. Funny how more drama is always on the inside. The fight for space, staking claim and marking territory with invisible chalk lines. My berth. My pillow. My towel. Well, atleast Douglas Adams would be happy they’re taking his advice seriously?

Meanwhile, there are noisy, chattering, over-enthu cutlet kids to deal with. Those that won’t sleep. And don’t let you read. You pause, stuff your elephant-poo butterfly bookmark deep in the spine of the book you’re reading, and try to think of a nasty tweet on the lines of how people should get their brains examined before they’re allowed to reproduce. But just then, whilst swaying tarzan-like from the middle berth singing ‘oh bavaria’, he looks up at you with big, round eyes of mock, pooled up innocence. And grins a toothless grin. #Sold.

Akshar saved Alice’s soul that day, helped slay the jabberwockies that haunted. “Off with your heads,” she muttered under her breath in a Helena Bonham Carter tone, as she swatted away recurring threads of thought. Memory has a funny way of tinting everything with a hallowed glow, that might never have existed in the first place. Sometimes, it’s just the ‘idea’ of something or someone that holds sway. Not the thing in itself. It’s very far removed from moments of true bliss – those that have a sense of ‘aliveness’ at their mere mention.  A far more elevated quality, unlike the crinkled, yellowing frames of construction that your mind tries to post-produce into pictures of ‘perfect’ nostalgia. Epiphany when you realize, that at the heart of it, these never were the real deal.

Brittle white-picket fences around faraway, standalone houses. Fields of brown singed with black. The self-induced scorch earth policy. But still, patches of green manage to shoot through. Although, the need to leave some sort of breadcrumbs along the way, refuses to go away. Maybe it’s because you might want to be found afterall. Or rather, you’d just not prefer losing your way too much. Tumble down the rabbit hole, again and again and again in mood-swinging extremes of delirium. Ofcourse, it could just be Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return playing out on loop. But would you much rather prefer Milan Kundera’s twist to it? Either way, you might still have to find a way to break out of living like the fourth category of people he describes in an obscure page.

Tracks keep rocking their change gently, somewhere beneath you. Sometimes, lulled into the sense of constant motion, there is a point while on a train, when you fail to compute your sense of direction – of which way is backwards or forward. But really, if you think about it, there is immense freedom in that moment; if you manage to recognise it.

“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.” ― Carson McCullers

Brown cardboard boxes

Bulging purple suitcases and square cardboard boxes painstakingly wrapped with unending reels of brown masking tape, do not the whole story tell. It’s difficult to open their hinges and stuff inside them, a dozen perky memories. Of walking through the narrow alleys of Shahpurjat trying to trace a ‘spring festival’ on a colourful map. Of ending up trekking up four floors to try out (yum) Bihari food on a rooftop instead. Of taking an auto ride to the eternity-end of town just to have Tibetan food. Of a trio exchanging an i-cannot-believe-it’s-so-good-AND-cheap look. Of the same trio bundling themselves into one single cycle-rickshaw and bursting into embarrassed laughter when the tyre fizzles out of air four peddle-pushes later. Of drunk drunk drunk madness. And dancing, with or without strangers. Of catching the flu and passing it on. Of swaying to jazz music under an open, grassy-air, starry night sky. Of bitching about the landlady. Of “doubting the authenticity of stories”. Of trying to whip up paneer dishes and runny pancakes and banana milkshakes with cinnamon. Of the return of IHC in your life and watching a play after so long. Of being so glad you did. Of running to overtake a hundred others so that you’re not late to watch French trapeze artists. Of everything wrong that can happen while hosting a guest and that one horrible horrible week of jinx. Of the never-ending house hunting, packing and that infamous Moving House Day. Of Mr netaji and “prabhu aap hi ke nagari mein”. Of double beds and water and CCD lounges that saved us. Of Bangali khabaar and orgasmic bhetki. Of Oblivion and being such a freakin’ awesome “effective team”. Of heartbreaks, those who do things the 100% way and ofcourse, “pencils”. Of the insane nights at TC’s, yes every single one of them. Of T’pot and endless cups of khullad chai and Uno and happy yellow cups of conversations. Of Shubaarambh, Alabama Shakes, Happy pills and Freedom, on loop, every minute of the day. Of my first month in Delhi and your last. We are not just the cardboard boxes that we carry and lug around from one city to another. We are all those things, people, memories and conversations that we choose to pack and carry away carefully, and also the ones that we choose to leave behind. Debu, we cannot even begin to imagine how much we’ll miss coming back home to you. You light up our world, so shine on, Tuli :)

Beats me

If he was Kerouac, this is the part where he would begin feverishly typing on 120-feet of taped-together sheets of paper, forcefully fed into the protesting, clanging typewriter. Ofcourse, it had to be a noisy process. His fingers had to match his legendary decibel-defying vocal chords. It also had to keep up the momentum of the pendulum, which kept swinging abruptly from the frenzy of pause-less, frenetic living to the slow drag of the obsessively examined stray thought in his head. He always preferred the former, but right now the compass needle aligned grudgingly with the prickly comfort of that proverbial bed of nails. If he cared to listen, maybe he’d even hear Bono drumming his forgotten hum, somewhere along the diminishing creeks that coursed all through his being.

He’d been a little late to this mad, subtly insightful party. The kind of party that you cannot believe you hadn’t heard of and arrived at sooner. And then once you’re there, you wonder how you could have missed all the many references buried everywhere that could have led you to it over the years. So when he got there finally, he took his time. These days, he liked to savour it slowly. He wanted it to live with him and become a companion for a while. Through a phase. Or the flavour of the month.

Bursts of a gurgling stream of consciousness. Maybe he’d shake things up a bit and change it all. Maybe he wouldn’t change a thing. Pages of this brand of spontaneous prose. He paused for a while to ponder if he’d want to scratch out the misogynist undertones that kicked up dust everywhere on old Dean and Paradise’s crazy coast-to-coast criss-cross across the great awning continent. The thought made him chuckle. Damn. If only it wasn’t suddenly fashionable for everyone to be a feminist right now. But stripped of it, the original roll of manuscript still had enough dope to intrigue. Its heady range momentarily breathed life into his steadily aging bones and rapidly graying hair. There were the absurd bits that bewildered him, while he found resonance with some other parts. He raised an incredulous brow in some portions while on other occasions he wondered what the classic fuss was about. It wasn’t really the sex, drugs or automobiles that piqued him. Possibly, it was the notion of a kind of freedom that you were allowed to touch and feel only when you had absolutely nothing else. Or maybe it was just the rare magic of a beautifully strung together sentence, buried in the midst of all the insane antics, that exhilarated him in its simple thought.

Ofcourse, once it was over, he could not help but dig for more. He was terribly curious about the subplots. Each of the scattered very many. What happened to every one of them? Was all of it real? Exaggerated reality? Or plain fiction? Each stumbleupon answered a few questions but always threw up a few more. It also scratched off the sheen a little bit. The myth of the glorifying media raised a sheepish finger as well. But he still hadn’t finished trawling through half of this tiny triangle of history he was trying to pore over.

When he thought about it, everyone wished they could have tiny elements of the ‘great amorous soul’ that Dean Moriarty personified so glibly. Except that his own road tended to throb to a different bop of *Relax. Grow thick skin. Shed in moment of vulnerability. Get hurt. Repeat.* He paused again, this time to tug more forcefully at the mind-numbing twines that threatened to bind him back into the utterly senseless cycle. Instead, he wanted to try his skip down a million roads and paint a million pictures in the sunshine. But this was the space where the colours always seemed to be running off in different directions. Where the hues took forever to find an intersection, only to slowly blot into the art of imperfection. The trouble was not his fear of letting go of his dizzy kicks on the road. The trouble was finding meaning when he was off the road.

“You spend a whole life of non-interference with the wishes of others..and nobody bothers you..and you cut along and make it your own way.. What’s your road, man? — holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?”

-Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady

“My business is to create”

So two months ago, yearning to link our lives to the tiny everyday creative works of art around us, a friend and I decided to make a three-minute travel video about the city I was living in, at that point. What started out as a casual exchange of messages with a link for the competition and a “Hey, maybe we should do this!”, quickly turned into a flurry of discussions on possible ideas, locations, shot-breakdowns and scripting. You don’t realize how daunting three minutes can be until you break it down to 180 seconds worth of shots. Our contrasting work schedules notwithstanding–she worked the day shift, I worked the night shift as well as weekends (because of ‘arbeit macht frei ’ situations at work ofcourse)—we managed to squeeze in early mornings, sultry afternoon lunch breaks and late night shooting schedules. When I look back now, those last two weeks before the deadline, of running around shooting in the blazing and unforgivingly humid Chennai sun feels like a blur, just because of how much FUN we had doing our little project. If you’re like us (or like Hilary Swank in that scene; sappy movie though ) you’ve had those rambling endless conversations about how you always want to be in the process of creating new things and doing projects just for the god-awesome love of it. So despite the final results of the competition not swinging our way, I’m still left with a treasured video portrait of some of my favourite parts from my 1.5 years in Chennai.  I am so glad that we didn’t just talk about doing it, but actually saw the project through till the end and finished it. For that alone, this deserves a mention here, even if it’s a little late in the day. :)

PS: A big thank you to everyone for all the love and support on our youtube channel!

A Tale Of Five Cities

You’re squeezed into a share auto and hurtling down Gariahat road.. but it isn’t until you’ve almost reached Gol Park circle that you realize you’ve been so lost in your thoughts that you’ve forgotten to alight at your midway stop. Or you may have been so completely plugged into your music on the local commute that you just missed your regular Lower Parel station hop-off. Or maybe, while riding your bike and mulling over an existential query, you don’t register that you’ve turned towards Camp instead of taking Holkar bridge to reach FC road. Else, you were so busy chatting on your everyday phone call that you’ve come out of the wrong exit from CP metro station. Or you forget to tell (nay, beg) anna to take that U-turn on Chamiers road to your office, until it’s too late and you’ve reached the next signal..by which time he’s cursing about petrol price hike woes/metro work diversion woes/getting-grief-from-cops woes/life-in-general-is-a-bitch woes/YOU-are-a-bitch-for-not-telling-him-about-the-U-turn-in-advance woes… (Insert an *enna koduma saar idhu* here)

It’s called slipping into a routine. But any one of the above is enough to jolt you right back. Ironically, you are not ‘lost’ when any of this happens. It just means you’ve allowed the place to grow on you. So much so that it’s managed to become a part of what gets classified and filed under ‘the familiar’ in your life. Contrast this with the first few weeks of settling into a new place. The focus always seems to be on how not to get lost. So you stay alert through every auto/train/taxi/metro ride, trying to memorize the sequence of train station stops, names of streets, important landmarks, count every left or right turn that you have to take so that you don’t get ‘lost’. Cut to now. When you’re comfortable enough to indulge yourself a break from that constant phase of alertness. To let your mind wander. It’s that reassuring feeling of knowing that despite the minor detours, you’ll somehow find a way back to your original destination, no sweat.

Then, if you give it some more time and stay a while, every place will begin to weave a distinctive story in your head. Each jaunt is special and will hold tremendous unique meaning because building these memories is all that you have of this place. You slowly start fleshing out a list of favourite places now and recall others where something striking happened.

It’s what makes the memory of the Lake in Cal ripple through clearly when you summon it. You woke up early one day to soak it in.. oh and remember that time when you had golguppa’s from that place nearby? A commercial sex worker in Bowbazaar recognizes you from the project meeting last week and calls out to you by name. You smile and stop by to exchange a handshake, a greeting in Bengali and ask her how she’s doing.

Then, there’s that other time when you clutched a newspaper clipping and followed the directions to that shop in Old Delhi with a friend, just to discover what in the name of god a glass of doodh jalebi was. That huddled walk back from IHC on a cold foggy winter night, discussing and dissecting that really interesting talk you just attended. The first time you went to Big Chill with a happy bunch. That late night car almost-accident another bunch of you scraped out of.

Oh, what about that time when you reached Pop Tate’s so late on an IPL finals night and still had so much fun amidst the shared disappointment when Mumbai didn’t win. You still have a fleeting happy thought of her at every IPL finals game. Then there’s that time when you sat down with a colleague, exhausted, on a footpath outside Arthur Road jail after the full day drama of the Kasab verdict. Or shared the thrill of beating the tide and making it out in time, from your maiden visit to Hajji Ali.

Of course, there’s no way you can forget that epic impromptu overnight road trip you three made and what it symbolized. Or how another one travelled an hour to the city from North Madras every Wednesday, just cause that’s the only day you get an off. Then you suddenly ponder on how much they all mean to you when each goes to great lengths to find out if you’re okay and one of them bursts into your room in the middle of the afternoon, worried sick, that one time when you stupidly decided to drop off the radar unannounced. You have all these moments.. that might seem absurd.. in-comprehensible to anyone else but you.

Then slowly, if you give it more time, the place begins to become a part of you. You don’t realize how much you’ve started to think of a place as your own until you defend its shortcomings to ‘outsiders’. Two-three weeks ago, wiping sweat off his brow in the middle of the relentless katri afternoon heat, visiting dad asks me for the 100^th time HOW I even work here. “Oh, it’s not that bad.. wait, let me get you something from Fruit Shop On Greams Road to cool off.” Yes, I may moan about it to friends.. but I wanted others to take back memories of only those bits that I love. It’s what makes me drag a bleary-eyed shwester at the crack of dawn to “catch the sunrise at my favourite beach here.” With a “Trust me, you DON’T want to miss this,” as an attached hallowed effect.

Then slowly and steadily, routine has a habit of dragging behind it that heavy word, monotony. Which is when we start craving for change again. Have you ever felt torn at the seams between detesting routine and resisting change, both at the same time?

But every once in a while, change creeps up silently from behind and manages to find a comfortable spot inside you when you weren’t looking. My closest friend mails me a Hindi song link with a postscript scribbled at the end that reads—‘So that you get out of the whole aiyoo zone’. Another tells me I speak with a slight-a south Indian twang now. But I think whoever said every adulteration dilutes, has got it all wrong.  Yes, I may have unconsciously imbibed new words, mannerisms, music and embraced them as part of the lilting vocabulary that surrounds me here, but really, how can you not? Not allow the place and every person to permeate through your every fibre that is. Plus I’m yet to find a suitably awesome alternative to the word mokkai or wait, I meant dubakur. (Sorry D, you’ll have to hear those for a long time now) Also, there are these other little things.. like I hadn’t realized up until then how and when the tamil music on my playlist had steadily grown over time. Even if you don’t understand each and every word of every song, you learn to feel it deeply, just the same. True, there’s a chance that some might still trigger erinnerungen that might threaten to pick at a few raw spots, but you learn to skip over those as well. Just as you learn to go back and sit calmly at that same table in the same favourite green coffee shop and sip the same drink. This time, in the more stimulating company of V Gogh’s letters, peering through your hazy rings in the air.

Maybe you never truly fall in love with a place till you’re at a point where you’re torn between feeling absolute delight as well as pure loathe about it in equal measure. But well, isn’t that true about people as well?

One year is a long time. But then, even a few months are.  You can change a lot in all that time. Or you remain the same. Unyielding. Incorrigible. Unmoved. I’d like to believe most allow for some change though. And if you’re lucky, each of these people, these places, etch a different vivid motif on you. Not all the outlines might look like those you set out to design.. But nevertheless, all of them chip at you and succeed in adding another piece to the complex jigsaw that you are.. right up to this very moment. So then tell me now, next is what?

But we pick up the scent as we wander about and il y a du bon en tout mouvement*

*there is some good in every movement

-Jules Breton / Van Gogh 

Phoenix tears

Normally, I would not post this here. Partly coz I’m too lazy (or mortified) to sort through and compile published stuff from the past.. But I cannot NOT have a record of the awesome-ness of the Ooty trip and what it meant to me. Because it was more than just a tiny trip in so many ways than I can care to explain. Point being, at the end of it, I feel like myself again. Also, more importantly..and quite simply put, I realized how much I miss writing. The whole process of it might push me so far out of my comfort bubble at first, (and despite zilch battery backup, really really snail-paced internet speed, looming deadlines, no mobile network coverage, office photographers bailing, missing some good acts, etcetra etcetra.. ) that feeling in the end..of having finished what you started.. is worth every damn thing in the world..and more.  

Music can heal you, that much you’ve heard. But to really, truly experience it..is something beyond.. yes, phoenix-tears miracle level. (erm.. the fact that I don’t care about making cheesy Harry Potter references proves something I guess) Anyway, I’m tempted to go into details of each band and each song and all their significance and what train of thought each started in me..but every once in a while you reserve those for just a select few, one of whom I cannot thank enough for way too many things. 

PS: I read somewhere recently that holding a grudge is allowing someone to stay rent-free in your head. And god knows how much I HATE rent day. So there! you should try it.. quite liberating stuff that :) 

OOTY: The throb of tribal drums rings out in the chilly Ooty air as a dozen members of the Kurumba tribe, dressed in traditional garb, whirl around each other in a circle, chanting ancient songs about nature. The setting, however, is not the traditional temple venue. Nor is the audience made of the fellow faithful. Instead, the Kurumbas are on a modern stage, with spotlights and sound props, doing the opening act at the three-day Music, Arts and Dance (MAD) festival, before a large, predominantly young and urban crowd.

A conscious effort to promote local folk music and traditions prompted us to invite representatives of the major six tribes in the Nilgiris to perform at the festival, says MAD organiser Kabir Ahmed. “These tribes are the original custodians of the land. But their younger generation doesn’t appear to be interested in taking their traditional sound forward. The idea is to give them a platform that they deserve in an effort to preserve their voice and not let it die out,” Kabir says.

Hailing from Kodamoolai village near Gudalur town, the Kurumbas use traditional instruments called ‘thavulu’, ‘thambiti’ and ‘kallal’, which they make themselves and perform their traditional dance, passed down through the generations on special occasions like temple festivals and marriages. Far removed from their life sans electricity in the midst of a tea estate, for many, this is the first time they are performing on this sort of a stage. And, they love it.

Basavan, 46, is the only one in his village of 80-odd families who knows to play the ‘kallal’, a wind instrument. Enthusiasm amongst the younger population to learn and master the traditional instruments though present, is also slowly waning, he says.

“Their songs are about collecting honey, detailing the medicinal properties of plants passed on by their ancestors and paying rich tributes to the soil where they come from,” says Vasamalli, a state tribal welfare board member, who is helping the tribes to bridge the gap and voice their stories before newer audiences.

Though big names like Indian Ocean and Raghu Dixit Project pull in the crowd, the beauty of this music festival is that it allows people to stumble upon a little-known band or artiste, performing a genre that they never knew they would like. “I think Papon & The East India Company had a beautiful amalgamation of folk music from Assam and electronica, and it’s amazing how this music made me reconnect with my land in an instant,” says Pooja Binepal, a London-based investment broker, here for the festival.

La Pongal, a Chennai-based band that collaborates with folk artistes across Tamil Nadu, was formed with the single aim of pushing folk music with a contemporary twist, to the forefront. “We have drummers from Alanganallur in Madurai as well as Antony, from Thanjavur who are big names in rural pockets. It is not easy to coordinate schedules, but the love for folk music and the need to make it more accessible to more people drives us,” says founding member ‘Darbuka’ Siva. Velu from Madurai says he conducts workshops for children across the country to pass on his art.

Bangalore-based Swarathma goes a step further and uses folk, fusion and rock influences to not only incorporate folk dancers from Mandya district in their act, but also talk about present-day issues in society. Their next album ‘Topiwale’, which will be out soon, examines and does a quirky and sarcastic take on the hypocrisies of politicians. “We want to make use of art to propel and activate people. An ‘artivism’ of sorts,” says band member Vasu Dixit.

Shabnam Virmani of The Kabir Project describes folk musicians Mukhtiar Ali from Rajasthan and Prahlad Singh Tipaniya from Madhya Pradesh as rural rock stars. “You have to be in a village in Malwa, in Madhya Pradesh to experience the fan following that these artistes have, easily drawing crowds of thousands of villagers. A music festival like this allows the younger generation to connect with their roots,” Shabnam says.

Antony of La Pongal sums it up best when he says, “Folk music is in my blood. The artiste may die, but the art will never suffer the same fate.”