foibled spirit

Not only because it was plain maths without calculators

2009-07-11T21:38:00.000-07:00

Just out of a popular Mexican film
in which beautiful people made love to each other,
the woman from the land of Hans Christian Andersen
is having tea with her boyfriend from the land of Dalai Lama

She is soon shifting to pursue a Masters,
and is going to see less and less of him
He is upbeat about his getting a job next to the university,
about being able to continue to sleep by her side for many more years to come

He is saying something...She cannot hear
this music from the land of elephants is too loud
But would listening help - how could they understand each other
Not only because that writer who loved peeling potatoes in his novel Women in Love said so...

She had met this cute little Buddha four years ago,
He was 19, she was 31, she was 31 after a 12 year old relationship
with a man from the land of Euphrates and Tigris...of Saddam Hussein
She had gone through his papers 12 years ago in the embassy-he was 5'10'',he was 31

Little Buddha shifts his gaze from Chicago Cubs on the giant screen
He is looking at her - her white wrinkled skin, her blond hair, her blue eyes
traces of cinnamon from the pastry on her lips...her lips quiver to tell him that
they would never understand each other,
Not only because it was plain maths without calculators,
but also because that writer roaming the streets of Prague said,
almost said, oh why did he say that in No Saints or Angels

For Ivan Klima, D.H. Lawrence
Picture : Anant A.

So this blog

2009-05-03T00:09:00.000-07:00

So much for chain of thoughts. I just took out my Berkeley shirt from the washbasin. The green mark won't go away from the white shirt. A mark I put on it as I celebrated my first touchdown rolling without any reason on the green green grass. A trinket seller in Berkeley, who had his stall next to where I had bought the shirt, told me about Lalu and Indian elections. He gave me his card and promised to call me regarding Dalai Lama's visit to Santa Barbara - he never called. A trinket was taken from his place; a peacock feather in the form of an earlet found its way to my friend's hands and then to K. Writing on Walter Benjamin today, and hearing Kabir Suman mentioning the grammar of words in heart gone wrong, I remembered the trinket seller again and looked for his card, I had lost it. So this blog.

Naseem : Grandpa's stories as history through a caravan of personal memories

2008-12-28T02:54:00.000-08:00

While indexing a book on Partition Cinema, I came across a discussion of the film Naseem directed by Saeed Akhtar Mirza. Reading about the film compelled me to watch it.

The film mixes the personal and the political. It renders history through a caravan of personal memories and asks the audience to remember it alongside the pedagogical official histories.Tracking the everyday life of a Muslim household in Mumbai around the time of communal tension in 1992, the film with great nuance through each small incident/altercation makes one ponder over one's perspectives/views.

Watching Naseem, it is impossible not to note where films like Gadar and LOC go wrong, unleashing as they do at times a pornography of hypermasculinist(ic) violence to drive home messages, which seem to be limping over (secondary as they become to) the specter of high pitched rhetoric and bombardment at the audience of spectacular scenes.

Naseem portrays issues relating to religious conflict/amity, class conflicts, rewritings of history, and about a past which saw many futures for itself. This is the politics of the film (and it is wise in refining (and not prescribing) ways of coming to terms with trauma). The film also has an affective dimension.

In the film, Grandpa (played by Kaifi Azmi) tells stories to grand-daughter Naseem. While Naseem's brother and his friend continue to belligerently contend that the time for Grandpa's stories has come to an end in the midst of such communal strife, Naseem however, retains the innocence to imbibe the stories. Such an innocence means to understand the value of laughter while being told (so what if unscientifically so? that) the sky is blue because one painted it so and not yellow.

The main pivot of the film rests on these conversations between Naseem and her grandpa. Grandpa's stories are of those of his pre-Partition everyday life lived in Agra. Around the spectacle of the build-up to the Babri Masjid demolition, in a dim-lited room, dawn-fresh Naseem (the name translates as "morning breeze" in English) listens to her grandpa as he fades into the dusk.

On a personal note perhaps all of us start loosing our innocence when our grandparents' stories stop making sense. Rationality of "the history" which preaches the either/or logic needs to be seen alongside histories of Grandparents' stories. We need to re-member those stories.

animating it

2008-12-25T23:54:00.000-08:00

she drew eyes on the cloud
animating it
and he fell in love with her then...

little did she realize
he hardly knew anything
about the pain she felt...

mousing the eyelashes
setting the cloud free
on a blog page...

A visit to a friend’s house has its own secrecy

2008-09-29T22:44:00.000-07:00

In book stores, it is quite probable that you might find “Midnight’s Children” seating next to“Freedom Song” under the shelf, Indian Fiction. If these two starkly different objects were to talk to each other, I fancy an antagonism. The former revealed Salman Rushdie’s magical genius putting him in the company of a Gunter Grass and Garcia Marquez, while the latter is Amit Chaudhuri’s most defining work. Both these writers however not only have differences in styles and sensibilities, but hold dissimilar views as to the use of the ‘English’ language in describing India, its Indianness – the term holding a certain amount of irony for Chaudhuri.

Chaudhuri’s fiction also does not showcase an overt attempt for ‘discussions on’ and ‘concerns about’ nations, ethnography, science and technology - that distinction would go to Amitav Ghosh.

In terms of prose quality and its inherent beauty, he is often compared to Vikram Seth; both of them seem to have a musical quality in their prose, almost poetry in prose.

Of the Indian writers, writing in English staying in India (Chaudhuri is now settled in Kolkata), he shares with Geetha Hariharan, the absence of any great resolutions taken by characters throughout the novel as also in the palpable lack of any great apocalyptic or climactic endings. The differences between the two do exist, but the one of greater significance would be that Chaudhuri believes even more in the “act of understating”, there is a conscious effort on his part for creating a lack of dramatic moments in his novels.

Chaudhuri found the address of his first novel “A Strange and Sublime Address” to be a house in Calcutta (most of his fiction has been on the city, three novels and a collection of short stories,barring ‘Afternoon Raga’ which was on the life of an Oxford student), its setting partly inspired by Sir V.S Naipaul’s “A House for Mr. Biswas”, where a school boy from Bombay, Sandeep, is visiting his relatives and here itself Chaudhuri through his very young protagonist, who also wants to be a writer someday, lays down the defining point of story-telling - “The 'real' story, with its beginning, middle, and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist.” The story will be about deviations and digressions, and so it was, following which Chaudhuri has with great linguistic preciseness, immense discipline, poetic subtlety, and an even greater courage in one novel after another demonstrated this obsession with digressions, echoing perhaps Italo Calvino’s assertion “Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it.” As far as my reading of Chaudhuri is concerned, he hasn’t uptil now, till his last fiction “A New World” ‘denied’ it.

Lets take up the story of “Freedom Song” – an elderly couple in their sixties Khuku and her husband Shib, Khuku’s younger brother Bhola’s family members especially his wife whom we know as Bhaskar’s mother, and Khuku’s childhood friend from Sylhet, Mini, make up the main cast. What happens over a wintry month following the Babri Masjid demolition, in Calcutta – Khuku and Mini spend a few days together in Khuku’s house which are a holiday for Mini who is a school teacher; Bhola’s household is planning to marry off their son Bhaskar. Ending notes – Bhaskar does get married and prepares to go to Darjeeling with his wife for a honeymoon, Mini resumes teaching and Khuku lying in bed thinks of golden old days, and yet “Freedom Song” has so much life to offer.

Is there any great drama – well there certainly were chances created but – Mini’s arthritis pain could have gone worse, could have made her bed-ridden, but after the vacation she is walking again with that usual pain and struggle. In the arranged marriage-setting scenario, Bhaskar could have been smitten by a girl and would have left his home for that girl, he infact does have some feelings for a particular girl but the girl’s mother feels a bit averse about Bhaskar’s socialistic leanings, his commitments for the party and so Bhaskar does not get the girl of his first choice, he is sad only for a day and relents as regards choosing the second one. In the wake of Bombay riots following the demolition, one could have expected a heated discussion between Khuku and Suleiman, Khuku’s tabla accompanist, but there is only a blush of shyness and embarrassment.

Authors are intuitive beings, they love to gamble. In Franz Kafka’s stories there is an obsession with the pursuit of a greater thing, the story mirroring life seems to be a ‘process’ of finally realizing something, the digressions there point to obstacles in addition to problems of communication. In Chaudhuri’s elliptical most befittingly realized prose in “Freedom Song” the digressions serve as distanced observation. There is an obsession here too, if Kafka’s gamble is to bank on a possibility to achieve the end, Chaudhuri’s is to observe and describe “lived experience” of unfolding lives.

In ‘Freedom Song’ he has worked with a greater number of characters than “A Strange and Sublime Address” or “A New World” bringing with it a sense of chaos and delineating the layers of middle class existence. The latter two have a tendency of being pushed into describing a more sheltered existence – a house or an apartment flat.

Sometimes characters move and as they move an evening in a locality gets described, as they get up from their bed a morning Azaan is interpreted. While peeping into the lives of his characters,Chaudhuri mentions musical maestros Tagore and Nazrul littered here and there are their lyrical compositions, adda and street theatre, saris and colors, the experience of living in cramped flats and servants, streets and the state of public sector undertakings, their drawing-room conversations hinting at soft-Hindutva feelings, dust on leaves and birds humming, critics wontedly point to the realism of Joyce’s Dubliners.

If there is a more taut plot in “A New World”, Freedom Song had bargained for poetic trajectories, the characters drifting in thought. As a reader, one becomes aware of the necessity for reminiscences similar to a novel like “Mrs. Dalloway” but not really in the technique of “streams of consciousness”. Plumbing into the lives of his characters in a very unobtrusive way, almost gliding, Chaudhuri tries to connect the disparate stories together and along with his lively evocations of feelings and places serves to stitch together a story of ‘the city’ and ‘the coming of old age’. It is difficult to map a few lines towards the end of a novel with surfacing of ideas, but I will leave you with them to perhaps gain an understanding of Chaudhuri’s concerns.

“A visit to a friend’s house has its own secrecy. Sometimes there seems no reason, except a slight sense of boredom, hint of life’s emptiness, a memory of familiarity and a promise of pleasure….she’d come to this city with some trepidation and uncertainty to make her home here in old age. The young leave this city if they can; the old it seems, return to it; and this had been the incentive for coming here – the possibility of experiencing in ripe old age, the buoyancy of visiting known houses through this roads, of watching the old apparently arrest and embrace time as children and grandchildren grow taller and older surprising one.” (pg 197-198)

Book referred here is Amit Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song, PICADOR, 1998.

that which has been <-> what has been

2008-09-08T23:30:00.000-07:00

Coming from Ohio into California, you notice that continuous mountainous range as one drives in a car. Of course they are the "landscapes and sites", you would want to capture in photographs - telling the world, proving that you had been there, had felt it. Maybe "felt it" is a word not that readily associated with "images". Maybe "seen it" is, and again I guess, I am wrong, I am ambivalent.

"Images" and "Memory" are obviously bound together. Memory comes with, almost invites feelings. Marguerite Duras's protagonist in "The Lover" would qualify as a proof/witness, in her recounting life through seeing images from childhood.

So, dropping from Ohio into California, I recounted (not without a bit of that whimsical playful imagined memory-ing) the contrapuntal transitory scenes in "Annie Hall" from the interior snowing New York to sunny sunny California. That cinematic moment each time it came to my mind as we drove in California, gave another moment of joy.

So far, I have been completely "out of form" with my pictures, infact I was horrible in that "capturing act" of photographing because I never seemed to have the camera when the right image happened to be there - presented it-self in front of me. Leave alone that, when the camera was there, the battery was down or actually gone. So, when I was on the Amtrak Starlight coach, seeing the Pacific Coast and with nearly everyone of my fellow passengers clicking pictures of that wild vegetation, of those flying birds, the ocean and the mountains on an evening horizon, I had to figure something to cognitively fight my regret away.

I would never be able to say if I did not have the pictures that "i was there" , that "i had seen it". I could say, yes I did take a "picture" - picture in the way Ethan Hawke takes of Julie Delpy in "Before Sunrise". I could close my eyes, take a breath and let the image "sink in" :D, silly me.

I told myself, what Roland Barthes had said to the world a long time ago- the photograph is about the ‘that which has been’ and it certainly is not the "what has been". But "what has been" - will i ever be able to articulate it in words? - the beauty that I saw, and there you go because "what I saw" is not the same as "what was". My memory will be garbaged by trivial memory of route maps to remember, passwords I ought not forget, citations I better am able to cram for my prelims.

Washing Our Hands Off -- A Short Short

2008-07-13T01:06:00.000-07:00

The child is giving final touches to a crossword, which has shaped into the form of a toy - a female body. The child is thinking on fifty-six down, the last word that has a hint - anagram “EITLYSXUA”. The child figures it out. Mother sees Father hooked up to the T.V. – a ball match. Father is taking no notice of the child’s report card, which she has given him. Father switches to the News channel as ads come up. Mother tells Father that they are responsible for the child’s conduct today. The child had e-mailed a photograph to one of the child’s girl classmates. The photograph was of a M country's girl taking off pants from a near naked Z country's soldier’s body. That girl classmate had found it disgusting. “The language it contained,” mother says, “it was so sadistic.” Father says, “This is a common problem. Parents cannot force their children not to use the Internet and see pictures, and then mail it to someone they found interesting. They have every freedom to do it. It is the society, which has given it to them. Parents just have to follow the norms, give them their due. One cannot always supervise.” After a pause, he adds in a demonstratively consoling voice, “I will talk to him.”

Mother fumes at Father. The child resolves the anagram and puts the “Y” of “SEXUALITY”. The doll toy starts to talk and pleads in a very seductive voice. The child looks on with wide open eyes and with an expectant half-fulfilled smile playing on his lips. The doll says, “I am a feminist. I want to be like a man. Rearrange the acrosses and the downs. You genetician, do it for me”. Mother is calling to the child, “Dear, come here, papa wants to talk”. The child speaks to the doll, “Sweetie, the rules of the game made me do this. You asked for it. Mother is calling, if only parents could stop parenting. I will see what I can do. You chose this and I am not responsible.”

The child makes his way through the rooms into the drawing room. Father is listening attentively to the latest sound byte. The president is in the middle of a speech, “…the death of Harry is unfortunate. But he ought to have to have read the instructions. This is a time of deregulation. The State needs investments and consumers are free to choose. He should not have taken more than six pills. We are not washing our hands of this episode. It’s just that we want to liberate our citizens…”

Long Jottings

2008-07-13T00:41:00.000-07:00

Having the blog dead for a long time, I thought of thinking not too much and writing the largely un-happening things in short paragraphs.

We went to the Fourth of July celebrations. Families, Music and Fireworks. Heard and actually made sense of the music of the band there – thanks to a former university music student amongst us. She told us that both she and her husband now teach at an international school in Mussoorie. With Susa’s composition playing in the background, all of us ended up talking about the inevitable mixed feelings of loving and hating certain things as one lived in another world after having lived for so long in one. And some of those likes and dislikes just stick to you. Glued memories make dreamy eyes and fascinating conversation. Pointing to the instruments played around by the band, she explained to us - the newly arrived Indian folks, with awesome patience the difference between a bassoon and trombone.

The weather in Mid West (in end-summer now I guess) is just about perfect. One could sometimes do with a little more of the breeze perhaps. Thursday night movies at the mall and the walk back home are pleasant. Thursday nights are the party nights.

I recently read a colleague’s auto-ethnography. The story there went like two South-Asian straight men apparently when they were returning from the mall walking; a couple of drunken college kids yelled at them as being “Fags”. When they later went to a restaurant that same night, and were waiting in line to order food, another incident occurred which made the incident a story for reflection, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. A boy and a girl couple came and were looking at another boy-boy pair there with a kind of look in their eyes. The boy-boy pair just reacted, “We are not gays.” The whole Heteronormativity thing plays out in interesting ways – eyes tell tales too. One of the South-Asian boys who witnessed it and then wrote the auto-ethnography also mentioned, “We could not afford a car and were labeled. The incident, which followed later made us think we could not blame it completely on postcolonial and race etc stereotypes. Cultural codes take a different turn and remain ambivalent too.”

A resilient fetish of the society with the “norm”. Auto-ethnography continues to be regarded by some as navel-gazing, similar to blogs. Coming to think of what stopped me from blogging for such a long time, a couple of thoughts had perhaps contributed to the hesitancy – some views that blogging is just navel-gazing, selfish self-sensitivity.

Some other quite striking incidents related to me by my friends could also have played the role.

A would be father-in-law dismissed his would be son-in-law – a guy his daughter loved, on the grounds that because he blogged, he was selfish and would be preoccupied with himself to take care of his daughter.

My writer friend told me that she quit blogging because she was unable to write any good five pages of a fictional story while she was writing blogs. She introduced me to blogging when apparently she enjoyed it and now she has not only stopped blogging but finished a novel as well. I can’t blog much anymore and instead of writing fiction, I am still investigating the tragic loss of my novel of my pre-blogging days. Obviously these are stray incidents and one could argue against the presumed interpretations drawn from these perhaps more idiosyncratic mentioned cases.

To end these jottings, I recently watched some fantastic films belonging to what could perhaps be called post-Third-World Cinema (I hope I did not use an extra hyphen). Relatively contemporary ones included Sissako’s “Bamako”, which made me remember Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. Even if they speak, are they heard? Can their statements/expressions be comprehended? From the position of the subaltern, the incomprehension in the face of people who are even willing to listen to them, perhaps makes even wanting to express difficult. Suicides are expressions too.

comparitive experiencing of Newsgames with critical literature, films

2008-03-16T20:20:00.000-07:00

Ian Bogost and his studio Persuasive Games took their take on Newsgames and started steadily being published in the OP-ED section of the NY times during May of last year. Bogost's jottings on the same and the first game called Food Import Folly are a classic precedent. Some others like Points of Entry have followed leading to crudely polemical and candidly refreshing long discussions on various aspects of 'games' and 'serious games' at Kotaku. Starting from a discussion of whether games need to provide fun or not, the discussion steadily diverges and forks into various concerns like how does one understand 'fun'? Can 'engagement' be concerned 'fun'? Gamers also seem to be acknowledging how subjective that 'fun ' derived from playing a game can turn out to be. While extreme positions definitely exist on both sides - some saying serious games are only for stupid pseudo-intellectuals while the other side at times coming close to being condescending as regards people who play violent games by terming them as largely unsophisticated.

Various other pondering(s) find their place - Do such games betray too much of a political message from their producers?, What does it mean now for them to be freely accessible to a large number of Internet users? What happens when one no longer requires specific set of skills to engage with games?

Perhaps the question which is really at stake is ...Do such games help in developing informed critical thinking? Does reading a comprehensive article in NY times about the immigration problem and playing a game over allocating merit-based green cards develop similar consciousness about challenging and probing issues? Maybe the question needs to be worded differently. Obviously, different media forms are experienced differently and one is certainly not asking for superficial effects-oriented studies. Yet, one could very well interrogate the comparative experiencing of these new set of serious games with say critical literature, or film on similar subjects. Certainly questions worth pondering upon as one thinks of persuasive games/serious games/edutainment/critical simulation/ideological videogames...

cracking pass-word(s), yes

2008-03-07T21:57:00.000-08:00

In 2146, an historian found an archived entry in some media form which used to be called a blog. It was dated from 8th March, 2008...

"I got up from my bed, and looked at the mirror, to look at myself. This act of mine is not much different from my experience of writing this blog today. I felt old today looking myself in the mirror and the same feeling stays with me as I write this blog. When I die, to write my biography, people shall look at my blogs I guess. People won't look for those diaries in stacked corners, in labyrinth cellars, or behind pillows. No diaries but blogs. Also, no correspondence through letters but they would be analyzing my emails, cracking passwords;cracking pass-word(s), yes."

Inspired by a reading of Javier Marias' "All souls"

much like an editorial response...

2008-03-02T17:29:00.000-08:00

The question again and again asked is whether these are 'simplistic videogames' or indeed even 'videogames'. One does not find a story/narrative/plot nor immersion. While September 12 seems to be a reaction at the collateral damage happening as a result of the war on terror, Madrid is an expression of 'empathy for /solidarity with' the victims of 2004 Madrid bomb blasts . There is no sense of victory in either games. No adversaries, no heroes in sight. Frasca's games are unconventional if at all considered games. Frasca has at times categorically mentioned September 12 is a simulation, not a game.

Both the games certainly are critical simulations of situations, adding more meaning into them by reconstructing say the 'war' and/or 'bombings', however, it would be safe to presume that one cannot be expected to play the game more than ten times. It does not have repeat value for the same person playing it. However, it is a credible response against a position, an ideology...much like an editorial response...

derrida, lights, aesthetic, comma,,,

2008-03-02T17:04:00.000-08:00

blur, dim, perceptible, passwords, signifier, derrida, lights, aesthetic, comma, hyphen, cine-ma, referent, enigma, coke, classified, sip, muffle, crackle, dawn, dusk, excrescence, sim,,,

what is poetry but the joy of

2008-02-27T19:21:00.000-08:00

Ironical to have not seen everyday life in normal curves

our statistics teacher gives us an opportunity

to write about a thing which gives us joy;

she must have had a hundred answers by now

and she must be exclaiming differently to each

the joy of visiting bolivia

the joy of sitting on a beach

the joy of imagination

the joy of sleeping for eight hours without an alarm

the joy of scoring a hundred out of hundred

the joy of getting to see a child smile

the joy of having done something for someone

the joy of having a cup of coffee after a walk on snow

the joy of teeth touch with ice-coffee

what is poetry but the joy of putting a misplaced metaphor amidst the order of language

what is music but the joy of putting a dissonant note in the sea of consonance

what is life but ...

Nintendo Gamecube

2008-02-23T12:42:00.000-08:00

From the flash game mentioned in last class, I progressed to Nintendo Gamecube. Thanks to first seeing two young players Jojo (7 yrs) and Lala (6 yrs) play it, and then with their help finding my way through the some games in ‘Sonic Adventure Two Battles’ like ‘Metal Harbor’, ‘Emerald Finding Race’, and ‘City Escape’. While I tended to enjoy the more slower analytical game of finding the emerald, Jojo and Lala yearned to play the racier ‘Metal Harbor’. The former is a treasure hunt, probing for the treasure in oceans and caves; the latter is a dizzying race in a harbor with many obstacles on the way. With the control in ones’ hands vibrating giving a tactile sensation, when one was hit helped because an inexperienced player like me could not always be sure of where and what I was on the screen. Also, though there was violence involved, the visuals were rather calm and soothing, and not gory.

I especially liked the ‘story’, which came in as a kind of ‘cut-in’ between two games when the Sonic or Metal Sonic (player character in the game) can go to Chao garden where eggs are kept. The story for the same goes like this – you can either choose to be Hero Chao (in which case you will be saving the world) or a Dark Chao (in which case you will be destroying the world). You get to have a hand in the Chao selection if you can make your way to the Chao garden where the eggs are reared. You have the Hero Garden and the Dark Garden for the respective kind of eggs. What was funny as well as clearly palpable and that drew laughs from both my young fellow players were the contrasting scenes of the two gardens. The Hero garden with flowers, butterflies, greenery and blue streams resembled ‘Heaven’ and the Dark garden with red black flowing streams and caricatures of devils dancing resembled ‘Hell’.

For my next Gamecube experience, I have decided to photoshoot Jojo and Lala playing, and improve my motor hand and finger skills with the control if I have to beat Jojo in the games.

Jhadoo Maro flash game

2008-02-23T12:33:00.000-08:00

‘Jhadoo Maro’ flash game takes place in a situation, which takes its context from the larger narrative of protests and negotiations that have taken place between Dow Chemical officials and activists involved with protests surrounding Bhopal Gas tragedy. The game is rather simple to play with the game player being a woman hitting with a broom an official of Dow Chemicals. Dow Chemicals took over Union Carbide whose industrial plant in Bhopal had led to the disaster. One tends to get points based on the timing of the broom hit as well as the force with which the hit is affected.

It is interesting to observe that the player is impersonating a woman and there is an identification that is being asked for from the player/audience because a majority of the survivors/victims of the Bhopal Gas tragedy have been women. One can also find pictures of women with Jhadoo in their hand protesting outside Dow Chemical office buildings in the earlier demonstrations undertaken by the Bhopal activists. Thus, while playing the game, one could experience oneself being an activist. In addition to that, I did experience a certain thrill in perfecting the art of hitting with the broom.

However, if it was meant to be a complete resemblance, one would have expected the woman in the game to be wearing a sari or a more authentic indigenous Indian costume. That is not the case. Though, one should be cautious of reading too much into this, the fact that the women is wearing an improvised ambiguous costume, it could mean that the character has been kept open and the player could fill in his/her own interpretation. It is also possible that with the local movement in Bhopal getting allied with transnational advocacy networks throughout the world, the representation of the woman is left ambiguous in the hope that more multiple fluid identities of the character can be formed, thus reaffirming that local disasters could have global answers and people in developed countries as global citizens can play their part in speaking against MNCs like Dow.

and the book we could not read together

2008-02-17T22:36:00.000-08:00

She came to me

so that we could read a book together

She wrapped us around a shawl

We had returned from mountains

Somehow we could never read the book together

Her hands traced the alphabets in black slower than mine

I would end up wanting to talk about what I saw in them

She would put a finger to my lips

and then she went to sleep

A deep sleep and I could not go to sleep

So I sat and looked at her

and the book we could not read together

interpreting punctuations of snow in the sentence of a road

2007-12-19T22:37:00.000-08:00

I take the daily walks to the main university library, called the Jerome Library. I do not regret it the least;having got a Javier Marias and Paul Auster, I can take rest in the cosy comfort of some delightfully inventive fiction.

After my first semester here, the inactivity of vacation is endearing...and that reminds me I still have a couple of activities for tomorrow - doing the laundry, cleaning the kitchen, shopping for groceries, attending a lunch invitation, seeing a film and thinking up my research proposal

And I might not just do any of these for the Auster novel that I have picked up and hope to get wrangled with...long walks in the snow are very much bearable for now as one finds oneself looking for and interpreting the punctuations of snow in the sentence of a road

For now it is poetic, then it shall turn melancholic, and then after five months depressing

2007-12-08T19:32:00.000-08:00

It is almost there everywhere

When they ask me 'Aren't you not overwhelmed coming from a hot and wet country'

Some of my other PIGS (Poor Indian Graduate Students) friends have quite often gestured

A bit derisive about my lack of reaction

It takes sometime for me to see and remember some of the pictures from my favorite American movies

And then connect them together...

For now it is poetic, then it shall turn melancholic, and then after five months depressing

mixture would remain just a memory

2007-12-03T00:46:00.001-08:00

The autumn came and by the time it left,

bared the tree...

When it was not winter and the sun still used to come

With my back to the sun facing the laptop

I could see the shadow of the tree on my laptop screen

This sight would fill me with a mixture of melancholy and joy

For the time of the winter I guess,

that mixture would remain just a memory...

a trip to Walmart today

on a broken-pedaled cycle seemed an adventure

what with rain coming and the wind blowing

all at the odd coincidental time

waiting at a traffic signal,

i looked at more fortunate people in cars

moments of self-pity left me soon

when a 60 year old sweetly wrinkly lady

passed me by

saying a hello

riding a tricycle,

smoking merrily a cigarette

a 60-year old lady

will that lady be another memory

or shall i meet her the next time

in Walmart, smoking merrily and saying

Have a Good Day

on a windy, chilly, rainy day!!

the link with the body and the mind could not be more poetic

2007-11-16T07:31:00.000-08:00

some events, which help one to breathe out of the cooking, eating, sleeping, studying routine

actually too many of them for a week

and yet this week one also got to mull about evolution and human society...

about relationships and what forgetting them means at the moment of remembrance...

not to say the least that a lot of good food and bad talk is always difficult digesting

Tahader Katha came up as a film which builds around the theme of 'digestion' - both mental and physical

it also hints how if dreams for which one struggled seem still far afar ,

one's ability to digest other people's shit talk lessens...

the link with the body and the mind could not be more poetic

I want to walk with that girl for whom I started reading my first story book

2007-10-14T19:19:00.000-07:00

Why does rituporno put a rabindrasangeet in certain scenes of his film

Why is one inclined to sleep more as temperatures come down...

Why do I want to walk with that girl for whom I started reading my first story book, once again today

Why do I remember each day now that the puja countdown has begun

All of these questions have easy answers, but are they the only answers!!!!

in a trimmed ohio field with a cemented pitch

2007-10-09T17:27:00.003-07:00

a really really long weekend passed by

four days of length it was

spent in dis-engaged activities

reading, cooking, sleeping

and oh yes a haircut -- really really short

and actually cricket - a couple of indians and desis getting together

in a trimmed ohio field with a cemented pitch

for a ten overs match with drinks, served by local farmer households

american countryside is an experience, a warm one

should reality be represented?

2007-10-04T18:04:00.000-07:00

any representation of reality is not the correct representation

so, should reality be represented?

reality should be represented in a way so that social change is possible

i do not know which way to concur!!

happy to hear stories, deep wonderful stories that religion has endowed us with

myths of religion - these stories, these beautiful stories....

narrated images into my eyes

2007-09-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

finally with the laptop in university library

but with the tactile pleasure of holding a NY Times this morning too

some good old Japanese fictional novels came my way

and they narrated images into my eyes

stacks and stacks of books and journals,

people laboring on....wish i could snap a photograph

Can we make characters talk to each other , in the way they talk to themselves!

2007-09-14T20:55:00.000-07:00

Highlights of this Week

Two quickly written papers, not very satisfying...

Reading Swartz and understanding power and resistance to it

Seeing Goddard's 'Breathless', I came to the question - is the intra-personal communication at any point of time excluded from the inter-personal communication?

Can we make characters talk to each other , in the way they talk to themselves!

Consumerism seems to be the 'act' or 'activity' in SL, all my peers were trying new clothes, new hair, new skin and I as a newbee just looked around...completely lost as I do if a shopping mall does not have a bookstore

The pictures one gets to snap in SL sometimes remind of a pastiche-ness of Cubism and Neo-constructivism, i could be mistaken but then i am not an art historian :)