Explaining India

How do you explain India to a non-Indian?

Here’s how some people did:

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/features/brand-equity/creative-thinkers-strategists-doers-on-how-theyd-introduce-india-via-its-cultural-artifacts/articleshow/32242368.cms

And here’s how I would:

1. Read R.K.Narayan’s Swami and Friends. Or watch the television series Malgudi Days. Either is a great way to get to know the innocence of a small town India, now possibly long gone. But it goes some way to explain where we all come from - a resource-poor, imagination-rich culture.

2. Read Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. If Swami and Friends was our past, Sacred Games is our rambunctious, terribly untidy present. It presents contemporary big-city life in all its corrupt unholy mess - with unimaginable wealth on one hand and a lower middle class struggling to keep their head above water on the other. Maximum City could do the same with a less fictionalised version.

3. Watch a few episodes of Amir Khan’s Satyameva Jayate. It explains the peculiar problems of an India still held hostage to a past that can sometimes seem excessively regressive to a liberal Western world view.

4. Talk to a shop girl in any modern format shopping mall. She will show you the ambition and fierce need of a young India grasping at upward economic mobility.

5. Visit any old temple in south India. You will see how irrevocably linked religion and rituals are to life of people every day.

6. And watch a Bollywood flick like Zindagi Na Milegi Dobaara or Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. There is an India that is tuned in to Western sensibilities like never before - moneyed, well-travelled, as much part of a homogenized global culture as anyone in any part of the world.

Disappointment

It’s a funny life. A year back, I was stressed out, convinced I was burnt out, convinced my 24x7 advertising career was the stumbling block to my prospective writing career. There were so many things I wanted to do – learn Spanish, travel the world, write stories, read tons of books, blog. And all were at a stand-still because I couldn’t take time out of my job.



Today I have a job that gives me weekends. That is definitely not 24x7. That does not turn me into an anxious, frazzled wreck. Now I truly have the time to do all the things I really want to do. And what do I do?


Spend my mornings on Facebook and Pinterest, evenings on comedy central, my weekends watching movies I have watched a hundred times before. I used to be more regular at the gym a year back. A year back my blog had double the number of posts in the same time. I met my friends more often (I had more friends) and had more interesting conversations.


If I ask myself why this is so, I have no real answer. Maybe all this time on my hands rattles me. It might be that my innate laziness takes over and I would rather vegetate than work at something, even if that something should excite me. Or maybe, just maybe, hard work has a self-feeding mechanism – it makes you work even harder. A stressed out advertising executive makes time to pen that poem or get up an hour earlier to go to the gym because she feels compelled to make the little time she has count! Who knows why?


All I know is, I disappoint myself. The past year, I have found myself slipping back, not pushing myself enough, not being hungry enough. I need to wake myself up from this inertia. I need to get serious about my hobbies.

Stealing Joy

I have conversations with friends about life. About what it all means. About being 42 years old and wanting to do and experience so much more. About the mundaneness of it all. About working at jobs that excite us just 40% of the time. About postponing interesting things. About not having the discipline to sit down and put that story in our head down on paper. About not finishing War and Peace because we haven’t had enough free time. About not getting fit enough to climb Kilimanjaro or even Kota Kinabalu. About not living life today.

And then, on the other hand, life is also about figuring that you are handed out bits of serendipity every day. Like discovering Julian Barnes. Getting on a local train after ten years, on a cheap weekend trip to Matheran, a place you haven’t been to after living almost two decades in Mumbai. Watching The Namesake. Or Moneyball. And coming across Mary Oliver in unexpected places. Stealing joy from the mundane, each time you are handed one of these bits of extraordinariness.

God and me

The only instance I remember of my dad hitting me was when I refused to say my night time prayers. It is one of my earliest childhood memories and a surprising one. Because the person who was most influential in inculcating religion in me was my mother, not my father.

I prayed everyday right through my childhood up until I left home for life in a hostel. Most evenings I sat before a lit lamp in the pooja room, singing prayers I had learnt from my mother and reading religious books. I remember the temples I went to regularly and where I broke coconuts or performed archanas on significant birthdays. Mostly these were rituals I followed quite blindly. But sometimes they were bribes and sometimes deterrents to horrible things. I did not enter the puja room or a temple when I had my period. It was an unquestioning world I lived in. There was no dichotomy in my mind between religion as I practiced it and the books and writers I loved and studied or the politics I followed (I was quite sympathetic to the communist cause).

I am not sure as to when exactly it was that I became aware of a dichotomy. Maybe it was when I met for the first time people who were so confident about the non-existence of god. College mates who thought not going to the temple on your period days was regressive. And family members who used my religion as a means of driving a very divisive political agenda. And by the time I read Richard Dawkins, I had already begun to feel the ambiguity about religion I most definitely feel today.

It is hard to explain. I sometimes find immense peace in reading those thousand names of Lakshmi, the Bhagavat Gita, Valmiki's Ramayan, a ritual I follow by rote everyday. The last time I went to the Padmanabha temple in my hometown, I was quite literally moved to tears when I stood before the idol. My mind still goes to the devi in my ancestral temple in times of stress.

But more and more, I find myself looking at this whole spirituality business as a crutch in an increasingly stressful world. And now there are even more forms of it to tackle - the new age gurus with answers to all of life's problems, the vipassana centres, the strangely hypnotic 'secret' to happiness, all of that multi-million dollar self-help industry. I ask myself when does ritual become superstition, whether it is at all possible to truly know and believe in things beyond the rational, the tangible, the here and now. I ask myself if I would not be better off spending my time and energy in doing things that make me the best me that I can be, today. Honest hard work, perseverance, goodness as human beings - shouldn't these be enough for happiness? Isn't blind belief truly scary? And if belief is not blind, can it really be belief?

It haunts me; this question of religion and its significance in my life. I push it away and it keeps coming back. Years of conditioning do not go away in the face of rational arguments. And reading Nadeem Aslam's God and Me in Granta brought all that ambivalence rushing back. Skepticism is a good thing, I tell myself. At least it gives the world one less thing to fight over.

Priggishness

Adjective:
self-righteous, smug, stiff, stuffy, prim, puritanical, narrow-minded, pedantic, starchy (informal), self-satisfied, prudish, goody-goody (informal), holier-than-thou.

I can be a priggish, self-righteous idiotic toad.

The report card

23 blog posts, a couple of them decent. A job upgrade that wasn't really one. A freshly painted house. A new blog of experiments that quickly became defunct. Tiger sighting in Ranthambore. A disappointing I-phone. Being a tourist in Delhi. Showing my mom the Taj. Self-doubt like never before. Friends as back up. Prague. A grandmom's 90th birthday. Amsterdam. And not a single point in the bucket list that has been ticked off. Been that kind of a year.

Big City

I saw this city for the first time sixteen years ago. And I fell in love with it. Just like that. A small town girl dazzled by the big city lights. There was an anxious uncle hovering over me teaching me the basics of getting around the city - the trains, east and west, fast and slow, indicators and platforms. I took to it like fish to water. Within days, I had found PG digs. And here I was, a young woman on my own in the big bad world, embarking on the adventure of a lifetime.

It was the place where I felt grown up for the very first time. An adult, taking my own decisions, a bonafide working woman, independent and cool. When I got out of VT station, when I took a shared taxi and much later, when I looked out of a Nariman Point office over the Oval Maidan, my fantasy was quite complete. The girl who watched Colleen Khan in the Pond's Dreamflower ad with such longing was now Colleen Khan herself.

It was also the city where I fell in love. A city perfect for falling in love. With a million ways to be together and no one to forbid it. Late nights and countless movies, long train rides with the rain beating down on you in the doorway, longer taxi ones, Irish coffee at Prithvi, horrible sandwiches at Sundance, the sea spray on Marine Drive - I couldn't have been happier.

I am older today. I don't wear those rose tinted glasses anymore. I can see the brutality of the city without romanticising it. Traffic jams annoy me, the din during Diwali is excruciating. I can no longer get myself onto a crowded train and rain on my face feels more bothersome than romantic. I can feel the hardness in me.

So there are times when I dream of getting away from this city altogether - to a gentler, more gracious place. But just once in a while, in those half-awake moments of an early morning, or when I enter a new, noisy bar filled with pretty, young things, or even when I rush past Marine Drive towards some terribly boring meeting, those heady feelings of that first year in the city come flooding back - the adventure of growing up, of discovery, of youth and possibilities, of being incredibly, intensely alive.

And my 40 year old self knows she cannot leave this place just yet - if only to hold on to her 24 year old self for just a while longer.

Revisiting The Great Gatsby

Unbearable longing for something completely unworthy; desperately trying to be someone you are not; an ability to be so completely inhuman; holding in high regard things so completely superficial; tragedy that goes almost unnoticed by the world...The Great Gatsby is such a lyrical mirror to the human condition.

Random

A sense of end

And almost-closed chapters

Yet new is on hold

Old and stale

Tired in body and soul

Is spring ready?

Hope and fear

In equal measure wait

Bold goes missing

Gift

It’s big and shiny and purple

Too much bling, she said

Like those ones in Vogue

I am not Vogue