tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90802689674602840042024-03-13T23:58:03.131+02:00 Blooming against the fence and all that Looking back. Looking forward. Looking confused. Whatever...Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-34677993179149653142015-12-10T17:50:00.000+02:002015-12-10T17:51:52.489+02:00Open mouthed and open ended<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Last month I wrote here on the <a href="http://nilanjanabose.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-write-story-five-guidelines.html">distilled wisdom</a> of five years of writing, well I have been writing all my life really, but that was unaware putting down of words on paper, whereas last few years I have approached the writing a little more armed and aware; a little less emotional, more in control, but of course only just. And I said in that post that the endings I liked were a bit messy, a couple loose ends here and there, something that could go on in the reader's head after s/he had shut the book. Open ended stories, in other words.</div>
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Just after I posted that nugget, I had the rare fortune of having a short of mine critiqued in detail by a publisher. The patron goddess of wisdom, who is also the patron of writing incidentally, obviously has a wicked sense of humour. The critique I received, itself about half the length of the story, a thorough job! and its message was that my story had a beginning, and a middle, but no end. It apparently failed to deliver because it left too many unanswered questions. If this had happened five years ago, I would probably have been reduced instantly to a wreck. But that is irrelevant. I hadn't submitted my work for publication, and so perhaps the 'rejection' for it was definitely a rejection, didn't feel overwhelmingly catastrophic or anything. More like a quiet joke life was snickering at. "Open endings, hah! Take that!"</div>
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Coming back to the point - the whole thing made me wonder, are open ended stories such damp squibs really? Forget my short, it might have other flaws apart from the unanswered questions, but generally? Didn't the father of the modern short story Chekhov himself favour open ended shorts? So many other writers seem to do too - take at peek <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/feb/06/an-unexpected-ending-for-literary-progress">here</a>, and I am sure there are readers who do as well. I mean, I'd understand a reader who wouldn't want to be left hanging after reading a 200 page novel, but a 2000 word story? What do you think? Do you feel cheated if some of the questions are left unanswered? Does an open ending deliver any reading satisfaction for you?</div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-1708670915645934872015-11-23T12:30:00.000+02:002015-11-23T12:30:39.459+02:00How to write a story: five guidelines gleaned in five years<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Think of a story. Then cut it in half. Then in quarters. Pick up each quarter and isolate it. Bundle it up in such a way that it feels kind of complete in itself. And then choose from the second, third or fourth where you're going to begin, maybe a point where the emotion's a little intense; or maybe cool, reflective. Pick a happening event and start in the middle of things. That gives the story the narrative space to vault into the back story, which is not the back story at all, but the beginning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>In media res</i>. In the middle of things. Even the epics are written like this. What's good enough for Homer and Krishna Dwaipayana is certainly good enough for me the paler mortal.</span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Guideline no 1: Never begin at the beginning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Beginning anything is difficult. Once a thing starts moving, it pretty much keeps on moving unless an effort is made to bring it to a stop. Who said that? Newton, I think. Ask any machinery operator, or an entrepreneur - start-ups require the maximum energy and attention. Once things have started going, momentum carries them along, purring nicely. What holds good for the entire solar system certainly holds good for me the tiny speck.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If the story begins in the middle somewhere, in the thick of action or plot, when it is three-quarters over in the writer's head, then obviously it is already more than half-done and done well.</span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Guideline no 2: A story well-begun is half done</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Whatever it is you are writing, it must grab the reader's attention and keep it. The story must hook the reader with its beginning, and not let him go till the finish. Collude with him so that he is part of the action, part of the characters' psyche, living inside their heads almost as much as the writer. Show him that only the paths are different but the choices and challenges, the indecision, the heartbreak, the triumph and tears, are the same.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Each of us lives in our separate bubble of time and place, with its own micro-environment, culture, mega-issues and stress. But a good yarn must break through all that and take him out of himself, engage him in another, perhaps unknown place, an imaginary bubble that doesn't exist in the physical world. Ensure familiarity by telling him mini-tales he already knows, motifs so familiar in our collective culture that he recognises them instantly and unconsciously. But also challenge him by not spelling out every little detail, let him fill in some blanks himself. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The epics do it by referring to well-known oral traditions, crystallising them and embedding them into the narrative. Modern writers do it by drawing upon the epics, on the collective art and literature of the world. And like I said, what's good enough for Vyasa...</span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So, Guideline no 3: Collude and allude</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A short story does its work in max 7500 words, most of them less than half that amount nowadays to accommodate changing tastes and shortening attention-spans. Micro-stories pare it down to less than 100 words sometimes, poetry even less. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The reader however sees a couple of pages, reads it in a few minutes. He doesn't even get a whiff of the internal madness that has gone into the making of it, however short or long. The agony of where exactly to start, how to build the tension, what motifs to stud into the narrative, the meticulousness that has gone into choosing one particular word over another, he will see none of it. A tale well-told must always appear effortless, but there must be madness in the method. Otherwise the story will be lifeless and dry. That is the covert madness, the writer's passion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What the reader will see is the conflict and the climax, where the story peaks, the characters and action go a little mad. And then they make their choices, the action falls gradually away into the end. Things going a bit mad in the story somewhere is what makes or breaks the middle. Unless the plot 'thickens' the story flags and the readers yawn, put the book down, or click away to another site.</span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Guideline no 4: There must be madness in the middle, and in the method</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Ever notice that a story is supposed to be an arc? Even a storyline is an arc, because a straight line is really a curve, a segment from a circle of an infinite radius. Everything is a cycle, a circle, a loop. The show always goes on. With or without you, the narrator. The show must go on in the readers' head, there are no endings; only a point where you must judge your exit and finish speaking. Timing is crucial. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">All good stories stop short of an ending and let the reader carry on with the denouement. And if the beginning has been chosen well, the ending is a piece of cake. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sometimes, even the writer himself can pick up the threads and carry on - writing a trilogy or septet as is the favoured mode nowadays. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Let me just say here that these guidelines, and I use the word guidelines loosely, apply outside of fiction as well. To poetry for instance. They even apply to blog posts. Actually this blog post starts with Guideline 5 and not 1. But I sliced it up and started with the end. Which could double up as easily as an actual ending too. See what I mean?</span></div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-62276471650282805672015-09-30T13:44:00.002+02:002015-09-30T13:44:57.827+02:00A bit of babble, but not much squeak<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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For the last three months, words haven't poured out of me as they normally do. I like to think that it's because my patience and/or my control has become better, but I suspect it's more to do with knowing to shut up when at a loss for words. Is that an improvement? Never mind.<br />
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The biggest thing that's happened in the past months was the vacation and the book launch. The IB-HCI anthology was finally done and released on Aug 1st. Two separate launch events were held, sadly none at Kolkata, so I had to be satisfied with photos and reports and emails, but that didn't matter so much because I never expected that I would be attending anyways. It just felt wonderful to see it all come together and to hold it in my hands. And it has been a thrilling and a huge learning experience all the way - from presenting the contest ideas through to being mentored by <a href="http://ashokbanker.com/">Ashok Banker</a> and the whole process of edits with the HCI team.<br />
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It's available from various retailers, here's the link from <a href="http://www.flipkart.com/ten-love-stories-indiblogger-selection-english/p/itme8exggkakznhg?pid=9789351773825&ref=L%3A-1781133401074021760&srno=p_1&query=10+love+stories+indiblogger+&otracker=from-search">Flipkart.</a> <br />
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-53325446866346170442015-06-17T10:28:00.001+02:002015-06-17T10:28:20.709+02:00No babble, no squeak<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Sometimes, a lot happens but doesn't exactly produce a pile of writing. Looking back, a lot has happened since I wrote here last - I joined a writers' group, I submitted poems, I got through some final edits of the final edits of the anthology, I started off a new story which is taking its own sweet time to get to the end, I wrote a guest post on a blog that I admire (wow!), I sat myself sternly down and completed the first draft of a poetry manuscript, and I wrote a bunch of poems for my blog and just like that. All the usual stuff that one can't really write about, they don't lend themselves to a dramatic narrative anywhere.<br />
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Then there's the other stuff - how the son did something right when he had the choice of easy on a platter, and both heart and head got swollen up to the point of bursting with pride and happiness and concern too. An old friend said she was coming to a neighbouring country and asked if we could meet up there? and how the stars and the universe and the immigration bureaucrats aligned up their wills to make that happen. A close relative suddenly made a gift that took the breath away with its generosity and love, and another said bitter things that made for discomfiture and bafflement. No amount of dramatic narratives would do these justice, if I wanted to write them down, which I don't. I keep these hushed inside myself for as long as possible, away from the sunlight, away from the babble and squeak of everyday meaningless noise.</div>
Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-72774864846505209952015-03-31T15:27:00.000+02:002015-03-31T15:27:43.824+02:00In love with love<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">It never ceases to amaze me that English,
which is one of the richest and oldest languages, certainly older than Bengali
my mother tongue, and richer with a vocabulary of more than a million
words compared to Bengali's 100,000; but English has just one word for love,
okay two if you count affection. Neither of them are nuanced, neither of
them indicate the nature of the emotion, the object to which it is directed. Clipped and curt and businesslike, it gives you the state of the one who
feels it but no further details. In the Indian languages I speak/know,
and in Arabic which I try to speak and know a little, there are several words
for love. In Bengali, there is general love, there is romantic/sexual
love, there is the affection felt towards someone younger, there is the love of
a mother towards a child, there is spiritual love directed at a divine being. And portmanteau words, which are an integral part of the normal language,
no neologisms there, yield unending variants: mother-love, brother-love,
son/daughter-love, friend-love. Does this say anything about the speakers
of the languages? I mean, apart from the fact that Bengalis are dreamy
navel-gazing idealists in love with love?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Last couple of months have just zipped by
- the child went on his first independent, international trip with his class to
France, and all my energies in the days of his journey and leading upto it were
taken up with not unravelling with worry and spoiling it for him. He managed
fine though he did not wear as many layers as I had required and entreated and
begged him to. Once he reached, there was no way to communicate directly
with him, but I survived somehow. Glued to the updates that his teachers
provided. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Also the alternative medicine didn't work,
not an iota of improvement after 6 weeks of relentless and fussy doses of pills
and restrictions, so went back to the regular ENT and got regular allergy
medicine, which seems to be working fine so far. Breathing in, breathing
out. What more does one need? Keeps it simple, the priorities, love it
simple. Wonder if there is a word for that in Bengali?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Tomorrow, or rather in a few hours, the A-Z Challenge starts, and this time I am better organised about both the reading, writing and visiting. I am not sure whether I should sign up with this blog too, I had originally thought I would, because then I could plan the ones on M-i-V and this could be completely spontaneous, I am a pantzer by inclination! But then again it might be better to wait for the third year to do that. </span></div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-26899757098471565712015-01-14T12:07:00.000+02:002015-01-14T12:07:52.735+02:00Minor epiphanies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Is it enough time now? To look back on the year 2014 with some perspective, I
mean. It's been a very mixed year for me personally. Joyous family
occasions and visits in the first half of the year made it go down sweet and
smooth in one long, breathless swig. But then a whole lot of things
happened in the second half, some mere irritants and some rather awful. They steadily drip-dripped all through, eroding morale and mood. So I kept putting off the stock taking, the mental toting up of pluses
and minuses. Meanwhile we are already halfway through January and the
first few global disasters have already muddied the waters - Charlie and Boko
Haram. And while je ne suis pas Charlie, je suis Ahmed more likely, and
je ai eu some sort of epiphany definitely. There is never going to be a
better time, for anything. This is the way it is, warts and all, and if I
want to sum up, it will have to be done with them included. I can't slice into
time, hold up a skein to the light, turn it this way and that, to make the past
look or feel better than it was.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The worst of course was death, and last
year it happened to come in threes. First a friend, then an aunt, then a
friend's mother who I called aunt, and who had once done up my hair as a child,
which incidentally my real blood-aunt had never done. That's how my life
has been, strangers and friends have done for me what relatives normally do,
and I see this repeated in my son's life as well, the perk-pitfall of
expathood. But I digress. In between the deaths, there were the usual annoyances of relocation
- the shipment took ages to arrive, a couple of books were slit into halves by
the customs while checking for contraband, a few possessions of no particular
value but prized nevertheless, got lost or broken. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Somewhere along the line, my connect with
Bahrain snapped, a place where I was happy to be previously, now feels vaguely
strange, strangely claustrophobic. On the other hand, my connect with Egypt, which seemed to
have snapped clean as I had got ready to move and pack over the long summer, I
now find hasn't really, ragged threads here and there persist and surprise me
still. Even the usual remedy of going away on a holiday and then the return,
that coming back to own spaces and the aha moment which usually drives the nail home as to where
home really is, failed to work this time. The son was supposed to go on a
school trip, a strategy I had thought would settle him in, but backfired big
time as the visa didn't come through in time. At the very start of our
holiday in mid-December, he had a nasty fall and hurt his ankle, and we ended
up going to the airport via the orthopaedic surgeon's clinic. Fortunately it
wasn't a fracture, but a ligament injury can be almost as serious. He is
a total trooper and happily trudged on with an ankle brace for the holiday, but
our enjoyment was rimmed with concern and initial panic. A mixed holiday
to round off a mixed year.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">But it's not all bad. It never is.
There have been highs as well. Writing-wise, and family moments; spikes
of enjoyment and laughter with friends. I have finally taken control of my health, and
have resolved to sort myself out in 2015 once and for all. Trying some
alternative medicine right now, which admittedly isn't working, but we'll see.
A time frame of three months, and then I dive into more intrusive treatments,
which I have been avoiding for the past five years because I am a bit scared of
it. Wealthier and wiser seem elusive, but healthier is an objective I can do
something about! And I'm going to get a grip on the anxiety and the needless
panic. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I know I feel this every January, I felt
this way about 2014 as well, and boy, was I right! This year too feels
important somehow, meaningful in some obscure way, as if I am just months or
weeks away from something greatly significant. As if the changes haven't
finished with us yet. I don't know whether that change is going to be for the
better or worse, I hope it is for the better, but I know as long as we hang in together, we will manage to cope if, by chance, it is
not. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-87287983718682926062014-12-09T13:16:00.000+02:002014-12-09T15:55:28.300+02:00Unfinished and unbalanced<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This year, as in all years, I try to tote up balance sheets, the
profits and losses, the learning and the opportunities lost, and it seems overall like
a hard year to sum. It has been a hard
year, harder than usual, difficult in complicated ways.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I have travelled back and forth, I have moved
home, I have battled with my usual, baffling, allergy-related illness and ye olde
spirit is finally flagging, I am more uncomfortable in this body and its odd “disability”
at this moment than I have ever been in the last five years. I started learning Arabic and then stopped, I
am not sure whether this is going to be a permanent break or if I will be able
to pick it up again next year. I blogged
and wrote much, but still couldn’t complete the edits to the novella, and now
that I think about it, maybe I should rewrite the whole thing, keep the kernel
and scrap the rest. A bit disappointing
either way. On the other hand, I also wrote
a whole bunch of flashes and short stories and poems, some of them felt real
good too, I started a new blog where I am less poetry and more me, all me in
fact. A blogpost here won an award. But right now all that doesn’t feel as
important, as monumental as the things that didn’t get done. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When I had come to Bahrain more than eighteen years ago,
that was a huge change, from a working woman to a trailing spouse, from a big
city, dwarfed in an even vaster country, to an island nation where one fell off
the farthest edge after an hour’s drive.
Claustrophobia would have been justified then,
but I am feeling it now with a lag of eighteen years. As it was, I had got on with the job at hand
and settled down and made the most of, even revelled at the staying-at-home
part then. I learned to cook and bake,
found flexi-time jobs, wrested new computer skills, started a family, learned knitting
from scratch, read a lot, made up stories and poems for my infant son, and left
myself no time for disgruntlement. Moving back here from Cairo seems minor in
comparison, I already know the territory, both physical and psychological. So
it feels a bit weird now, to be hit with this irritable restlessness, this
chafing at a way of life that has been long familiar, in fact enriching even,
truth be told. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is patently obvious that
the further I have journeyed from my place of birth, the more time and
resources I have had to look at my paths mindfully and critically, to regulate
the pace of the travel; to glean, at leisure and unstressed, whatever insights
that might have been granted me. I have been lucky in more ways than one, so it
feels petty and above all quite baffling to give way to an attack of negativity. To lose my perspective and let it be coloured
by the temporary heartaches of the last half of the year. Maybe I should revisit all this later this
month, leave this blog post unfinished as of now. The year is not yet over. I think that is just what I will do.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-18389080530717701142014-10-21T05:27:00.000+02:002014-10-21T08:44:58.215+02:00Forever Indian II<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh29iFsRv3fEPYLnegilkPHnktob4fa8BDlGzMYOsY6s17h4sQmHHCQRo61H0L1fmQs-0Xp0PGO-ZZaPOdJEwoyJ_f_1IcxwXGpwP01q2w3sXbMmUMm3vMA4KXzdwbS9WArdSGwmt63jyt_/s1600/tata.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh29iFsRv3fEPYLnegilkPHnktob4fa8BDlGzMYOsY6s17h4sQmHHCQRo61H0L1fmQs-0Xp0PGO-ZZaPOdJEwoyJ_f_1IcxwXGpwP01q2w3sXbMmUMm3vMA4KXzdwbS9WArdSGwmt63jyt_/s1600/tata.jpg" height="400" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Banners in front of the Tata office, Mokattam, Cairo</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #191919; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">What, Indianisation?
Again? Well, yes. In a </span><a href="http://nilanjanabose.blogspot.com/2014/10/more-indian-than-you-think.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;" target="_blank">previous post</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #191919; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">, I have put forward a historical perspective on the
multifarious ways the world has been Indianised, past and present. I have dutifully looked at facts and blathered
on about figures - populations and diaspora, trade and FDI. I don’t say facts and numbers are not
important, they are. Extremely important. But they are kind of dry. Lack the thrill sometimes, that sense of
amazement on unearthing some tiny miracle tucked into the
mundane somewhere, wholly unexpected.
Nope, numbers can never tell the entire story. For that one has to look beyond them. </span><br />
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<i><u><span style="background: white; color: #191919; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><b>Jahaan bhi jaaun yeh
lagta hai teri mehfil hai</b><o:p></o:p></span></u></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My personal experience of living in 4 foreign countries (Nigeria,
Egypt, UAE and Bahrain) and travelling 20-odd has always taken me places which
turned out more Indian than I ever expected. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Through the 70’s, I lived in two different small towns in remotest
north-eastern Nigeria. Facilities were
basic - a primary school, two secondary schools – one each for boys and girls,
one hospital, one small departmental store, a traditional market, no
restaurants. However, both towns had
open-air cinemas, and to my delight, Hindi movies were regularly screened to
packed houses. The films and the film-stars both had a massive fan
following. I have watched more Bollywood
films living abroad, first as a child in Nigeria, then as an adult in the Gulf,
than I have living in India.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In Egypt, where I lived till recently, the fandom of Amitabh
Bachchan is far-reaching. When he visited Cairo in the early nineties, the
immigration formalities had to be completed at his hotel because the airport
was mobbed. I have heard personal
anecdotes of Egyptian fans going to extreme lengths for an autograph or a
memento. In Sharm-el-Sheikh, a cab-driver has talked about his favourite
Bollywood celebrities, and his knowledge about our films was way more than
mine. All this in spite of restrictions
placed on Indian films in Egypt since 1987! This has recently been relaxed, and
Bollywood films are gradually making their way back into Egyptian theatres
again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In both Egypt and the Gulf, Hindi films dubbed/subtitled in Arabic are
beamed into homes through dedicated TV channels too. Not just films, surfing through channels
in a hotel in Morocco, my husband has suddenly chanced upon a dubbed Hindi soap. Surfing channels, I have come upon ‘So You
Think You Can Dance’, and to my surprise, not only did non-Indian dancers perform a fusion Indian dance, but also the judges of European descent remarked on how their
performance drew from <i>kathak</i>. Indian entertainment is popular practically
everywhere.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So is Indian food. From
Amman to Zurich, there are Indian restaurants wherever I have travelled. In
Amsterdam I have come upon an Indian restaurant called Gandhi. Far away from
the Indian hubs, I have spotted eateries offering the full tandoori works in
Inverness. In Cairo, some dozen Indian
restaurants flourish. In the years that
I lived there, I have seen Indian items like <i>papad</i> and mint chutney nudge their way slowly but surely into
supermarket shelves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There have been yoga and meditation sessions conducted at the Giza
pyramids and at Azhar Park in Cairo; henna
days and Indian dance classes are offered in the posh suburbs. Egyptians participate in these events with
great gusto. At a Holi celebration at
the Indian Chancery grounds, Egyptians outnumbered the Indians two to one, and
the <i>gulal</i> ran out!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Egyptians at Holi in Cairo</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">During my time there, Tagore’s 150<sup>th</sup> birth centenary
was marked with several events. I turned
up for some of them, and was taken aback at the number of Egyptians who
attended. In one of the addresses, I
heard Prof Galal Amin, an eminent economist and writer, remark on Tagore’s
influence on his childhood. He further went on to elaborate on the
correspondence between Ahmed Shawqi, the famous Egyptian poet, and Tagore. But Galal Amin is of an older school;
I came across Egyptian people a generation younger to me, who had read Tagore’s
poetry. A gentleman in the audience gave
us an impromptu recital of “amader chhoto nadi chole bNake bNake.” It blew my mind the level of Indianisation
that this great Bengali poet has brought about single-handed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Forget Tagore, the gentleman has had 150 years in which to make an
impression. I have myself picked up
Indian authors’ books from Diwan’s in Cairo and Jashanmal’s in Bahrain. Contemporary Indian authors such as Neel
Mukherjee and Amitabh Ghosh are available in Middle-Eastern bookstores now,
unthinkable two decades ago. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Kurtis</span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, gold fringes, Indian embroidery and jewellery are now common in
the West among high street fashion retailers.
Indian style tops and jackets, and flat women’s <i>chappals</i> are retailed in Egyptian shopping malls too. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Another slightly sombre face of Indianisation is in El Alamein. Fallen Indian soldiers, fighting on the
British side in World War II, have been commemorated in the WWII memorial there. So a “corner of a foreign field” in Egypt,
“remains forever Indian”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Cultural exports often piggy-back on trade and overseas
investments, on the backs of Indian SME’s.
I have watched this business-led Indianisation in myriad small ways in
my corner of the world. From shopping at
the Chellaram’s chain in Jos in the 70’s, to spotting Ashok Leyland trucks
running in Dubai; and Bajaj auto-rickshaws in the working-class suburbs of
Cairo. From staying in an Indian-owned
B&B in Amsterdam to seeing Indian silk cushion-covers offered by a leading
British high-street retailer. It gives
an Indian heart a proud lift indeed when it suddenly sees the Tata logo flying
high on a banner planted in foreign soil. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><u><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Chhor aayein hum wo galiyaan…phir bhi
dil hai Hindustani</b><o:p></o:p></span></u></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Did you know Diwali is an official holiday in Fiji and Trinidad and Tobago; and
Mauritius? I've met third generation
Mauritians of Indian origin who put out lamps for Diwali and dress in
traditional Indian attire for festivals.
Some people there still stick to the vegetarian diets their Brahmin forefathers
followed, though the Mauritian society has no caste system. Hindu weddings are solemnised with age-old Vedic practices. Majority of the Indian diaspora seem to preserve their cultural traditions three four generations down the line, wherever they might settle in the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As I was writing, an Anais Nin quote about how we see things as we
are, and not as they are, flashed into my mind. Maybe it's just me? So I sought other opinions - from Indians and non-Indians. A selection from what they had to say:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height: 150%;">People here are fond of Indian food. Almost every German city has Indian
restaurants. Food served is adapted to the local palate.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height: 150%;">Some clubs here have a special
Bollywood themed night. Events where Bollywood singers visit. Bollywood movies
are screened here. There are Bollywood dance classes, classical Indian dance
classes and of course, Yoga courses.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height: 150%;">In Heidelberg, the South Asia
Institute teaches four south Asian languages, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Bangla. Also
courses on politics and history. Recently they had a summer school to learn
Sanskrit. There are books in German about learning Hindi and Sanskrit. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height: 150%;">University communities of Indian
students everywhere organise Diwali, Holi celebrations. Germans also
participate enthusiastically. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height: 150%;">Although there are many positive perceptions
about India, there are also many negative/false ones. Popular German media does
not always report objectively about India.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Vihang Ghalsasi, Indian, Doctoral student</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You just don’t see many Indians in the street here. There is a call-centre in the inner city
where I understand many Indians work. They have not settled en masse in
Brisbane. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">(But) there are several Indian restaurants and yes, they have
grown in the last couple of years. One of my favourite restaurants serves
traditional food from the Punjab region.
It is hugely popular with Indians and Europeans alike and is always
packed. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Denise Covey, Australian,
teacher & writer/blogger, Brisbane, Australia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When we were school kids, people used to say that if you were to
buy a pair of (foreign) jeans, chances were 30% that the denim would have been
produced in India.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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Nowadays, thanks to our IT industry, people say that 30% of the software that
the world uses, whether in banks or airlines or wherever, is produced in India,
or by Indians elsewhere in the world.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Certainly a pointer to how the world looks at us and the shift in
the skills we bring to the table.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="background: white; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: "lumm=95000 lumo=5000"; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;">In sports, words like “doosra” when applied to a cricket bowling
delivery have become part of the commentators’ regular usage. </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: #0D0D0D; mso-style-textfill-fill-colortransforms: "lumm=95000 lumo=5000"; mso-style-textfill-fill-themecolor: text1; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-themetint: 242;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sandeep Bhargava, Non-Resident-Indian, Director, Avani
Resources Pte Ltd, London, UK.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are so many (instances of Indianisation). There was a study done in Canada about
religious preferences – the number of non-Indians switching to Hinduism,
Sikhism and Buddhism has gone up, from something like 7% to 17%, from one
census to the next. Bhajan/kirtans have
become very common. Yoga is a big thing.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is a craze to attend an Indian wedding, dress up in Indian
attire and jewellery. Henna tattoos are very popular. People dress as Indian brides and grooms in
theme/costume parties. Cotton (kurtis)
and silks from India are things everyone wants to see in their
wardrobes. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Kama Sutra is also a craze, at adult spas Kama Sutra massages are
taught to improve relationships. Incense
or agarbattis are burnt/lighted for creating ambience.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">People call us and ask for home remedies/herbal products – like honey
and ginger for coughs and colds. People
use neem oil as a pesticide rather than chemical ones on fruit trees or
indoor plants, as neem is safer. The use
of Ayurveda, satvik diets etc is trending.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Riki Roy, Canadian-Indian, President,
Omnus Investments Ltd, Edmonton, Canada.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">As the Navaratris started last September, the Bahrain National
Theatre hosted a performance by the Royal Ballet of Cambodia, a re-telling of
the Ramayana through dance and puppetry. So very apt, it seemed to me, summing
up Indianisation in a nutshell. Religious
epics that have diffused east and have influenced foreign art forms now coming
to be performed in western Asia.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Many concepts that diffused east and west from India in the past,
are now converging steadily and inexorably into trends, crazes, fashions the
world over and ultimately, into a force to be reckoned with. The cultural Indianisation that began in
the 1<sup>st</sup> millennium is now merging with economic Indianisation in the
3<sup>rd</sup>. India is finally coming
into its own. And I am fortunate that I am born Indian, that I witness this process. There are a million
reasons to be grateful, a million reasons to celebrate. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>This entry has been written for "More Indian than you think" contest sponsored by <a href="http://www.moreindianthanyouthink.com/" target="_blank">Lufthansa</a> over at Indiblogger. <br /><br />If you are Indian and have travelled abroad then I would love to hear your views. And if you are not from India, then I'd love to hear your views too - do you see/use Indian style fashions, paisley prints, jewellery? do you enjoy yoga, or Indian food, do you have friends that do? Have you heard of or read any Indian authors/poets? watched Indian films?</i></span><br />
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-64005290522501048122014-10-17T12:23:00.000+02:002014-10-18T16:41:20.759+02:00Forever Indian <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">India has captivated the imagination of the
world since ancient times.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">Her list of
contributions to our collective knowledge base and cultural heritage is
formidable.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">From small things like
buttons (Indus Valley Civilisation, 2800 BCE) to sophisticated concepts like
the zero and </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">ahimsa</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">, Indian ideas and
discoveries have diffused across the world for millennia and still impact lives
today.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">A paisley patterned scarf, a dish
of kedgeree, a game of Ludo, a peaceful protest rally – these are all more
Indian than you think!</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw5hRltJDePQ32R8fByVZJpLdbobe7DyBgvluPNISO56n8YyX8h49tm6ia-EvxpNyue82lqPj0xoFZ_gyOuVMr6cjk7viYXizM58n_xywxs8VGZG2dj1fRVpdxbOlxy4pdXhbnNBW6PWX6/s1600/Ind1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw5hRltJDePQ32R8fByVZJpLdbobe7DyBgvluPNISO56n8YyX8h49tm6ia-EvxpNyue82lqPj0xoFZ_gyOuVMr6cjk7viYXizM58n_xywxs8VGZG2dj1fRVpdxbOlxy4pdXhbnNBW6PWX6/s1600/Ind1.jpg" height="220" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In fact, the planet itself is more Indian than you
think, and its Indianisation is not a recent phenomenon; it has been that way
for many, many decades, even centuries. But of course, the pace of this process
has shot off the charts with liberalisation in the 1990’s. Simultaneously, the Internet and social media
have brought about a heightened awareness and pride. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">India is a youthful nation, half her population
is less than 25, almost two thirds is below 35. As we have hit the noughts and
twenty-teens, a young generation of Indians has come of age
post-liberalisation. They have witnessed unprecedented growth levels
internally; burgeoning world interest in India fuelled by her market and
manufacturing potential; her space and nuclear capabilities; and her increasing
engagement with world trade and tourism.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">
</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">Last but not the least, they have participated in her remarkably stable
democracy in recent times when dictatorships, political turbulence and
religious extremism have taken a tenacious hold in many countries abroad.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">No wonder they take such pride in India and
her heritage, no wonder that they feel the world is their oyster, that it feels
ever more ready to be Indianised.</span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is not to deny the challenges that India
still faces, and there are certainly enough of them. However, for the first time since
independence, we are not defined just by our burdens alone, there are success
stories as huge as the challenges in the mix. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><u>The hard facts </u><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">India is the second most populous country in
the world, more than one sixth of the world is Indian.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">And we are not confined to our own country,
there is a vast Indian diaspora spread out across the planet.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">It is estimated that there are 25 million
Indians overseas, both of Indian citizenship and origin.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">The countries where there is no local Indian
community, if they exist at all, are few and far between.</span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">According to UN, India is projected to overtake
China and become the </span><span style="background: white; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">most populous country by 2028.
Therefore, just looking at sheer numbers, there are rather a lot of us
Indians. As our numbers have grown, the
world in the most basic sense has become more Indianised.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">An estimated 2 lakh Indian students go abroad
annually to foreign universities. This figure rose by a whopping 256% in the
noughts, though it may be levelling out now.
Even so, there is a significantly large body of university students in
UK, Europe, USA and Australia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The US now has the largest Indian diaspora,
with the total population of Indians estimated at more than 3 million, growing
at its fastest clip since 2000. They
attain educational levels substantially higher than average, comprise a
significant share of the professionals, academicians and entrepreneurs;
therefore, they generate and command a share of wealth that is quite
disproportionate to their share (just 1%) in the American population. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Australia has an estimated Indian diaspora of
over 3 million as well, also the fastest growing segment. Compare this to the total population
estimated at around 23-24 million people and its impact becomes immediately
self-evident, a share of 12-13%, though possibly more diverse in terms of
education and affluence than in the US.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Britain, with its long colonial history,
traditionally has had a large numbers of Indians living there, currently
estimated at almost 2% of the total population. It has always been more Indian than the rest
of Europe and its Indianisation started
in the 19<sup>th</sup> century : the first Indian MP in Britain was elected in
1892.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are 6-7 million Indians in the Gulf
region, the majority being in UAE and Saudi Arabia; and from where the forex
remittances to India are higher than from the West. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Indians abroad must also include the outbound
Indian tourists. We now travel abroad in
huge numbers – 15 million Indians travelled overseas last year, double the
number of foreign-bound travellers in 2005.
This is expected to grow to 50 million by 2030, (driving several foreign airlines to redesign their service offerings to include Indian elements).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">Each of these individuals, whether student,
settled immigrant, Indian worker abroad, or traveller, creates their own
cultural footprints and impacts foreigners on their paths.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">When these cultural mini-ambassadors measure
in the millions, their impact is mighty.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<u style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So, when exactly did this Indianisation start?</span></u></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">Religion, philosophy, art and architectural
ideas have travelled along the Silk Road since ancient times, from China and
India to the furthest limits of the then-known western world. So much so that
the term Silk Road itself has become a metaphor for exchanges between the east
and west.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">Indian cultural exports are
not anything new in that sense. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">Buddhism
spread along the Silk Road first to China and then to Japan and Korea. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">Indianisation started millennia ago.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDOJrW_5M1hkw24Ax2HRBN3eT1FIUZ6dqUxDv73kkEt5UM9jpnTNqdD-TBaRrFjGzKrHj7fzs-64CkeLIluDxxFW4zfopbA95Fgj_KLaCPhRLv0yjmn5JEBFF1fZn5RNP7KeXj5ajcBQo8/s1600/Ind2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDOJrW_5M1hkw24Ax2HRBN3eT1FIUZ6dqUxDv73kkEt5UM9jpnTNqdD-TBaRrFjGzKrHj7fzs-64CkeLIluDxxFW4zfopbA95Fgj_KLaCPhRLv0yjmn5JEBFF1fZn5RNP7KeXj5ajcBQo8/s1600/Ind2.jpg" height="275" width="400" /></span></a></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">The first cultural ideas diffused abroad with
the emissaries that Emperor Ashoka sent out propagate Buddhist ideals in the
first millennium.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">Portuguese and other
European traders took not only commodities back to their own countries in the
15</span><sup style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">th</sup><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> century.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">In Victorian
times, the Great Exhibition of Indian art and design in Britain in 1851 took an
Indian design motif, the </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">ambi </i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">or
mango, and it was woven extensively into British shawls, in Paisley, from which
the English name for the motif is derived.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">
</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">Vivekananda introduced Americans to the Vedanta in 1893 in Chicago.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">Indianisation of the West as well as the East
has been going on “softly, softly” since way back in time.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Bollywood has got to have the largest mindshare when it comes to
current vehicles for Indianisation. Much
is made of the screening of Hindi films in the West now, of Lagaan’s Oscar
nomination, of Slum Dog Millionaire’s recent success. But the fact remains that Hindi films have
been hugely popular from decades before, they connected with common people in
foreign lands, with mainstream audiences in Africa and the Middle-East,
audiences to whom both Hindi and Hinduism were completely alien. Guru Dutt’s films were popular with Japanese
audiences, Raj Kapoor’s and Dev Anand’s with Russians. Just as TV channels like RTL beams Bollywood
fare into German homes today, so do others like Zee Aflam and Bahrain 55 into
African and Middle-Eastern households, and have done so for years.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Indian films had some successes in the West as well. Mother India was nominated for an Oscar in
the 50’s; Do Aakhen Bara Haath, Do Bigha Zameen, Amar Bhupali, and several
others won awards at the European biggies of Berlin and Cannes during the 40’s
and 50’s. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The influence of Indian personalities on peoples
far away from India, both in terms of the physical distance and the cultural
milieu is remarkable. Gandhi took the
concepts of <i>ahimsa,</i> non-violent
resistance, and popularised in throughout the world. Martin Luther King Jr was inspired by his
ideals, and Gandhi continues to exert his influence on all peoples who choose
to protest peacefully.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tagore, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1913, has exerted a wholly unfathomable influence on the Spanish
speaking world. South American
poets/writers such as Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral have been
inspired by him. There are schools named
after him in Colombia; university courses on him and his works in Costa
Rica. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Indian musicians have left their own marks on
the west too: George Harrison labelled Ravi Shankar as the ‘Godfather of world
music’ in the 60’s. Ali Akbar Khan was
the first Indian musician to play Indian classical music on American TV in the
50’s, to record albums outside India and subsequently, to start music academies
in Boston and Basel.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Yoga and meditation, Ayurveda, herbal home
remedies are almost ubiquitous in all corners of the planet. The first yoga institute in America was
opened in the 1920’s, and yoga went mainstream in the US by the 60’s. There are yoga institutes and classes offered
in Sao Paulo and Rio, Ayurveda is taught in universities in Argentina. Yoga in
turn influenced Joseph Pilates, an American of German origin and the inventor
of the Pilates system. Yoga is hugely
popular in Germany, there are more than 3 million yoga practitioners according
to their local Yoga Teachers’ Association, that’s almost 4% of the
population. Yoga Alliance International,
an Indian yoga network of teachers and institutes has members in Europe from Greece
and Italy to Turkey, from Britain to the Scandinavian countries.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The last but not the least, Indian cuisine
remains one of the most widespread vehicles for Indianisation. Everyone loves Indian dishes. Chicken tikka
masala is the most popular dish in Britain, and the oldest ‘curry house’ has
been in operation since the 1920’s there.
Indian restaurants exist in every
city everywhere in the world, and seem to thrive even where the local diaspora
is thin. If food be the measure of a culture’s influence then we have
Indianised great swathes of the world already.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<u><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">On the backs of entrepreneurs<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">Cultural exports do not happen in isolation, they
nearly always ride on the back of trade, exports of goods and ideas feed off
each other.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">Let us just take a brief
look at what’s happened to Indian exports pre- and post-liberalisation. In
1990, India’s exports stood at around 18 billion USD; that has now crossed USD
300 billion in 2013.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">More important than
this phenomenal growth, is the diversification of her export markets and deepening
of her exports basket.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">From basic
agricultural commodities India has gradually moved to include value-added, made-up
merchandise and services. The star performer here in this growth has been the
Indian IT industry.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">India has also slowly
nudged its way into new markets.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">The
share of total exports to Africa and Latin America has steadily risen, though
the USA-EU-China axis absorbs the lion’s share of Indian exports still.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;"> </span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A major part in the Indianisation has been on the backs of Indian
businesses, big and small. As with
exports, this has spiked phenomenally after liberalisation, especially from the
late 90’s. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Consider this, L.N. Mittal, the Chairman/CEO of the biggest steel
company in the world, is one of the richest men in the UK. The Tata’s are the biggest private sector
employers in Britain. If this is not Indianising I cannot imagine what is! In fact, the Tata’s manufacturing bases now
range from South Korea to US in 80 countries.
Similarly, The Aditya Birla Group now operates in 36 different
countries, from China to Brazil, from Austria to Egypt to Australia. Asian Paints operates in 17 markets from S.E.
Asia to the Caribbean.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">However, long before the megamergers and megabucks happened and
grabbed headlines, there were Indian entrepreneurs in UK, in Africa and indeed
all over the world; setting up tiny grocery shops, restaurants and other SME’s,
Indianising their immediate localities one workshop/shop at a time. For instance, Chellaram’s set up its first
business in West Africa in the 1920’s.
The C.K. Birla group invested in its first engineering unit there in
1960’s. There are a multitude of
examples like these spread across Africa and Europe, North America and South-East
Asia and West Asia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Add to this India’s string of successes with its space programme, the Mangalyaan is only the latest; it should not be forgotten that India has in
the past launched several satellites, and has sent a mission to the moon. The
Indian flag has flown on its surface, one among just a handful of nations in
the whole world. Not just the earth, we have Indianised a little bit of the
moon as well. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Add also her nuclear capabilities, her massive pool of young and
talented manpower, significant numbers of whom are highly educated and
motivated, and further Indianisation of the world seems inevitable and
unstoppable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Up until the 17<sup>th</sup> century, India numbered among the
richest, most powerful of nations; Prof Angus Maddison estimated the Indian
economy to have been around a quarter of the world economy during the Mughal
period. Subsequently, it declined to
abysmal levels during and due to colonial rule.
But there can be no doubt that India is finally coming into her own
again three centuries later; and sometime during the 21<sup>st</sup> century
will reclaim the ground she lost. And I am fortunate that I am born Indian,
that I witness this process. There are a
million reasons to be grateful, there are a million reasons to celebrate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This entry has been written for “More Indian Than You Think” contest sponsored by <a href="http://www.moreindianthanyouthink.com/" target="_blank">Lufthansa</a> over at IndiBlogger. </span></i></div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-52145272667002891532014-09-28T14:04:00.000+02:002014-09-28T22:12:29.266+02:00It wasn't just charity that began at home<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Over at the other blog, the "flogged" <a href="http://nilabose.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">blog</a>, which incidentally has just celebrated its third anniversary, did you even think we'd survive this long? I know! I even surprise myself sometimes. Anyways, getting back to the point, over at that very respectably-aged blog we have been talking about <a href="http://nilabose.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-celebration-of-blogs-and-life-which.html" target="_blank">identity, straddling cultures </a>and alienation and frustration resulting from the diaspora experience. With a British-Nigerian poet who knows a thing or two about straddling. And identity and alienation. And of course, poetry. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I found that post extremely interesting. Partly because she happens to be a native of the country where I was a foreigner once, the <i>bakuwa</i>, often called <i>bature</i>, the skinless one, the distinctions between my lighter Asian skin merrily conflated with that of Europeans, to my discomfiture, resentment as well as astonishment. But as I reflected on my diaspora experience, it kind of appeared that my entire trajectory has been a little different, drawn awry by its own momentum. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<u><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The first cut is the deepest</span></u><br />
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<br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But first, a couple of actual experiences where I felt unfairly treated because I was a minority, a foreigner/stranger or some way related to my identity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The earliest incident happened when I was maybe 6 years, my family lived in Delhi at the time. A children's squabble somehow escalated into the parents of my friend instructing their doorman that the "Bengali kid" should be barred entry. That was the first I heard "Bengali" being used as a marker, a pejorative. Not that I understood it at the time, I just felt ghastly and came back home and sat in a corner sulking; my mum saw me and cannily paraphrased Hemingway, "no friend like a book" she said and thrust one at me and so I was rescued.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The second instance I remember was in a small town on the fringes of the Western Sahara, little known then, a world nested in a bigger world, both oblivious of each other mostly. In the early 70's my father took a job with the Nigerian government and was posted to the remote north-eastern corner of that country, a town called Maiduguri, at that time the state capital of North-Eastern State. It was tiny compared to Delhi, where we had moved from, and culture shock wasn't a part of my active vocab at that point, but had it been, it would still have proved to be rather inadequate.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I went from my hard-won comfort zone in Delhi, hard-won because I had been uprooted from Calcutta just four years before into a milieu as drastically different from my birthplace, as Delhi was from Maiduguri - climate, language, school curricula, social surroundings, everything. Even the school building. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My first classroom in Nigeria was a shed, literally, the walls were of corrugated metal about 6 feet high, a gap of maybe 2 feet running all around on top, and a similar metal roof held up above, there was no floor, it was just sand. It was as hot as a furnace, temperatures could shoot through the 40's without any effort, there was one pedestal fan to keep the teacher cool. I know now the reasons why it was so, and they are good and sufficient, but then it felt like the end of the world. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But 8-year olds are resilient little people and can cut through the fluff remarkably quickly. I soon got to like my teachers, I made some friends, and I was a sturdy little girl raised in the arid Delhi climate which was close enough to the desert to be a help. The medium of instruction was English, there was no problem, and the advantage was that there was no other language to study. There was no Hindi or Bengali or Sanskrit to sit exams in, cool or what?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Like in every school, there were bullies, some of them much older, angrier, rougher. The students were naturally a mixed bag, we the products of relatively affluent expat professional parents were thrown together with sons and daughters of less educated, less affluent people, from far less fortunate circumstances. Again it is easy to understand and accept their resentment and aggression in hindsight. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I and some of the other expat girls got groped inappropriately, took quite a few hits on our backsides and fronts, and of course there was the name-calling and intimidation as well. It took me sometime to figure out the insults in Hausa and hurl them back. But whatever I did, whether I resisted or not, shouted back or not, the whole thing left me feeling violated and seething with the injustice of being picked on because I was a stranger, I didn't speak the same language, and/or looked different. Those days, the coming of womanhood was not feted as it is now, it was portrayed as more a bother than a blessing, and the whole discussion on body image and confidence had a vastly different tone. Most times, no-one discussed anything, victim-blaming is looked askance now, but when I was growing up, it was a given. If she's been groped it's her fault! Groped at ten! Jeez what kind of precocious nastiness do we have here now?!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are of course the other instances about explaining names and spellings, and people demanding why I can't speak the majority language fluently if I am travelling/residing in a foreign country, why I do or don't wear the bindi, bare my midriff, blah blah blah, but those have never felt vicious to me, more in the way of making conversation and I have never felt particularly insulted by them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The last incident I recap here is much
later, it happened here in the Gulf in the late nineties, on my first stint
here. I had changed jobs, taken up an appointment with a locally owned
small research firm as their head of operations, but wanted to quit after a
short while as there was NO work to be executed, and playing solitaire for 8 hours
at a stretch has limited charms even if one is paid to do it. It drove me
nuts. It also ruined my eyes forever, but that's irrelevant.
Anyways, the top boss was reluctant to let me go, he was convinced I was
scooting off with his (non-existent) operational secrets to his far more
successful competitors, and the more I assured him that wasn't the case, the
more convinced he became of my supposed perfidy. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The usual heated discussions ensued,
wherein I was threatened with deportation (I had not transferred to their
sponsorship, so that one was empty), my husband with loss of face and job, and
then finally ended by equating "an Indian like" me to an unprincipled
liar, cheat and a mercenary so-and-so. I left that office shaking with
rage (I was a bit more excitable and quick tempered those days, I am almost better now. Cool as a cucumber.) Again, knowing
what I know now about the man, and the firm, it is easier to understand where
he was coming from and why. As I said, hindsight always clears up the
foggy bits in the picture.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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What I have learnt from my experiences and the narratives all round me can be summed in a few words. <i>Firstly, if you are a woman, you are halfway being to excluded already.</i> My life lessons have been mild and easy-peasy, no serious damage anywhere. I am greatly fortunate that I come from a family where everyone forgot to point out that I was a daughter and a burden, to be married off, given away after a childhood of dependency, without any expected returns, either emotional or financial or spiritual. Or maybe they never thought of daughters in that light altogether. No-one ever said to me that education was too pricey, too risky, reserved for males only. If you had the brains and the inclination, you were free to study whatever and up to whichever level your competencies could match. Do whatever you wanted, except of course stay out after the curfew.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There is a family anecdote which illustrates my point. My father was on his way to get married, my grandfather as the head of family ready to accompany the son to the venue. Enter my youngest aunt, who was a university student then; she explained that due to some misunderstanding with her professors, her admission to her final examinations was held up, the submission of forms was closing the next day. My grandfather promptly asked my father to continue, and himself went, dressed formally for the wedding of his eldest son, to grapple with his daughter's educational hurdles. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Let me also mention here that unlike my parents, my grandparents lost practically everything but a roof over their heads in the Partition of 1947. Money was seriously tight, and higher education was comparatively expensive. My grandmother sold off her jewellery piece by piece to feed the family. My grandfather sold his gold watch and chain to pay my father's architectural college fees.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Why then talk of exclusion? Into my first job, I was young and enthusiastic and perhaps a little idealistic also, the gilded notions about equality and justice had not worn off still. The outfit had just bagged a huge contract on farm equipment research involving rural fieldwork at the basic village unit levels, a first for the company and an exciting feather to be added to all involved caps. However, I was not allocated to the project at all, my male colleague who had joined the organisation on the same day as me, led a team of interviewers into the farming heartlands of Bihar and Bengal. So I screwed up enough courage and went to argue with the Research Director. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /><br />He waved me off, "It's not a matter of your abilities. It's not safe, you'll be alone late in evenings, no proper security, no proper public toilets, sleeping out in the open some places maybe. It's not a risk that we can take. Besides, the respondents will likely be all males and uncomfortable speaking to women, so we might miss out on some angle."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /><br />That's it, ladies. Back off. No loos, stay and work in urban areas and miss out both on skill build up and the enhanced moolah. (As an aside, more than 25 years later, I am happy to report that some attempt is being made to address the loo issue at least!)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Needless to say, there have been other occasions where I have faced similar arguments, and have had to give up work that I wanted to do and that would have earned me extra income, simply because I am a woman. The laws are there in place, the infrastructure still isn't, the attitudes are a hairsbreadth from abysmal, and implementation/enforcement is kind of a joke, though things are improving all the time, albeit at a maddeningly slow pace. And my issues have been a piece of cake when I compare the narratives of some other women I know.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>The second thing is that discrimination, much like charity, begins right at home.</i> Yes, I know that sounds conflicted, especially with what I said a minute earlier, but it is a conflicted issue, how to get away from that? My grandfather, the same grandfather who opted to go fight his daughter's right to sit an exam rather than attend his son's wedding, once showed me the family tree extending back some 10-12 generations, a rambling behemoth of branches and twigs; cousins going up to three and five then seven and then eleven limbs apart, each of the limbs formally allocated its priorities and responsibilities and duties, and pecking order as witnesses to family functions of various rigid levels of solemnity. I was perhaps a tween, on home leave from Maiduguri for the summer vacations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My name was not there on that huge scroll of paper. Nor were any of my girl cousins. Nor my father's sisters. I was outraged. When I asked the reason, my grandfather explained that only women who came into the family, i.e. married into it and therefore became part of the husband's family, were allowed on that parchment. The daughters would have their names written into the families they married into, not the ones where they were born. Why is that, grandfather? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Because only men have the right to perform spiritually meritorious acts, the giving away of property, of wealth, of cows, and daughters. Only sons can perform the funeral rites for their parents/foreparents, light up lamps of clarified butter to illuminate their pathway right upto the highest heavens, no daughter can do that, and therefore daughters get no place on the spiritual tally chart. And that was that, whether daughters sat exams, worked, married their chosen man and lived entirely independently otherwise had nothing to do with culture and customs going back thousands of years even before the family existed. You can't overturn the weight of your heritage with a three-page western-style education, now can you kid?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It made an impact. A painful one must be. So much so that years later I am writing about it over here. The odd snarky comment, the brush offs, the misspelling of my name by a random stranger, of darker or lighter skin colour, has hurt much less than these erasures by people who know me well, the discrimination by those who I call mine. Truth be told, I don't go among strangers expecting to be accepted, I know that one has to make one's way into a group, over time, with great effort, braving rebuffs. No-one likes a cat among the pigeons and nor do cats like a pigeon thrown into their midst, for all that they might try a little cruel sport with it as some temporary distraction. They either kill it or turn away after having their fill of fun. The group remains the same as before in the short run.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My teachers and headmasters in that school saw/knew the bullies, they knew what was going on, yet they never publicly made any redress, no-one was punished. My own elder female relatives' advice - ranging from "walk a little more decorously" to "do you have to let everything stick out? must you swing arms and bums that wide?" was another form of discrimination that hurt. Make yourself invisble, in other words. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I didn't have to go anywhere foreign to have my first taste of exclusion, that happened right inside my own country in Delhi. My people. Always my own. Always the people I knew and who knew me. People I studied with, or those who taught me, worked with me and/or paid me for my work, presumably after some kind of favourable judgement about my character, otherwise why employ me anyway? None of them were random strangers in the street, not some abstract unknown face passing by. That is what the face of discrimination has been in my story, and that is what has hurt.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>The difference between my blogger friend and me is that she was born in Britain, and so she has a legitimate claim there. I have no legitimate claim anywhere else except in my own community, my own state, my own country, and my own people, whether they share the same nationality or ethnicity or not. Discrimination and injustice happens only where there is a legitimate claim, and therefore for me, and millions of others like me, it can come only from the people who are the closest, groups that we feel innately connected to, groups that define our identity, and in the end make or break us.</i></span><br />
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-88157153291746636052014-09-09T22:53:00.000+03:002014-09-09T22:55:58.957+03:00Toppish and Tennish : A Choice of Short Fiction<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Did you see that books-that-stayed-with-me challenge recently making the rounds everywhere? A couple of friends tagged me, and then I tagged a couple, and before I knew it, my tbr list, which is always a mile or two longer than I like, was raging totally out of control. </div>
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I had at least two books of short stories on my list. So the other fall out was that I couldn't get rid of the idea of putting together a list of memorable short stories. Here are some wonderfully rich tales, sad, happy, comic, horrifically thrilling, and deeply satisfying. No particular order, and many more stashed away in the memory bank, restricting myself to the ones that were TOM when I sat down to write the post. Except for a couple, most are available online so links included. And no, none here from Chekhov, don't kill me! I do not really like his stories, the fault is entirely of my own taste and character, nothing to do with his brilliance.</div>
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<a href="http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/EndParty.html" target="_blank">The End of the Party</a> - Graham Greene<br />
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<a href="http://www.beyondthecouch.org/0307/silver_water_0307.htm" target="_blank">Silver Water</a> - Amy Bloom<br />
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<a href="http://www.tarleton.edu/Faculty/sword/Short%20Story/The%20Short%20Happy%20Life%20of%20Francis%20Macomber.pdf" target="_blank">The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber</a> - Ernest Hemingway<br />
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<a href="http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lamb.html" target="_blank">Lamb to the Slaughter </a>- Roald Dahl<br />
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<a href="http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Neck.shtml" target="_blank">The Necklace</a> - Guy de Maupassant<br />
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My Beloved Charioteer - Shashi Deshpande (No links that I could find, part of an anthology called The Inner Courtyard)<br />
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<a href="http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/GardPart.shtml" target="_blank">The Garden Party </a>- Katherine Mansfield<br />
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<a href="http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~alsv/Phillips-The%20Ant%20and%20the%20Grasshopper.pdf" target="_blank">The Ant and the Grasshopper</a> - W. Somerset Maugham<br />
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<a href="http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~alsv/Phillips-The%20Ant%20and%20the%20Grasshopper.pdf" target="_blank">The Gift of the Magi</a> - O' Henry<br />
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<a href="http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/vashtar.html" target="_blank">Sredni Vastar</a> - Saki<br />
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I am actually rubbish at picking favourites. The minute I put down Sredni Vastar say, I feel conflicted, what about the Reticence of Lady Anne? And The Last Leaf is surely just as sentimental and satisfying as The Gift of the Magi, isn't it? What about Alice Munro, she is a favourite contemporary short story writer, where do I fit her in? Margaret Atwood? Kazuo Ishiguro?Salinger? Twain?</div>
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And how can I not even mention the richness of Bengali short fiction? Samapti by Tagore still gives me goosebumps, Banaphool's works, Satyajit Ray's Fritz... And what about the novellas? Mice and Men, and The Snow Goose and The Small Miracle. The names come tumbling one after the other and there's no stopping. The nicest thing is of course that in real life, there is no need to stop at ten or twelve, no need to pick favourites at all. </div>
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Do you like reading short fiction? And if you do, which are the ones that you have liked?</div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-21447411428985464502014-08-27T04:41:00.001+03:002014-08-27T05:19:09.759+03:00Heraclitus, melancholia, and summing the summer<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I certainly can't remember having heard of Heraclitus till a minute ago, can you? He was an ancient Greek guy characterised as a "weeping philosopher" because of his melancholia, which incidentally makes him my kind of guy straight off, because I am all for a good weepfest every now and then. He spoke, my intensive research informs me, obscure truths. And one of his obscure truths, which is way more familiar to me than his name, was that no-one can step into the same river twice. What he is actually supposed to have said was "everything changes and nothing remains still...and...you cannot step twice into the same stream." </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It was all yonks ago, so who can tell what he theorised accurately? His words were reported by other philosophers, who in turn were quoted by their pupils and so on. Rather alarmingly like a game of Chinese whispers gone berserk, only neither in Mandarin nor in Cantonese and nor in whispers. However, be that as it may, the idea has always resonated totally with me, somewhat surprisingly, I have to admit, as I don't possess a single philosophical grey cell anywhere in my brain. But if that stream caper is true, then by that same logic, you can't step onto the same island twice either. And I have been given the opportunity to verify his obscure truth for my own self as we returned to live in Bahrain for the second stint. It is not the same island I left almost a decade ago, and neither am I the same woman. We'll have to settle in afresh, no short cuts, no royal and easy roads to it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><u>Summing up</u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The beginning of summer, truth be told, feels such a long time ago now. Late in April, that's when it's summer in my hometown, the husband received a phone call one Friday morning from the HQ and rushed off to the backyard as there never was a clear signal inside the house. I thought nothing of it, phone calls from the HQ are not exactly a remarkable feature. He came back and duly dropped the bombshell, which turned out to be okay, I mean I wasn't shattered or anything, though I had imagined I would be. We had been in Egypt for more than 6 years, I had begun to think of my child sitting his school certs there in another 3-4 years time. We had settled down, found our grooves in that place and life felt good. Now if this isn't an opportunity to indulge in a couple of sniffles for someone who enjoys a weepfest, I don't know what is. But not a single sniffle. I was surprised by my own steady reaction. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Of course, one half of me was devastated at having to wrap my head around the idea of not getting my regular Cairo favourites and fixes. But the other half? For the week we didn't know the posting, it spent its time happily researching the various possible locations, schools, housing, hospitals, how to connect with the rest of the expat community there, what local ruins and monuments were there to drool over. You know the drill. But it so turned out that we weren't being sent off on a fresh adventure, but were to return to Bahrain, the place where we had started out in the ME almost 18 years ago. And once known, that too felt right and good. Shortly after, in early May, we left for India to attend a family wedding. There was another one I was to attend in July as well, after the school holidays began.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the few days I had before flying off, we established contact with schools in Bahrain (always the first priority) and I called a friend who lived there. We spoke at length, one of those connections where one can pick up the threads without any effort, and she invited me to put up with her instead of a hotel on arrival. I said I didn't know when that would be, but I'd let her know as soon as the dates were finalised. Both of us were mighty glad that we would be seeing each other regularly again, but she quite frankly said that I would find Bahrain "a little boring" after the cultural and historical density of Cairo. I knew it too, I would have to deal with it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Three months passed by in a few fast flashes, we enjoyed both the weddings, ate, drank, danced and made merry. For a time, it was uncertain whether I would have to pack up the house before we left in July, but that thankfully wasn't the way it worked out. The son sat his admission tests in Cairo for the new schools, and also his regular exams, there was enough going on to keep things lively for all of June. He and I left for Mumbai for the wedding as soon as the summer holidays started. That same day his father left for Bahrain on a recce. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The paperwork should have been through by the time we finished with our month-long holiday in India, and I had expected to come back and wind up and leave for Bahrain by August. But that is not how it worked out either. We duly packed the house up as scheduled and moved to a hotel, but while the adult visas were through, the child's visa for some obscure reason wasn't forthcoming. Our tickets were rescheduled and cancelled, once, twice, three times before the visa suddenly plopped out like a rabbit from a hat, and the tickets were yet again rescheduled and rerouted through Jeddah suddenly at a day's notice. Transit at Jeddah, well, that was an interesting experience too, but that's for some other post.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The hotel had various problems with Net connections, so we would go back to the house, bare of all our stuff except the still working telephone and WiFi, and catch up for an hour or two. On one of those trips, my trusty five-year-old laptop broke, one hinge of the screen cracked open, though it continued to function still, even if in drunken flickers, hanging on for dear life just by the wires. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">On another, totally different trip, I started my broken machine and idly clicked Facebook open, with the idea of letting my friend know about our plans, or rather frustrating non-plans. There was no immediate urgency except I didn't know when my laptop would finally break down. Scrolling down casually I found an update from her daughter explaining the circumstances of her death in my newsfeed. I know I sat there staring at the screen. I know I left some sort of garbled messages of condolence. <i>Thoughts too deep for tears.</i> I don't know if I had anything that could be called thoughts, just my mind darting off along different tunnels of memory and darting back again like a scared and baffled animal. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">She was my first friend in Bahrain. She had a smile that could light up a room. We had swapped recipes and ripe jokes and book recos, we had shared a workplace and good times and some not so good too. She was only marginally older and she was gone, just days before I was supposed to land up. It felt terribly unfair, she had a lot to live for, a lot more of her children's successes to celebrate, a lot more to give her community. But then again, a sudden painless death is the best exit, though a terrible shock for family and friends. A rich and happy life and a painless, smiling death, that is a life to celebrate. But as I flew into Bahrain, I knew there was going to be no stepping onto the same island, in more ways than one. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We have now been here for ten days. Summer holidays get over soon. Since the school and flat and the details of living and commuting and all that blah was taken care of earlier in July, we have moved directly into our home here from the airport itself. A first in my experience of moving country. Our stuff hasn't arrived yet, naturally, we'll have to wait some weeks for that, but otherwise it's all plug-and-play. We have been driven around the island, the fridge has been stocked, new school things bought, the last of the paperwork finalised. I have even managed a trip to a bookstore, which wasn't there when I lived here last. The traffic is more no doubt, but the congestion that I had heard about has eased up with the addition of new flyovers. Humongous malls and fancy-shaped swank buildings with pointy tops and glass façades have come up. Over our first weekend we walked the child back to where we lived before, and it is exactly as it was, though he of course has no recollection of it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I am enjoying the free availability of all things Indian, food and groceries, signboards written in familiar Indian scripts. I hear Bengali and Hindi and Malayalam spoken on the roads and the supermarkets, and it is still a thrill to hear your languages so far away from home in a foreign land. The Khaleeji accent, both of Arabic and English, feels reassuring, and charming. It is not the same island, but it is familiar still. A new computer has been magicked out of some new and huge gadget shop, and I am trying to wrap my head around advanced versions of its software. But I am blogging for comfort on my old one, which is manfully working still, much to my amazement. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I am missing the wide open, expansive feel of the Cairo suburb on the fringes of the Sahara, the silhouette of the pyramids on the horizon - I never tired of them, the austere yet magnificent desert sunsets. The river. My god, there are no rivers here, not even a thread of a stream. Today as I looked through some of my photographs of Tanoura performers to put up on my new desktop, the thought sprang into mind from nowhere that I didn't have enough close-ups, and hard on its heels, "I must click some close-ups next time," before I remembered there is no next time, vaguely panic stricken and disorientated.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Too much seems to have been crammed into one single season, too much dancing, too much revelry, too many goodbyes, too much emotion altogether. <i>Joto hanshi, toto kanna.</i> That's a Bengali proverb, roughly translating as "there's exactly as much sorrow (to face) as there's laughter." That kind of sounds like a</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">nother of Heraclitus' famous and obscure beliefs - the unity of opposites. Another of his sayings goes something like "the road that goes uphill is the same as the one coming downhill." I am not sure how steep the slope is going to be, or whether I should try going up or down, but as long as there's a road, there can be nothing to complain about. I'll find out soon enough. I just need to stop for a minute and get my breath back.</span></div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-40282589575191754342014-08-07T17:41:00.001+03:002014-08-07T17:41:17.719+03:00Declutter. Pack. Detach.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN-GB">I am not exactly
a Pollyanna, but the glad game is not to be scoffed at; the truth is that there’s some take-away in
every situation. Incidentally, the
packers turned up, the house has been now stripped of our worldly possessions
and looks stranger and more sterile by the minute. I realised afresh that a home is really made
out of knick-knacks and photographs, teenager messes of cords and earphones,
mismatched socks in laundry baskets, scrunched up throws on sofas. Talking
of laundry baskets, the presence or absence of one itself is crucial to the
feel of home, the bathrooms look oddly unfamiliar, like hotel bathrooms without the bins, just the brushes by themselves on the lonely emptiness of the counters. And definitely the sink looks massively weird without our
early morning coffee mugs in it.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Though our stuff
is out on the road, hopefully making its slow way to Alex and then onwards, the
MIA is still MIA, and our travel plans have had to be postponed a little. Two more days of living out of suitcases and
eating off disposable plates, camping under a concrete roof. Waiting for that one phone call, that one
email to snap shut the bags and stride out of the door. Never a dull moment! And the fun continues apace once we reach our
new destination too, as the stuff does not arrive for the next 4-6 weeks. I just hope we manage the trip there before
the boxes do!</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">I have now moved
home 19 times, this one will be my 20th. There are many apparent negatives to this
complete uprooting and moving again and again, especially when there are children
involved. I am sure everyone can imagine
the potential horror stories for themselves.
But one of the great things about it, when and only when the uprooting
happens through active choice of course, is that the whole process is a kind of
systematic and ruthless detox of the immediate micro-environment. One picks and chooses, one prioritises, one
can’t take it all, so what’s worth saving? and passing on? and what shock horror is to be thrown away? Old
clothes have been chucked; you know, those I hung onto in the hope I would be
able to fit into them again after slimming down a bit. Any day now.
Toys given away at school charity drives, food and booze passed on, papers
sorted out and trashed. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">A mini-lesson in
detachment and disengaging, and it always surprises me. How quickly the mind can bear to tear away
from a beloved object, amble out of comfort zones, its eyes fixed on what’s
coming rather than what’s gone already. My
books are no longer on the shelves here. My cutlery not in the kitchen drawers, which
open silently without a single metallic rattle. I am now utterly decluttered. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Egypt is a place
I’ve enjoyed deeply. I have gained insights into myself here, grown in completely gobsmacking ways travelling this country. It’s been the setting of many milestones for
me and my family. I have loved living
here to bits. But it is no longer home. How easy it is to write that down. And my god, how difficult!</span></div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-26557492434325897782014-08-04T02:24:00.002+03:002014-08-05T15:59:57.957+03:00Fresh out of supplies <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Serenity. That's the first prerequisite. For blogging I mean. For any kind of writing to happen really. A nagging restlessness might sound luscious and sophisticated, but it is not an aid to writing. Not for me. Only when life is kind of boring and routine can imagination run riot, or put its thumb into some completely useless fact and pull out a blogpost from there. Too much uncertainty and it sits cowering at the corner nibbling at comfort food, its fingers greasy, its eyes zoned out.</div>
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My summers for the last so many years have been predictable. School's out by end June, and kiddo and I are back on home leave till the holidays get over. We move around, meet up with relatives, take trips out as a family sometimes, just the three of us, and in all that, I have found time to write and even blog, if I can coax a net connection out of somewhere. Going on holiday hasn't affected my writing much.</div>
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This year is turning out to be different. I am blogging less, writing less, I have achieved very little that I set out to do with the novella. My usual practice to write a verse everyday even if is only a couplet has been majorly interrupted. And all of it feels beyond my control. <br />
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Everything feels a little out of control, to be perfectly honest. The tickets are booked, the packers come day after. But the visas are still MI all this A. At least, one of them is, and till all three are done it is as good as nothing being done. Rather, as bad. I know things work out, they always do, it is a matter of time. Time is the solution to every problem, I know this from heaps of personal experience, not from some ghastly pseudo-inspirational gobbledygook posted on social media. But I am still panicking. I can't settle to anything, leave alone writing or rhyming or posting. "Write it as it comes" ha. Well, nothing coming, not a drop. Panic does not make for writing. Serenity is the key, but that suddenly seems in terribly short supply.</div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-78733321732586413332014-06-22T09:07:00.000+03:002014-06-22T16:47:33.974+03:00Top ten : Egypt<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My absolute favourites in Egypt:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">1. The pyramids. Of course. Start with the biggies at Giza, and the sound and light show is a must see. Then go to the step pyramid of Sakkara, the first and still the best one to understand the minds that dreamed them up as tombs. Don't miss the small but rather neat museum on-site. If possible also take in Dahshour. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin6jUfcaStSQWWgW0iKoP2AafjKrAV7jsclqQk82Pqgjz5pQuBiRYXIHGgZOZMBruILco3ZPChK5oZGRCYgPHEwaqQttFWIEZhN8vMK7oCB9xOfELGKoEL_b88OHeyJvS5B9EQwTf_7_aR/s1600/015.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin6jUfcaStSQWWgW0iKoP2AafjKrAV7jsclqQk82Pqgjz5pQuBiRYXIHGgZOZMBruILco3ZPChK5oZGRCYgPHEwaqQttFWIEZhN8vMK7oCB9xOfELGKoEL_b88OHeyJvS5B9EQwTf_7_aR/s1600/015.JPG" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Khafre's pyramid at Giza</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sakkara</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">2. Take the night train to Luxor and spend a day or two at the Valleys of Kings and Queens. Karnak Temple requires a couple visits, one by day to wrap your head around its humongousness and another at night for another riveting sound and light show. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8EVJ4RD150s4yhQTqHmehcW-bkqHaN7nsNsT5r7EQUZFRhavelWjsohsX0DSTHxrYUQAs33O8TwmFS0EhtC2Z1ZIurAWM60MWsxH36b8_CZolwY_EtBsazc045AxZxlVBr0XAkYs1qxpG/s1600/014.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8EVJ4RD150s4yhQTqHmehcW-bkqHaN7nsNsT5r7EQUZFRhavelWjsohsX0DSTHxrYUQAs33O8TwmFS0EhtC2Z1ZIurAWM60MWsxH36b8_CZolwY_EtBsazc045AxZxlVBr0XAkYs1qxpG/s1600/014.JPG" height="226" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sunrise through the window on train to Luxor</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Luxor Temple</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">3. Go into the White Desert and marvel at the limestone shapes sculpted by the winds and sands. Camp for the night under the stars. Enjoy a vast and unimaginable peace. Watch the sunrise wash over the desert. Unforgettable!</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Road to Bahariya</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sunset in the White Desert</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Campsite at White Desert</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">4. Enjoy the Nile's final resting place, go to Damietta where the eastern branch of the Nile meets the Med. Tranquil and honest and untouristy. Watch the catch come in early morning. And take a felucca and sail the evening waters at Cairo, Luxor and/or Aswan. Sit by the river and sip a coffee, or smoke shisha if that's your thing. Enjoy the Nile. Period.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Felucca at Aswan</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fishing boat at Damietta</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">5. Spend a day in Islamic Cairo - Sharia Khayameya, Sharia Muizz and the Khan el Khalili. Several mosques and mausoleums to check out, old merchant residences - the best restored is Beit Suheimy. Great shopping opportunities too, but be prepared to bargain hard. Go on to Wikala al Ghuri on Saturdays and Wednesday evenings to watch the Tanoura being performed by whirling dervishes. Programme starts at 8 pm, but seats fill up by 7-ish. Mind altering, in the best way possible.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Feel the drums and cymbals 'talking" to each other in this jugalbandi</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Colourful, mesmerising, devotional, rhythmic and riveting!</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">6. Alexandria - a two thousand year old city with a completely different vibe, Egypt's ex-capital and now her second city and main port. Visit the Graeco-Roman monuments. The real roots of the revolution have their home in Alex. Khaled Said's home city, also home to many independent bands and musicians and graffiti</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> artists. Museum at Bibliotheca is certainly worth a visit, Fridays it shuts at 12 noon. Eastern harbour and the Corniche at Qaitbey's fort great for people watching. Best seafood.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Boats in the Eastern Harbour Alex</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Qaitbey's Fort stands at the site of the famous lighthouse, a boat in Egyptian colours is moored in the foreground</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">7. The monasteries at Wadi Natrun, and Zafaraana. St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, where Moses' legends abound. Each monastery is a reminder of a time when Egypt was profoundly Christian. Sinai itself is forbidding and utterly fascinating and endlessly wonderful. Sadly, not such a safe place for travel any more.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">St Catherine, Sinai</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The bell tower inside St Catherine's Monasery</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">8. When monument fatigue strikes, Pharonic, Islamic or Coptic, seek relief at Fayoum oasis for a spot of peace and culture-free quiet; or get to the Red Sea resorts. Sharm al Sheikh is the most famous, the others are quieter. My personal favourite is Ras Sudr.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Water wheels at Fayoum oasis</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ras Sudr at sunset</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">9. The Med resorts are not exactly terrible either, El Alamein has the WWII memorials, if you're into that period of history. Or you can give those a miss and stick to the beach. Mersa Matruh is difficult to get to in terms of the driving distance, but the rewards are truly great. Beautiful beaches and crystal waters. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ageeba beach Mersa Matruh</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Father and children at Blue beach Mersa Matruh</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">10. Can't get away from Cairo? Not even an hour's drive to Fayoum or Ain Sokhna? Never mind, get to the Azhar Park on Salah Salem Street, an oasis of greenery and peace in the heart of Cairo. Open air performances by local artists every Friday evening. Minaret view sunsets come for the price of the admission ticket. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw2CRy4T7g4QR4cGB0uhJLBJqnNCh3ZiCWZCETf0ah_n6K9mPMd3scX8ZdGefAoF2L1ao2UnG9tqqcvCoVSRMz1RBhBkZ5n21ab6y9fdgLYYDneh8dDH8YantmTO6NhNxzXuxgnEbDMs5T/s1600/4935_1062618054906_3562275_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw2CRy4T7g4QR4cGB0uhJLBJqnNCh3ZiCWZCETf0ah_n6K9mPMd3scX8ZdGefAoF2L1ao2UnG9tqqcvCoVSRMz1RBhBkZ5n21ab6y9fdgLYYDneh8dDH8YantmTO6NhNxzXuxgnEbDMs5T/s1600/4935_1062618054906_3562275_n.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Azhar Park sunset</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Those are my top ten. What are yours? In or out of Egypt, wherever you've travelled, and/or lived?</span><br />
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-30294788390779244542014-06-08T12:39:00.000+03:002014-06-08T17:03:36.258+03:00Leave me out of it, Mister!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.lennartnilsson.com/bilder/Lennart-Nilsson_home.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.lennartnilsson.com/bilder/Lennart-Nilsson_home.jpg" height="309" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Credit <a href="http://www.lennartnilsson.com/home.html" target="_blank">Lennart Nilsson</a> </td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Lately
I have come across a positive deluge of opinionated thinking on several issues
related to family life. An extrapolation
of one person’s experiences, prejudices and shortcomings onto a blanket generalisation
and thrown around the shoulders of the entire world. Often this takes the guise of “golden words” or
“30 things that you must do before you are 30” or some such. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Someone
writes casually that he hasn’t done this or that particular thing (for his
child, for his parents, for his partner) and then goes onto an admonition – “do
this now, or you’ll end up regretting it!” Another says women should delay higher
education till after their childbearing is done. What? Yet another sermonises about how senior
citizens should be cared for, or pontificates on how the family bed and
co-sleeping has worked for their family and so should be adopted worldwide. The carving of one person’s experience onto
stone and then a moral drawn, and flogged as some sort of commandment for the
world to live its life by. It is the
last bit that I have issues with. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><b><u>Pick
your regrets</u></b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I
have lived my life as mindfully as I can under my particular circumstances, and
I know what I want to do for all of my family members, thank you very much. In fact, many of my choices have been
specifically guided by “if I don’t do it this way, I’ll regret it later.” Of course every choice comes with its set of
residual regrets attached, it is just a matter of choosing which regrets I
would rather, or rather not, have. And
we each choose the ones that we can live with individually. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Ian
McEwan, a writer whose books I admire, said some days ago that finding out
an unborn baby’s sex is “moral kitsch” and predisposes the child to gender
stereotyping, and that’s why his son and his son’s partner have chosen not to
find out the sex of the baby they are expecting. Fair enough, it’s a choice that many would-be-parents
make, preferring to draw out the surprise till the last minute. But to condemn all parents who might want
to know the sex in advance seems quite simplistic and frankly, wrong. There are issues of health and gender related
diseases for one thing, and for another - if the parents are the sort of people
who would gender stereotype a baby, then how will finding out the sex a few
months later morph them into the opposite?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><u><b>The
11th commandment </b></u><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In
my society, it is illegal for clinics to give out this information anyway, as
we haven’t yet managed to overcome the preference for male children and the
fact of female foeticide and infanticide and a host of other grave evils resulting
from it. It can be done privately and
illegally of course. But for many would-be-parents who would simply like to
follow the law of the land and also find out the sex of their unborn child without
being into foeticide and all that, it is not an option even. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I
spent most of my pregnancies outside of India, and in the one that actually progressed
as far as the 20-week scan, I answered “yes” to the doctor’s question without
even having to think about it. I found
out the sex of my child, not because I wanted to gender select/stereotype, but simply
because my own experiences made me unsure of how much time I had with this
child, and because I wanted to be able to engage as personally, as intimately, as
closely as possible with the “foetus” for
as long as possible. For all I knew, this would be the nearest I would get to
motherhood, and I wanted to be completely aware who it was that I was carrying
and mothering and to call them by name as soon as possible, long before I saw
their face. Or genitals. Knowing that helped me to be mindful and grateful. I kept my knowledge private at the time, in fact I
have not spoken of it to anyone up until now, and only the father knew all along. I cannot
equate my motives with “moral kitsch” in any way. I don’t think I deserve
blanket condemnation either, and neither do many others with different but equally
justifiable motives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 200%;">There
are many high and unrealistic expectations that society places on women, especially mothers; to add another straw to that particular camel’s back seems wholly
unnecessary. Judge not so one-dimensionally
that ye be not judged the same. If an
additional commandment were really essential, if would be this, it would be
this, it would be this.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-5829234031766031662014-05-27T14:37:00.001+03:002014-05-27T14:37:02.718+03:00Waiting<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>I sing to use the waiting</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>my bonnet but to tie</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>and shut the door unto my house</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>no more to do have I... ~ </i>Emily Dickinson.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That verse feels so apt today!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The thing with waiting is that - practice doesn't make perfect. However many millions of times it is done, it is still difficult, and difficult not with the hugeness of an obstacle which at the end gives relief and a sense of achievement that one was able to surmount it; but a fuzzy irritant like a moving pebble in a shoe that one can't wiggle out without either taking the shoe off or feeling absurd about taking so much trouble over such a small thing. It's a no-win situation like no other.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I have done a lot of waiting - I have waited for the school bell to ring; the holidays to come around; I've waited on platforms and departure lounges and transit halls for trains and planes; for exam results; for editors' answers; for doctors' and lab technicians' reports. Right now, I am waiting for my Cairo life to end, and to know exactly when I can make a new start in a different place. The problem with that boils down to a lack of control, I can't actively hurry the process, I can't delay it, it happens outside the range of my understanding and knowledge, there is nothing I can do except, well, wait.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I haven't got discernibly better at the waiting over the years. But what I <i>have</i> learnt is to manage my impatience better. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The pebble must take its own time to free itself from my shoe and in the process free my foot too; I have just learnt to keep on walking, to ignore the discomfort, to focus on a different distraction. Some days that pebble feels as large as a boulder, some other time I can shrink it to a mere grain. Today isn't a grain day, it's a boulder day, and my feet hurt, so it's a good idea to sit down and read some Emily Dickinson. Tomorrow I'll be up and walking again.</span></div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-49064659521356952582014-05-05T10:25:00.000+02:002014-05-05T10:26:27.337+02:00Tanoura<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This week I went back to the Wikala al Ghouri to watch the Tanoura again. Somehow it has so happened that I have been going back to watch those Sufis at pretty regular intervals throughout the past six years that I have been living in Cairo. With and without guests. This last time, which is the last time really before I leave for good, it is a goodbye of sorts. I am touching all the places and things that I have enjoyed about this city in a final gesture of farewell and then it's over, I detach and focus on what is to come rather than what I leave behind and how I wrench myself out, away from all the dear and familiar patterns.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The troupe were their usual mesmerising selves, the performance was crisper, amazingly lively. Probably each member of the audience feels this - that the performers speak directly to them, yet are actually not performing at all, because this is not a dance, it is an internal spiritual quest. That something devotional and spiritual can be so exuberant, so joyous, such an audio-visual, sensuous feast! It is almost difficult to reconcile that idea with our usual notions of austere spirituality. It always makes me feel uncomfortably wet about the eyelashes for all my wishy-washy wavering atheism, and equally it makes me want to get up and start dancing myself. The energies and the high are just magnificent. Definitely I wanted to go back and watch it once before I left, and now it's done. And a sense of huge peace in the doing.</span></div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-88989888624464153702014-04-27T16:42:00.001+02:002014-04-27T20:52:59.739+02:00Feelin' groovy? or perhaps not<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height: 200%;">The
book I would write? Well, it’s not a
book, but half a dozen, half-written already! And no, I am not creating a nested
metaphor within a metaphor in a cutesy reference to the book of my life or some
such. That’s also been half-written already,
only not sure by whose hand, as I am kind of wavering and agonised agnosticklish,
and I don’t want to open that whole can at all if I can help it, so forget all
that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; line-height: 200%;">The
fringe benefits of being a trailing family member are manifold of course, but
the most crucial of them is a heightened understanding of the word “random”. In the last eighteen years that I have lived in the Arab world, six of them here in Cairo, this has been brought home to me many times over. An expat is always acutely aware of the transience of relationships, even as the families come in and form friendships, they are aware of the fact that the depth and frequency of contact is directly proportional to the length of the breadwinners' posting there. There are some friendships, both at an individual and family levels, which persist through stints in different cities all over the world, but those are exceptions rather than the rule.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I am
essentially a narrator, whether in poetry or in prose, a story teller of sorts. The longest story I have written
so far, a novella, is about an Indian guy - Abeer, and his
relationships, set in post revolutionary Cairo. He is a loner, an amateur
artist, and a wannabe indoor gardener; his relationships, both unmarried and
married, have failed. Abeer is the typical expat, detached from the local
population and their struggles; but on one of his painting forays into the countryside
he comes across a young woman and is inexplicably attracted to her.
Sameer, Abeer's colleague and a family man, feels more rooted in the
country as his children are being raised here. But a crisis in the
company where they both work turns everything on its head, a worker is injured
accidentally and things get ugly. Sameer finds that he is not as rooted
in Egypt as he had thought after all. Abeer, who nearly loses his life in
the aftermath of the crisis, must come to terms with his own take on the
situation, will he take a risk and stay? Resolve
his ambivalence towards this young Egyptian woman? Or will he
too cut his losses and run away? Like Sameer, like Abeer himself has done in
the past.</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 24pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This story
began as most of my stories do - as a flash, but then it just kept getting more
and more complex and lengthier, it stands at around 30,000 words now. I
wrote it in 2012, just a year after the revolution happened and almost finished
it, only the denouement remains to be written. I left it for sometime
to "cool", and it is my plan to go back this year and complete the
ending and do the edits and tie up the loose ends. The reason I have
dilly-dallied so much on it is because I will have to rewrite the whole in the
past tense. Since it began as a flash, I started off with present tense,
and then it was too much of a disruption to change tracks in the middle.
I never thought it would exceed 10-12000 words, and no problem, I'll
change things around when I do the second draft, rather than start off again at
the half way mark.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Jo kal
karein so aaj karlein</i>, such an effective lesson this has taught me!
Never procrastinate.</span><span lang="EN-GB"><u1:p></u1:p><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Over the past
week, I have come to know that our stay in Egypt is over, we move out in
another few weeks, max a couple of months' time. Out of Africa again.
Cairo has got under my skin like no other place, it has grown up my son
and his mother in such unimaginable ways that it is mind boggling. It is
going to be a real wrench to start off again in a different place, but of course
that is also an opportunity. I am going to take the remaining time I have
here, which is not much as I will be travelling in May and then again in June,
but whatever is left to me here will be soundly utilised for the remaining
research and revisions. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That is the book I want to write right now. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">I hope I will be able to finish the story I
started in Cairo before I leave this magical, maddening and totally mesmerising
city. Wish me luck, universe!</span></div>
</div>
</div>
Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-58690758213768236302014-04-23T12:36:00.000+02:002014-04-23T18:22:59.740+02:00A giant leap remade into tiny <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">I
just finished gorging on the radio drama of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chander_Pahar" target="_blank">Chander Pahar</a> a few days ago, a famous staple from my childhood, and my first introduction to Africa. That book is still there in my old room at my
mum’s, a spontaneous gift to me from a much older cousin after he’d finished
with it. My mother read it to me, chapter by chapter, through the afternoons
officially meant for napping. The only
reason for that must have been her love for reading aloud to me, because by
then I could read myself. Very
little napping got done, obviously.
She read it to me once, and then I read it on my own again. I have been reading and rereading it and
listening to it all through my life. It’s one of those timeless experiences that one doesn’t tire of, even after childhood is long over. The book cover (which was designed by Satyajit Ray, no less, only he hadn't the cult status then) has come off and been sellotaped
many times, the silverfish have got to it too, I saw one year on home leave,
Kolkata is so hard on books. But unlike my
cousin, I have never managed to finish with it.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><b><u>Right into Chander Pahar country</u></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">A
year after my mum read it to me, she broke the news in her typical, gentle-lead-ups-are-only-for-sissies
way that we were moving from Delhi. Oh,
really? So, we were going back to Kolkata, to my grandparent’s house? No, to Africa! Immediately the simple but effective
illustrations of the open African grasslands, peppered with the acacia and the
baobab, the vastness and the majesty, flashed into my brain. I had no problem identifying the first baobab
I saw on landing in Kano. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Unlike Shankar in Chander Pahar, my father’s job in West Africa did not require him to stay in tents rigged out
in the bush, we lived in regular houses with flushing toilets and electric hobs,
and I even got to go to school and all. However, the culture shock <i>was</i> severely
truncated. Everything was new and different, but nothing was much of a
jolt. I sat in a classroom made out of
tin sheets nailed to wooden stakes driven into the sandy ground. We watched films at the officers club out in
the open air, one of the officers doubled up for projector duty, sometimes the screening was interrupted by a viper slithering
in between the rows of metal chairs. I
wasn’t very surprised at anything, not at all put out. Hadn’t Shankar, the
protagonist of the book, faced down a black mamba, way more evil than vipers? Hadn’t he been threatened by lions? This was Africa! Anything was possible! A
travel adventure story created by someone who had never set foot in this
continent yet captured it accurately and magnificently in polished prose was my
guide, buffer and comfort blanket all-in-one.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><b><u>From a giant leap...</u></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Much
later into teenage I heard my mother relate an anecdote from her single days. That someone had read her palm
once at one of those light-hearted gatherings where all unmarried women of a
certain age get their fortunes told; she had been given a reading that she will
go into the “faraway lands of the <i>rakshasas</i>”, and the political incorrectness
apart, had no difficulty in equating Africa with that reading and the accuracy of that long-ago prediction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-left: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<div style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Neither
of my parents come from lines of intrepid adventurers, the farthest anyone
in both their families had settled was Northern India, in places like
Chandigarh, Lucknow, Delhi, the really brave in Ahmedabad maybe. For my mother, growing up and living practically all her life in Kolkata, moving to Delhi must have been daunting. But at least she knew other family members, distant cousins, friends-of-friends there, people to help settle her in. Delhi was the capital, it had the best infrastructure, the best prospects, so what if the language was different? A postcard took only a couple days to reach, you could get on a train one evening and reach home 24 hours later. But Africa? No-one she knew in the whole continent, no-one except the cultural attaché in Delhi to advise her; and an old class-fellow of my father's who was working there already. Moving was a giant leap of faith. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><b><u>...to a tiny one</u></b></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 18pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">
Almost twenty five years later, I watched a plane take off with my husband in
it and understood exactly how high that leap was. We were relocating to
Bahrain, a country where we knew not one soul. Six months earlier, I
didn't know its coordinates. I didn't sleep that night in a haze of
diffuse anxiety. I have this hyper-active imagination, I dreamt up a massive
range of somewhat negative what if scenarios in a short couple of hours. There
was only a fixed telephone line at home, he called that almost a day later to
inform about his arrival. My mum-in-law and I sighed audibly in relief.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;"><br />
<br />
Subsequently things have changed a little. We have relocated a few times since that
first move. From late nineties onwards, there's been internet at home, so
that an armchair reconnaissance could be carried out as soon as
postings were finalised. I have left messages in expat blogs/forums asking for
help on the specifics, and got answers from perfect strangers who
were kind enough to respond. Moving has lost that fear factor, that huge,
arching leap into the completely unknown. It just retains a sense of
adventure and anticipation. Expat life has its own downsides of course, but one
thing it doesn't do well is boredom.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"> </span></span></div>
</div>
Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-15101962268486537872014-04-16T23:07:00.000+02:002014-04-17T02:24:53.794+02:00Does action speak at all?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">This
morning I got the news of the sudden passing of an old (but young) friend's
father. She and I were together in Bahrain for several years, before we
moved away - I to UAE and then to Egypt, and she first to Saudi and then to
Canada, the typical trajectories of trailing spouses. But we all kept in
touch albeit intermittently, she and I share the baggage and the privilege if
any, of being the only child of our respective parents, and therefore our
connect overrides the age difference which is substantial. </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">I saw
the message from her husband, and I rang her and we spoke for over half an
hour, and at the end of the call, I realised I had said nothing of any
"comfort value". I don't have words for these situations, I
have never been good with the spoken word, the right ones don't come for me
when I need them the most. What are the right words, even? I have
no idea if the call was of any use to her at all, just that I had an immediate
need to make it, I didn't think what I was doing, I rang the number blindly as
soon as I finished reading the message, without checking for the time
difference or things that I normally would do before making a cross border
call, almost like a reflex. </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">Was it
a self indulgence, then? Can anybody except the close family and/or
people physically close provide comfort at a time like this? I don't
know. I felt better for having spoken to her, whether she felt the same I will
never know, but I suspect not. No matter what comfort anyone offers, grief too
is something we ultimately must tackle and come to terms with alone, completely
unaided. All the hype about being there for each other etc works till the
halfway turnstile and stops, the rest is a trip no-one can undertake by proxy.
</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<b><u><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">Never
forgets her first</span></u></b><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">There
is a proverb somewhere in the Mediterranean, Italy? Spain? one of those places
with those TDH romantic types, which in sum means that a woman doesn't forget
her first love. Maybe. But I know for certain that she doesn't
forget her first brush with sudden death. I wasn't a woman, I was a girl
of 6-7 years, those days we used to live in New Delhi. My father, along with
two other friends, was in the process of establishing an architects'
firm. We lived on the first floor of a rented house, the front three rooms
were the office, the back rooms were home. The two were connected through
a balcony. I sometimes disobeyed strict orders to keep away, and walked across
that balcony after school into the office. The staff there indulged me
with gifts of pencils, and showed me those meticulously detailed architect's models
with their greensponge trees and little people with briefcases
and fascinating bluerippled pools of water in teeny-tiny swimming
pools. </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">Across
the road from us was a three storied house, a large Punjabi family lived there,
they had a teenage son, he vroomed in and out of the street on a motorbike. No
young children, otherwise I would have remembered going there, and I never
stepped into that house. My parents might have known them to say hello on the
streets, but nothing more. The social barriers were more strictly
observed then, my parents as young middle class people, still struggling to
make ends meet, were unlikely to be on intimate terms with a rich business
family which could afford motorcycles for its youngest member.</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">One
evening there was a commotion in that house, a lot of people gathered, a whole
line of cars came to be parked there. I saw men with the gravest faces, and saw
- for the first time in life - grown women crying with the corners of their<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>pallus</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>pressed over their faces. My father
stood by with an equally shocked face on our front patio. I will remember those
expressions if I live to be a hundred.</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">I
learnt that young man had died in a road accident, hit by a lorry at the AIIMS
junction, no signal there then, just a roundabout. He was thrown from his
bike, and he wasn't wearing a helmet, safety wasn't paramount in those days
either, no fines for not wearing one, he took a direct hit on his head and died
on the spot. At that time he seemed grown up to me, but he must have been
what? all of 17-18 years, must have just got his licence or maybe he was riding
alone on a learners' in a sudden fit of daring, breaking rules has an
irresistible attraction at that age. </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">I saw
his body being brought home late in the dark, and my father remained out on the
patio with the lights off most of that night, keeping some sort of vigil
with his mourning neighbours' for a young life lost so needlessly, so heart
wrenchingly. He said he was unable to sleep when I asked him why he
wasn't going to bed, I remember his cigarette glowing in the dark as he paced.
Maybe my mother joined him after I fell asleep, perhaps she went to condole
with the women after the cremation was over. Most likely she did, with the
appropriate words and a mandatory basket of fruit.</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">"You
hear of somebody in trouble, you go to them and make yourself useful," she
said to me once, when I was much older but equally as unwise as I had been at
7. </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">"How
do you know it's not an intrusion?" I had asked her sassily.</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">"It's
what you make of it," she had replied,"If they feel like talking, you
offer your attention, if they feel like tea, you make them some. You help any
way you can and then come away and let them get on with it. As simple as that.
I can assure you, they won't be thinking of who's gawking and who's come to
help. It's not about the visitors at all, it's not about you."</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">My mum,
unlike me, has always been good with the spoken word. Apart from being
less<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>uncertain</i>, less <i>diffident</i> about
things, less self-absorbed with the nitty gritties of her own
perspectives. Their entire generation, it seems to me. They know when
to observe those barriers, and when to topple them and reach out.
They don't obsess about their degree of usefulness, they know their roles
and they play them without wondering if the playwright has got it right and if
the script can improved. Maybe it's their faith, in god, in an afterlife,
in following scripts.</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<b><u><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">Going
to the turnstile</span></u></b><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">Before
my friends came to Bahrain, in August 2000 there was a ghastly air accident
just off the island of Muharraq. A few hundred feet from the runway, flight GF
072 crashed into the sea. No-one survived. The passengers were a
medley of nationalities, but most were Bahrainis and Egyptians. Many were
children, returning to school after the summer break. </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">Bahrain
is a tiny place, everyone knew someone on board that flight. I checked
the passenger list the next day but didn't find any familiar names, big sigh of
relief. But later a friend rang in tears, her nephews were on the flight,
returning alone from Cairo after spending their summer holidays with friends.
The mother was a wreck, the father had gone that morning to bring back the
bodies. My first reaction was a shocked silence, and the second one was just
the same, I wanted to drop everything and rush to her house that very
minute. </span><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">Better
sense prevailed and I went later in the afternoon, when the family were
formally receiving condolences, and I had no need for any words, because I
didn't know any language that my friend's mother, the bereaved grandmother of
those two boys, spoke. I sat on the floor amongst the women, someone made
tea and poured me some in the clear beakers that Arabs serve it in, and the
lady sat with the weight of her grief and a dry-eyed dignity that was more heart
breaking than free-flowing tears. It turned my brain inside out, the
rawness of that mourning and pain in that quiet women's majlis. From
there too, I had come away without knowing if my mostly-unexpressed sympathy,
served any purpose. Did it matter who came to share in the mourning? Does it
count who comes with you to that halfway turnstile? Do actions speak at all?
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-35873429497225968702014-04-08T12:09:00.000+02:002014-04-08T12:09:23.396+02:00Bread for thought and thought for bread<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Despite being a Bengali and way too fond of my rice and fish combo, I have a thing
for wheat. Wheat in any form, baked into bread, leavened, unleavened, flat,
loaves, fancy, whatever; non-bread as in pasta and noodles; stirred as
thickening and taste-enhancer into sauces and gravies. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">Nothing like the smell of a freshly puffed
phulka coming off the fire and on the plate, eaten plain or with a smear of
ghee, dipped into daal or if you prefer, into honey. I can eat it straight without anything at
all, standing right next to the hob, so hot that one has to move it from hand
to hand, the morsel from left cheek to right, searing on the palate. Bread is the ultimate comfort food. Let the
gods keep their ambrosia and amrit and whatever other godfood there is. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;"><b><u>The Longest Connection </u></b></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Wheat has the longest connection with humans. It was among the first grains cultivated somewhere in the Levant around 10-15,000 years ago. The switch from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled agriculture was made on the backs of wheat precursors. It started with gathering wild grass seeds for eating, and then someone, very likely a she, got fed up of all the trudging over rough terrain to find the next patch of einkorn, maybe also of the packing and unpacking of heavy stone tools, and the rounding up of screaming kids and looking for a cave dry enough and warm enough to sleep the babies already! So she saved a handful to scatter on the soil next to the current camping grounds, and of course there was no moving out of that den till the seedlings came up and yielded their seed, and then she saved a handful of that yield to plant the next season. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Meanwhile, the hunters found it more and more tedious to have to keep up with the herds of bisons or whatever, and bring back the kill over increasing distances to the same spot from which the women refused to move because some straggly new seedlings had come up. So the men got hold of some wild animals, sheep and goat, and penned them in. They were fed the leftover grass stalks and they were happy and gave meat and milk, and the latter was curdled in the sun and the first yoghurt and cheeses were made. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 17px;">Presto, the Neolithic Revolution and settled agriculture! </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">And before those hapless humans knew it they had become settlers from nomads, producing insanely beautiful rock art to decorate their homes; comparing the merits of this patch of soil to another, and whipping up livestock races, for all we know. Laying the foundation for suburban competitiveness and keeping up with the Joneses - </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">"Arrey, uski gufa meri gufa se safed kaise?!" </i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">and l</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">eading to all manner of delicious and marvellous stuff such as sewage treatment systems and custard sauce.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;">Unleavened flat breads, to which category our chapati and phulka belong, have an even longer connection, because they were being baked much before we learnt to grow the grains. The first breads were being baked 30,000 years ago, from pastes of wild cereals, the foreparents of grains such as barley, rye, wheat and oats in Europe. Bread wasn't the staple it is now, obviously humans ate it as and when they found the wild grasses, and it formed only one of the food sources. That changed with settled agriculture in the Levant, and grain based cultivation meant the wide and steady availability of bread, and so it gradually became a staple, eaten at every meal with varying accompaniments. Initially, wheat bread was reserved for special occasions, and coarser grains were used for daily meals. By 500 BCE, baking and retailing of bread had evolved into a specialised profession, people could buy breads and cakes from a baker's shop in Athens in Antiquity.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;"><b><u>..and a powerful symbol</u></b></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;">It is not clearly known what languages were spoken in the Stone Ages, but our languages today certainly celebrate the primordial connection we have with bread. Bread remains a powerful symbol across the world, in religion, in politics, and in literature. Our needs are summed up by "do waqt ki roti"; we "break bread" with someone close; we have one or more "bread-winners" in our families; we ask for our "daily bread" in our prayers. Unrest at increasing prices or shortage of food is labelled "bread riots". In ancient Rome, rulers had a simple maxim of "the bread and circuses" - in other words, keep people fed and entertained for stability. Marie Antoinette's famous (but likely falsely attributed) statement "let them eat cake" (instead of bread) is supposed to have led to the French Revolution. And don't even get me started on the symbolism of bread in literature - from Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs via Khayyam and Rumi's mystic poetry to Neruda's romantic verses, bread has symbolised guidance and abundance and life itself. </span><br />
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<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white; color: #666666; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;">"A loaf of
bread," the Walrus said,</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: #666666; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;"><br style="text-align: start;" />
<i><span style="background: white;"><span style="text-align: start;">"Is
what we chiefly need:</span></span></i><br style="text-align: start;" />
<i><span style="background: white;"><span style="text-align: start;">Pepper
and vinegar besides</span></span></i><br style="text-align: start;" />
<i><span style="background: white;"><span style="text-align: start;">Are
very good indeed--</span>...” </span></i><span style="background: white;">(Jabberwocky,
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 13.0pt;">I think I shall stop on that note, there really can't be anything more to add after that. </span><br />
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-50486112218032781702014-04-04T23:37:00.000+02:002014-04-05T12:29:49.933+02:00What's in a name?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I was born with a short fuse apparently, I told one of my senior relatives <i>"amake ragiyo na, raagle ami chandaal"*</i>, at an age so tender that I have no recollection of that actual event. My relative reportedly roared with laughter, ROTFL as they put it now. That is where I must have picked up the notion that laughter is an appropriate reaction to anger. I find any rage, including my own, funny. I mean, I can be in the middle of a satisfying marital spat, with guns blazing on both sides, me ahead on point-scoring by miles, and then completely ruin everything by bursting out with a laugh at the wrong moment. I never manage a clear cut victory. Story of my life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">However inconvenient that reaction might be, what strikes me now about that childhood episode is the cool acceptance of caste-ism in everyday language and life. Obviously, a young child would not know what a <i>"chandaal"</i> was, I was parroting an adult, overheard in a conversation around me, or perhaps, as I prefer to think, on my grandfather's radio. In all the telling and retelling and the accompanying mirth of that gaffe, no-one ever mentioned it was wrong to conflate viciousness and brutality with a group of people, with caste stereotypes. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A few years down the line, I brought home a school report in Delhi, where a single letter of my family name had been omitted. My grandfather who was with us at the time, was extremely upset. I couldn't figure out what all the fuss was about. I was used to my name being misspelled, long Bengali, Sanskritised names were uncommon outside Bengal still; so I didn't understand what he was so annoyed about. He told me that one omission changed the family caste from the highest to a rung lower on the scale, intolerable in his view. Caste? What's that, grandfather? And so I got my first lesson in it. I remember. I was seven.</span><br />
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<u style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><b>Slicing the world</b></u><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b> </b> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Of course there's a lot in a name, and not one should ever be misspelled. Especially not on a school report and other important documents. My grandfather did more than just teach me about castes that day. He taught me a lesson in respect. Respect the work enough to want to do it error-free, respect the person you address enough to know their name correctly, above all respect yourself, know your roots without which pride and self-respect and respect for pretty much everything else is impossible. Those long, heavy words weren't articulated, but were part of his message that day. I have no issues with that, all good lessons and one is never too young to learn them. What bothered me vaguely is this way of slicing the world into us and them, where the last names of my friends were more important than the first. Really? You mean Renuka's perfect 10 at spellings didn't make her better than me? It was baffling.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A year or so later, my family moved to West Africa, where whole new ways to slice worlds into us and them opened up. I learnt that every society has them, whichever cultural divides you straddle, whichever lines you use. Being an outsider everywhere gives a kind of unique perspective, I was exposed to other bases of discrimination, and I was sheltered by the great distances from the ones in my own.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I came back to settle in Bengal almost twenty years after I left it. India and the wider world had changed a huge amount in those years, humans had been to the Moon and back, our own Rakesh Sharma had confirmed that India looked <i>saare jahan se achchha </i>even from Space. My grandfather's leisure was now spent in front of a colour TV, his radio had fallen silent. His views on caste remained unchanged of course; that didn't surprise me in the slightest. Treat everyone with due respect, but marry within your caste, employ only Brahmin cooks.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Old people often hold onto the ideas of their youth as a last straw of reassurance against the avalanche of exponential, unfathomable changes they experience. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">His generation had seen too much, felt too much for one lifetime to contain and adapt seamlessly - two world wars, the first aeroplane flight, the Independence, the bloodbath of the Partition, the uprooting of his family from the centuries old homestead, the famines, the 1961 and 1971 wars, the nuclear programme, the space programme, satellite TV, women's right to their father's property being made into law, my god just listing them here makes my head spin. So naturally he held onto anything that felt immutable and stable, the ancient laws given by the scriptures. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I could understand that clutching at straws, I didn't grudge him the comfort and stability of the </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">status quo</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But what surprised me was the encounters I faced at my workplace, among my peers and younger people. Nothing very offensive or remarkable, nothing tangible that anybody could object to. A remark about some particular double-barrel surname being part of a "shrewd" community, another one being "devious", an offhand joke cracked here, a smiling reference there. It took me time to figure them out, because of my upbringing elsewhere I was unaware of the significance of the names, how each family name is linked irrevocably to caste, and sometimes to birthplace. A Tamil colleague casually pointed out how he wouldn't be allowed to sit at the same table and eat lunch with me back at his own village. A close friend mentioned drawing back from a relationship because the potential partner was from a different caste. Even people years younger than me asked "what caste is that?" when they came across a surname they hadn't heard before. I was gobsmacked how prevalent this caste business was, how insidiously common the slicing still remained.</span>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That was several years ago, things have changed further. My grandfather is no longer with us, his radio, his wall clock and his house itself have passed out of my life. Liberalisation, globalisation, the Internet, multinationals, pride in heritage coupled with greater openness, Indians leading global corporations, the rise and rise of the middle class. More and more young people travel the world, work abroad, and also come back from abroad to settle back in India. Many old traditions have blurred, many have been discarded. The world has not yet become India's oyster, but perhaps we have got a finger under the lip of the shell. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Last year on annual home leave, I got talking to a group of people </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">informally</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> - and was surprised to come across the same caste associations, stick to your own class/caste/faith when it comes to socialising and relationships; you can't really socialise with the so called "lower" castes, the chasm is too wide. No-one was prepared to accept that this "chasm" was more a function of education and economic backwardness rather than caste. Our bases for slicing the world haven't changed all that much. My grandfather may have passed on, but everyday caste-isms are alive still, sadly; finding strange homes in hearts and minds much younger. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>* Loosely translated that means don't mess with me, I'm a Chandaal when angry. Chandaals are traditionally associated with the cremation rites and death, and the word/caste is used negatively to mean vicious, mean, fiery tempered and a person of uncontrolled appetites.</i></span></div>
Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-61468647391584086022014-04-01T13:01:00.000+02:002014-04-02T00:24:58.446+02:00In praise of being grounded<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I read a post somewhere last week, about a train journey in North Eastern India, and that took me back instantly to my own. Once upon a time in my life all long distance journeys meant roads and rails, flying in a pressurised metal capsule on the silver side of clouds wasn't necessarily synonymous with travelling. Air travel is fast, efficient, no-nonsense, very business like, just like the rest of our fast-paced urbanised-upto-the-gills lives now. But I still feel I haven't really travelled a country till I have negotiated the bumps and the culverts of its roads, or waited interminably for the signal to turn green stuck in a train miles away from anywhere. I still insist on a long-distance bus or train trip on every holiday, otherwise I feel I haven't really got my money's worth. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The shortest train ride I have taken is maybe 20 minutes, the longest is around 45 hours, from Trivandrum to Kolkata. I don't think I would like to spend such long hours inside a ladies coupe now, though I certainly didn't mind that trip when I made it many years ago. A cousin and I went on a two week trip to South India and padded around - Bangalore, Mysore, Ooty, Kanyakumari, Trivandrum and then up along the backwaters of Kerala via Cochin turning east to Chennai (then still Madras) and up through Vizag and Rajamundhry to Kolkata. Unforgettable, the little vignettes of rural India through the train windows. Interesting travel companions too, two young women from Germany, much like us, they were nurses they told us, and had saved up for this holiday, travelling the whole of India on a budget. They ate only bananas the whole journey to avoid the dreaded bugs. My cousin and I marvelled privately, we couldn't imagine how much money it took to go off to a different continent like that. It would have taken me half my lifetime to save that much and go off on such a trip, beyond the realms of dreams.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That journey was a one-off, I have never again been on the same train or route, the opportunity has never arisen to travel so extensively in the South. Of course I flew in and out of Chennai and Cochin and Bangalore a few times, and took a cab up the Nilgiri slopes to Munnar on work-related hurried trips, where there was no time to walk around and smell the coffee and the flowers; I went on a holiday even, to Coorg just a few years back, but then we flew into Bangalore airport, with its flower export handling facilities and wifi in place, a very far cry from the old, ancient railway platforms and the colonial era red brick station buildings. Just not the same thing, the feel of those trips. Train travel is so much more relaxed and restful, so much more grounded, a longer, more in-depth learning opportunity in that close brush with the co-passengers, cooped up in the coupes, in those vignettes of life flashing past the windows. Air travel can't ever hope to replicate that same magic.</span></div>
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9080268967460284004.post-59544769087183244532014-03-27T15:46:00.000+02:002014-03-28T15:28:20.436+02:00All are whole, but some are more whole than others<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I am waiting for that perfect topic to plop into my mind before I write here again. But it isn't. And meanwhile I can't stop thinking about a short <a href="http://annas-adornments.blogspot.com/2014/03/through-eyes-of-child-wep-challenge-for.html" target="_blank">sketch</a> a blogger friend posted, a semi-fictional conversation between two little girls discussing earrings, one of them complaining about her mother allowing her only glue-on ones and no piercing. A perfect storm of thoughts and memories in a teacup.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><u><b>For a whole bar of chocolate</b></u></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">My ears were pierced in my fifth year, and my memories of the event are very clear, it happened at my maternal grandfather's house, one of my elder cousins, my mother's sister's daughter, was also pierced, just before me. We both had to sit on the floor on a small square rug, behind us our grandfather's bed against the large window, and before us our mothers and the stranger who did the piercing. I remember nothing about him except that he wore a somewhat soiled dhoti. My cousin cried a little. My aunt promised us a whole bar of chocolate each if we didn't cry or make a fuss. I remember becoming apprehensive at this point, if adults were willing to give such recklessly huge bribes, then it had to hurt like hell!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When my turn came I sat on the rug and the man pulled at my ears, first on one side and then the other, and I felt a prick while he marked out the position on the lobes. I kept waiting for the terrible pain for which only an entire bar of chocolate could compensate enough. But he did nothing further and turned away, I remember the smell of Dettol, but not my lobes being cleaned, and then my aunt handed me the chocolate. It was over. The first blood had been drawn.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I remember being mildly disappointed when I looked in the mirror next, there were only bits of black yarn threaded and knotted through the scabbed hole, no fancy earrings like the grown ups. I don't know when I got actual earrings, my first pair were tiny hoops in gold, which my mother substituted with small silver ones when I started to walk to school by myself, maybe around six or seven. She had heard or read of a little girl's lobes being torn open when her earrings were snatched by a mugger. I liked my silver earrings better than the first gold pair because they had a small crystal embellishment. At that time, silver was as good as dross. The assumption was no-one would want to steal them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I wore those all through school, till I was sixteen, never thought of taking them off, or trying a different pair. Studs and danglers were totally no-no, as was costume jewellery. The whole idea of a child/tween/young teen possessing a range of earrings was inconceivable. I didn't see the women in my life changing their earrings often, from my grandmothers to my cousins, everyone had a pair stuck on their ears forever it seemed, I never consciously thought about the ornaments. I started with my brand of special cluelessness pretty early. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I took off my hoops first when I passed my school certificate and went back to Delhi. At that time, it was all the rage to wear nosepins and many young women I knew got their noses pierced. I didn't, though if anyone had asked me why, I wouldn't have been able to articulate a reason. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Over the years there I acquired maybe three or four pairs of silver studs to rotate as and when I liked. That felt grown up and almost decadent.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><u><b>You're not quite whole without some extra holes</b></u></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I vaguely disliked going out with bare ears, or even with the wire hook earrings which left the holes visible. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For a long time, I disliked also that compulsion that I felt I was under, to wear earrings to cover my lobes. Pretty much a no-win situation. S</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">ome neuroses are good for a decade, some others more long term and greater value for money. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One learns to pick and choose ones complexes as one grows, that's one good thing about ageing. Nowadays I don't give a (insert preferred expletive here, I can't think of anything strong enough right this minute) either way. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But the thing is, women who don't wear jewellery make people uncomfortable in India. I remember standing, bare-armed, bare-eared, by my mother's bed when she was very sick indeed, just before she got diagnosed with her cancer, and a visiting doctor remarking on my unjewelleried state, asking why my arms were bare. I remember being out with an aunt and her telling me that I was not fit to be seen in public because I had forgotten to wear my earrings that day. She insisted that I buy a cheap pair and bung them in right then and there, which I didn't, but all the same I felt like an idiot, like my slip was showing. I was unmarried then. The expectations regarding jewellery wearing take a quantum leap after a woman is married. Let's not even get into that here.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And the thing is also, women who wear too much jewellery or the wrong kind of jewellery make Indians equally uncomfortable. A young adult woman wanting to get multiple piercings in her ear is likely to be opposed by her family, the same family who have got her lobes pierced as a religious ritual at age one or three or whatever. A niece who wanted a tattoo and a piercing for her 18th birthday didn't get either ultimately because no-one in the family </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">approved </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">(including me! I dislike tattoos! henna is so much cooler). Either way we can't seem to let our women just be themselves.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The problem with any piercing is that it is a mutilation. It alters our bodies permanently. Any piercing done in childhood impacts our acceptance of our own bodies. "Look, your ears are not pretty as they are, they need things to hang down, stick out, loop over, loop under, to make them look presentable." That's the message, and we pick it up. However clueless, however unconsciously. It took me years to realise that bare ears can be pretty too; better bloody late than never.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Of course, jewellery and piercings and extreme decorations are all part of self expression, about choice and rights. Any adult should have the right to do whatever the hell she pleases with her own body. Adult. That's the operative word here. Not a four year old or a 16 year old. Not even an 18 year old who is dependent on her parents still, or who might change her mind two weeks later. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /><br />As I was writing this post, my husband came in, so I asked him whether, if we had had a daughter, he'd have considered piercing her ears. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Pierce? ears? Wha-? What for?" he looked at me with a is-that-a-trick-question-what-are-you-up-to-now kind of expression and then satisfied, said,"Nah. Not under my watch. Besides, any daughter of mine can damn well pay for it herself." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What for. Exactly.</span><br />
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Nilanjana Bosehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08656370320322301943noreply@blogger.com2