Sunday 29 July 2007

Chaos. A mad rush. Lists. Plenty of lists. Lines scratched out, lines erased, lines replaced. People to meet, people to call. Dissertation mania. Pages to be read, pages to be sorted, pages to be typed. Panic, exaustion, dread. And repeated again. An almost gnawing worry, a mind in constant turmoil. Questions to be answered, solutions to be found, comfort to be given, friends falling apart, friends to reassure, things to make up for, in reverance and devotion, love to those most important. Stretched at a hundred places at once. Undoing. Unmanageable. Daunting. Choked. A range of feelings extremely familiar. The familiarity infuriating. Deep breaths unhelpful. Patience weaning...reaching zeniths end...an almost unacceptable feeling this. Water. Splashing the face hard as often, as mercilessly as possible. A desperate scramble for respite...is it deserved...or is this self pity...

And suddenly warmth from old wrinkled hands, soft and rough on the face at the same time. Crinkled eyes, black and beaded but glowing with love unquestioned...warm in her embrace, enconced from the world...a relief expressed in drying tears on her bossom. A strength to carry on blazed from her frail yet unbeatable spirit.

Granny in absolute ingnorance and innocence with a single smile and hug made it all do-able and I echoed her whispered words, "I love you too Pati".

So easily its a new dawn.
Posted by Pavitra :: 08:44 :: 7 comments

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Sunday 15 July 2007

Home to you...

I’ve been meaning to write this since my return to Delhi. I have the fondest memories of this dirty, uncivilised, over populated, polluted yet generous, cultured and wise city. I came back from my year as a student in London last month. The Delhi airport with its little neat duty free shops and extremely smart and efficient ground stewardesses is like any other international airport. You don’t quite realise you are in India until you make you make your way out and then it hits you so hard you only have reflexes enough to gasp. The driver greeted me and I settled for a nostalgic drive back home. The area around the airport is covered with slums for at least about five kilometers in places.

Like brown and black dunes, the acres of slums rolled away from the roadside, and met the horizon with dirty heat-haze mirages. It seemed impossible that a modern airport, full of prosperous and purposeful travelers, was only kilometers away from crushed and cindered dreams. Had I been a foreigner, my first impression would have been that some catastrophe had taken place, and that the slums were refugee camps for the shambling survivors. Since I wasn’t a foreigner, I knew that they were survivors. The catastrophes that had driven them to the slums from their villages were poverty, famine and bloodshed. Somewhere in my subconscious I had expected to see it. I knew it. Like every Indian does in every picture of every road and scene etched forever in his mind. But it still hurts. For that moment I blamed London for having spoilt me and made my nerve endings raw. But I do remember bleeding for this sight even then before I left.

As the kilometers wound past, as hundreds of people in those slums became thousands, my spirit writhed. I felt defiled by my own health and the money in my pockets. It’s a lacerating guilt, that first confrontation with the wretched of the earth. I had worked as a labourer in a restaurant in London, I had lived surrounded by this poverty for most of my life. Still, that first encounter with the ragged misery all around cut into my eyes.

That guilt soon flamed into anger and rage at the unfairness of it: What kind of government, I thought, What kind of a system allows suffering like this? In indignant bourgeois thoughts I also wondered what kind of wasteful human attitude allowed the people to let this happen to themselves (I most sincerely apologise for this callous thought).

I looked at the people then and I saw how busy they were. Occasional sudden glimpses inside the huts revealed the astonishing cleanliness of that poverty: the floors were spotless, the utensils all stacked together in little pyramids. And then I saw the women (I admit to always having found all these Indian women extremely gracious in spite of the dirt in their lives and in their surroundings) wrapped in all colours of sarees, dupattas and some in just a meagre imitation of both sweeping the areas around the huts, cooking meals on stoves outside the house, braiding their daughters hair; constantly active. Mostly I saw the affectionate camaraderie of the fine-limbed children, older ones playing with younger ones, many of them supporting baby sisters and brothers on their slender hips. Responsibility at such a young age under such dire circumstances where each one should have been only thinking of himself and how to diminish the pain of his own depravity filled me with a certain pride for this beautiful race.

I thought then that this is the reason for India’s speciality. I also understood in a way that this is the reason for India’s deplorable status as a developing nation. We are special and great for the deep connection between Indian and Indian. We love ours anywhere and however. The camaraderie is strong. But our failure lies in the fact that there is no bond between Indian and India. We love each other, we love our culture but we don’t love the nation enough to do something about anything. The fight, the killer instinct, the possessiveness dies with the people and the culture. It doesn’t reach the land. It doesn’t matter; the poverty, the disabilities, the corruption nothing matters anymore to the educated Indian. He has forgotten ‘India’…he returns/lives only for his ‘Indians’ (by his I mean his immediate friends and family), his ghar ka khana and his language.

Almost reaching home, I saw a few more beggars sitting together sipping cups of chai and talking with smiles on their faces. In a city where there are no rooms for miracles, (I won’t end with the cliché that miracles do happen) the beauty of it all is that these people still believe in miracles.

I love every moment of every breath taken here in this country, on this land. I hope this feeling isn’t romanticism of the youth. I hope I don’t have to come back to this page ever to remind me of it. I hope I can be more sincere than sincere while publishing this. I hope.

Posted by Pavitra :: 11:31 :: 9 comments

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Monday 9 July 2007

Would you die for the one you loved?

Climb every mountain
Run the distance
Lavish with every soft word ever known
Swim across the seven seas
Wade through taunts of mockery
Stand still as cutting shards of glass shear your skin
Walk over thin ice
Bend over to allow thou perch
Kiss thou feet in reverance
No shame, no wrath, no avarice
No moment of qualm
Your love alone...
Tis' not enough, not enough, not enough.

Posted by Pavitra :: 09:43 :: 15 comments

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Tuesday 3 July 2007

It's a kids life

I walk everyday. Sometimes I walk fast, sometimes slow and sometimes am too lost in thought to notice the speed. I love drinking water. I drink like a camel. I even sleep with a bottle of water by my bed and get up a few times each night for a gulp or two. So I love opening my mouth wide while staring up at the sky when it rains. I like dust storms. I like the extraordinary charged quality in the wind. I love walking through them even though I need to bend my head low in order to avoid the besieging particles. I love Labradors. I enjoy calling out to every lab I see on a walk and watch it come towards me with a little jump, a wag and a wiggle. I also love kids. I take immense joy in watching them play, yel,l shout, fight, laugh and play again whether in the heat, rain or a dust storm. I love especially listening to kiddo conversations, the vague boasts, the bizarre exaggerations, the ‘my daddy strongest’ syndrome, the blatant honesty. I come away from these conversations always with surprise and envy at the forthright existence. I know all these things make me sound old and boring. But I have been walking in this park and have noticed these little kids play together and I realised how much of an impact peer pressure has on children and their decision making abilities and the evolution of their moral rights and wrong, on their ability to take the initiative.

Meera plays with Rajeev and Malini who are her neighbours. They come from the same social set up and have seen the same kind of life. It isn’t much but subconsciously it still makes an impression on them about the hierarchies of society. They play ‘tag’ and ‘blind mans bluff’ and make a whole load of noise and enjoy themselves silly. Rajeev and Malini always make fun of Sangeeta, the poor girl who lives with the ‘aaya folk’ where they play ‘pakadan pakadai’. They rag Meera and make her feel extremely ashamed when she says Hi to Sangeeta once in a while. They mimic her and call her names and tell her they won’t be friends with her if she continues to talk to the ‘aaya girl’. ‘Bbut but she’s in my class,’ Meera stammers. ‘So go stick with her and catch her fleas’, shouts Rajeev. And so Meera began to ignore Sangeeta whenever the other two were around. I saw Meera and Sangeeta go over to Sangeeta’s side of the living quarters once or twice. The two little girls seemed extremely happy and were giggling over something like all little kids do. But the next time Meera saw Sangeeta when Rajeev and Malini were around she ignored her. I saw Sangeeta’s face drop with disappointment, shame and confusion as Meera turned her back to Sangeeta when she called out to her. I saw Meera flush a little trying to hide her abashment from Sangeeta while calling out to Malini to take the ball.

Rajeev suddenly stopped coming to play for a few days. It was holiday season, so I figured he must have gone out of town with his family. With Rajeev gone, Malini’s visits to the park became erratic. It was then that Sangeeta and Meera could be seen playing everyday. Those two weeks their friendship blossomed and flourished. I saw them play, run, talk, giggle, draw with sticks in the mud and become thick as thieves. Meera was moving out of this place in a few days. I realised that as the wooden boxes began to pile up outside her house and there was a whole load of chaos that can be seen in an Army officer’s home when he is about to move out on a posting.

Rajeev came back, yet Meera would run across the park earlier than normal to Sangeeta’s side of the living quarters so that neither Rajeev nor Malini would spot her. She was embarrassed of being seen with Sangeeta but had become such fast friends with her that she didn’t want to give up on the camaraderie. The day she was to leave Meera was stuck with Malini and Rajeev as the parents were saying goodbye. The kids were cracking jokes and enjoying as usual.

I saw Sangeeta walk up the path to Meera’s house then. She wasn’t alone, there was a man walking beside her. I am guessing he was her father. She had a little gift wrapped package in her hand. Meera saw Sangeeta coming and suddenly detached from her two friends and went towards her. Sangeeta gave her the gift, which Meera quickly tore open right there. Malini and Rajeev walked up to her, saw the two tiny little plastic dolls wrapped up in the gift paper and exclaimed ‘How cheap! Couldn’t she have gotten you something better?’ Embarrassed, Meera turned to Sangeeta and asked ‘Aur kuch nahi la sakti thi?’ Sangeeta gulped a sob and with tears running down her cheeks took hold of the man’s hand and walked away. I think I saw a look of anguish and uncertainty on Meera’s face, like she wanted to run after her friend and apologise. But she didn’t. She just stood there and watched Sangeeta leave.

I don’t know if she felt bad or guilty. I don’t know if she felt remorse later. I don’t know if she will remember Sangeeta or the incident in her later years. But it was as simple as that. Her peers had such an influence on what she thought or did; she didn’t strike out and do what she wanted to. Most of the times when we are growing up or going off to college, our parents advice us to avoid bad company, not to get tempted to smoke or drink. What we all forget is that peer pressure affects a lot more of the basic issues, of what we would stand up for, whether we would, what would make us take the initiative and how much harder the peers can make this for kids.

Not bad for a walk huh?

Posted by Pavitra :: 09:51 :: 10 comments

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Sunday 1 July 2007

When you have no light to guide you
And no one to walk to walk beside you
I will come to you
When the night is dark and stormy
You wont have to reach out for me
I will come to you
Sometimes when all your dreams may have seen better days
And you dont know how or why, but youve lost your way
Have no fear when your tears are fallin
I will hear your spirit callin
And I swear Ill be there come what may
So if you feel that your soul is dyin
And you need the strength to keep tryin
Ill reach out and take your hand
I will come to you

-Hanson

For all these words...will I?

For all the doubts then can I even ask...will you?

Posted by Pavitra :: 03:15 :: 5 comments

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