What's it going to be then, eh?

Philosopher once told me, "It is also about empowerment. Your decision empowers YOU. If you don't decide, someone decides for you. You don't have the power -THEY have the power over you. You are forced (into a position). You have to learn to make that choice.. It is your freedom."

His words come back with a fiery determination to me this morning, as I put down Burgess' Clockwork Orange and got a call from my work place asking me about my commitments for the next academic year. I said I might want to quit. I thought I was finally making a choice. But they said, we could negotiate. We don't want you to quit.
I'm back to square one, I dislike making choices.

But after reading Burgess' book I'm forced to retract my statement. Burgess says, without choice man ceases to be man. It's worth reading the book or watching Kubricks sensationally notorious film for people like us who live in democratic, yet State controlled societes. Choice is important. To the state, like Auden says in "The Unknown Citizen", we are merely a number. With our power of choice taken away, we become mere clockwork orange, like Alex in the book. Some lines from the book that intrigued me:
'Choice,' rumbled a rich deep goloss. I viddied it belonged to the prison charlie. 'He has no real choice, has he? Self interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self debasement. His insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrong doer. He ceases to be a creature capable of moral choice.'
'These are subtleties,' like smiled Dr. Brodsky. 'We are not concerned with motive, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime-'
'Me, me, me. How about me? Where do I come into all this? Am I like just some animal or dog? Am I just to be like a clock work orange?'
'What's it going to be then, eh?'

Do we care?

So I finally did what I've wanted to do for a long time now, participate in a car rally! About ten hours of non stop driving and 500 kms later, I don't really know what to feel. Now that I was behind the wheels, speeding down the expressway and winding down ghats, the drive seemed doubly thrilling. When I completed the drive from Mumbai to Lavazza and back, I was ecstatic. Our cars carried big stickers on either side , with our number and a huge ad for Lavazza. But a day later, when I see the campaigns and coverage the event has received in the papers, I feel slightly guilty and highly stupid. Guilty, because I feel like I sold a little part of my soul by participating in a rally that was only ostentatiously to support the cause of Woman's cancer and was really an advertising campaign for Lavazza, the new township coming up near Pune. Stupid, because all the cultural theorizing didn't help me see through this gimmick and my excitement got the better of me.

The media has been creating quite a hype about Lavazza in the last few months. I also have a bunch of pretentious people for relatives who visited the place a few months back and couldn't stop going ga ga over it. After driving through this upcoming township nestled in between seven hills, I am only left feeling sadly overwhelmed at the absolute power man has over everything around him. The isolated five star town reminded me of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Lang In his 1927 film envisions a futuristic city of the 2026AD where man is merely automaton. Lavazza might be an engineering and architectural marvel. But it has left thousands of villagers dislocated without fair compensation and hundreds of trees have been razed off to dig swimming pools and helipads.
The ravaged rocks of the mountain out of which the township is being carved, will have a story written in stone. We'll just be to busy notice.

Musing for March: Every event organized by the TOI is usually a gimmick. It is always a profitable business venture given the velvety gloss of a pertinent social cause.

What to do?

Its been crazy three weeks cramming in time for the various deadlines that I've been trying to meet on all fronts. My plate has been rather stashed up with a teaching job, a freelancing project with an education firm, my masters program, enrolling for a car rally, figuring out a summer holiday, toying with the idea of starting a small circulating library and beating the Mumbai heat. The result: I haven't had time to look at my brand new inheritance of lovely old books from half a century ago or even contemplate my future career moves.
If there's one thing i dislike greatly, it is making decisions. I know its awefully lucky to be spoilt for choice, but that's one spot I dread being in. So just as I was making my peace about postponing career decisions to a later week, Shorty sent me a mail frigidly titled "freelancer?professor? student of education...?" Attached was an article by Alain De Botton on office culture.An excerpt,

"Watch anyone halfway competent at work and it’s hard to do anything other than respect them. In our age, levels of commitment that in previous societies were devoted to military adventures and religious intoxication have been channelled into numerical, legal and managerial needlework. In the olden days, home used to be the place of kindness and refuge while the workplace was cruel and blunt. Now the equation is often reversed. How politely we tend to behave at work, next to the insults we throw at one another at home, where there is no human resource department to coax us into being more civilised. Nowadays workers have to be “motivated,” meaning they have — more or less — to like their work. So long as workers had only to retrieve stray ears of corn from the threshing-room floor or heave quarried stones up a slope, they could be struck hard and often, with impunity and benefit. But the rules had to be rewritten with the emergence of tasks whose adequate performance required their protagonists to be, to a significant degree, content, rather than simply terrified or resigned. The new figures of authority must involve themselves with childcare centres and, at monthly get-togethers, animatedly ask their subordinates how they are enjoying their jobs so far. Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in a velvet glove is, of course, the human resource department.

Office work distracts us, it focusses our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it gives us a sense of mastery, it makes us respectably tired, it puts food on the table. It keeps us out of greater trouble. "

Just a few days earlier, I found out that my designation at the place I was freelancing was that of an 'education consultant.' It had a fancy ring to it. But that was it. It was a booming, hollow fancy ring. As I sat on a swivel chair in their air conditioned office, designing 'quality' educational products I realized how 'quality' education can never be produced in the four walls of a capital driven business venture. Adding quality to education needs a human helping hand....no high end multimedia kit can bring that dimension of quality or meaning to education which an ordinary teacher can. Quality education begins and ferments in a classroom.

My work isn't merely distraction. It doesn't put much food on my plate, but I'm happy gorging on the food for thought it often leaves me with. So is the decision made? I don't know.

I'll just have to wait for another academic year to unfold... :)

Some kind of wonderful!

A wonderful Parsi gentleman unknowingly bequeathed me a treasure. He left me not just his rare collection of books but also pages of his life still fresh with the smell of his memories and the faded blue ink of this fountain pen. I can't wait to write about my Sunday in a garage piled with what I love...old, moth eaten, dusty, mouldy books. It was a heady Sunday well spent losing myself in the cacophony of dusty, old books. He had all the books I've possibly always wanted to own..Kerouac, Flaubert, Ionesco, Waugh, Graham Greene, countless English and American Anthologies, Indian writing, Brecht, Wesker, Chekov, Miller, Fitzgerald! (A catalogue will be up soon). I also found some priceless editions of Life magazine, old editions of the Encounter and the London Literary Magazine. I cannot even begin to tell you about all the books this man had! Right now my room is overflowing with his treasure...here's just a peek from the crime site.

Settling Scores

These days when my eyes are not blinking, all they see are black, white and red. My calcium deficient nails carry a guilty red smudge every once in while. It doesn't go. The whitener works only on paper.

I'm settling scores. First I rip them apart and then add it all up.
Yes, paper correction is not an easy, fun task. Its arduously, painstakingly, long, monotonous and exhausting.
(Its one of the things I think I will permanently dislike about my job)

Your story

Did I tell you?

Today, I walked down the same grey stone curb where you'd rudely pulled me away from the mass of moving bodies and whispered a recipe for magic in my ear. After that we gazed at a red bus stop promising each other, we'd meet again only at a similar bus stop, a year later, when you would have sprouted more hair and me, more wisdom. We laughed at the two pairs of shuffling feet behind the bus stop, one jeans clad, one in a bright yellow chudidar. Then we sat for over an hour at the same place having a lovely conversation about nothing. When I said I have to leave, you nonchalantly muttered 'stay'. I didn't. I took your nonchalance too seriously.

I've wondered a few times if I should have stayed.
On second thoughts, I stop wondering.
You wouldn't have had a story then.

At a station.

The black beads of her mangalsutra glistened in the light of the noon sun. For a moment her worry knit eyebrows relaxed as her lips creased into a fleeting smile. Sometimes she allowed herself the indulgence of footboard travel, she liked the wind ruffling her hair. The subji she had prepared that morning had turned out to be a little too salty. Varun, her son had complained, as always. Nonetheless it had gone into all three dabbas, Varun's, his father's and her's. They would have the same subji for dinner too, when they all returned home after a long day. She couldn't afford extravagance. As the 1:10 Churchgate local entered Dadar station, she gathered the pleats of her startched cotton sari , held on to her bag and prepared to alight. An arrogant sunbeam caught a thin silver strand in her hair. She swiftly alighted and walked towards the foot over bridge.
Just as the train blew its whistle and inched towards pulling its serpentine self out of the station, a young man came rushing down the bridge steps. In his pin stripe pants and crisp white shirt, he wore the look of a successful professional. There was a rush of heady determination in his gait. With his eyes fixed on the train that threatened to move any moment, he did not see her in his way. He ran, his arms flaying in the air. She tried to dodge him. Unsuccessfully. They collided.
He twirled her around with his flaying arms now enveloping her in a disarming embrace. Neither knew what was happening. The unwarranted, amused stares of curious onlookers broke the spell. He rushed to hop on to his train.
She was still wide eyed with the joyful excitement the twirl had whipped in her. She coyly smiled as a young bride would, trying to hide from the gaze of the amused bootpolishwala, the chaiwala, the paperwala and others . She didn't yell at him or slap him. She only carried the happiness he had unknowingly passed on to her in those brief seconds.

What's on my Calendar

It's already a week into the month of March and I dont feel particularly resolute about anything. Except, flipping my calender maybe. It's a month when my city begins to scorch under the glare of the sun. The land turns dry and skin just melts. It just forewarns us that yes, "April is the cruelest month." March in my head is a friendlier month. It is a month which(for me) spells sunshine, happiness, color and freedom.
This month my calendar has to remind me of something that makes me go light in the head and happy. As I sat thinking about color and happiness, a film I love flashed before me. I want to bring a spray of color and a dash of life on a mute piece of blank paper. So, my calendar is going to carry a poster of Won Kar Wai's film Chungking Express. Its a film that can just scoop me out of the darkest shell and coax the cynic in me to shut up. The film is a melange of things I love ; food, a soap bar that cries, music, a gritty gun wielding blonde, a towel that weeps, a can that preserves memories, dark alleys, yellow sunshine, a simple girl who dreams, a silly man who whines, lovers who come without an expiry date. Everything about the film is a reaffirmation of life, as it is, a riot of goodness peppered with the bad,sad,mad and ugly.
It is going to be a colorful year, a few clouds, laced with a lot of happy sunshine.
What say?

The Gun Shot

He softly pushed the stray locks of her hair behind her ear. His hand trembled a little. It wasn't his first time. His fingers had still not gotten used to the coldness of the metallic butt. The delicate curve of the trigger sent a thrilling tingle down his spine. She cast a fleeting glance of uncertainity at him. He gave a weak smile of reassuarance. Then, he softly dabbed the tip of a black felt pen on her lovely ear. He took aim. He squinted in the incandescence of the white light that the mirrors were reflecting. Her eyes were shut in anxious anticipation of a single numbing moment. He inched the barrel closer to the soft cartilage. He tightened the grip of his slender fingers around the trigger. Her eyes were still shut. He pulled the trigger. There was a loud Click. For a brief moment her face crumpled as she winced. It was over. She opened her eyes and smiled. The jewel shone on her now red, left ear lobe. Before leaving, she thanked him and appreciated him for his perfection.

He never told them that even he shut his eyes before every puncture he made. It was always a shot in the dark.

The crooner and his aide.

We begged and pleaded. Finally he relented. "But you will have to wait for forty five minutes," he thundered. We burst into a toothy grin. We would wait. He lumbered up a wooden staircase and disappeared.It was well past the time for the last order. The smell of vinegar pierced through the warm night air.
A lone couple sat on the corner table, their heads hung in silent meditation over a bowl of noodles. A gentle drone of the electric fan was the only musical accompaniment to the occassional clatter of the cutlery. Vhiner set his lips in a pout. He wanted to go to the outlet of mass manufactured sandwiches, across the street. Papayaflakes had raised her eyebrows in exasperated impatience. She didn't have patience with food or people. Now, she dropped a fork only to stir up the silence.
A short pudgy man suddenly popped up from behind the rather tall counter. He looked around the small restaurant, alarmed. His pixie like ears had tweeked up in fearful anxiety. Seeing us, he recovered. Longlashes flashed him a dramatically heartfelt smile. "We'll get our food faster" she whispered through her teeth.He disappeared behind the counter once again. We turned our backs and resumed our wait.
A few moments later a voice boomed cheerfully from behind the counter, "you like Elvis?" He waved out a couple of cds in one hand and a mike in the other. "YES!" we almost answered in unison.He was elated.
He whisked out his mike and switched on his jukebox. For the next thirty minutes he seranaded us with Elvis' soleful melodies. When Michael, our grumpy waiter finally returned, he too was smiling, a heap of momos stacked up on the plate in his hand. Michael and his boss, the man behind the counter, loved Elvis.
The steaming momos he served us, were soft and delicious.

Everytime a vinegary pungent smell wafts through the air and Elvis croones "Falling in love with you" I fondly remember Michael and his boss. And of course the momos.