Un Momento

There's a vaguely-coloured butterfly air-skipping out in the verendah in the sopoforic heat.
My Mum finds a pair of binoculars and peers at me from across the room. I love her when she's off-centre.
My father's TV's on and comments blare about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's body language at a recent press conference. My father watches blissfully, his own commentary running in his mind which he will soon disclose to me. I can always count on him to update me when am not in the mood for the newspaper.
There are friends on my phone, friends in my email, friends loving, liking, friends I don't need right away but who comfort by simply existing. Nusaa, hello :)
Right now, I'm checking out Jamie Woon on youtube. I say 'Night Air' is my song, dark and delicate but you know what? Daytime isn't so bad.

In Memoriam: The Girl with the Pearl Smile

There was this girl we all knew. Or at least we thought we did. She was sweetness and light, sugar and spice, all things nice. Really. She drove the boys crazy with her feminine charm and glam all the while seeming like she had no clue about it. Girls just loved her and wanted to protect and mother her. She had this big kind heart-rarely speaking an ill word about anyone. She had a depth and sensibility and a disapproval of shallowness that wasn't instantly obvious. She danced, she sang-the sweetest voice you would ever hear. She had these big innocent eyes, soft cascading long hair and dewy skin. She made you think of early spring - pastels, soft winds and summer on its way. She loved the sensitive heroes of new Hindi cinema, loved songs 'Stereo Love', 'Tera Hone Laga Hoon', and 'With You'. She loved love.

Evidently, she had a winter within her too. She kept to herself, storing thoughts and feelings in inner lockers for not even her closest friends to know. People would reach out but she was private. Her emotions and her thoughts were her own. She would spend time with her friends, hours over coffee, music, movies, jokes, celebrity gossip. She would listen and soak in those of others' but no one get any closer to her. She had intense romantic thoughts, posted messages and pondered over life-openly, yet solitarily. Each one of us has an inaccessible zone, right? An area cordoned off from public viewing. We shouldn't be intrusive. We stuck our heads around the corner, hollered offers of being right there in case she needed us and backed off. And suddenly, when we weren't looking, she just upped and left. Without a clue. Without a warning. Leaving us questioning our own values formed on privacy, friendship. Retracing our steps to before that fateful night. Hadn't we tried? How close was too close? Could we have 'saved' her?

Questions, hypothetical, rhetorical questions ring out. In the company of friends and also when we're alone. Thinking back to times when we've all felt helpless and sad in the bottom of the well. Times when we've wanted to hurt ourselves physically and hurt those around us emotionally, just because we have so much heavy sorrow that we cannot lift out of our hearts. Times when friends have consciously or inadvertently stuck out a hand and pulled us back into the blindingly beautiful life-this form that we're supposed to fill out, living through the boxes, filling in the blanks and maybe drawing in the margins, too.

Maybe we aren't supposed to leave our friends be. Maybe we're meant to grab them, shake them, make them believe that life is worth living for-that no matter what happens, however humiliating, frustrating, depressing, if they just lean on us a bit longer, it'll be okay. The clouds won't part and the fog won't lift immediately, but just wait it out and see. Fight those dark forces who don't deserve a nanosecond of your time and see. There's so much ache out there, but there's so much thrill too.

Our 'Golden Girl' has gone away. When she was here, she taught us about beauty and grace. With her passing, perhaps, we should learn to not hold back. To love and be loved, to hold hands, hold out and hold on.

Yercaud

Yercaud, with friends, was to me all about loungy days spent cuddled up under quilts in my friend Princess's getaway home. Watching hours and hours of my (former) classmates's closet addiction-Korean soaps and movies. I am now a veteran of the over the top drama and high school romance of 'Boys over Flowers'. Yercaud was also all about food-proper scheduled nourishing homecooked meals that I (who are utterly accustomed to eating dinner out a minimum of three days a week or no dinner at all) found extreme hard work. Yes, unwinding was the theme of this holiday. The treks, the late night girlie conversations, the drives up and down silver lanes that seemed to vanish into misty oblivion, the endless photographs taken-all these fringed around the central activity of a lot of eat, sleep and not-so-well-deserved R 'n' R time.


An initial group of 8 of us began the getaway-from-it-all at our friend's colonial age home nestled within a sprawling estate. The sloping roofs of her house, the lived-in and personalised rooms of her and her family all added to the irreplicable hillstation charm that I've always romanticised about. The group later waned to four of us in Princess's gorgeous place-dreamily pretty with delicate curtains, cosy beds, pampering with food, and endless time and space. That's when it began raining. And we left the modern world behind. No TV, no phone battery, no electricity. Slowly my camera battery died out too. We preserved the laptop charge for intermittent midnight doses of Gu Jun Pyo's badboy attractiveness in 'Boys over Flowers'.


You know about my cravings for rain, right? Yercaud was a scene out of 'Raavan', the mist engulfing the quiet quaint hilltop town into poetry and mystery. I just HAD to take a solitary walk with an umbrella. How you perceive a place varies dramatically based on the presence of company or not. Maybe by myself I'd have some poetic, brilliant flashes of original thought. I wanted to figure out what my real perceptions were of this dreamlike setting at a time in my life free from errands or activities. My thoughts should be profound, not racked by longing for anything more because this was exactly what I'd been dreaming of for the longest time.

Or maybe that wasn't the point. Silence was easy and it just became me, like the Starsailor song.

In the Summertime

Sorry. My apologies to the residents of this spaced-out space. I mean it. I have missed you and I love you.

I have had a lot to say. Then again, sometimes nothing at all. (Isn't one supposed to say it best that way? Okay, well) Let me begin at the beginning.

It's summertime in Madras. And yes, wow, that isn't really something to be said since it's always summertime in Madras but honestly, when it comes to April-May (not June, NOT June, June is glorious-since it's my birth month) it becomes especially summertime in this annoyingly homely in comely way city that I call mine. We've been getting geared up to face the consequences because of what Al and Leo have been talking about (read:global warming) but it hasn't been so bad, actually. Oh yes, it did hit 40 and they have been doing some load shedding but hey, it's not murderous. If you stay home and sleep in a cool dark place without moving.

By the way, it did rain this night. The sound of thunder, the smell of wet earth, the flashes of lightning tricking you into almost daytime-ness, I tell you, there have never been more heady intoxication for Chennai since the Super Kings won the IPL last year.

Anyway, summertime for ME (yes, we're back to being self-obsessed. How COULD we veer away from the central focus of this blog for so long?) has always been rejuvenating. Restorative. Therapeutic. Transformative. A singular moment for change (I'm not talking about the current political transition in my home state's government). A breath of fresh air. Summer has always been this collapsible box, this stretchy rubber band expanded into an eternal moment where newness bubbles under the surface of every searing layer, reinvention is palpable and possible, and where I basically get a mental and physical makeover. Oh yeah, the soul too.

However, summertime is also fraught with fear, panic, insecurity and the lifelong question - what am I doing with my life???

I thought I'd escaped it this transition-phase time. But it's back. It's okay. I've become more combative and less sheepish about answering the questions. Aeroplane's teasing me for being the high school dropout after winning gold medals. I'm okay with that. It's just that...I want summertime to make good on its promise for transformation.

I went on one spontaneous holiday. Yercaud-Salem-Trichy. 6 days. That's long for me. More about the actual holiday later. Then Pondicherry for a day. Besides that, it's been long hours at the gym (with no real change..yet!) and lots of Keeping up with the Kardashians. From Khruschev, Kissinger and Kennedy to Kourtney, Kim and Khloe. Wow. I can see a total career path developing here. Smooth.

Okay, more whining later. Next post will be about holidays, positive activities and completing all those inane little tasks that chirped at me during my exams and dissertation oh so long ago.

Seems like it was another life.

"The World's My Stage"

Perhaps the gravity of the situation has not hit me yet. Here I am, poised in front of this wide white screen with rows of words forming its centrepiece. Words of pressing importance, words that must be ingested and later regurgitated upon less white sheets of paper. This night is like any other night. But this night involves studying for possibly the last college-level, instutionalised exam I might ever write.

I was always inclined to place exams and academics as top priority. Whether it was because of the rigorous competitive education I had in school, or my parents' emphasis on excellence in whatever you do, especially studies. Or maybe it's just because I live in India and especially Madras. It's just that I've gotten used to studying for so long (12 school years + 5 years of college) that I can't imagine putting anything else on top of that list. Health and fitness takes a backseat during exams (as my recent rapid consumption of fiery, poky tapioca chips confirms). I've taken a break from my beloved gym for almost three weeks, provoking admonishing messages from my gym-mate and self-proclaimed trainer/health advisor. I've cut off from friends for the longest time, becoming invisible and unreachable to them even in moments of crisis. Bad friend, me, bad.

And now I'm on the brink of the literally unknown. I faced this moment before, before I commenced to study again. But now there's not much left I want to study in this city, in terms of college enrollment and hitting books, writing tests-that kind of study. I've experienced the best of Chennai academic life. And I'm pretty sure I want to break free for a while. Not be tied down by schedules (oh, but I do want to work), not have to quit extracurriculars or health priorities because I find something else more all-important and stress-inducing.

I have enjoyed studying. I would like to do it again. But I'd like to see what it's like to have new priorities and even let the older ones, pushed to the backburner, take centrestage again.

(Title courtesy: K)

This room's too small for me

I am thrashing, twisting, stretching but thoroughly immersing myself into North Africa. My research is about the conflict in Western Sahara, so it's mostly Morocco but I'm pretty much soaking up the region-text, music, pictures, videos are not enough.

My back aches as I sit, chained and glued to the computer, my eyes glazing over as I attempt to sift through thirty-six years of a dispute that involves so many people and so much politics. I attempt to make sense of the words that seem so simple on paper but translate to so much complexity when it comes to peoples and nations.

This is a region I am drawn to for reasons so many that I don't bother to enumerate them. People find it intriguing that being in India, I am so obsessed with Raï music and why I would choose a topic like this, so irrelevant in this part of the world and so much less contributive to South Asian International Relations, which desperately needs theorisation as it is. With the recent Jasmine Revolution, Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya, the relevance of North Africa cannot be overrated. Authoritarianism in the region that straddles the Middle East and Africa was a ticking bomb.

How can I explain what I feel when I see a black and white patterned wall motif that instantly transports me to some Moroccan monument? Or how even the names of controversial personalities and tortured places sound so lyrical- Houari Boumedienne, El Ouali Mustapha Sayed, Marrakech, Smara, Saguia el-Hamra, Rabat, and of course, Ma' al-'Aynayn, the almost mythical leader of the "Blue Men" (PLEASE read 'Desert by J.M.G. Clézio) And how can I even BEGIN to explain how I feel nestled within the notes of a Rachid Taha song, how I can surround myself with the dreamy notes of 'Valencia' and put myself to sleep, the language clashing with the city, state, subcontinent I am from and yet feeling so at home, nurtured and loved?

I look away from the computer, step outside my swirling thoughts of rising desert sands, of midnight bonfires with flames swaying to the sound of Mariem Hassan's voice and accompanying guitar, of The Alchemist shrouded in black astride his horse as he gallops up to the seeking Santiago, mystery in his apperance and pure wisdom in his eyes, of Moroccan palaces with ornate details ceiling to floor, speaking of grace and beauty made by mortal humans with divine art in their hands, of Cheb Khaled singing the Maoual to 'Hada Raykoum' and enchanting with his soaring voice, of Rachid Taha's rampaging 'Barra Barra' beats and Cheb Mami's wistful 'Khalouni'. I look down at the tiny room, the papers strewn around, the books and feel my soul resize itself. But sometimes, I let it transcend the physical and let myself live the dream. I get up on my bed, grab my invisible mic and sing, to the minarets and to the desert, to the sea and to the palace, to crowds of adoring fans, in a language I cannot speak.

Moment of Discovery

Don't you ever wish you could recapture that first feeling of discovering a song, movie, book, image, word, person, place and falling in love?

The innocence, the complete unconsciousness of that moment is non-renewable. You step outside yourself and attempt to feel the you that you were. But it never comes back. That's what they say about time being a healer; you forget the pain. But it's got its downside when it comes to wanting to re-feel that one perfect moment where you discovered something new and it stuck with you.

Watching Chris Brown's 'Forever' a couple of minutes ago reminded me of the time, Winter 2008 (?), the place (K's and my attempts at dance class), the feeling (a crush on someone but I HONESTLY don't remember who). But I don't remember when and how this song grabbed me and touched my heart. Sure, I watched it on TV, not knowing who this guy was. The song's may not be a classic to connoisseurs of hip-hop/r&b/dance/pop and the video isn't the most artistic (though the girl is REALLY pretty and Chrib Brown's moves are quite nice). But it's a pretty, adorable, personal track that instantly transports me into where I want to be most nights: dancing under the stars with yellow lights all around, with a chance of Something Happening, of destiny taking over and magic seeping into reality.

http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8lq5Urj-kc