The Days we Coasted by...(Part 2)
As we disengaged our footwear and tentatively stepped into the river we discovered why it sported such a deceptive, dark facade. Its clear waters simply showed up the color of the pebbles that made up its bed. And this was indeed to its credit quite unlike what we had made of its dark colors. Agreed the water level was quite shallow, it could at best only come up to our shoulders but in contrast
to what we had imagined, the water was cool and crisp.
We undid our clothes and walked into the river in our underwears to scrub ourselves and enjoy the cool morning. At dawn the river looked like still waters. The flow was imperceptible. Vijay avered the river hadn't a flow, which sounded presposterous to me. I picked up a little leaf sticking on to a nearby rock and let it float in the waters. For a moment I wondered whether Vijay was right, the
leaf hardly moved. But ofter a clutch of seconds we saw the distance it had patiently accumulated.
We sung a few tamil songs that featured heroines bathing by some waterbody, gay abandon. Further our imagination careened to those in which some mischief-monger, a la Krishna, walks away with the clothes and belongings on the banks leaving those in the joyous dips of the river high and dry. Then our imaginatinative banter extended to us getting arrested for nudity and profanity in the town of Chiplun...because of us losing our dresses, the news getting flashed in Sun TV', 'Two IIM Students Arrested in Chiplun Town for Obscene Display..'; 'IIM
Students' Innovative Protest Against Joshi's Diktats-Sleepy Chiplun Enraged!' and so it went. We had such rollicking fun for the next hour or so that it made me think how delicately this tour was posed till the previous evening, its prospects swinging like a pendulum-shall we , should we, would we,need we, why should we...hmmm! Finally the pendulum just stood struck in the affirmative and here we are.
After an hour or the sun was out along with a few lads, upstream, to get its morning dip in the river. The river shone only a little despite the black pebbles that colored its flow. And the flow now turned quite strong. The water level rose rapidly and I had to relocate our belongings twice, farther up in the bank. We were wondering if the river was dammed somewhere upstream-that neatly explained the low water level which was growing tremendously. Soon after we finished our rendevouz with Vasishti, dried ourselves, and next headed to the hills nearby.
To be continued...
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Friday, April 30, 2004
Thursday, April 29, 2004
The Days we Coasted by...(Part 1)
'Is this the river we came to bathe in, all the way from Mumbai', Vijay asked in a downcast voice. The Vasishti that was drawn in a promising blue color in the map was now a dark little flow which seemed to eke out a stark living and seemed ready to wilt further in the oncoming summer. From the bridge where we had just alighted upon, we could sense none of the grandeur we had imagined in its name. Worse,
instead of clear waters, a suspectfully dark river, banked by srubby undergrowth and smooth pebbles were all we could see now. Evidently this bank was once its bed-or takes up its old avatar under the river once an year if the monsoons granted the boons. Images of Cooum and Buckingham Canal, smelly black open-air sewers of Chennai, visited us. 'Here is the Cooum of Chiplun', we wanted to wail. The size, current, color-from this distance all the dimensions of the river tucked our conversation within dissapointment and deprecating humour.
'Never say aloud we came all the way from Mumbai to bathe in this river...', 'Hmm this is what the hotelwallah mentioned as where you can have a refreshing bath..ahem..', 'I am not bathing..whatever water making up this river would be displaced that I shall have to emerge dry anyways..' And so we went on.
We felt pity for the lone individual who was washing his clothes in those dark waters. 'Cleaning up the river', intepreted Vijay. I added, 'Why the bother yaar...if only he had been patient for a couple of years, he wouldn't have had a river to clean up...'
We went farther away from the bridge towards a parallel railway line that spanned upon a bridge the misplaced banks and the skeleton river. We saw a couple of other individuals bathing, in a manner we surely cannot mistake as a cleaning expedition of the river. We asked the last person if we can indeed bathe in the river. The man neatly srubbed and with washed clothes over his shoulders answered in affirmative and left the place for us. We opened our eyes for the first time to look beyond its dark and skeletony facade and view the river afresh. We dipped into its cool waters and came up with some of the best moments of our life...
...To be continued
'Is this the river we came to bathe in, all the way from Mumbai', Vijay asked in a downcast voice. The Vasishti that was drawn in a promising blue color in the map was now a dark little flow which seemed to eke out a stark living and seemed ready to wilt further in the oncoming summer. From the bridge where we had just alighted upon, we could sense none of the grandeur we had imagined in its name. Worse,
instead of clear waters, a suspectfully dark river, banked by srubby undergrowth and smooth pebbles were all we could see now. Evidently this bank was once its bed-or takes up its old avatar under the river once an year if the monsoons granted the boons. Images of Cooum and Buckingham Canal, smelly black open-air sewers of Chennai, visited us. 'Here is the Cooum of Chiplun', we wanted to wail. The size, current, color-from this distance all the dimensions of the river tucked our conversation within dissapointment and deprecating humour.
'Never say aloud we came all the way from Mumbai to bathe in this river...', 'Hmm this is what the hotelwallah mentioned as where you can have a refreshing bath..ahem..', 'I am not bathing..whatever water making up this river would be displaced that I shall have to emerge dry anyways..' And so we went on.
We felt pity for the lone individual who was washing his clothes in those dark waters. 'Cleaning up the river', intepreted Vijay. I added, 'Why the bother yaar...if only he had been patient for a couple of years, he wouldn't have had a river to clean up...'
We went farther away from the bridge towards a parallel railway line that spanned upon a bridge the misplaced banks and the skeleton river. We saw a couple of other individuals bathing, in a manner we surely cannot mistake as a cleaning expedition of the river. We asked the last person if we can indeed bathe in the river. The man neatly srubbed and with washed clothes over his shoulders answered in affirmative and left the place for us. We opened our eyes for the first time to look beyond its dark and skeletony facade and view the river afresh. We dipped into its cool waters and came up with some of the best moments of our life...
...To be continued
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Ode to my Old Pocket Diary (roughcut)
You were the receptacle for my
stray thoughts which would have
vaporised if not for your pages.
You held that yellow leaf I decided
for posterity to accompany and also
my dreams big and petty.
Do you remember my four minute mile
wish was first recorded within your realms.
Where are you this minute when I am nearing that mile.
You were the receptacle for my
stray thoughts which would have
vaporised if not for your pages.
You held that yellow leaf I decided
for posterity to accompany and also
my dreams big and petty.
Do you remember my four minute mile
wish was first recorded within your realms.
Where are you this minute when I am nearing that mile.
Saturday, April 24, 2004
Ha ha ha..
Finally, on the threshold of my first freewheeling journey.
It feels good to just plan as you go, take ferries or board buses
If all comes to naught simply take a walk or
swim along the currents of the river.
See faces, observe landscapes
and dip in a life that moves slower
and deeper.
Await, friends, lots of posts on places and travel. My mind is bubbling and my fingers
itch to bang it all off the keyboards.
Adieu for now. Back on tuesday.
MaheshC.
Finally, on the threshold of my first freewheeling journey.
It feels good to just plan as you go, take ferries or board buses
If all comes to naught simply take a walk or
swim along the currents of the river.
See faces, observe landscapes
and dip in a life that moves slower
and deeper.
Await, friends, lots of posts on places and travel. My mind is bubbling and my fingers
itch to bang it all off the keyboards.
Adieu for now. Back on tuesday.
MaheshC.
Friday, April 23, 2004
The Sundew Moments
My 'CubicleNeighbour' asked me to explain the story behind 'thesundew', the longstanding name of my email accounts(hotmail, yahoo, and now Gmail!). Though there isn't much of a story behind the name there are surely crystal moments.
Human memory is a mysterious instrument. It has its own laws, which rule what to remember and what to discard into the deeper recesses of our consciousness. Often it springs surprises by pulling up to the forefront, frozen pieces of our memory we thought have long vaporised. Hypnosis and various experiments on memory have shown that our memories are only fossilized, not vaporised. Field reports from Freudian psychoanalytic practice has also shown how intricately memory is linked with emotions. That which is painful we forget, hence the necessity for
techniques such as free association which can approach those sensitive zones tangentially.
But there are images that linger on, to recur and almost become leitmotifs. Some of these beautiful images I suspect are not moments in the sense they could have happened in a discrete time interval. Rather, I wonder if they are luminous aggregations like pearls are-layer after layer of related memories over a seed event.
There is a sepia-tinted image of my childhood in which I am walking down an avenue of tall Ashoka trees, my fingers tenuously linked to my mother's palms. It is dusk. The place is littered with seniors chatting, laughing and walking down the avenue in groups. My contention is that this moment probably never happened as I cherish it. Many such evenings would have been picked, chosen and pickled for an everlasing flavour; crystallised for an everlasting radiance.
Ofcourse most of these images do happen to be vivid, definite moments too. I consider them granted boons, by God if you like it that way. They can't be contrived. They can't be waited for. If you are lucky you catch these as they come by, like whiffs of a distant kitchen in the air.
Have you seen the American Beauty? The film has a name for these. It calls them 'the plastic bag moments'-the seemingly commonplace stuff of our lives which can parent extraordinary beauty, if only we want to. The final frames of the film are that of a discarded plastic bag sauntering in the breeze, rising and falling, dancing in slowmo-lovingly, if you may.
The elements of a Margazhi dawn in Chennai are faint mist, dew, and the sun. Alas the ascent of the sun rapidly kills the former two. So much so I could arrive at that magical slot of 6. 15 to 6. 30 when all of these coexisted after only weeks of determined observation. And why did I want them on the same stage? Because of thesundews! During one of my jogs I had chanced upon the dividing median a crop of grass crowned with glassy spheres: dewdrops charged with sunlight. With
a slight shift in my angle they disappeared. So there they had been, shining within the delicate, tremulous angle between me, the dewdrops and the sun. They hadn't existed in my earlier lap. They didn't in my next.
The magic of angles lies in the fact that it is a single parameter capturing the relationship between three entities. Let me give an other instance. While in the memory described previously two of the elements were on terra firma, in this two are right up there in the early morning sky's blue. Me, an early morning jet, and ofcourse our sun. For most of its observed passage it flew dully, silently. At the magical angle I caught its affair with sunlight. It shone like a broken shard of mirror in a placid sky.
During my 6. 00 O' clock fast train to ChurchGate, between Vile Parle and Santa Cruz, an aeroplane usually made its flight, towards the setting sun. The velocity of the train, factored by the huge distance, looked as if it was equal to that of the aeroplane. A kid would have shrieked in excitement about how a plane hung suspended, resolutely stationary, as if a supermechanic went about fixing its snags midair for many minutes!
Sometimes we end up observing each other like the multiple reflections of a mirror hall. Once, in office, our group of four made its way for a refreshing cuppa. Suddenly he broke away making his way towards her at her workstation and cajoled her flirtingly to join us. She, next to me, staring at them, stomached the sight of cooings. My eyes travelling from the pair to her was caught by him behind
me, who like an omniscient being oversaw all the flicks before him. He, had the last smile!
Once, in the terrace, over the same kind of cuppa that we had ambled towards in the previous paragraph, we made small talk and pointless laughter in a closed circle, each in different postures, all at obtuse angles to each other. A joke went around which I didn't quite understand as didn't Radhika next to me. The other three were emitting enthusiastic peals of laughter that I sought her eyes for some solace. But she was looking intently at them. 'Hmmm..!', I cast my sight downwards and immediately thereafter, it occurred to me that she just then suffered the same fate as I had a second before. So I again turned up to her but she was no longer looking at me and I thought I had been wrong and started to turn away. But right then she too must have felt, quicker than I had felt last time, that she had missed me in a snap and hence caught the tail of my turning away. Now she lingered on. I knew that she knew and I knew too she knew that I knew. With that unconscious knowledge hardly verbalized even to ourselves, we finally locked eyes. We erupted into a laughter as if the tension resolved was that of a joke.
Such is life I thought yesterday when I was catching the whirlwind generated between our 8 O Clock fast and another fast train on the adjacent track: In the twin strings of the call of duty and the search for love my life is a necklace of sundews.
My 'CubicleNeighbour' asked me to explain the story behind 'thesundew', the longstanding name of my email accounts(hotmail, yahoo, and now Gmail!). Though there isn't much of a story behind the name there are surely crystal moments.
Human memory is a mysterious instrument. It has its own laws, which rule what to remember and what to discard into the deeper recesses of our consciousness. Often it springs surprises by pulling up to the forefront, frozen pieces of our memory we thought have long vaporised. Hypnosis and various experiments on memory have shown that our memories are only fossilized, not vaporised. Field reports from Freudian psychoanalytic practice has also shown how intricately memory is linked with emotions. That which is painful we forget, hence the necessity for
techniques such as free association which can approach those sensitive zones tangentially.
But there are images that linger on, to recur and almost become leitmotifs. Some of these beautiful images I suspect are not moments in the sense they could have happened in a discrete time interval. Rather, I wonder if they are luminous aggregations like pearls are-layer after layer of related memories over a seed event.
There is a sepia-tinted image of my childhood in which I am walking down an avenue of tall Ashoka trees, my fingers tenuously linked to my mother's palms. It is dusk. The place is littered with seniors chatting, laughing and walking down the avenue in groups. My contention is that this moment probably never happened as I cherish it. Many such evenings would have been picked, chosen and pickled for an everlasing flavour; crystallised for an everlasting radiance.
Ofcourse most of these images do happen to be vivid, definite moments too. I consider them granted boons, by God if you like it that way. They can't be contrived. They can't be waited for. If you are lucky you catch these as they come by, like whiffs of a distant kitchen in the air.
Have you seen the American Beauty? The film has a name for these. It calls them 'the plastic bag moments'-the seemingly commonplace stuff of our lives which can parent extraordinary beauty, if only we want to. The final frames of the film are that of a discarded plastic bag sauntering in the breeze, rising and falling, dancing in slowmo-lovingly, if you may.
The elements of a Margazhi dawn in Chennai are faint mist, dew, and the sun. Alas the ascent of the sun rapidly kills the former two. So much so I could arrive at that magical slot of 6. 15 to 6. 30 when all of these coexisted after only weeks of determined observation. And why did I want them on the same stage? Because of thesundews! During one of my jogs I had chanced upon the dividing median a crop of grass crowned with glassy spheres: dewdrops charged with sunlight. With
a slight shift in my angle they disappeared. So there they had been, shining within the delicate, tremulous angle between me, the dewdrops and the sun. They hadn't existed in my earlier lap. They didn't in my next.
The magic of angles lies in the fact that it is a single parameter capturing the relationship between three entities. Let me give an other instance. While in the memory described previously two of the elements were on terra firma, in this two are right up there in the early morning sky's blue. Me, an early morning jet, and ofcourse our sun. For most of its observed passage it flew dully, silently. At the magical angle I caught its affair with sunlight. It shone like a broken shard of mirror in a placid sky.
During my 6. 00 O' clock fast train to ChurchGate, between Vile Parle and Santa Cruz, an aeroplane usually made its flight, towards the setting sun. The velocity of the train, factored by the huge distance, looked as if it was equal to that of the aeroplane. A kid would have shrieked in excitement about how a plane hung suspended, resolutely stationary, as if a supermechanic went about fixing its snags midair for many minutes!
Sometimes we end up observing each other like the multiple reflections of a mirror hall. Once, in office, our group of four made its way for a refreshing cuppa. Suddenly he broke away making his way towards her at her workstation and cajoled her flirtingly to join us. She, next to me, staring at them, stomached the sight of cooings. My eyes travelling from the pair to her was caught by him behind
me, who like an omniscient being oversaw all the flicks before him. He, had the last smile!
Once, in the terrace, over the same kind of cuppa that we had ambled towards in the previous paragraph, we made small talk and pointless laughter in a closed circle, each in different postures, all at obtuse angles to each other. A joke went around which I didn't quite understand as didn't Radhika next to me. The other three were emitting enthusiastic peals of laughter that I sought her eyes for some solace. But she was looking intently at them. 'Hmmm..!', I cast my sight downwards and immediately thereafter, it occurred to me that she just then suffered the same fate as I had a second before. So I again turned up to her but she was no longer looking at me and I thought I had been wrong and started to turn away. But right then she too must have felt, quicker than I had felt last time, that she had missed me in a snap and hence caught the tail of my turning away. Now she lingered on. I knew that she knew and I knew too she knew that I knew. With that unconscious knowledge hardly verbalized even to ourselves, we finally locked eyes. We erupted into a laughter as if the tension resolved was that of a joke.
Such is life I thought yesterday when I was catching the whirlwind generated between our 8 O Clock fast and another fast train on the adjacent track: In the twin strings of the call of duty and the search for love my life is a necklace of sundews.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Yaaron, Apun Mumbai Mein Hain ..!!
Its happening frequently nowadays..I start to write a piece-of shortstory, of poetry-and hold back from updating the blog until it is completed. Then I find I am sitting on it for too long and on the other hand there are so many other things that urgently want to be voiced. So shelving the stance of 'update-the-short story-what-may-come', here are my reflections on my current muse: Mumbai!
This city is big and at times, overwhelms. Like its train travels, the nattily dressed gents and sexily dressed ladies, the sights of Marine Drive, the amazing clockwork that the railways are, the explicit ads for innerwears you can't excape at the busy Church Gate station, the worklife whose timings seem to extend into wee hours of the night and whose travel, to and fro, could stretch beyond 100kms a day, ...so many things: this place oozes enterprise, sexuality, and energy.
Chennai is in comparison, what do I call it, innocent, preadolescent...? These constrasts are worth atleast a 15 min film, I say!! I even came up with a longish title for the film: Various are the Ways the Waves lap the Shores.
The title takes its inspiration from the contrasting beachlines of the two cities. For me they seemed to reflect the lifestyles of the two cities. Here sitting at Marine Drive on a full moon night I see the waves slap the rocks and crash against the concrete structures that bulwark the reclaimed land against the sea. In Chennai its as if the sea and the sand softly cradle against each other..!!"
I guess this is how commercial capitals all over the world shall look like. Always on the go, with a set of values that are designed to further commerce than anything else. Cities that are the lands of promise to the brethren from the hinterland. Cities that have enough moolah to support lavish cultural activities. Cities that are big enough to allow space for the different types of mainstreams, and hence for various fringe elements at its circumference. Cities busy and hence granting anonymity. An anonymity amidst the crowd that comes so close to freedom, because the others are too busy minding their livelihood!
As I am just into my third week I guess my eyes are still fresh to catch the nuances in my daily life. The city still feels like a dope and I like to absorb, through my eyes and in lesser degrees through my other senses, its wares. I travel from ChurchGate to Andheri by train and from Andheri to MIDC (East Andheri) by Bus. These account for most of my observations.
I have never seen such ferocity in people trying to board trains. Believe me, even the wretched crowd of Jallianwallah Bagh would have acted in a less frenetic way on their route to escape. Last night I and my friends were badly mauled at Dadar station and emerged with hurt ears.
We were wondering why people do this because there is always enough time for everyone to get in. Vijay who was accompanying me said, 'Simply, there isn't enough space for everyone to be seated. People travel long distances, nobody wants to stand the whole distance...the fight is for the seats'. Everyone in this country fights for some sort of seats I thought wryly-politicians, students, train commuters..! 'Vijay...I feel it has almost become a sport for them..I have seen
people doing the same even when the train had been empty and there were only a handful of people trying to board the train. Even then the behaviour was the same...to beat others into boarding the train first. Maybe people simply get a kick out of it or simply have got habituated to it, that they keep doing it irrespective of the change in the situation. Maybe this is an ocassion everyone can legitimately show aggression and who wouldn't want to let some steam off after a hard day's work. So the few seconds madness of train boarding becomes an alibi for agression...'.
It was evident Vijay, and Krishna who was with us then, were hardly convinced by my alternatives. We simply wrung our hands that this was one of those inexplicable things and shoved it into the deeper cellars of our mind for future cogitation.
To be continued...
Its happening frequently nowadays..I start to write a piece-of shortstory, of poetry-and hold back from updating the blog until it is completed. Then I find I am sitting on it for too long and on the other hand there are so many other things that urgently want to be voiced. So shelving the stance of 'update-the-short story-what-may-come', here are my reflections on my current muse: Mumbai!
This city is big and at times, overwhelms. Like its train travels, the nattily dressed gents and sexily dressed ladies, the sights of Marine Drive, the amazing clockwork that the railways are, the explicit ads for innerwears you can't excape at the busy Church Gate station, the worklife whose timings seem to extend into wee hours of the night and whose travel, to and fro, could stretch beyond 100kms a day, ...so many things: this place oozes enterprise, sexuality, and energy.
Chennai is in comparison, what do I call it, innocent, preadolescent...? These constrasts are worth atleast a 15 min film, I say!! I even came up with a longish title for the film: Various are the Ways the Waves lap the Shores.
The title takes its inspiration from the contrasting beachlines of the two cities. For me they seemed to reflect the lifestyles of the two cities. Here sitting at Marine Drive on a full moon night I see the waves slap the rocks and crash against the concrete structures that bulwark the reclaimed land against the sea. In Chennai its as if the sea and the sand softly cradle against each other..!!"
I guess this is how commercial capitals all over the world shall look like. Always on the go, with a set of values that are designed to further commerce than anything else. Cities that are the lands of promise to the brethren from the hinterland. Cities that have enough moolah to support lavish cultural activities. Cities that are big enough to allow space for the different types of mainstreams, and hence for various fringe elements at its circumference. Cities busy and hence granting anonymity. An anonymity amidst the crowd that comes so close to freedom, because the others are too busy minding their livelihood!
As I am just into my third week I guess my eyes are still fresh to catch the nuances in my daily life. The city still feels like a dope and I like to absorb, through my eyes and in lesser degrees through my other senses, its wares. I travel from ChurchGate to Andheri by train and from Andheri to MIDC (East Andheri) by Bus. These account for most of my observations.
I have never seen such ferocity in people trying to board trains. Believe me, even the wretched crowd of Jallianwallah Bagh would have acted in a less frenetic way on their route to escape. Last night I and my friends were badly mauled at Dadar station and emerged with hurt ears.
We were wondering why people do this because there is always enough time for everyone to get in. Vijay who was accompanying me said, 'Simply, there isn't enough space for everyone to be seated. People travel long distances, nobody wants to stand the whole distance...the fight is for the seats'. Everyone in this country fights for some sort of seats I thought wryly-politicians, students, train commuters..! 'Vijay...I feel it has almost become a sport for them..I have seen
people doing the same even when the train had been empty and there were only a handful of people trying to board the train. Even then the behaviour was the same...to beat others into boarding the train first. Maybe people simply get a kick out of it or simply have got habituated to it, that they keep doing it irrespective of the change in the situation. Maybe this is an ocassion everyone can legitimately show aggression and who wouldn't want to let some steam off after a hard day's work. So the few seconds madness of train boarding becomes an alibi for agression...'.
It was evident Vijay, and Krishna who was with us then, were hardly convinced by my alternatives. We simply wrung our hands that this was one of those inexplicable things and shoved it into the deeper cellars of our mind for future cogitation.
To be continued...
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