lakshya, and other off-target meanderings.....

for those who read the last blog...

http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=89114

bharat bahadur, suddenly infamous in the news... is nepali....


but to move on...

i've had a long thirty six hour stint at office... sleeping on the couch,waking up at three in the morning, and getting to work again, till nine at night - hence no blog...

on the evening before the mad two days started, i watched 'lakshya', farhan akhtar's much waited second movie, and quite liked it. it hit home...
they almost got it right...

i liked the barely hinted at atmosphere of delhi university, with protest marches and pizza hit all part of the deal... (along with sartorially elegant saree clad professors with a past replete with police lock-ups!)

i liked the way the songs between hrithik's and preity's characters were shot.. both the happy one in delhi and the 'sad' one in ladakh... in a vilalge deserted by its people, being strafed by an unseen enemy,as the trucks rumble past...

i liked how hrithik's fight isn't about the nation at the end... it's bloody personal... for an indian war movie, that's bloody something else... (an indian war movie with the most convincingly shot battle scenes i have seen in a long time... in which people die stupid pointless deaths without shouting stupid pointless slogans... and don't necessarily take the enemy down with them...


i liked parmeet sethi's devilish (but not inhuman and not a caricature) pakistani major... sitting atop peak 5179 and beating back retreats with an assured ease...till he gets caught out by the surprise attack...

and i especially liked how the movie begins.... when hrithik sees the line of control for the first time.... and relasies what it means to be a 'hindustani'...as he startes across a vast, desolate beautiful stretch of no man's land at a bunker staring back at him... it's the recognition of the most fundamnetal of facts.... that our borders, arbitrary shitty geometry that they are, define our nationhood....

my own realisation of being 'hindustani' came after i crossed the border.... so there's an interesting variation there, on the borders as identity theme which gets played out at wagah all the time...


i relaise this post isn't making sense... i have nothing to say and am going right ahead and saying it....

but there is something in the air now that wasn't here two years ago... like those last lines from zen and the art of motorcycle maintainence...

Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We've won it. It's going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.


so we can make a movie which looks at kargil,which for five years has defined our fucking nationalism... which recreates settings with detaield research, and takes pride not in the fact that we can beat paki butt... (like gadar did, under the very thin disguise of historicity)... but in the fact that we are a secular decent country who bury the enemy with full military honour....

and seriously, what i like best is that there is a life for our hero after he's climbed his own personal mountain... (peak 5719)... and when last show, he walks out in civilian dress...

we were coming back, my 'boss' and i from a meeting with the director general, csir, when the boss said he really liked te atmosphere in the hall, with people clapping and cheering for lakhsya...

the context was that amar (boss)believed that india was really shining now - that now, we've got it right - what with a muslim scientist president, and a sikh economist primeminister leading our country (compare to george dubya bush...) ... what with out booming infotech industry and our urban prosperity being mirrored by a huge amount of rural innovation and the proliferation of technologies that are really going to be beneficail for the poor....

(links in next post....)

now the directr general of the centre for scientific and industrial research dr. raghunath anant mashelkar, is a man who is truly with it... he meets jefferey sacks for lunch and delivers lectures at the big-shot firang universities... and yet was completely unswayed by the hype of 'india shining' and big business booming... he said that what india ticks isn't the tip of the iceberg that everybody concentrates on, but the fact that the tip is on top of a whole unreported iceberg of innovators and activists who are really tranforming this country into something else... where illiterare women learn how to fix solar lanterns....

and all the research i've been doing in the past month or so has convinced me of juston e thingds... as it has convinced amar - we've won it. it's going to get better now, you can sort of tell these things...

i guess my next couple of posts are going to be full of how people who the bjp can't take credit for in their wildest dreams havegradually helped in making india... all of india,... truly, truly, shining...

but now, let me just finish with what iced the cake for me...

another movie, two weeks ago... a fairly shoddily made movie in a half emptynight show hall... govind nihalani's dev in paras...

a movie which recreates the gujarat riot story in bombaY....

where when taking kareena kappor/zaheera sheikh's lead, one after the other the brutalised women of the chawl raise theitr hands in evidence against the politicain who led the riots... and the whole hall sponanously started clapping....

and i started crying... because... i didn't expect it to happen....

becuase it said so many things, that spontaneous clapping, that mr vajpayye and company wouldn't have neccesarrily wnated to hear....

becuase i can't imagine the same film and the same scene getting the same reaction in the same hall two years ago....

i cried becuase my country, as represented by those spontaneous clappers in the hall, seemed to be healing itself of the madness that the previous regime had impised on us, the insidious madness of soft hate....

trials never end..... but things are going to get better now... you can sort of tell these things...

Monica's dinner guests

Monica has this in her character - she can make friends with just about anybody. The class/religion barriers that insulate most of Delhi from most of the rest of Delhi, not in the space of interaction (incredibly mixed for us all), but in the space you give to others in your mental horizon - in the space of the stories you're willing to hear (am i making sense here?) .... those barriers do not exist for her.

She listens, and wants to listen to all sorts of people, and they want to talk to her. (I used to be like that, but at 24, after six years in Delhi, I'm already a cynical bourgeoise grouch most of the time, and don't care to listen to anybody 'not my type', unless I get paid for it - defintion of ' urban researcher' - one who gets paid to do what most people should be doing anyway... pay attention to where they are.... ) So anyway, one of her friends is this urchin type little boy flower seller, who gives her a rose every time she passes his shop. and just like she would with me, or her friend the libyan diplomat (is this beginning to sound like that bob dylan song already... 'like a rolling stone'), she invited him home for dinner on tuesday...

she made a great dinner for him, too. a pretty damn kickass salad and noodles with tofu and broccoli and all the exoitc veggies she could find.... (in India, tofu and broccoli is still exotic, ... at least to me...) called him him up twice becuase he was late.... and finally he turned up, all togged out, with a bouquet of flowers, with his elder brother in tow, who was reluctant even about coming in.

Once he was in, though, he was pretty comfortable, and told us about how he ran his business (the flower shop) and how the family had emigrated from nepal but considered themselves delhi-ite (ajay, the kid, had never seen his 'native village'). ajay himself, though he looks about twelve, is already done with formal schooling. he spends half his day at the flower-shop, and the other half learning the motor-mechanic trade at the nearest garage.

then, in ten minutes, they got up to leave after drinking some squash.

the brother insisted that he'd just come to drop ajay, and he was leaving, and ajay could come back whenever. ajay insisted on leaving with his brother, though it seemed like he wanted to stay.
in that much hesitation, while the brother went doen the stairs, ajay had a chance to speak to monica.

- i have to go now, otherwise he'll thrash me when i get home. but i'll come again when he's not around...


monica wondered, later, whether she should have insisted more that ajay stay, as i polished off the wonderful dinner meant for him. (monica had told me to go easy on the food before, that i could eat sandwiches later....)

I said the kid was smart, that he knew his priorities, and that he'd be back...

it seems so simple.... the kid was overstepping his class limits... and the brother wnated to hold him back. in the hindi, 'aukaad mein rakhna', to not let him forget exactly where he was placed ....

but then the brother and his flower business probably made more money than monica and I would make together, in a month - barely that we are out of impoverished student mode...

so it wasn't aobut the money...
then why the hell couldn't ajay have dinner with us?

was it becuase they were from nepal, and however much they claimed delhi as home, delhi won't completely claim them?
becuase he didn't want his brother to fall into our un-intentional do-gooder trap of believing in the goodness of this city?
becuase however well puran(the bro) did financially at his honest hardworking business, he would never acquire the easy English-speaking sophistication that clings to us, even when we speak everyday, un-accented Hindi?

or maybe he was just jealous of the easy charm of his brother, which reached out to this 'exotic' woman with the short, red-streaked hair?

... who knows? these are all 'Hindi film type' explanations, but sometimes that's all there is... and sometimes it isn't that inaccurate

all i knew was that night we had hit a barrier, or a series of them. Not insurmountable, but indicative - of the complexities of delhi, and the little ghettoes we all live in, to preserve a sesne of who we are... that this metropolis is a million ghettoes of the mind, and i don't know whether they're opening up or closing tighter....

(say when the activists who define themselves and their politics by their sexuality, like the lgbt movement so powerful in delhi, are they opening up to the society at large or hemming themsleves in tighter?)

the next morning, i noticed that the bus i was commuting to work in was run by nepalis - maybe i wouldn't have noticed it if uit hadn't been for the night before.... but the Jai Pashupatinath Ki' on the door, and the the 'chinky' look of the crew convinced me. i remembered that the entire staff of one of my favourite cheap restaurants, including the cokk who makes the most amazing chinese food -are all nepali...

yet another ignored ethnic group in supposedly 'punjabi' delhi...

just what prevents this place from doing a yugoslavia to itself?

synchronicites - And how it all began with salam pax....

synchroni-cities… delhi/elsewhere

For one there’s the soundtrack of ‘Love in Tokyo’ playing in M’s room as I sit and write this – among my first blogs…

And there’s that blurb from the back of ‘The Shadow Lines’ – to paraphrase, ‘evocation of home darkened by an intimacy with elsewhere’.

Not that there’s much of an elsewhere I’m intimate with, personally. The only city outside of India the mental map of which I carry is Lahore – and when one lives in Delhi, 2004 – Lahore is likely to seem more like homecoming than otherness…

So elsewhere I haven’t been – except learning to be comfortable with the astonishing diversities and contradictions and babel that usually people a day in my life. Or that of most people living in India, for that matter.

But elsewhere has been here. Entered my life not through the often superficial reportage and anecdotes of travel books and TV, newspapers and magazines, but through email and weblogs.

I first became aware of Salam Pax, in Baghdad, through a friend then in Oxford, soon after the pent up war broke last year.

It was through her that I became aware of the amazing anti-war movement in England – and how people all over the world were ready to come out onto the streets of the world to protest an unjust war. Last February, I wasn’t just a distant spectator to the events unfolding in Europe. Through her emails and forwards, I was pretty much there – among the hopes and joys and enthusiasm and the sheer joyful, exuberant defiance of it all….

… and the sadness when it all seemed to come to naught. When the bombs fell on Baghdad.
Especially, when on the fifth day of the offensive, American warplanes totalled the phone exchange, and one of the most unique voices coming out of Iraq became silent. For all anyone knew then, forever.

Atishi was heartbroken. And she wrote to me, not knowing whether Salam Pax was dead or alive. She had regularly reading the guy the world had come to know as the Baghdad Blogger, who wrote in his own funny, sad, abrasive, ironic angry way of the Iraq that he saw.
A living breathing world that I discovered on his blog archives, only after his silence. A world which I lived, through Salam Pax, and whose imminent, unjust destruction was like a personal blow.

That’s when I wrote ‘Synchronicities’, originally a letter to my friend Atishi, which tried to explore the linkages forged between lives in Oxford, Baghdad and Delhi – the other side of globalisation, as the stories of everyday people, and their lives, became accessible to other , ‘ordinary’ people, on opposite sides of the world.
Stories that were strangely, inextricably, inevitably entwined if you cared to look for the pattern – and hence, Synchroni-cities, a play on the Jungian theory, and the particular interpretation of it by The Police (as in the band) on their song ‘Synchronicity 2’

Link -
http://www.lyricattack.com/p/thepolicelyrics/synchronicity2lyrics.html

Later, with some (as in not very much) hesitation, I published “Synchronicities” in a copyleft collection, “Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media.”

Link –

http://www.sarai.net/journal/04_pdf/38anand.pdf


The hesitation was only because I knew that when Atishi found out, she’d be hurt. Because she is a deeply private person… and sharing a deeply private and heartfelt communication between the two of us with a rather large audience of strangers and acquaintances (whoever picked up the book, whoever accessed the website) would be considered a breach of trust.
Knowing all of this, I didn’t actually tell her about it, until after the book was published. For I wanted it to be published and out in the public debate. not (only) for reasons of fame and agrrandizement, but becuase I genuinely believed that what we'd thought and felty, and what I'd ended up writing becuase of it, was important and valuable, and people would respond to it....

She was slightly upset. And still is, sometimes, because I function with a growing disregard for the distinctions between ‘private’ and ‘public’. It’s a debate that is on between us - the sanctity of personal space, versus the free for all (literally) of the public domain…

That’s part of the reason, along with prompting from another friend, Roshan, that this blog is now on. So that I can write about the city/cities that I see/inhabit, my life, and those of the people around me – for if it is not our everydays that make up ‘history’, and all stories worthy of being told, then what is?

Link –
http://www.tasc.ac.uk/depart/media/staff/ls/WBenjamin/CONCEPT2.html
(see Thesis III on this page...


For too long have our ‘personal’ lives been guarded zealously, cut off from the larger political – so that you fail to see the connections between your life and the politics that surrounds you. For too long have only novelists had the license to turn our sordid, mundane lives into art that we consume… For too long, in preserving the exclusivity and hierarchy of ‘best’ friends versus the not so privileged, does knowledge of the personal become the currency of power in relationships. For too long have we spun webs of secrets and lies to trap the ones we ‘love’. (Like George Bush and the WMDs to bring democracy to his beloved Iraqi people?)

On this blog I will tell stories. Stories that people may not necessarily be comfortable with my telling.

The words of a seminal work of pop-pulp-philosophy are all I have to offer –

‘Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world.
Even if what is published is not true.’
- Richard Bach, 'Illusions, the adventures of a reluctant messiah'....
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