note to self

"I have come to believe over and over again, that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.... My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.... and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken."
~Audre Lorde

A sindhi poet and the story of India

In the past, I have written about my ambiguity when it comes to religion and then about my urge to move out of the country. The former, as I realize today has become more and more persistent with time and the latter ever-transient. One day, here. The other day, gone.
Past few days, both – the persistent truth and the transient feeling – presented themselves in a series of two documentaries, hitherto unrelated but for me now.

The first documentary – the story of India is a 6 part series written and presented by Michael Wood and produced by BBC. These 6 hours is nothing but a series of revelations, of awesomeness that is India. From its genesis to its multi-diversity to its teeming pantheon, phenomenal riches, extraordinary culture to its fight for freedom and of course the biggest draw for me was the legend of Gautama Buddha. That such a man was born in India overwhelms me. That the Bodhi tree, under which he sat to think and changed the way the world thought, is actually just a few hours away from here, where I sit typing this post. That he found a religion that competes with Christianity and Islam in numbers and has followers as opposed to mere claimants. Osho describes Buddhism as being religionless and therefore free from malice and prejudices. Think of it, where did it all begin. In-dia.

The second documentary, Sufi Soul – The Mystic Music of Islam, written and presented by William Darlymple of ‘The Last Mughal’ fame, for a small part looks at closeness of Islam with Christianity (considering the fact that both the religions were born in the Middle East) and for the bigger part looks at why Islam has abandoned Sufism, which propounds no harsh rituals and doctrines of Islam but uses song and dance to reach God. The author/presenter travels to Syria, Turkey, Morocco, India… and Sindh in Pakistan.
His visit to Pakistan is of particular interest to me…when it comes to the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif, a Sufi Poet of the 16th Century. Darlymple reports ever since Shah Abdul Latif’s death in 1752, each night 6 Sufi Monks gather at his shrine to sing his words and play his music. The words I could not fathom, but the music played on a stringed instrument is played by clapping its surface and plucking its strings to produce a sound I had not heard before. That music piece didn’t last longer than a minute but had me so hooked that I can’t do without it for long these days. Naturally then I set out to know more about Abdul Latif. I discovered, much to my own surprise, that he was a Sindhi like I am. On further enquiry I discovered all the elders in my family know about his poetry and music. An uncle and aunt even recited couple of Latif’s verses on the spot. This brought to me, a unique sense of belonging to something I have been trying hard to unbelong to. It’s mildly unsettling to decide to want to forego what you have and then realize the very reasons you wanted to forego it for, are baseless. It's liberating to discover that the real reasons can always be found in acceptance.

a silver lining

these days are hectic again. with a new job, diwali rush and life's other decisions lurking in the corner waiting to make themselves happen, i feel hurried. to top it, today i helped pack relics of our past in a blue bag. zipped, slapped, picked and tucked away for yet another year. or five, who knows. but we rest easy in its wake, knowing our past, howmuchever tedious, is safe. and accessible. all we need to do is look at one photograph and years of memories come flooding back, overwhelming us and pushing us into the future forward.

reminded me of tori amos' 'a sorta fairytale'.
on my way up north, up on the ventura, i pulled back the hood, and i was talking to you, and i knew then it would be, a life long thing, but i didn't know that we, we could break a silver lining

luckily for me, i don't break the silver lining. my affair with my past remains intact.

a time for drunken horses

times flies so fast these days that it’s unbelievable how long i have held a certain thought in my head and not thought it through. and wasn’t yesterday the first day of the year and today it’s past mid-september!! what does one account this unusual time lapse to? in my case, it’s too many events, too many disappointments, too many surprises, and then of course way too many movies. i have never in my life been such an avid movie watcher before. of course, it helps when you have like-minded friends, some working in the movie industry, one even prompting me to write a screenplay myself. the idea appeals to me, but for the fear of not being adequately talented. i mean, the movies i have watched and analysed of late have ruined my appetite for any regular fare. i just can’t stand mediocrity in movies anymore. every movie hath be better than the best, or else forget it. i don’t forgive and i surely don’t forget.

lucky for me, i have managed to watch movies that qualify as not only absolutely must watchs, but also ones that stay with me for a long long time. like what’s eating gilbert grape wth johnny depp and leonardo di caprio. i re-saw it after several years now and saw it again and saw it again. its nuance-ridden (in particular when leonardo who plays a lunatic unwittingly climbs up to the highest water tank in the town and his shoe falls off making him yell: ‘my joota fell off, my joota fell off.’ yes, joota being hindi for shoe) script is such that once you get it, it’s difficult to get over it.

or the breathtaking a time for drunken horses by iranian/kurdistanian director bahman ghobadi. i watched his turtles can fly almost 2 years ago and haven’t stopped recommending it since. it moved me such. and not me alone. i have had one avid movie goer pronounce he’s seen it all, now that he’s seen turtles.
a time for drunken horses made before turtles can fly has a similar plot. of kids on the iran/iraq border trying to make sense of their ridiculous existence, working hard in dire weather and taking care of each other like their parents would. the parents in the meantime, are either blown up by landmines, shot in ambushes or have died during childbirth or due to poverty. so in short, the story has everything to make it dark and foreboding….but not for ghobadi. he says and shows it the way it is. no overt drama, no pretensions, no coloured views. is it a film, a documentary or life? you can’t tell. the lines are blurred. he makes the characters a part of your life, like the scenes are played out not on your tv screen but right there in your living room. like the one in which a crippled boy of diminutive frame sits in front of a guest, to play a little game. pick up a pebble, secretly put it in one hand, fold the fist, fold the other fist and make the other player pick the hand that has the pebble. the guest who is this huge man in front of the cripple is uninterested in the game, and therefore does not pick either. the cripple slaps his (the guest’s) hand with one of his and urges him to play. without realising that the slapping of hand actually gives him away. the hand which is used to slap is obviously not the hand with the pebble. the guest still uninterested, picks the wrong hand on purpose. that half a minute scene made me laugh out loud over and over again. the spontaneity and the innocence of that action blew me away. that is humour of the finest kind and that too in a film that is so far removed from any sort of light-heartedness. but that’s ghobadi and maybe that’s the story-telling tradition of iraq/iran. where people have had a raw deal. blame it on islam, blame it on bush, blame it on saddam, blame it on fate. but blame one must. because those beautiful people deserve better. much much better.

of placenta, pittsburgh and panic

at the outset, the title of this post may sound clever, pretensious but i must clarify it's also fateful or rather fate-filled. that 3 Ps happen in a period of 3 months to a P can't be just so i, the P could frame a pretentious title. by this, i don't mean to say the Ps happened to me directly...that is to say i haven't developed a placenta. yet. nor am i moving to/visiting pittsburgh. yet. panic-struck, well i am sometimes but thankfully not the kind this one is about. yet.

these Ps are about 3 of my closest friends, ones i have laughed and cried and grew up with and how each one of them found themselves in an out of the ordinary situation in a matter of 3 months.

the one with placenta, quite obviously was pregnant, till she endured a whopping 10 hour labour to give birth to a pink baby girl. it disappointed me that she didn't ask to see the placenta before it was discarded, like i had instructed her. it infuriated her that i could ask so much of her when all she wanted to do then was sleep and preferably die. the baby of course, is pretty as hell and occasionally turns pink.

pittsburgh has 33 colleges and universities including carnegie mellon. it has art, music and culture centres. it has rivers and wayside cafes and exhibitions centers. it has oriental furniture that can be bought at ridiculously-low prices. it has this and it has that. at 7 in the morning, with a full bladder and groggy eyes, while still listening on the phone, i imagined being there. just like my friend, single and fancy free exploring the world all by herself. making a fantabulous career, away from the pressures of settling down and *this* closer to frank lloyd wright's legendary fallingwater. at the time of the morning, i recalled doing a small study on the architect for a electrical switches client, a few years ago. i remembered fondly how much the man rocked my world then.

panic. my least favourite of the Ps but inevitable nonetheless. leaving home, hearth, family, friends, exes turned friends, vipassana breaks and of course a business made successful by an assortment of overweight people from different walks of life, she decides to do something she swore she would never do. in fact, she is doing everything she never imagined she would. a. get married b. move away to a foreign land and a much much colder one at that. c. have a traditional wedding d. quit financial independence e. study again starting with the nightmarish GRE. f. cook and clean and manage a house and hubby. g. be a dutiful daughter-in-law who has the sane mind to already remember birthdays of soon-to-be in-laws and be there with surprise cakes and sleepy smiles at midnights.
understandly, the panic had to hit and it did. i was there, most times when it did. not a pretty sight that. but then days passed and panic seems to have dissipated under the barrage of activity. wedding bells will toll, precisely 4 days from now. and a new life will begin. :-)

the end of yellow glamour

to submit a document to greenpeace by 12 noon tomorrow, i have been rummaging through their website for the past 3 days. what i have learnt specifically about climate change is nothing less than alarming. not that global warming and rising sea levels were alien concepts but getting this much more familiar is decidedly unsettling. especially when i realise the harm incandescent bulbs behind smoky lamps that i so love cause. now i dare not switch on another lamp/bulb unless absolutely necessary. for me, it's the white obnoxious lights from now on. but then i have been told there are yellow CFLs too. small mercies!
meanwhile, do go and sign this petition. please.
http://www.greenpeace.org/india/banthebulb/petition

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