The Stone Collector

Went to Dover yesterday and found the smooth rounded pebbles on the shore most fascinating. They were patterned most exquisitely. Wendigo was maha-amused at my obsession and took this pic. Centered my giddy spiral of a head quite nicely, methinks. My first photo as a grown up (?) on this blog!



P.S. The red bit is not my coat's kinky lining. It's my jhola. Pic of one pebble here.

Picnic in Dover Tomorrow

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

A A B A D C#'

Mere saajan hain us paar
Main mann maar
Hoon is paar
Woe mere maajhi!
Atyaachaar
Just cut it yaar!

In other news, I need one shrink (I also need to shrink, hehe)


Update: menaredogs menaredogs

And...Show

When they say they did it "for your own good", on being confronted with charges of years of lies and deceit, what they really mean is that they did it "for their own good." Someone making you believe certain things does not lead you to become happy and confident, for it often seems too far fetched anyways. However, it keeps your conduct in line. Once the false gospel has been preached, you had better be converted, and show all outward signs of having believed. It makes life much easier for them, having swept your suffering under a carpet which they never lift, but which suffocates you to death invisibly.
And then one day the game is up and when they show you their cards, you realize that all your childhood, you have brought up happy and well balanced parents.  

To Be Or Not To Be?

I have written an essay about disability for my end-of-term submission, and I've repeatedly come across versions of this statement in the reference literature:

"To decide to terminate a pregnancy if you find out the foetus is likely to be disabled is to tell the disabled people of the world that you wish they did not exist."

To be able to grasp this statement in its entirety, one first needs to wade through the abortion debate. If one agrees that abortion is a right that should be awarded to willing candidates, one needs to think what criteria should determine when abortion is ok. Who decides whether it is better not to carry a particular pregnancy to full term? When does "the gift of life" become the "curse of life" for the child or the mother, and who is to determine the fine line between a gift and a curse?

A parallel question is: what is disability? Is there a sharp line between the disabled and the able, or is it a continuum, for example from the school football star to the kid who needs to rest after half an hour of exercise, to the kid who is excused from sports because of a weak heart, to the kid with polio in one leg, to the kid in a wheelchair?

If one passes through these discussions, the next question is: does aborting a disabled foetus mean you are not sympathetic to the disabled and you do not admire their positive attitude to life? I am not sure this is quite true. On the other hand, if I hear someone say "I'd rather die than be fat", it hurts me immensely as a fat person. Further along the continuum of disability, the earnest desire of people to be unlike you definitely causes more severe psychological damage.

Some would say this is not an issue to be discussed theoretically. I would say "What would YOU do if you discovered that your unborn child was likely to be disabled, however you choose to define that term?"

Anonymous comments are enabled for this post, in case you'd like to remain unnamed. Please do not waste your time ranting against me: if you read carefully, I have not taken any stance. Thanks for your time.

Still Nothing

And then at Gloucester Road station, four chatty young women got on to the Circle Line tube, all friends, every one different, and each the heroine of a different genre of fiction.

This headache will yank my left eye out. I wonder if it's possible. Maybe I've been watching too many cartoons.

Nothings

Delhi looked like it had stopped still waiting for me to come back; nothing was new except the arrival of Costa Coffee, in a move to woo me back, I suspect. London did not even notice I was away for a bit: it is overrun with daffodils, and new food places dot my daily route, and it is daylight for like forever, and all this in a very little while. Lesson: Missing people, putting life on hold for them, and trying to change yourself into what they like ain't no good, for they don't value it after all.

***
The Bangladeshi kid from Wales across the paper thin walls that divide our rooms should either explain to me why she feels compelled to laugh like a hyena, or should stop doing so. Nothing in the world can justify laughing like a hyena, even for hyenas. There are a million ways to be happy without making your neighbours across paper walls type furiously while green smoke emerges from their ears.

***
Touchdown at Indira Gandhi International airport felt like coming home in a teary-eyed sort of way. Touchdown at Heathrow felt like coming home in an idiotic grin kind of way. I have either many homes or none. Does a nine-hour flight after a life-altering fortnight qualify for jet lag-type concessions to oneself? My shoulders are throbbing in pain, and my cheeks are climbing up my face to shut my eyes.
I'm very, very tired. I think I'll rest awhile.

Quite Grateful, I Assure You

Such a clear signal from outer space, all those green one-eyed people have the same thing to say:
"We Hope You Know What An Exceptionally Wonderful Thing You Have Here And How Likely You Are To Screw It Up By Being Yourself."
Beginning to scrape the cement out of my former accommodation on floor 2.5 (completely coincidental, wendigo, I assure you) with my little finger (the one with the fast-growing nail), and planning to kneel there to thank Heaven for what I have: the one or two people who do not think I am the world's luckiest dog.

Correction: It is floor 1.5 (before the child who remembers everything wakes up and corrects me). Haven't been to that building in a while, forgive my fading memory.

Biographical Mushy Casual

So this evening I was lying in bed listening to the buzz in the living room. My dad was fiddling with his brand new digital camera bought with the approval of a boy who was showing off his favorite computer game to my sister, while my mother hovered about him asking what snack she should cook for him.

Nobody knew I was missing, and I smiled to myself, knowing I was home, and, having provided a (much better) replacement for myself, was completely redundant in a most amazing way. The throne of spoilt pampered kid in this house has been usurped.

Two days later, the band around my finger feels like it's been there forever, and I've had to use my word-of-the-month about once:

Fee-on-say: Noun (Proper. Not Common). The Lord of the Ring.
Used in a sentence: The fee-on-say hates Delhi.

Split Wide Open

Can't remember London except as a vague dream. The smell of sweat and roasting jeera and the sound of horns blaring are the package called Delhi. London will never know the adrenalin rush of speeding through a yellow light at a busy intersection. And Delhi will never know why in God's name the yellow signal actually exists.

Changing cities is changing lives. And, in Delhi, crossing the road without looking just because there's a zebra crossing is changing life for death.

Kya Bataoon Maa Kahaan Hoon Main...

...yahan udne ko mere liye
Khula aasmaan hai
Tere kisson jaisa bhola
Salona jahaan hai yahan sapnon waala



Me flying home to Mummy for the vacations tomorrow. Too sleep deprived to post these days, with Lent term essays and Cambridge et al. Will be back to blogging soon.

:-)

...Love, we are in God’s hand.
How strange now, looks the life he makes us lead;
So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!
I feel he laid the fetter: let it lie!

Robert Browning in Andrea Del Sarto

As You Like It

And the following draw to a close:

- The Royal Shakespeare Company's London Season (Super!)
- The best part of my entertainment budget (12 plays! woohoo!)
- Six months of my stay in the UK (I want my Mummy!)
- The final taught term of my course (Whatever)
- My patience with the winters (Brrrrrruddy Hell!)

Dyer Consequences

The school newspaper comes out every Tuesday, and prides itself on its tabloid-itude. Student union elections were held last week, and the paper carried a sarcastic report today. Many candidates had, as part of their election promises, vowed to have more drinking water facilities on campus (I know of one water fountain and I've been here six months.) So a scathing snippet in the paper said that with so many people wanting drinking water facilities, the school had decided to dig some wells and let students harvest their own drinking water from them. The text was accompanied by the picture of an Indian girl who had contested the elections.

The girl was shown standing in a well.

Now the paper routinely pisses me off with its sexism and occasional racism. But this time, it hit a very raw nerve. Any Indian looking at the picture of a woman in a well is carrying far too much historical baggage to be able to smile and turn the page. The Jalianwalah Bagh incident, for me, repeatedly evokes not just anger at the cold blooded murder that happened on one day in history, but provokes the rage at centuries of culture that consider the forceful ravishment of a woman as fate deserving of her death. Having seen Khamosh Pani at a Pakistan Society screening recently, the anger was much closer to the surface.

The woman in the well is an icon of a world engulfed in conflict where neither party values women's lives. If I write all this in a letter to the editor, it might just get read, and get published in a parody form next week. I don't expect people who refer to "sheesha bars with Arabian girls and shit" to understand my problem. I'm most welcome to carry my chipped shoulder back home where I belong, where I could be expected to jump in the well to avoid being raped tomorrow.

Well, if it's threatening to rip your soul apart, blog it. And then just hope you've got it out of your system.

Bad Day

I could not concentrate on my book on the tube today, because the teenaged boy and girl in the seat opposite were all but tearing each other's clothes off, and I wanted to throw my book down, walk across to them, and tell them to be very careful, because one day she will have a job, and one day (before she gets the job, if I don't intervene) he will get her pregnant, and then her boss will say that women with children are not good enough to work.

Sheesh man! I would spit today out of my life if I could.

P.S.: Completely forgot it is Aamir Khan's birthday today! Fust time in 16 years, I forgot! Hurray! Harnaam Singh will be happy to know this!

A common greyness silvers everything

Death is invisible in Central London. Death happens in a dignified, behind-the-curtain way somewhere else. There is no sound of weeping or dying. Death is not to be seen while walking on the roads. I thought I saw a dead something on the road today, but it turned out to be soil.
There are pigeons everywhere, but nobody knows where they go to die. Nobody knows where they nest either, just as nobody knows where the black and grey camouflage coats who walk the road bring up their young.
Maybe I need to get out of Central London, or maybe the sun just needs to break through the clouds from time to time.

Just Another Day

As the IT man (always a man) fixed the computer in a classroom, a pair of red plastic handcuffs (with hearts printed on them, and the message “Prisoner of Love” emblazoned in white) fell of the desk. He saw them and said to the lecturer “Ma’am, you dropped your handcuffs. I’m not asking what they’re doing here.” Thirty female students, who were examining a sticky-jelly-boy-bits souvenir, burst out in laughter. As the computer phut-phutted to life, a headless bikini model lit up the projector screen.

We are the Gender Institute. We exist to amuse mankind. Or so it must seem to the IT department.

P.S.: If you’re getting all excited about what goes on in our classroom, you’re not allowed to even think about it till you have read Foucault. Then, if you’re alive, we’ll tell you how we use handcuffs and jelly genitalia to deconstruct homosocially-negotiated-heterosexuality. By then, you’ll surely be dead.

Some More Please!

Just paid 1.55 pounds for half a slice of pizza at the hostel cafeteria. I suspect the person in the kitchen slicing the pizza is the lovable chap who serves breakfast on most days, and counts the number of potato wedges he puts on our plates. Whenever he’s around, we either avoid taking anything that’s not of a pre-determined size, or clear our throats and shamefacedly ask for more, not always successfully. We steal little pats of butter sometimes, but that just makes the situation even more pathetic. Being the powerless little creatures we are, we take heart in abusing him:

Bedardi hai who nigoda
Khaana deta thoda thoda
Lekar ghar jaayega saara
Bhooka marta pet hamaara
Usko toh chaain kabhi na

Kar de mushkil jeena
Roz woh kameena

No More!

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