Amrapali...and her choice

April 1, 2015, 5:16 am

(This is my first A2Z blogging challenge. For the uninitiated, there will be a blog post everyday in April (barring Sundays), and we kickstart with a post drawing inspiration from the alphabets – so we start with ‘A’ today.)

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I also thought it’s a great idea to start with my pet peeve – people in general moaning about how good things were ‘back then’. The Back Then is usually many centuries earlier, when the moaner was not around in the present form. The moaning is usually triggered by anything that the moaner perceives as ‘outrageous’. Like the recent daft ‘My choice’ video. I say it is daft because it was poorly worded, intentionally or unintentionally. Firstly, when any corporate entity that endorses and reinforces notions of physical beauty talks about ‘empowerment’ – they are bound to get it wrong. Secondly, when they rope in a lady who works in a highly sexist environment, and her profession makes demands on the way she projects herself – from appearance to body language – they've simply lost the battle. Unfortunately, in the Indian context, such glamourised packaging of serious gender issues have reduced the value of the words ‘empowerment’ and ‘freedom’ – freedom has come to connote only sexual freedom; and empowerment has come to connote exercising a choice when it comes to sex and physicality. Don’t even get me started on ‘equality’ – that’s been reduced to a battle of ‘ladies only’ compartments in trains vs. ‘general’ compartment.

But coming back to the moaners of Back Then When Moralilty Was At Its Peak – I thought I’ll talk about Amrapali.

Amrapali was an abandoned girl child. Her foster parents found her under a mango tree – hence her name. This was Back Then in 500 BC or so, in the kingdom of Vaishali (parts of modern day Bihar). Vaishali was a powerful kingdom, with a sophisticated political system – and therefore, a prosperous one.

I don’t know much about Amrapali’s childhood...but it was obvious she was a very pretty little child, who’d grow into a stunning beauty. She was a very talented child, a great dancer. I suppose she had a happy childhood till she turned about 10-11. Remember – even as late as early twentieth century, we were cool with child marriage – the law did not ‘interfere’. So think of the time back in 500 BC. By the time little Amrapali turned 11, she already had many ‘suitors’ clamoring for her hand in marriage. Even the king of Vaishali lusted after the child. Think of the societal setup – where the parents are probably proud of the attention their child has brought on them – the problem as they see it, is not about protecting the little girl, but about ‘how to avoid offending the powerful men who are all after their daughter’.

Anyway, Amrapali became the headache of Vaishali. There was serious danger of infighting amongst the princes and such like of the republic – possessing Amrapali had become a conquest for many. It was such a serious issue that the parliament actually held a discussion for this ‘problem’.

These learned men came out with a solution that was acceptable to all. They’d make Amrapali the ‘Nagarvadhu’ or Bride of Vaishali. A posh name for prostitute. Of course – they’d be fair though. They’d give Amrapali her own palace, probably enough money for her parents...and accord one of the highest ‘honours’ to her by naming her Janpad Kalyani. It meant that she was declared the most talented and beautiful girl in the entire kingdom. It also meant that unlike ‘ordinary’ women, she was given the right to choose her lovers. I think of that child. Maybe she had just entered her teens when all this happened – 13-14 years – maybe she did not even understand fully what was in store for her. That right to choose one’s lover is such humbug – as if a child has any powers if the king or the prince or some royal asshole wants to rape her. Yes, even Back Then, society found ways to justify sexual offences against children and women.

And thus began her journey. History books gloss over her life – as if being a ‘royal courtesan’ was easy. Imagine the number of painful abortions and miscarriages and physical abuse she must have endured. No wonder she fell in love with Bimbisara – the neighbouring king of Magadha. Legend has it that Bimbisara had heard so much about her beauty that even though Vaishali was an enemy state, he disguised himself as a musician and entered the kingdom. He truly fell in love with her – it must have been a refreshing change for her – from all the royal psychos who’d visit her only for her body, to this handsome musician who seemed to respect her, and her talent. But Bimbisara also wanted to annex Vaishali – so he mixed business with pleasure and carried out an attack on the kingdom. It was only then that Amrapali came to know of Bimbisara’s real identity. Bimbisara wanted to make her the empress of Magadha, but she refused.

What a painful decision it must have been for her! Returning with Bimbisara meant freedom from the life she had to endure in Vaishali. She’d be someone’s legitimate wife, she’d have children...she’d have a family. But she knew that Vaishali would never sit quietly – stealing someone’s Nagaravadhu was an affront on collective ego of the ruling class. There’d be war – millions of deaths – all because she wanted a normal life. Amrapali makes her choice - she gives up that once chance at love.

Bimbisara returns to Magadha heart-broken, only to endure a coup by his psychopathic son Ajatashatru. Bimbisara is imprisoned, and eventually dies in prison. Some records suggest that Ajatashatru too falls in love with Amrapali. By then Amrapali is thrown into prison for conspiracy against the state. Enraged, Ajatashatru burns down the entire city – when Amrapali emerges to see her burning city – she decides to renounce everything and become a nun.

In another version, it is said that Amrapali falls in love with a travelling Buddhist monk. A plausible scenario – her own life was in shambles, her body and mind ravaged. The peace radiated by the monk must have been very healing for her. Indeed, meeting a man who is not sexually aroused by her – that itself must have been therapeutic. She eventually becomes the first Bhikkuni or a nun in the Buddhist order. Abandoned on account of her gender at birth, and victimised all through her childhood and adulthood, once again on account of her gender – shedding that identity that was so tied to her body and sexuality – it must have been absolutely liberating for her. I think she finally found happiness when she became a Bhikkuni.

Whenever I think about this outstanding woman – I can’t help but think – to truly find yourself, to truly understand your identity with self-awareness – empowerment comes from within. Only then can you make the right choice. This is true irrespective of gender, isn't it?

(To the moaners of Back Then – hope your moaning has come down a notch.)

© Sumana Khan - 2015

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Boredom

April 2, 2015, 6:10 am

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How has the day been so far?

Are you stuck in a boring meeting, wishing something would happen to shake up things? Like a fire perhaps. Or a meteor-hit. Or at least someone throwing up.

Are you in your little cubicle trying to look busy; playing Mario or Solitaire? There is work - but you can’t get yourself to do it – it is so terribly boring. You restlessly keep refreshing your Outlook – to see if any interesting emails have come – but it’s all landing in the spam folder – someone asking you to look into their webcam, or someone peddling those pills.

Are you sitting at home – kids at school, spouse off to work, the domestic help has finished her chores and the hours stretch in front of you. The house is quiet, and you can do a million ‘productive’ things – you can finish at least two chapters in your manuscript, or the painting you were working on, or the dress you were designing, or the yoga...but you are listless, restless. You get yourself a bowl of chips or chevda or whatever is your fix. You park a large mug of caffeine boost on the table. You open your laptop and surrender to the internet. You read news portals...not for the news as such...but for the comments on news articles. You open Facebook and scroll through your newsfeed. You click on the various videos of babies playing with dogs and sneezing pandas. You add your bit to the collective outrage over something or the other.

Or your day is packed – running from one place to another, jumping from one task to another, meeting after meeting, call after call. Yet, you feel empty, unaccomplished.

Before you know it, the day is done. You feel depressed by night. Crappy. Snappy. Irritable. Your life is in a rut, you rage. It’s the spouse’s fault. It’s the kids. It’s the education system. It’s the lousy culture of the country. It’s the country. Maybe it’s just hormones. Maybe you are depressed. You can’t sleep. You open the internet on your tablet and start surfing. Well, there’s that bitch having a spa-holiday again. And look that numpty back from college – all happy and celebrating his fifteenth wedding anniversary. Everyone seems to be leading a perfect life. You feel hostile, black. You finally drift off to sleep at three in the morning. Before you know it, the day has started again.

If it is of any comfort, you are not alone. No, it’s not the onset of depression or hormonal imbalance or...well...madness. It’s a worldwide affliction of epic proportions; it’s called boredom. If boredom came with physical symptoms, I bet it would be declared an epidemic.

In a paper titled ‘On Boredom’ published way back in 1953 in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Dr Ralph Greenson outlines boredom - "A state of dissatisfaction with and a disinclination to action; a state of longing and an inability to designate what is longed for, a sense of emptiness; a passive expectant attitude with the hope that the external world will supply the satisfaction; a distorted sense of time in which time seems to stand still." That’s about the most perfect description of the condition.

I think boredom in small doses is good – you can’t always remain in a super-charged mental state, with your brain whirring and buzzing. But sustained boredom; in other words, a long period of feeling disengaged and uninspired is a precursor for depression. We ought to take constant boredom more seriously – without our knowledge, it does affect various physiological and psychological states. For example, our cognition is affected – from attention span to response time. Extended periods of being disinterested in general could lead change in neurotransmitter levels – example a suppressed level of serotonin.

The most important line in Dr Greenson’s description is our expectation that somehow the world will firstly recognize we are bored (as if anyone cares!) and then, provide us the required gratification. What is that gratification we need – we don’t know. But we do reach out to some comforts – buying things we don’t need, and more often than not, indulging in boredom eating. But the most fatal effect of prolonged boredom is the negativity it generates. You know, idle mind...devil’s workshop. Next time you are ‘bored’ – try this experiment. Disengage and observe your thoughts. Do you think about happy moments? I can bet you end up reliving an unpleasant situation. You remember the hurt it caused, you remember the person who hurt you. You imagine a future event where you are in confrontation with this person. You imagine a complete hurtful dialogue you will have. Before long, you have generated enough stress and anxiety for yourself; and what’s more, you start festering in it.

Being stuck in this kind of rut does not mean you are lazy – it’s a result of the way things are structured around us right now. Our education, corporate structures, lifestyle – everything is geared to towards a mechanical routine. Everything is outcome based. Everyone is measuring productivity. There is constant breathlessness, the foot is always on the pedal. There is no time for an in-depth experience. There is no time for in-depth knowledge acquisition. There is no time for an in-depth conversation. Everything shall be done ‘after retirement’...till then, keep running.

I don’t have the 10 steps to ward off such fatal boredom. I mean many of us can't dash off to Italy and Thailand eating, praying and loving along the way. But from my experience, you can make life a tad richer by doing one of these –

1) Create something – anything – let it be shaped by your hands and heart. It could be just writing something to drawing a rangoli or baking a cake.

2) Acquire knowledge with child-like enthusiasm - put your heart in it. If you want to learn about black holes in space – go all the way – from the theory to the equations. You may not have understood anything in school – but now, as an adult with no exams to judge you, you’ll be surprised the amount of things you can grasp. The only rule – don’t learn anything that will be ‘useful’ in your career.

3) Impart knowledge – come out with fun ways of teaching someone something. It could be computers for senior citizens. Or Math for non-math folks.

4) Challenge yourself – if there’s something you've never tried – because of lack of opportunity...or simply because you were conditioned that way (for e.g. you can’t do something because of your gender) – do it. At least make plans for a start

5) Read, read, read. The more you read, the more you tend to introspect – the more interesting you become as a person.

Most importantly, for all these things you do – don’t expect accolades. Don’t do it for that...do it for your pleasure and your pleasure only!

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Charulata

April 3, 2015, 5:34 pm

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(It is the third day of A2Z blogging (at least it is stillthe third day in some parts of the world!) so we are on C)

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Well, after yesterday’s rant on boredom, I thought I’ll give an anti-dote – a movie recommendation. Well technically, it’s more of a character analysis...but both the book and the movie left me with an emptiness that was at once joyful as well as sad. I know no other way to describe it. The movie is Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, based on Tagore’s ‘Broken Nest’...a novella. Need I say more?

Bhupati is the rich young gentleman, with enough money to last for generations. He is a good man, Bhupati – kind, decent and ignorant of the wily ways of the world. When one is rich and good and gullible, such a character cannot be a superhero. Or, in this case, a suave poet, a romancer or even a practical zamindar. Indeed Bhupati is none of that. Believing all that flattery of his English skills, he starts a newspaper – and we see him toiling on his publication day and night.

Charu is Bhupati’s wife – charming, intelligent and witty. And, lonely. Here, it is important to peel the epidermis of the word ‘lonely’. We must look beyond the literal sense of the word. Charu is not lonely because of the bland reason that her husband has no time for her. Charu is still young, and has led such a comfortable, cloistered life to even understand the nuances of companionship and complain. The loneliness in her case is more primal in nature – she has no one who needs her, who makes demands on account of her affection...someone who makes her feel that yes, she is important in their scheme of things. It is not as if Bhupati does not love her, or that he ignores her – but she exists, as do all the people and things in the house.

Amal is Bhupati’s cousin, a college-going boy, probably in the same age range as Charu. Bhupati asks Amal to keep company with Charu. Charu and Amal become the best of friends, and we revel in their child-like quarrels and the purity of their bond. Amal is like a greedy child asking for treats to do his tasks. He’d want a hand-woven pair of slippers one day...or embroidery done on the mosquito net. Amal fulfils Charu’s greatest thirst – someone asking her...nay...demanding that she do something for them. The audacity that can stem only from affection. An affection that is untainted by any hint of sexuality. With much grumbling and taunting, we follow Charu through her tasks – her childlike way of revealing surprises to Amal. We follow them through their wild ideas of transforming the garden into something exotic – we’ve all done that as kids – imagined building castles and palaces till it became an almost-reality in our heads. We know we cannot build the castle, but we must fight and whisper and conspire about the rich planning.

There is not a single line anywhere that explicitly tells us that Amal and Charu are falling in love. There is a hint of the moment, stealthy, like a whiff of fragrance that was at once overpowering and at once not there. It is the day when Amal first reads his writing to Charu. Charu – she of the limitless imagination – is awed by Amal’s talent. Sharmishta Mohanty who has beautifully translated the original into English puts it as, “That day, under the tree, Amal first tasted the intoxicant that is literature; the girl who served the intoxicant was young, so was the tongue that tasted it, and the afternoon, full of long, falling shadows was becoming mysterious.”

‘In love’ in this complex story becomes such a blasé, such an inadequate phrase. We follow this tumultuous journey – of misunderstandings, of fights, of separations. We struggle with Charu – who cannot understand the constant pain she feels, nor the origin of the pain. At the surface, indeed as Bhupati sees her, she comes across as a child who jealously guards her treasures. But it is only towards the end we see the depth of her love. It is not the love born out of attraction towards a man or a woman. It is not the love born out of a compassionate understanding. It is the love that is as nourishing as her very breath; it gave colour to her imagination, it made her feel wanted, it made her important to someone else. Charu does not have any predictable intentions – no, she does not want to run away with Amal, she does not want to live with him etc – there is no hint of any of these predictable, almost obscene desires. Charu mourns Amal’s absence because he took away the most precious thing from her – that somehow he needed her – even if it was something as silly as reading what he wrote to her, waiting for her analysis. She must now once again become the rich wife under whom the servants do their bidding. She must do a series of duties. She will of course have everything. She will have nothing.

We will never know if Amal reciprocated...in his mind at least – we can only guess by his silences. But it is Bhupati who wins our affections – kind, foolish Bhupati.

It is a moving, beautiful story that is still relevant today. It is a story that makes you search for a silent corner...you’d want to ponder over the trio long time after the story has ended. Do watch, do read.

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Dessert Trance

April 6, 2015, 1:40 am

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If you grew up in a traditional South Indian family like I did, you’ll probably agree that sweets were meant for ‘occasions’ – mostly festivals. The reason I emphasize South Indian is because I know there are belts that have jilebis for breakfast. I mean, on one of my early visits to my husband’s Bengali home as a new bou, imagine my gawking surprise (and delight) at being presented with a plate of shingaras (samosas) and jilebis for breakfast. Anyway for South Indians, the end of a meal is signified by curd rice – or rice mixed with yoghurt, a dash of salt, and consumed to the accompaniment of a pickle.

Even in weddings that lay out a smorgasbord – with peni and chiroti and payasa and boondi ladoo as sweets – it all ends with majjige anna or curd rice. Probably the coolness and the acidity regulator in yoghurt helps settle down all the spices and sugar consumed all through the meal. In the weddings I’ve attended as a cynical teen, watching people consume food off the traditional plantain leaf (seriously, what an eco-friendly way of eating!) was an entertainment in itself. For example, there is a process to eating your chiroti and peni. First you sprinkle a generous amount of sugar on it. Then, soften the crispy chiroti/peni by slowly pouring badami milk provided specifically as an accompaniment. So when you put this divine thing in your mouth – you have the slightly bland and crisp taste of the underlying chiroti/peni, the crunch of the sugar that would not have fully dissolved, and the hot, thick milk richly flavoured with saffron and almonds. Do this the wrong way and you’ll have a mushy mess, with the milk flowing in tributaries all over you ele or leaf, and soon, it will pool on your lap.

See that’s the thing...these exotic sweets required a lot of effort to prepare...and demanded your concentration whilst eating – so you savoured it all the more. These are not usually prepared at homes – the only place where we could taste them was at weddings...so for me, chirotis/penis are all the more precious. The last time I had chiroti was in my friend VC’s wedding...and that seems to have taken place in the Jurassic era.

But for me, the emperor of desserts is ghas ghasepayasa - a sweet porridge flavoured with roasted khus khus or poppy seeds – because of its simplicity in preparation, unique flavour and after-effects.

There are variations in the preparation from region to region, but here is the way I do it –

Ingredients –

1) 2-3 cubes of jaggery, depending on their sweetness

2) 5 tsp of poppy seeds

3) Rice flour 3-4 tsp

4) Half a shell of coconut, grated.

5) Milk – ½ litre or more, depending on the consistency you like. You can use semi-skimmed, but whole milk gives a richer taste.

6) Nutmeg and cardamom for flavouring (you can use nutmeg powder).

Method –

1) Dry roast poppy seeds till a nice aroma filters out. Remove immediately from the flame.

2) Grind the roasted poppy seeds, grated coconut and rice flour in a mixer, adding little water. The consistency of this batter should be thick and smooth.

3) In a thick-bottomed pan, place the jaggery, add a little water and on a low flame, allow the jaggery to melt. Filter this melted jaggery to remove impurities and transfer this to another thick-bottomed pan. Add the poppy-coconut batter to the jaggery solution, and on a low flame, bring to boil whilst constantly stirring. You can add the nutmeg powder now.

4) Add milk in small quantities till you think you have the right consistency. As the kheer boils on low flame, it takes on a satin sheen and become thicker. Adjust the consistency as per your requirement by adding more milk.

5) Switch off the heat. Pound three or four pods of cardamom and add the powder to the hot kheer.

Your payasais done. But – you are not to gobble it up uncouthly. If you want to hit nirvana, you must try my method.

Firstly, make sure the day-after-payasa is a holiday. So a Saturday is ideal for this. If possible, take the traditional oil bath. A good substitute for castor oil is coconut oil, considering we don’t get seegekai in its original form easily – and considering most of us are losing hair, rubbing the scalp with seegekai may not be a good idea anyway. Do the traditional Indian head massage with warm coconut oil and sit in the sun for an hour. Don’t read, don’t check emails ...nothing. Just turn your face to the sun, and let your skin absorb the warmth and energy.

Once you are done with your shower, have a light lunch to make space for the payasa. Serve yourself the payasa in a large steel tumbler. The temperature of the kheer should be just right – it should not be scalding; it should not be lukewarm. It should be just hot enough for you to feel it against your throat, and the flavour of the poppy seeds should flare in your mouth. Throw on your favourite music (my fix is Pink Floyd’s ‘Any colour you like’) as you drink your payasa. The poppy seeds usually have a sedative effect, but taken this way – well...it’s the most organic way of entering psychedelic trance.

To me, that is a dessert!

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Ego

April 7, 2015, 8:42 am

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The concept of Ego is something that has troubled humans from the time we’ve formed civilizations. Questions on ego and identity have formed the basis of philosophy and, to a large extent, psychology. It is interesting to note that ancient philosophers across the world spoke of immortality of the soul, and this permanence of the soul became the core for many cultural and religious philosophies. For example, Plato, way back in the 3^rd or 4^thcentury BCE, wrote a treatise ‘On the Soul’. In this, he records his teacher, Socrates’ discourse about the soul. Central to this idea is the notion that the soul is imperishable. In India, gurus like Madhvacharya, Ramanujachrya and Shankaracharya shaped Hindu philosophy that guides many of us even today. The core of our philosophy is once again the immortality of the soul, in contrast to the perishability of the physical body.

This central idea further gave birth to the Dvaita and Advaita philosophies. Madhvacharya advocated the Dvaita philosophy – there is the supreme God soul – Brahman (paramatma) and the individual soul (jivatma). His treatise and teachings went on to distinguish the differences between these two ‘entities’ – hence ‘Dvaita’ (two). On the other hand, Ramanujacharya and Shankaracharya advocated the Advatia (not two or ‘a-dvaita’) philosophy – where we believe that the souls of individuals, and that of the Brahman, are one and the same. Of course, it is much more complex than that – ‘soul’ is considered as the highest, and purest form of consciousness – and in this state, the soul is nothing but Brahman or God. In the Sri Vaishnava philosophy, we believe that supreme soul or Brahman is none other than Vishnu. In other words, each of us carry a drop of that supreme power – the power that is responsible for imparting that initial energy to atoms, from where it all began.

These are terribly exalted metaphysical ideas – but I believe this quest started with Who am I? Rene Descartes famously said ‘I think therefore I am’ - indeed the entire western philosophical journey starts with this statement. Don’t you think it is fascinating – I mean from an evolutionary perspective, one moment we were grunting and growling, rubbing two stones together and discovering fire – and the next moment, we are on this complex self-realization quest!

Ego too is tied with this sense of ‘I’. What does this ‘I’ mean? Surely, it is much more than a sum total of your body parts. We can vaguely answer as ‘mind and soul’. We can say identity. But what is identity? Is it just your name? Your lineage? Consider a hypothetical situation – let’s say you are cut off from all the people you know and your memory is completely erased. What does ‘I’ signify in this case?

If you compare the works of all these great philosophers, you’ll realise that we all have the same fundamentals. The difference lies in our quest for the answers. If you look at the Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism – be it any of the Acharyas, the Thirthankaras or The Buddha – this quest was a personal undertaking. All these great men chose to walk the path, and their discourses were drawn from their experiences.

I’ve often pondered on the phrase – attained enlightenment. What did this mean? I came across this phrase in school, in the history text book. It mentioned the place where Siddhartha ‘attained enlightenment’ and thus became The Buddha. It troubled me no end, this not knowing. When I raised this question, I was unfortunately misunderstood, and was reassured that such questions won’t be asked in the exam.

But somewhere along the way, it was Mahavira’s exceptional life that helped me understand, to a very miniscule level, what these great men were after.

When we say a quest for higher consciousness, it has to be a consciousness that is completely cut off from the physical world. Research has shown that consciousness exists outside the five physical senses through which we interact with the environment. It is this unattached consciousness that is liberating, boundless and energy in its purest form. But neither have we been able to study it, nor harness it.

The pursuit of this consciousness demands an extraordinary state of complete detachment. In other words, you have to break every form of attachment – from your relationships, to even self-love. You have to completely dismember the concept of ‘I’. The first step is to distance yourself from things that attach you to a physical world– renunciation. But just by cutting yourself off – going away to an uninhabited forest – does that help? In a small way it does – you now become alone. You don’t have any emotional crutches. Without human interaction, there is no emotional friction. The mind becomes free for higher pursuits.

But this is the easier part. What about your self-love? That is the survival instinct at a very primal level – encoded in our very DNA – the reflex to avoid anything that causes physical pain and discomfort. By shunning creature comforts and denying luxury to the body – some control over that survival instinct is obtained. The biggest obstacle however, is the larger part of the ‘I’ – the ego that encompasses your sense of self-respect. How does one detach from that? I think this is the reason why all the great tapasvis also became bhikshus – they adopted the practice of accepting alms. How much of a beating the notion of self-respect must take, when a former prince or a king should stand in front of a house, with his palms extended, begging for food? What a rigorous, ruthless way to destroy the ego!

I am particularly moved by Mahavira’s journey into self-realization. He gave up wearing clothes (a practice still followed by Digambaras) – the last bastion of self-love. When you reach a stage where you break down your ego to its very atoms – you begin to dissociate yourself from your body. By a cruel paradox, the body is still the vehicle for whatever energy you carry – so it has to be nourished. So you must reach a stage where you eat only for nourishment, as if you are just taking care of an independent entity.

If you examine your thoughts – it is all tied down to your relationships, yourself, your actions, someone else’s actions, your comforts, your desires. So what happens when you withdraw from all this including your own physical body? I can only guess – when all the noise is turned off, you become so self-aware (another paradox) that you can ‘feel’ the vibration of very cell, every atom. Indeed, there is no absolute silence – it is said that in this state of hyper silence within your mind – the sound that you can hear is ‘Om’; which is why it is called theprimordial sound. It is the state where you are able to harness the energy within you - the Brahman within you; you become a part of the Brahman, you become enlightened.

At a very primal level, ego is tied to one’s body and nothing more. To that extent, even animals have ego. But as we become more sophisticated in our thinking, in our interactions and relationships – ego assumes larger, more abstract proportions. It encompasses notions of self-respect, self image, self love. At the end of the day, in order to function well in our social hierarchy, ego is important and necessary. When our sense of ‘I’ is inclusive – ‘my home, my town, my planet’ – it is beneficial to society in the long run. When ego becomes restricted to self-pleasure, it takes on an ugly shape ‘everyone should recognize my power and importance, I am entitled because I exist...’

I think for this life – it is enough if we choose the right kind of ego.

©Sumana Khan – 2015

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Fog Tales

April 7, 2015, 11:20 am

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Have you ever stood in open air, with the fog curling at your feet? It cloaks everything in silence; your pupils, devoid of colours, dilate. You can feel the tip of your nose and ears going cold as the fog seeps between your hair strands. You feel the damp clutch at your throat, pouring into your lungs. You see your breath, vapour dissipating, one with the fog. You cannot move. There's stealth. There's mystery. There's seduction.

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Gravity Fan Club

April 8, 2015, 5:20 pm

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No, I’m not talking about the movie. I’m referring to the actual gravity. The force that makes your feet stick to earth. And as of now, I suppose I’m the only member of this fan club (in my age group at least :) ). Wanna join?

Back when I was a kid, there’d be days when all the friends in the street would discuss seriously about stuff we’d read in our mythologies, about our gods and demigods. (Guess now we'd be labelled as 'saffronised'). We’d discuss the mechanisms of the Pushpakavimana – Ravana’s flying city, piloted by thought. Yeah – you could just think in your mind about your destination and the Pushpakavimana would go on autopilot and steer you through. You’d be free to lounge about in the pool, drink madira and party with the apsaras. We believed wholeheartedly that there was technology back then to fly this way, and somewhere along the way, something cataclysmic occurred, and we perished, only to be reborn, all that knowledge lost...or at least out of grasp. Today we are almost there. We need many more generations; many cycles of incremental evolutions to completely harness our thoughts...but for now, artificial intelligence is good enough. (I still believe in this, laugh all you want).

Anyway, one thing that really fascinated us was that in the place where Brahma sat writing our destinies, 1 day for Him was equivalent to thousands and thousands of years for humans. Or, for the divine entities of lower order, like the regular Devas, 1 earth year = 1 Deva day or something like that.

It remained a fairy tale, until the day I began to enjoy theory of relativity (way after I was done with classroom imprisonment). And no, I don’t do equations. I’m not wired to imagine that way – for example, a line or a slope can be represented by an equation. Not my cup of tea.

So here’s the deal. First, we need to understand the concepts or space and time. For this, we should approach the two from a very literal perspective. Imagine an empty room. Just four walls, the ceiling and the floor. Now, bring in furniture. The sofa against the wall. The TV in front of the sofa. A coffee table in between the two. If you imagine the room as the space given to you, there are objects at specific locations within that space. In nerdy terms, we call the location of the objects as coordinates. Space has dimensions – length, height and width.

Now let’s consider the tricky business of time. By time, we can imagine only one thing – a clock showing the minutes and seconds. But what exactly is this concept of time? We perceive a passage of time when some event occurs in the space around us – an event that changes the state of an object; that change causes another object to change its state and so on. That became too nerdy? Well, imagine the earth as one big room – that’s our space for the time being okay? We perceive the passage of time because of a series changes around us – for one, the sun rises, rather the position of earth is such that we are able to see the sun over the horizon. This is a change in state of the earth – it has changed its position. Because this has been such a constant event over millions of years, our bodies have evolved to be in sync with the rising sun. So the next event is triggered. Millions of living bodies change the internal rhythm so that we can all ‘wake up’. The earth’s position keeps changing – this is observable by the change in position of the sun in the sky – and this in turn is perceived as ‘time’ by us. Somewhere along the discovery path, human race calibrated time. But here is the thing about time – unlike space, time has no dimensions.

So in essence, space and time always coexist. Time becomes irrelevant without space – imagine an empty room, no windows, no doors, just a dark cube. Imagine sitting in this room. You wouldn’t know whether it’s day or night; you wouldn’t have any clue for how long you’ve been sitting – because there is nothing to indicate how much time has elapsed. To indicate this coexisting space and time relationship, a mathematical (uggg) model was worked out – famously known as space-time continuum.

Now that we got the two lovebirds sorted out, let’s tackle gravity. In the simplest sense, gravity is the force of attraction between two objects. The greater the mass of the object, greater is its gravitational pull. That’s what Newton figured out with the falling apple. That’s the era of classical physics. Gravity is much more than objects dropping to earth. This is where Einstein’s theory of general relativity plays an important role.

Imagine a plastic sheet stretched tautly on a frame. Now, take a heavy ball and place it in the centre of this sheet. What do you observe? There is a dip in the sheet right? Take smaller, lighter balls and place them on the outer edges of the sheet. What happens? Without you applying any force, these balls accelerate and roll towards the heavy ball in the centre of the sheet. That’s the way our galaxy is. The taut sheet is space – vacuum. In the middle of that space is the heavy mass of the sun. As in the sheet, this mass causes a dip in space. So how come none of the planets are accelerating towards the sun, and falling into it? It’s because the planets themselves are moving at such high speeds, that the velocity keeps them in orbit. Assuming the planets were stationary, what would cause them to roll towards the sun, like the little balls in our experiment? What force causes anything to fall from a higher height to a lower height? Gravity. How do we know there is a dip in space? It is, after all vacuum? Simple. A straight beam of light shows curvature, in what is known as gravitational lensing effect. In very plain terms, Einstein in his general theory of relativity said this space-time distortion caused by heavy masses is perceived as gravity.

Now, because space-time is a duo of sorts, it’s not just space that is ‘dimpled’ by gravity. Time also is ‘pulled down’. This is known as gravitational time dilation, and it’s super fascinating. In other words, time ‘becomes’ slower when we are closer to a massive body like the earth, when compared to being far away. So time for someone who is on land is slower when compared to someone who is orbiting the earth. In other words, greater the mass of the object, greater is its gravitational potential – closer you are to that object, slower is the time.

Now imagine a mass that’s a million times greater than the earth’s. Obviously, time is even more slower on such a mass when compared to earth. Do such objects exist? Of course. The biggest, badass supermassive blackhole in the middle of our galaxy is Saggitarius A* - apparently has the mass of 4 million suns. Imagine how slowwwww time would be if you are in the vicinity of this.

So coming back to my childhood fascination – Brahma’s 1 day = thousands and thousands of years on earth – it is no fairy tale at all. It is all true. Proven.

It is comforting, especially when you have lost a loved one...to know...on a restless night, if you look out of the window and spot a star...they’re out there.

(PS: If you enjoyed this post, you may also like my take on the boson )

↧

Hello World

April 9, 2015, 12:45 pm

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‘Hello World!’

If you've touched a computer for the first time in the early 90s – you’ll know what those two words mean.

I saw a computer for the first time in my life in high school. We had an option of taking up Economics or Computer Science. Economics was out of question...I’d taken a look at the textbook prescribed for Economics – small print, fat book, no pictures nothing. Just text, text, text. So I took the only other unknown option. The text book for comp science for high school was a slim, glossy volume. It had pictures of an abacus, a pencil sketch of a sour-looking Charles Babbage and some grainy black and white photos of huge mainframes. Cool, I thought, I can handle this. At least I can score some marks and make up for the ones I would definitely lose out whilst trying to prove some theorem, or getting the volume of a cylinder wrong. I mean I flipped through the pages. I saw BASIC, BASIC everywhere. There – it was just the basics, I thought. No big deal.

And then the classes started. Babbage baba was okay. But what the hell – I thought a computer was just a fancy calculator. Apparently no. I had to write weird little words and phrases to make it tell me if A was greater than B or B was greater than C. Seriously. What the hell. By the time the term progressed, I figured I was in the deepest shit there ever was. The only comfort was many others were wading along with me. We thought the only way out was to learn the programs by rote. At the most, the ICSE board would ask the greatest of three numbers or the least of three numbers, we reasoned. But there was a big mystery I could not solve. Granted I’m not very bright when it comes to math – but I could make out the greatest or least of three numbers just by seeing them. Why on earth would I want to break my head to make a computer tell me that?

So, as I was zoning out of these mysteries of my life, a meteor hit me. We were to do a group project. Write a big program and all that. I felt as if I was underwater. Okay – so what did they mean by big program? There was only one soul who was the Buddha in our group – completely Enlightened. If at all I have a degree today, it is because of her. Otherwise I’d be a high school dropout, slumming it out as a school ayah or something, for sure. We all turned to Archie to imbibe her knowledge. She said they wanted us to do a real-world project. Like calculating profit-loss or simple interest kind of stuff. I tell you, that was one time my heart flew out of my mouth. Profit loss program? I mean even on paper, if the math problem threw in a discount calculation, I’d space out. And they want me to write something to make a computer understand? School ayah, definitely, I thought. Wiping puke and snot off little brats.

I poured out my woes at home. Amma was concerned. Appa scolded the government for torturing children in the name of education. We could not find any solution, so we fell back on the only option left. Say Jai Sri Rama whenever I entered the computer class and hope Rama would infuse extraordinary amounts of grey matter. Well, Rama did not do that, but He showed small mercies.

For one, we all rejoiced deliriously when we came to know we need to submit only a group report. Of course there’d be a group viva and the examiner could choose anyone to ask a question. Knowing my luck, I was sure he’d pick on me. What the hell, I’d include a few more shlokas along with Jai Sri Rama and hope for the best.

The second mercy was that two of my friends were in a similar situation as I was. Of course they both are infinitely more intelligent. The three of us decided to join private classes. In our school, it was like Thrissur mela in the computer class. Maybe if we got a bit of individual attention, we could crack it, we thought.

I think my friends did well. I was still stuck in the rut. From comparing numbers, we had moved on to identifying prime numbers. The teacher probably saw my phantom face and said, ‘Don’t worry. The trick is to write down how you do it real life. That’s the all-go-rhythm. Then translate it into BASIC.’ See that was the problem. If you showed me a number, I could tell if it was prime or not only based on gut feel. I struggled. Variables and whatnot. I think they gave me a certificate out of pity.

In the project group, Archie had the brain wave for the project. She proclaimed we’d do a Poultry Farm Project. I surrendered my life at her feet and zoned out. There were quite a number of variables. There was lot of counting of eggs and chicken. There was lot of multiplying cost of one egg. There was cost price and selling price and finally profit. Archie and a few other brainy ones wrote the program.

Then came the viva. We were all crowded around the examiner who kept peering into the computer screen. I chanted Rama’s name. I had learned one other shloka, guaranteed to ward off ill omens, but I forgot the lines...another ill omen. Finally, it was all over. One or two questions were asked, and answered by Archie and a few others. I waded into pre-university.

By then, computers had reached many offices. They were kept in air-conditioned rooms where women in sweater blouses and cotton-rolls in their ears tapped away at the keyboard. We had to remove our footwear to go near a computer – the dust could wreak havoc, we were told. I swore that I’d never ever touch a computer again. Stupidest invention ever. Babbage had no other better work but to ruin the lives of future generations.

Years down the line, I was staring at the DOS prompt...and the journey never ended. I did make my peace with Babbage. Forgave him and all that. I even roamed around with a 3-inch floppy disk in my purse – it had my resume.

I eventually did a little more than write a program that said ‘Hello World’. But seriously, thank god for Windows though - the visual imagery is a blessing for people like me.

↧

I Am Vertical

April 11, 2015, 8:43 am

≫ Next: Janice Litman Goralnik nee Hosenstein

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(Excerpt from Collected Poems - Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes)

I am vertical by Sylvia Plath

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them --
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

This is a poem that never fails to stir me in a strange way. Powerful by itself, in retrospect, the context of Plath’s life adds unbelievable pathos to it. Sylvia Plath was an outstanding poet and writer, who committed suicide at the age of 30. This was not her first suicide attempt; she was plagued by depression all through her life, winding in and out of psychiatric care. Her academic achievements were dazzling. Her body of work throbs with a pain of its own, stinging like tears.

At the surface, the lines of this poem are innocuous enough – but go a level deeper, you can hear Plath’s voice – her bewildered helplessness, her pressing desire to call it quits. Assume her point of view, and, only for a moment, wear the cloak of depression and read the lines...

The first line But I would rather be horizontal– a continuation from the title – sets the tone of the poem. The imagery conjured up by the word ‘horizontal’ is startling. One knows what it means.

The second line I’m not a tree with my root in the soil– it’s probably a recurrent question in a depressive mind – what is the use of being alive (vertical)? Her reference to the roots, nourishment and ‘motherly love’ is interesting. It can be interpreted as a lack of connection and rootedness that seems to dog her. It’s not as simple as ‘counting one’s blessings’ – a depressive mind is a black hole – no amount of love can fill that up. It reveal’s Plath’s mental isolation. There is also the sense of her pained bewilderment – of no one understanding her. It is true: for a normal person, it is difficult to show empathy with someone suffering from such clinical depression.

Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted

We get a glimpse of her self-image, which is not very flattering. I think for the kind of abject depression she was battling with, she could never really appreciate how much she was cherished and respected.

But it is the lines - So that each March I may gleam into leaf, and Unknowing I must soon unpetal - that, to me, gives an idea about the kind of conflict that goes on and on in her mind. Her reference to the immortality of the tree (compared to her own lifespan), and the ‘daring’ of the flower further confirms this conflict of thoughts – on the one hand, there is a desire to live a long fulfilling life, but on the other, there is the sense of futility. The flower blooms spectacularly irrespective of its destiny to wither and die. The tree, rooted and tall and strong – it is happy to remain that way. But what about human life, with its curse of intelligence and self-awareness? A flower and a tree may not know their destinies – but humans do. It all eventually leads up to the same end. Human life is inherently cruel – just as we mature (well, probably not in all cases), and make peace with ourselves and the world around us, our body turns against us. In a sadistic twist of irony, the body that we nourish and nurture so much, withers in an undignified way, even as age sharpens the mind to dazzling brilliance. Our mind, ever intelligent, growing younger with its capacity to understand the universe, must also register the fact that its vehicle is no longer up to the job.

For someone as creatively hypersensitive as Plath, thoughts of the body and mind, and the inevitability of death would have had a profound effect. The thought of ending it all would have always been buzzing inside her head. I guess some days it would be really loud, this buzzing – a mental torture of the worst kind.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.

In these lines, Plath reveals almost metaphysical thoughts – her sense of absolute insignificance in the larger scheme of things. For all our jumping around, it is true that humans are insignificant in the cosmic sense. But to have this reality hang like a dense cloud over your head, and inside your head – what a prison such a mind is.

It is more natural to me, lying down.

This line is chilling and tragic at the same time – the sense of Plath’s surrender to her depression; she is almost comforted by the thought of death – that there is a choice to put an end to it. There is a choice not to go through with the physiological hideousness of life.

Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

Dust to dust – six feet under, the human body, whether it was useful in life or not – nature puts it to use – the body, now back to its very basic elements – is one with the earth, from where the trees and get their nourishment; and indeed there will be flowers on the grave.

Plath eventually committed suicide on Feb 11, 1963. I won’t go into the morbid details – but for someone in her state of mind, I think it truly was an escape to freedom.

She leaves behind a treasure trove of contribution to modern English Literature. In the Bell Jar, she says, “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” I hope she found her eternal peace.

↧

Janice Litman Goralnik nee Hosenstein

April 12, 2015, 8:36 am

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Okay, I’m probably a bit of a loser for this psychoanalysis of something as innocuous F.r.i.e.n.d.s of all the things. Sure, I love the six of them as much as the next fan – but I probably love two characters a pinch more than the main protagonists – Janice and Gunther.

In particular, I love Janice’s character for her freshness; she’s remarkably uncomplicated; loud, boisterous and unapologetic who stakes claim on whatever god is around quite vehemently. And who would not want a friend with an infectious laughter?

But here’s the thing – whether intentionally or unintentionally, the makers of Friends have revealed a universal truth. If one is ‘good looking’ in the conventional sense, then being weird is cute. We love Phoebe’s quirky weirdness. We love Monica’s OCD. We quite tolerate Rachel’s dumbness. But let’s say you are not the conventional beauty; then people can point at you and laugh at your weirdness.

I think one should be lucky to have a Janice in their lives. Janice-like characters are more open about their emotions, almost in a child-like way. They are guileless, and are not burdened by outward conditioning of How To Behave and Blend In. They are so free – free from ‘people are watching’ syndrome.

Next time you cringe when an unconventional friend meets you on the road – probe a bit deeper into your hypocrisy. Do you cringe because he/she is genuinely embarrassing – you know...like referring to unmentionable body parts as a matter of conversation – or do you cringe because the person is just different from the mould?

↧

Keepsake

April 13, 2015, 3:22 pm

≫ Next: Lonely Hearts

≪ Previous: Janice Litman Goralnik nee Hosenstein

I held my niece for the first time on her first birthday. We studied each other warily. Inky black eyes returned my stare. All I could register at such close quarters was a tight shock of curls and a drooling mouth that was always trying to find things to chew. I guess all she could register was my nose. She patted my face with her chubby fingers, tested her grip on my already weak hair, tried to chew through my mangalya and finally settled down to using my lap as a trampoline.

My sister nonchalantly said Hamsa becomes hyper during sleep-time. Sure. By then I could not feel my thighs. I saw Hamsa staring intently at my ears. No, I shook my head. ‘Nononononononononono,’ she replied and finally did manage to nip a bite. Order was restored after a teething spoon was given to her to chew.

Lunch was announced and Hamsa was now taken over by other laps and ears. As I neared the dining area, I felt unusually light. Maybe Hamsa had beaten out some calories off me with all her jumping, I thought. It was then that I realised that I was feeling light because my saree was coming undone; I was in an almost-Draupadi state in the middle of the dining hall, even as other guests trooped in. There was nothing to do, but to turn towards the wall, bunch the saree and tuck it all back in. I now looked as if I was expecting quadruplets. Hamsa! Silent little ninja...efficient mischief maker. She’ll keep up the family name.

Hamsa and I got to know each other pretty well over the next couple of days. I nodded

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satisfactorily when I figured this girl, like me, thinks sleep is unnecessary. Indeed the closer we got to her nap time, the more Hamsa would act like Mick Jagger, trying to prove she is not sleepy. There’d be a tremendous battle of wits between my sister and Hamsa...of course Hamsa almost always won. Then there was that evening when we saw Hamsa flipping the pages of a magazine. We beheld the sight with a quiet pride. Yeah it’s silly ...I am sure Hamsa was plotting on tearing a page and shoving it inside her mouth before her mother could pounce. Guess my sister also thought the same, I saw her entering a crouching position to take the pounce, should the need arise.

Most mornings, Hamsa and I would spend some time on the balcony – I had to keep her distracted so that my sister could take a shower in peace, and Appa could go for the day’s grocery shopping. I’d show her crows and pigeons and she would look at me in disdain. Buses interested her a bit, but only if they blared the horn. But mostly, the brat was interested in clutching at my earring and pulling it out – with the earlobe if possible.

I managed to keep my ears out of her reach, but my luck ran out. I often wore this salwaar with a bit of mirror work sewn in. Hamsa seemed to love it – the minute I’d lift her up, she would set to work immediately, trying to pluck out all the shiny things with a wicked determination. Then I figured if I sat in a particular sunny spot, the mirrors would reflect the light on her – little golden spotlights on her hands and legs and she’d go crazy looking at her hands, her laughter spreading like soap bubbles, and smiling faces would pop out of other balconies. I now had found the trick to keep her away from my ears. But I had just the one salwaar with mirror work. Whenever I was in a plain one, she’d look closely for the mirrors and stealthily, her hands would proceed towards my ears.

One morning, I was in the right salwaar, but it was a cloudy day. Hamsa was in a bad mood too. She kept grumbling in her baby talk, and, just to be polite, I too grumbled about taxes and all that. She liked it – yeah looked like she loved a good rant now and then. So the more I discussed the tax situation, the louder her gobbledegook became. Then, we paused to take a breath. She was back to trying to pluck the mirrors on my dress. Then she stopped and looked at her hands. No dancing spotlights. She looked at me and I said, whatever it is, don’t do it. She tried to lick the mirrors and bite them free. I was distracted only for a moment ...man she was quick...my ear was in a toothless mouth within a second. She remained insanely triumphant for the rest of the day.

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She’s now three, and before we know it, she’ll be thirteen, eighteen...but I have a keepsake. The frock she wore during The Battle Of The Ear-Bite. I have to settle scores...I’ll be the senile aunt who embarrasses her on every birthday. Wait till you turn 16, Hamsa...heh heh heh...

↧

Lonely Hearts

April 14, 2015, 9:44 am

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Hehehehe! Cheesy title. Well, today's blog letter is L and I thought I'd dish up a good playlist whether your heart is lonely or not.

Back during my assignments abroad, it was a general shit-hits-ceiling scenario on most days. The only window of peace was the late night radio stations. Irrespective of the city one was in, there’d always be a late night slot on some frequency for those wallowing in unrequited love, or those who loved and lost. I think these programs aired around 11 in the night on weekdays and went on past midnight. The playlist was comprised of the usual suspects – but it was the RJ who made the phone-ins more interesting...oh the voice... viscous honey gliding on the airwaves. Returning at an unearthly hour to a cold, dark apartment after a crappy day at work really sucks. I’d always turn on the radio even before I got to the heating. I loved the way the voice of that unseen RJ banished the stone-cold silence, and made the alien flat feel like home.

Well, for today’s blog, I figured I’d pretend to be your RJ (it’s another matter that my voice will jar you awake)...and here’s my play list for a lonely hearts club...or insomniacs out there. Turn off the lights, move your chair close to a window, sit with your legs resting on the window sill, stare at the sky and turn on the play list J

Coming up first is the immensely sexy Chris Isaak, fighting a losing battle with his heart in Wicked Games...

We can’t just talk of only one Chris now, can we? Here’s Chris Rea’s soulful regret in And you my love...

The anthem of any lonely hearts club - U2's With or without you...

When it comes to affairs of the heart, everything has to be INXS, yes? There's just Not enough time...

Sometimes, you simply have to leave. Jethro Tull tells you how in Still loving you tonight

Aaand...Scorpions take over from Jethro Tull in Still loving youuuuu...

Reo Speedwagon is not left behind in all the loving, people...

Once bitten twice shy. No more loving...here's Def Leppard telling it like it is in Love Bites.

Scorpions sting and love bites. You can only be Broken. Turn up the volume for the superbly slick Depeche Mode.

Maybe you're broken in a more fundamental way. Radiohead dishes out some raw angst in Creep.

But you know, at the end of it all, there's always a choice...of Coming back to life...and David Gilmour tells you all about it.

There's a good side to insomnia, I tell you! Hope you enjoyed the playlist!

↧

Mania

April 20, 2015, 10:58 am

≫ Next: Nightmare

≪ Previous: Lonely Hearts

(Academic submissions = Missing in action. I think the blogging world has moved forward with many letters – but then, I’ve never been known to keep in step with anything in general. So let’s carry on where we left off, shall we? This is a work of fiction, obviously...it’s in two parts).

PART 1: MANIA

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Dead leaves blew in as I pushed open the door to my apartment lobby. I stepped inside with a gasp of relief. The warmth of this stale, confined air was so good; the smell of carpet cleaner and air-freshner had never felt so welcoming. A sickeningly sweet vanilla. I stood for a minute, leaning against the wall, allowing my body to recover from the stinging fury of the wind outside. A ‘mother of all storms’ was about to whip this city’s ass. I had to walk just a couple of blocks to reach home, but the wind made the one-mile walk seem like a hundred miles. By the time I’d reached the traffic junction near Ted’s Bristo, the wind had touched 50mph. I had to hold on to an electric pole for support. A passing police car had slowed down, and the officer had shouted over the wind, asking if he could drop me off at Ibiza mall. The mall had been converted to a community hall of sorts for this weather emergency. I’m right around the corner, don’t you worry, I’d said. I should have gone to the mall. Should have.

Anyway, I’m glad I made it safely to my home. Just in time, if you ask me. The little greyness that was left in the diseased sky was erased swiftly by mouldy clouds. The streets were drained off its occupants. A silence I’d never experienced before descended on the city, punctured by the occasional wail of a far-off ambulance or a cop’s car.

I walked across to the lift. A red ‘X’ was taped across the lift doors and a sign board said, ’Given the extraordinary weather situation, we have been informed of imminent power cuts. The lift has been deactivated keeping your safety in mind. We regret the inconvenience.’

8 floors. Better than walking outside though. I rested my forehead against my door, panting for breath. Next door, I head the Polish family talking excitedly. It was as if they were celebrating the weather. I could picture them holding their camera phones against the window as the storm blew in. I wish I had company too.

I heard a rustling noise inside my flat. Footsteps. I straightened up – had momma come? I inserted the key with much rattling. “Momma?” I called excitedly as I opened the door. A blast of furious wind hit me. Damn it. I must’ve left the bedroom window open. There was no momma of course. How could she come all the way from Wichita? But why couldn’t she? I was angry, pouting. Mommas are supposed to do that. Know when the child needs her and all that. Just because I’m thirty it does not mean I don’t need her. I’d told her about the storm. It’s all I ever spoke of in the last couple of calls. A good momma would have said, ‘Don’t you worry honey. I’ll come down and we’ll ride out the storm with hot chocolate and piping chicken broth and soups.’ But no. Not my momma. No sir. Uh huh. Momma does not like her ballroom dancing sessions interrupted. Or her bridge nights. Or her hair appointments. ‘Don’t whine. Don’t be a weakling, missy. Be independent.’ That’s all she ever told.

I slammed the door shut, aided by the wind. Alright. I’ll be alone. I don’t need anyone. I switched on the lights in the hallway. ‘Hallway’ is such a fancy term for this space. It’s just a narrow corridor. To my left is the kitchenette and living room. To my right is the bathroom. Straight ahead is the bedroom. It’s an old flat with worn out carpets and peeling wallpapers, and cardboard walls.

I walked to the bedroom, and sure enough, the window was open. It was a vertical sliding window that always got stuck mid-way. I struggled furiously, the wind slapping my clothes against me. I finally managed to lock it down. It was seven in the evening, but it looked inkier than midnight. I turned on the lights and turned up the heating.

I walked into the living room, still in my street clothes and coat. I turned on the floor lamp and switched on the electric stove. I did not have a radiator in the living room; but the stove served the purpose. The stove and some brandy. Neat. I’d feel toasty in a couple of minutes; I could take off my coat then.

My kitchenette was really a slab against a wall in the living room. They’d crammed a microwave and a couple of shelves to make it functional. The dwarf fridge shared a plug point with the TV. I’d stocked up on loads of tinned food – soups and beans mainly. I pulled out the can opener from the draw. For dinner we have a tin of soup and a tin of beans, ladies and gentlemen.

I turned on the T.V. as I poured the beans into a sauce pan and began stirring, drinking my brandy straight from the bottle. All the news channels were going ape shit about the storm. They had Casey or Kaisey or Keisha or whatever her name was for tonight. Shiny cobalt blue dress with matching brooch and earrings. Bet her knickers were cobalt blue too. She was talking to some expert about clouds and storms with that orgasmic expression; as if she’d never seen a fucking dark cloud in the sky in all her dimwit life.

Dinner was ready. I changed into tracks and a full arm tee and sat cross-legged on the frayed sofa with my bowl of soup, flipping channels, hoping to catch something dirty. Through the thin walls, I could hear the Polish folks yammering away; their TV was on too. I could hear gunfights and dan-dan-dan music. Their noise was comforting.

Ah. ‘Sinister Passions’ was about to start. It promised to be the fare I was looking for. I turned down the volume, pulled the coffee table nearer to rest my legs – and... that’s when I noticed it. Two coffee cups on the floor. I set aside my soup and stared at the cups, thinking hard. I had not left any cups lying about like this. I never leave my cups on the floor. And two cups? Not a chance. I looked inside the cups. Wet ring of coffee glistened at the base in both cups. I stood up fast. Someone had been inside my apartment, that’s for sure. The footsteps I’d heard...the open window. Shit. I kept the cups at the sink, left my dinner on the coffee table and ran to my bedroom. I walked to the window and pressed my face against it, looking this way and that. Black rain came down in sheets and the window looked like the windshield of a car caught in a storm. There’s the access, I thought. The fire escape ladder. Easy-peasy. Even I could do it. But the window could be opened only from the inside. I checked the latch. Yup. It can’t be opened from the outside. So that meant...Cristo.

Cristo. It had to be him. Cristo was a good friend. Not a boyfriend. How do they say it...friends with benefits? Yeah...that’s me and Cristo. He usually comes over when he’s in the break-up phase...you know till he gets hooked to the next girl. I know it sounds pathetic...but hey. I don’t want to be burdened by morals and love and commitment and all that shit. This is just fine for me. He treats me real nice. That’s good enough for me. Yeah, I bet it was Cristo. He’s the only one who has keys to my apartment. He and Momma, the witch of Wichita. We can rule out the witch.

Now Cristo...see there’d be days when he’d come in before I returned from work. You know, he’d run the bath for me and keep something nice for dinner on the stove. Nothing fancy. Just pasta or macaroni and cheese. And some wine. ‘You eat too much of that tinned poison baby,’ he’d say hoarsely as we did other stuff. We’re not too much into romantic talk. Like I said. It’s just fine by me.

But Cristo had gone down south to Florida. Maybe it did not work out. I called his mobile and caught his voicemail. ‘Hey baby,’ I said, fluffing my hair, as if he could see me. ‘It’s me. Ummm...have you been to my flat today?’ I disconnected. Am not much of a phone person.

I went back to the living room, finished my dinner, rinsed the dishes, including the cups and went to bed. The storm was raging outside, although the hurricane touchdown was still hours away. A little after 2am, Miss Cobalt Blue Knickers had announced. It was the kind of night when you don’t want to be alone on a cold, creaky bed. I wished Cristo would let himself in, and snuggle up next to me.

What if it was not Cristo?

I sat up. Yeah...what if it was not Cristo? I walked back to the kitchen and rummaged through the cupboards. The meat cleaver felt good. Comfortable, heavy, solid. I swished it in the air a couple of times. Yeah that’s good.

I kept the cleaver next to my pillow and stood staring at the window for a good measure. I dragged a rickety chest of drawers to the window; piled up a whole lot of cardboard boxes on it. Those boxes were heavy with the junk of my life. There! Only a small slit of the window could be seen. Now I could sleep peacefully. I left the lights on though.

When I woke up, it was dark. The storm had knocked out the power as predicted. I squinted at my mobile phone; it showed the time as 8:05am. I’d missed a call from Cristo. The hurricane must have sucked out the fucking sun, I thought, as a headache began to squeeze a nerve just above my right eye. I checked my voicemail. Yup there was Cristo sounding all sexy and summery. He said I’d sounded weird and my message was weirder. He was still in Florida. ‘I tell you what honey. Pack your shit and come to Florida,’ he said. He was working in Kissimmee. He could fix me up with a real nice office job. And then, there was the sun most times. None of this depressing crap.

I was so charged up that my headache flared. Yes. I could leave for Florida like...right then. I mean in two hours tops. There was no packing...I just had to throw all my stuff in the dumpster. Perhaps I’d carry a set of clothes. I could buy new stuff when I got to Kissimmee.

I swept off the sheets and swung my legs out of the bed, kicking something. A small scream may have escaped from my lips. I don’t remember. Two coffee mugs rolled on the floor. The truth flashed like neon lights on a motel.

Someone was inside my flat.

From yesterday.

↧

Nightmare

April 23, 2015, 3:21 am

≫ Next: Oh Maggi!

≪ Previous: Mania

PART – 2 – NIGHTMARE

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I scurried back on the bed; my back against the wall; hands groping for the meat cleaver. I sat on my haunches, the cleaver in my right hand, ready to spring if I felt the slightest movement around me. I waited, my eyes darting around, identifying every familiar silhouette in the dull grey light struggling in through the window slit. No white-eyed demons sitting on my cupboard – just the solid, rectangular outlines of my suitcase. My bed was low level, sagging: so no chance of anyone hiding there, waiting to grab my feet.

I don’t know for how long I sat that way; long enough to feel silly I suppose. The house stood in its usual quietness. The Polish folks were stirring next door: I could hear the flush. I realized I had to pee real badly. “Don’t you whine, missy. Don’t you be a weakling!” I heard mother’s voice in my head. She’d usually smack me on the mouth the minute a pout formed.

“Think!” I commanded myself. Whoever was inside, obviously did not want to harm me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have woken up in one piece. The cleaver would be lodged in my skull, for example. Besides, it was clear that no one was inside this room. Either they’d let themselves out, or they were in the kitchen or in the bathroom.

As if in answer, the power came back. Thank god I’d left the lights on everywhere. I got out of bed, still clutching the cleaver behind my back. I plastered myself against the wall next to the bedroom door, counted to three under my breath and peeped out quickly into the corridor and withdrew. The corridor was clear.

I stepped into the corridor and put my ear against the bathroom door: there was no sound. I turned to the living room door. I usually keep this closed...hate the stale smell of soup and beans floating to my bedroom. Cursing myself, I dropped to my knees, pushed the door in one swing and lunged inside. And felt silly. The place was empty. I was angry now. I stomped across to the bathroom, the cleaver in mid-swing. Of course no one was inside.

I kept the cleaver on the bathtub and finished my morning ablutions. ‘Here’s what you’ll do, missy,’ I thought, ‘you’ll make yourself a strong coffee. You’ll take a nice, hot shower. Then you’ll head out to Sammy’s diner and have a big, badass breakfast. Then, you’ll go to Port Authority bus station and book a Greyhound for Kissimmee. You’ll come back, pack a suitcase and leave. Just leave. Write a note to the concierge to clear out your stuff. Leave tips for him. Leave your set of keys. Just leave, leave, leave.’

It was almost noon by the time I returned triumphantly to my hole-in-the-wall. I had a ticket for a 4:30pm Greyhound. 34 hours journey by road. 3 transfers. I couldn’t wait to get out of this dump. Just being outside; amidst people and under the open sky, it felt so good...so wonderfully ordinary. I actually wondered if I was responsible for the coffee cups somehow. I mean I’d been slugging a lot of brandy lately. Momma and Cristo were big time coffee addicts. Maybe I was missing them so much that I was mimicking them under the influence.

I opened the door to my flat, just in time to see the bedroom door close softly. ‘Who is it?’ I yelled, anger and fright sucking the blood right to my brain. I locked the front door and ran towards the lift. Once in the lobby, I dialed 911 and reported an intruder.

The cops came within two minutes. ‘I’d gone out to run some errands,’ I told the two officers. ‘I returned a couple of minutes ago. I was just about to get inside my flat when I saw someone closing the bedroom door. I mean, I did not see the person...I just saw the door closing. Like...the bedroom door is right opposite to the front door.’

Officer Nguyen nodded. ‘Floor and flat number?’

‘815, 8^th floor. Take the left corridor when you get off the lift. Last flat on your left,’ I said as I handed the keys.

‘Stay here, do not come upstairs. Once we’ve cleared the place, Officer Gutierrez will come down and escort you, okay?’

I nodded. Officer Gutierrez had already drawn her weapon and was heading towards the stairs. Officer Nguyen took the lift.

Officer Gutierrez returned to the lobby after fifteen minutes. ‘Your flat is clear, Miss. Could you please come upstairs?’

Officer Gutierrez made small talk in the lift. The weather. This building. Low crime during the storm. All the while she was studying me. I could feel it in my bones. Her eyes were like smudges of midnight. I felt any moment she’d lunge at my exposed throat and start sucking out my blood. I disliked Gutierrez. Lithe, firm, porcelain skin. The kind of woman that drove Cristo crazy.

Inside my flat, Officer Nguyen was casually studying my collection of tinned food. Yeah, it looked odd – all my kitchen shelves had tinned food. I had just one cabinet with two or three pots and pans. And cups and spoons. My fridge was filled with alcohol.

‘Sit down, please,’ Officer Nguyen pointed at the sofa. He sat opposite to me on the coffee table. Gutierrez remained standing, arms folded across her chest.

‘Are you all right, Ma’am?’ Officer Nguyen asked in the most professional ‘To Serve and To Protect’ tone.

‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Sh...shaken up though. I...I think someone has been coming to my flat when I’m not around, officer.’

Officer Nguyen took down my basic details. He was one of those men who breathed audibly.

‘Ma’am we found a meat cleaver in your bathroom. Can you please explain that?’ Gutierrez asked.

I did not look at her when I answered. I explained the situation with coffee cups. ‘I would never, ever leave unwashed cups lying about like that. I mean look around this flat – you can see it’s immaculate.’

Officer Nguyen and Gutierrez exchanged glances. Something was said, unsaid.

‘Could you please follow me to your bedroom?’ Officer Nguyen stood up. He nodded at Gutierrez.

‘Why? What’s happening?’ I flinched at the way I whined.

Officer Nguyen did not reply. I followed him to my bedroom and staggered back. There were more than fifty paper cups lying about on the floor – the smell of stale coffee congealed in the room. The carpet was stained with coffee spills.

Behind me, I heard Gutierrez call for back-up and an ambulance.

‘I don’t know what’s happening, officer!’ I started shaking uncontrollably.

Officer Nguyen picked up a comforter from my bed and wrapped it around me. ‘Sit down, Miss.’

I sat at the edge of the bed. ‘I...I don’t drink coffee, Officer.’

‘Do you have any family living nearby?’

‘Of course she has.’

My head snapped up and I turned around. ‘Momma?’ I yelped. Momma was standing near the window, lips pursed and arms crossed, her right foot impatiently tapping the floor. The stance she always took before smacking my mouth.

‘Gutierrez! Need you here!’

I barely heard Officer Nguyen. ‘My own daughter, living in such filth!’ Momma was so angry.

‘No Momma!’ I sobbed. ‘It was intruders.’

Gutierrez rushed in. She put an arm around my shoulders.

‘Lay off my daughter,’ Momma’s voice was like a whiplash. Gutierrez stepped back immediately.

‘Come back to Wichita, girl. I’ll fix you up real good. Look at what you’ve done to your life. Living like a tramp.’

I trembled.

‘She’s coming with me..dum dee dee dah...to Kissimmee!’ My heart soared as I heard the voice. Cristo! Cristo stood at the door. ‘Hey honeybunch,’ he said as he swaggered in.

We heard some more footsteps and a couple of officers trooped in.

‘Now, now officers,’ Cristo drawled, ‘let’s not get excited. This is just a case of a scared little ‘un. Scaredly, scaredy cat.’

‘We’re not going to hurt you,’ Gutierrez said softly, kneeling down in front of me. ‘We just want you to be safe. We want our doctors to make sure you are okay.’

‘Don’t believe that bitch,’ Momma spat. ‘They’re gonna strap you to a stretcher and put you in a mental asylum.’

‘Run sugar, run!’ Cristo whispered. ‘Fire exit.’

In a flash I threw the comforter wrapped around me on Nguyen, kneed Gutierrez in her face, bounded on the bed and dived for the window. One of the backup officers caught my leg, but I slammed his nose real hard with my elbow. I was out on the ledge. I did not think twice. I jumped. That’s all I remember.

EPILOGUE

Officers Nguyen and Gutierrez sat quietly as Sergeant Reyes listened to Marge Sullivan’s recorded statement and made some notes on an A4 writing pad. Gutierrez had a broken tooth and an ugly swelling below her right eye. Lucky she did not end up with a broken nose.

Marge had escaped death: she’d fallen straight into a dumpster filled with torn sofa cushions and mattresses. An inch on the outside, she’d have hit the fire hydrant and the tarmac. She was rushed to the Bellevue and put under suicide watch after treatment for trauma. The doctors said she had the devil’s luck – she’d gotten away with just a couple of fractured ribs. It had taken her all of twenty minutes to give her detailed statement to the police.

‘There’s going to a review of this case obviously,’ Sergeant Reyes said, putting his pen down and cracking his knuckles. ‘I saw the footage of your body cameras. Christ...she spoke in three different voices. Hell, even that psychiatrist...what’s his name...Richardson? Anderson? Whatever...even he paled when he saw the footage. No wonder you both look like shit. Sorry about that bruise Gutierrez. You want time off?’

‘No way.’

‘Can’t remember any case that deteriorated as quickly as this one,’ Officer Nguyen said.

‘What’s with this meat cleaver, Gutierrez? Sergeant Reyes pointed to Marge Sullivan’s meat cleaver lying on his table, packed in an evidence bag.

‘I’d like to send it for forensic tests, Sarge.’

Sarge Reyes started at the cleaver for a moment. ‘What’s going on in your mind?’

‘I got a bad feeling about this one. We did not just walk in on a psychotic episode...I think there’s something more to it. I mean...when we walked into her flat...the filth just hit us. Piles of unwashed dishes...I don’t think she ever got around to washing up. There was mould and fungus on some of the plates. Don’t think she cooked anything either. I mean there was tinned food everywhere. Tonnes of it. She had even stocked the bathroom shelves with tins. Her fridge was filled with alcohol. She was tottering on the edge of becoming completely dysfunctional. I mean – not a pint of milk, no eggs, bread – not a single everyday-stuff in that fridge. Her kitchen draws were filled with disposable stuff – plastic spoons and forks. So the meat cleaver seemed so very out of place. It looked new too. Nguyen checked her trash bin in the kitchen – found a two-week old Wal-Mart receipt. She had bought some Cognac, more tinned soup and the cleaver. It’s just a hunch, Sarge. I have a really bad feeling about this.’

Sergeant Reyes sat back in his chair, eyes closed.

‘We wanted to contact any of her family members or friends,’ Officer Nguyen said. ‘Her mobile phone has only two contact numbers – Mommy and Cristo. Both mobiles are unreachable. We also found Hertz rental bills in her purse. Looks like she’d taken a trip to Wichita and then to Kissimmee ten days ago.’

‘Get in touch with the local PDs in Wichita and Kissimmee,’ Sergeant Reeves said. ‘Let’s get an address for the numbers. And Gutierrez, get the work done on the cleaver.’

It was nearly 3am when Sergeant Reyes got a call from Officer Gutierrez. Preliminary luminol tests showed considerable blood traces on the cleaver. ‘Meet me in the office,’ Sergeant Reyes said as he got out of bed. ‘Call Nguyen too.’

Almost immediately, the hospital called the Sergeant. Marge Sullivan was missing. It was almost an hour before Sullivan’s flat was officially declared a crime scene. An APB was put up for Sullivan, her mother and Cristo.

A roll of 12,500 dollars was found bundled in one of Sullivan’s stockings. There were blood smears on some of the notes. ‘Robby,’ the Sergeant called out to one of the forensic guys, ‘can you do a luminol check in the bathroom? Just a hunch. She’d want to wash her hands in the sink...in case there was a homicide here.’

After a couple of minutes, Robby yelled from the bathroom. ‘Sarge! You gotta see this. It’s a fucking aurora borealis in the bathtub.’

Sergeant Reyes and his officers carefully stepped inside the dark bathroom. Indeed the luminol-treated bathtub glowed intensely under UV light.

‘There’s been some real butchery here,’ Robby said, a slight tremor in his voice. ‘That’s a lot of blood, Sarge. As you can see, there are traces of blood leading out of the bathroom.’

‘Treat the corridor. Follow the trail.’

There was considerable blood splatter in the middle of the corridor. There were minute droplets leading to the bedroom.

Gutierrez kept her pen on the floor to mark the area of the blood splatter. ‘Turn on the lights’.

She blinked a couple of times when the lights came on and looked up at the ceiling directly above the pen. There was a loft hatch.

‘We found a step ladder behind the cupboard in the living room,’ Robby called from the bedroom. ‘It’s got blood trace.’

‘Christ!’ Sergeant Reyes suddenly felt sick.

The loft hatch was opened with a crowbar, and Robby climbed into the loft. The heads of Mrs Sullivan and Cristo were found floating in two aquariums filled with formaldehyde. The rest of their bodies were missing.

Even after months of investigation, the file on Marge Sullivan remained slim. The bodies of Mrs Sullivan and Cristo remained untraceable.

Marge herself was never found.

↧

Oh Maggi!

June 5, 2015, 6:34 am

≫ Next: Predator Within

≪ Previous: Nightmare

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It’s been a tumultuous week, eh? Here I was, after moving homes and popping an artery packing and unpacking, looking forward to settling down with a bowl of Maggi and a screwed up horror movie, when Maggi made headlines. It was like...well...it was like you’ve been going out with this great person for decades...of course the person is not all perfect...but hell, s/he’s there when you need him/her the most, s/he’s dependable, accessible and then poof! You discover s/he’s a secret meth addict or something. Okay, that was a sad hyperbole. But still – come on! Maggi has become a part of Indian culture. It is to an Indian what a burger or a sub is to an American. Or Fish n Chips to a Brit.

No single Maggi-eater ever proclaimed Maggi was healthy. But it filled up a space where no other food item could. Returning home at an odd hour? An hour where you can’t really cook and eat rice – say at 5pm or midnight. Besides, you’ve got to make another gravy for the rice – either dal or rasam. Midnight or thereabouts is also not an hour where you have energy to roll out chapathis and prepare a side for that. Unless you are super-organised, it’s also not an hour where you can smear dosas on a pan, or steam idlies . But you are hungry – so hungry. So the best option most of us reached out for was Maggi cooked with a load of veggies. It’s a one pot dish, and of course it does not get ready in two-minutes. But it’d be hot, tasty and filling. Of course, it is nowhere as healthy as roti and sabzi – but any day a better option than, say a pizza or a Chinese takeaway?

Am I supporting Nestle? No. I think the presence of lead is a serious issue, and they have to investigate how lead seeped in – most probably in a more downstream process of their manufacturing cycle. But what gets my goat is the sanctimonious finger-wagging and I-told-you-so discussions. Not to mention the ridiculous fear-mongering about MSG or monosodium glutamate. This from people who stand in street corners eating pani puri and licking the pani right off from their elbows; or eating churmuri wrapped in old newspaper cones. These are the ones who tut-tut and call you posh if you said you don’t eat roadside food. The ones who ridicule your ‘fear’ and put all sorts of arguments about ‘how do you know hotels are clean’ and ‘but the guy is wearing plastic gloves’.

So let’s get the basics of MSG right. In its base form, MSG is the salt of glutamic acid. Glutamic acid is a non-essential proteinogenic amino acid. Without getting into technical details, it is enough to know that ‘proteinogenic’ simply means a building block for proteins. Amino acids are further classified as essential and non-essential. The non-essential amino acids are manufactured by the body. The essential ones need to be included in our diet. Coming back to Glutamic acid; it is non-essential: it is produced inside the body. Salts of glutamic acid are known as ‘glutamates’; glutamate is a very important neurotransmitter involved in neural excitation.

It so happened that during extensive research, it was found that glutamic acid has flavour-enhancing properties. In my understanding (please do correct me if I’m wrong) this is because of the salt of glutamic acid – monosodium glutamate. As such, glutamate is found abundantly in all food we consume – from our tomatoes to cheese to mushrooms. MSG was isolated in a study conducted in Japanese University – and it was found that MSG lent a savoury taste (termed as umami in Japanese). The result was that MSG was now manufactured as a food-additive – or a taste enhancer. Just like our garam masala. One of the brand names for MSG is ...yeah...you guessed it...Ajinomoto. Yup the small pinch of Ajinomoto which brings alive most of our Indo-Chinese cuisine – from manchurians to fried rice. Those of us who have experimented for the restaurant-taste also know what happens when Ajinomoto is added carelessly – it has a pukey-smell and taste. It has to be absolutely less than a pinch. Better still – don’t add at all.

So is MSG good, bad...a death-wish? Meh. In my opinion, anything manufactured artificially can be done away with. Including food colourants. I mean, I don’t even like people fiddling with my atta. 'Fortified atta', my left foot. Leave my atta alone. Butter mixed with vegetable oil to make it ‘less fatty’. No thanks. I like things as they occur (as close to as possible) in their natural state. I like to spread plain butter on my bread, thank you very much. Besides, we never know what else is added undeclared in the manufacturing process yes? But seriously, stop hollering about MSG as if it were snake venom (which is also a protein chain by the way). If you are so freaked out about MSG, stop eating mushrooms; stop topping your pasta with parmesan cheese; stop eating tomatoes, potatoes...

If one is a strict dietician, instant noodles would make you squirm. See for the noodles to reach you in those packs, they actually have to start off from a lump of dough. Like, our idiyappam from rice flour. In large scale manufacturing, the dough, let’s say wheat or just plain flour, is mixed with water, starch and salt. And other additives (depending on where it’s manufactured) such as phosphoric acid. Yeah, you read that right. Food-grade phosphoric acid gives the tangy taste because it acidifies the food. What do you think is there in your cola? Phoshorous salts are also used as leavening agents. Think dough. Think kneading. Think leavening agent. Anyway, the noodle-dough is kneaded (by machines obviously) – the act of kneading helps release gluten. Gluten is what gives dough elasticity. Yup. Maida dough for obattu, pizza dough...gluten is the hero there. Did you miss out on starch? We know in its pure form starch is nothing but this big fat carbohydrate, made up of big fat glucose molecules. Starch in food preparations acts as a thickening, stiffening and gluing agent.

So once the dough has fermented well, it is cut into strips and steamed. When it is steamed, the starch gets gelatinized and kind of holds the noodles in shape. So now that your noodles have been steamed, it has to be dried. Ah. There are two ways of drying it – either by passing really hot air on them, or by flash-frying them. Flash-frying is like stir fry – only you drop the noodles in really hot oil for a minute or so, just enough for the moisture content in the noodles to evaporate. Almost all the stiff instant noodles we consume go through this method. I guess this is where lead could have seeped in...if the cauldrons are not maintained well...and good lord if the oil is re-used. There are the ‘soft’ noodles that you get – they’re probably air-dried.

And, this is pretty much the same process followed for your regular vermicelli, rice shavige etc. The only difference is these Indian ‘noodles’ do not come with a masala packets.

So would I eat Maggi if it came back with a renewed and rigorous quality control? Don’t know. Depends on my options. I mean Maggi with veggies followed by hot chai or pizza with coke...the choice for me is always the former. Right now, I’m cool pressing out string hoppers made from plain rice flour.

↧

Predator Within

June 18, 2015, 1:25 pm

≫ Next: Quest For A Cure

≪ Previous: Oh Maggi!

A very brief intro on cancer

In many ‘tragic’ movies of yesteryears, one of the plot devices used to kill off the wailing heroine (or a stoic hero) was to impose some disease on her/him. In the 70s, it was mostly T.B. In the 80s and thereafter, we progressed to cancer. Often, blood cancer (mostly announced by the bespectacled doctor to a glycerine-eyed hero as ‘bledd cancer’).

Growing up, at least my generation heard of cancer only in the movies. I do remember a little girl when I was in 1^st or 2^nd standard. She was a frail little thing, and she missed school a lot. After an elongated absence, she came to school one day, her shaved head covered by a scarf, and she’d gotten frailer, her eyes now filled her face. It was her birthday and she’d come to distribute chocolates to the class. She was accompanied by her parents, and all the teachers came to our classroom to sing to her. After she left, some of the teachers went away to the staffroom crying. Soon after her birthday, the school declared a holiday because the little girl “was now playing with angels”. Most of us never understood what we’d witnessed. It was not an era where information was free-flowing. But by and large, cancer was unheard of.

But now, cancer is so widespread. Almost everyone knows someone who is suffering, or who has been snatched away by this disease. Cure for cancer has become a holy grail quest. Perhaps this is a moment I should take my hat off to one of my schoolmates, a brilliant PhD, whose research is directly linked to this area – cancer cell biology. People like me can only stand outside the arena and cheer on the good work of so many such researchers, scientists and doctors. My contribution is my support to a charity called Cancer Research – by participating in a 5k charity run. The funds I raise are pittance – but nothing is insignificant. The funds allotted by governments will never be enough, and we never know who will make a breakthrough – maybe a group of researchers working on grants funded by charity trusts? Who knows?

But my reasons are not all that altruistic. For one, there is the 5k that keeps me motivated to get moving. Then of course, there is that need to be a part of something bigger – even if it is in the remotest way – something that is removed from one’s own world of needs and desires.

My responsibility, I think, does not end by shuffling feet at a 5k and asking friends to sponsor me. I also think it is important to understand the disease, and spread awareness. To this extent, I hope this blog helps a little bit.

What exactly is cancer?

To understand cancer, we have to first go back to our school biology – right down to the very basic component of our body – the cell. A quick peek into your kid’s biology school book will give you a refresher on the human cell. For the purpose of this blog – imagine the cell as the teeniest drop – most cells have a boundary ‘layer’ called the cell membrane. The membrane encloses a gelatinous substance called cytoplasm. Amongst other teeny structures like the endoplasmic reticulum, mitrochondria etc, the most important resident of every cell is the nucleus. The nucleus houses the chromosomes; now the chromosomes, as we all know are made of DNA molecules that carry genetic information. Groups of cells with similar function and structure form a tissue and work together to perform a specific job. An example of a tissue could be muscle tissue. Next in the hierarchy, groups of tissues get together to form an organ; in turn each organ performs a specific job. Heart, liver, lung etc are all organs.

Now although the human body stops ‘growing’ once we reach adulthood, internally, there is constant birth and death at a cellular level. One of the important cell behaviours is the ability of a cell to divide and produce more cells. This is known as cell division or mitosis. A parent cell perfectly divides or splits itself into two daughter cells. That is, each of these daughter cells has exactly the same structure as the parent cell, including the DNA molecules. Each of these daughter cells will go on and split into two other cells and so on, at predetermined times. All this is controlled by the DNA in the cell nucleus - in other words, the cells are instructed by a genetic code as to when they should split. So in a healthy human body, the cell division ensures that dead cells are replaced by healthy ones in a very systematic, proportionate way.

Sometimes, the cell division goes out of control (I’ll not go into the technical details of mutation). The cells no longer listen to the genetic instruction. They divide aggressively and soon reach a critical mass; in lay man’s terms, they are now deemed as a ‘growth’ or a ‘tumour’.

A benign tumour is one which is just a harmless growth – it could be a wart on your hand, or a clump of mass on your intestine. These are localised growths, and they don’t invade other parts of your body. They can be removed safely by a surgical procedure.

But the when the cells start invading other parts of your body, they are termed as malignant – this is cancer. These cancerous cells do not exhibit normal cell behaviour, and in time, they will outnumber ‘normal’ cells. In other words, the organs which they are a part of begin to malfunction.

Causes of cancer

There are more than 100 different types of cancer, and the causes can range from genetics to environment to lifestyle. However, inherited ‘faulty’ gene that can cause cancer is quite rare. For example, breast cancer in men, or cancer of the kidneys, or women with cancer in both breasts and ovaries – these rare conditions will probably have a hereditary link. That goes to say that a majority of cancers as we know today – breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer etc – can all be linked to lifestyle, diet and health, and hazardous environmental exposures.

We all know that tobacco has a staggering statistic when it comes to causing lung cancer. Even constant exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke can potentially cause cancer. Over exposure to harmful UV rays causes skin cancer. Similarly substances like betel, betel juice (paan) causes cancer of the mouth and throat. Alcohol consumption also has been linked to cancer, especially because of acetaldehyde.

Those working in certain industries that involve inhaling wood dust, coal industry (mines), asbestos, arsenic, aluminium, painting etc – these are all highly carcinogenic agents.

The link between obesity and cancer is complex and research is still ongoing. But it can be a potential cause because morbid obesity definitely impairs hormones, whilst putting other pressures on the body. This in turn can cause faulty mitosis, resulting in cancerous growth.

Your lifestyle also is important – if you eat a lot of junk food, by junk, I mean just that – junk. That is, your diet has no healthy balance of carbohydrates and proteins – it’s just sugar, trans-saturated fat and sodium. You are essentially screwing up your internal systems – right from your hormones to the functioning of your liver and digestive system. Maintain this long enough, and something in your diet could cause a faulty cell mitosis. Before you know it, you’ll have a growth on your colon, for example. In other words, those fries may not directly cause cancer, but can be cancer-inducing. But lifestyle is not just about food. Stress has become a part of lifestyle that has wide-ranging consequences on physiology. From ulcers to tension headaches, palpitations to panic attacks – stress has a finger in the pie. Constant stress can once again screw up your hormones, make you obese and you can become a sitting duck for cancer in your fifties. Sexual choices, sexual behaviour is also a part of lifestyle. Unprotected sex with multiple partners – well that just opens a huge can of worms. HPV in women can cause ovarian cancer. HIV can suppress the immune system and as a fall out, one can become vulnerable to cancer.

Certain medical treatments also could cause cancer – treatments that suppress immune systems like chemotherapy. Imbalance in the hormone estrogen also is implicated in cancer – thus treatments that involve this hormone, especially postmenopausal treatments can cause cancer.

Given that we are increasingly in the clutches of manufactured foods, beverages and highly industrialised environments, it becomes all the more important to take charge of our health. Starting right now. We can’t control what we are born with – but we can control what we become. It is okay if we don’t become anything worth mentioning – but it is worth your while to become healthy.

In the next blog, I will discuss the latest cancer treatments.

NOTE: If you are interested in cell physiology, perhaps you should borrow this book from your library– Molecular Biology of The Cell by Bruce Alberts et al. I said borrow because the price hurts.

If you want to know more details about causes of cancer and especially carcinogens and their classifications, you can visit this link.

And finally, if you can please sponsor my 5k in any small way, I'd be indebted. Thank you in advance. You can send your donation online - your funds directly go to Cancer Research folks (not in my bank :) ) Here is my page - https://www.justgiving.com/sumanakhan

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Courtesy: http://raceforlife.cancerresearchuk.org/index.html

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Quest For A Cure

July 23, 2015, 4:53 am

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Well, now that most of my to-do stuff is kind of out of the way, I cease to be a stranger at this blog. So what had kept me away from this haven? Firstly, I wanted to get my upcoming book out of the way. Catch this book trailer...and if it interests you...keep an eye out for more updates.

Secondly (which should have really been “firstly”) I was busy finalising my masters research proposal for ethics approval etc.

Thirdly, I had to rework on a manuscript. Massive rework.

Fourthly, I was mildly chided for being a recluse and not interacting with my readers...I mean, I’m not on twitter and I don’t have an ‘author page’ on Facebook. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think I’ll ever get on to twitter, and I’d rather have people ‘like’ my books, rather than 'like' me. So as a compromise, I now have a website, where my mugshot has been inflicted upon the world. I have also managed to sum up my life in a brief paragraph, in case you wish to know "more" about me. So scoot to this link if you are curious.

Once all the above chores were done, I spent many sunny days catching up on my reading – more on that later. And watching old Kannada movies...more on that in the next post :)

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This year's "medal"

Coming back to where I stopped - I’d like to thank Shweta – one of Kaapizone’s followers – for her generous contribution to Cancer Research. Thank you so much for sponsoring me Shewta...you are so wonderful. I hope I get to meet you some day. The 5K was on 19^th (this past Sunday) and it was a lovely day. I jogged for only two kilometres and walked the rest of the way, planning for my manuscript’s surgery.

So, here we are. As I’d mentioned in my previous blog, in this post, I’d like to discuss some of the more recent developments in cancer research. But, if you’d like to understand existing treatments such as chemotherapy, surgery etc, I do recommend this website - http://www.macmillan.org.uk/information-and-support/treating

In a recent breakthrough – I’m talking about as recent as last month – a trial involving immunotherapy saw that advanced melanoma was stopped, and/or brought under control in 58% of cancer cases. In terms of a medical trial, that’s a huge percentage. The trial involved two drugs – ipilimumab and nivolumab. So what does immunotherapy do? In a very layman’s terms, immunotherapy uses the body’s immune system to fight cancer. We all know that whenever anything ‘harmful’ enters the body, the immune system immediately goes into attack mode. It spots the enemy and eliminates it. In case of cancer, the immune system is unable to spot the cancerous cells. Immunotherapy changes this game plan. It ‘marks’ the cancer cells so that they are now ‘visible’ to the immune system. And the immune system does the rest of the job. Immunotherapy is usually administered intravenously by means of a vaccine injection.

Vicky Brown, 61, is now a famous case study in immunotherapy. She was diagnosed with advanced melanoma that had spread to her lungs and breast, and was given only weeks to live in 2013. She took part in the trial – and the cancer was ERADICATED within weeks. Eradicated mind you – not just reduced. But the cancer has recurred, and it has been treated successfully once again. She has faced side effects, but they were controlled. You can watch some interesting interviews and case studies here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-31365272

It’s also good to know about different schools of thought on cancer treatment. There are some who vehemently criticise the conventional treatment methods. There are alternative and complementary cancer treatments which are not mainstream, the main argument against them being lack of rigorous trials. On the other hand, alternative researchers and practitioners point out the power of pharma corporations – cancer is big business, and so is fund raising. They have a point – but the debate becomes scary for someone battling life and death. Should a terminal patient approach orthodox medicine, or should they go for an alternative treatment that costs less, and claims better treatment success? You can take time and go through these points of view here and here.

After reading literature on both sides of the argument, I see a faint point of convergence. Immunotherapy is here to stay – and the cure for cancer should come from within...from our immune system. So, lifestyle choices become all the more important, given our exposure to more and more environmental hazards. That is, having a good immune system becomes a preventive “therapy”.

Eat well, sleep well, don’t allow stress to suck your life. And, have that spoon of Chyawanprash every day.

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Revulsion

July 30, 2015, 2:16 am

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(This post is in honour of Cecil, and many of his fellow-animals slaughtered by monsters)

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I’ve more or less given up reading news. Not because the human situation is so dire and depressing – but because I’ve stopped feeling anything. Be it beheadings, bombings, depravity in the name of religion, or the extraordinary agony of millions of refugees and “illegal” immigrants escaping the frying pan and falling into the fire.

Despite my alarming levels of apathy, there are certain kinds of news that do manage to push my rage button instantly. Not anger – but blinding, livid, blood-boiling rage. For example, the news about Cecil the lion. That majestic, royal, beautiful beast. Tricked into its death by a lowly coward. Cecil was lured into a trap, struck down by a modern bow and arrow weapon, thereafter, beheaded and skinned.

The perpetrator of this heinous hunt is a doctor no less, a millionaire dentist living in Minnesota – Dr Walter Palmer. When he’s not filling up cavities, this vermin has an expensive hobby to fill the cavity in his soul. He throws about money for the thrill of big-game hunting. From beautiful rhinos, to kingly cheetahs – he’s slaughtered them all. You can see him flashing his porcelain veneers as he stands over the bodies of all these magnificent animals – as if he’s done something great.

Unfortunately, this man came to light only because he hunted down a popular lion – otherwise no one would have heard a peek. Indeed his assertion that he did everything legally, despicable as his “regret” is, might just be true. Big-game hunting is an old blood sport. Trophy hunters pay serious money to hunt exotic animals, and as their title suggests, carry back the “trophy”. There are regulated, legal safari operators who can arrange the entire trip. The tour operators will provide you with a team – professional hunters who know the lay of the land, who’ll advise you on the kind of weapons to carry and so on. One of the tour operators have listed all the game you can hunt on a safari (I’m not sharing their website). For example, a “trophy” of an elephant that you’ve shot will cost you $35000. The trophy could include the head of the animal, tusks...perhaps its limbs...anything. I’m guessing that’s what happened with Dentist Dracula. He’s paid $50000 for the lion hunt. He was provided with professional hunters. They allegedly tied a dead animal as bait on their vehicle and headed out in the night. Unfortunately, Cecil caught the scent and bam! He was shot with a deadly arrow by the devil dentist. Despite being horrifically injured, Cecil managed to evade his killers for more than forty hours. But an injured animal is as good as a dead animal. Cecil had been shot in the flank – maimed and in terrible pain. His hunting days were over. The poor beast must have suffered so much – hungry, thirsty, in unbelievable physical pain as the arrow stuck out of his body. When the bastards reached Cecil, one of them shot him, mercifully ending his suffering. They then proceeded to get their trophy for the satanic doctor – they skinned Cecil and beheaded him.

But the doctor is not alone – obviously, if it’s a bloodthirsty sport and it involves loads of money, there has to be a club. Introducing Safari Club International– their tagline reads as “First for hunters”. They have instituted awards for hunting – check out this one – Grand Slam awards. It gives you a checklist of how many animals you have to kill to win an award – you can do “just” the Big Five or...if that has not quenched your blood lust, you can go for “African 29”. Going through this website is stomach-churning.

It’s not easy looking at the tour operators’ offers either. For example, if you want to hunt “dangerous game” then you obviously pay more. One of the websites has proudly advertised that you can hunt a fully grown crocodile. The entire body can be a wall-mounted trophy. Or, you can hunt down a rhino and keep the rhino horn as a memory of the “wonderful” hunting experience. This magnanimous operator goes on to add that you can only hunt male rhinos, and that if male rhinos die of old age, it does nothing for conservation... but if you kill a young male, then you are contributing to the conservation of the species. Huh? If you can get you head around this logic...please do explain.

Indeed all exotic trophy hunters mask their bloodthirsty hobbies behind the mantra of ‘conservation’. In reality, according to this report, the repercussions of trophy-hunting a male lion, usually the leader of a pride, is far-reaching – right down to weakening of the gene pool. When the dominant male is killed, the next dominant male takes over, and as programmed by its instinctive behaviour, it kills all the offspring of the previous leader. It is estimated that every time a sick human hunts down a dominant male, it results in the death of at least 6-8 others in the pride.

Looking at the despicable dentist’s photos – I could not help wonder – does this fool really feel brave? Indeed all the so-called “grand slam” winners of Africa 29 or Big Five – do they really think this killing hobby of theirs enhances their masculinity (and I’m also talking of the women hunters here)? There is nothing brave in sitting in your vehicle, luring and tricking an animal, blinding it with a spotlight and shooting at it. Or, shooting from a helicopter. Or, more disgustingly, going on a canned hunt where the game is in an enclosure and you only have to adjust the crosshairs on your weapon and shoot. If you really have the balls – then you have to put your gym-exercised feet on the ground. Stand beast to beast; match movement to movement, cunning with cunning. Chances are these idiots won’t last ten seconds. Cowards!

To add insult to injury, these cowards claim trophy hunting contributes to the GDP of the poorer African nations. In reality, it is a very small percentage, even though it runs into millions. Mostly, it is the tour operators’ profit and the money hardly trickles down to the communities. But if you really want to give an ethical contribution to the GDP – why not actually put your money in serious conservation? Fund research, infrastructure? The key word here is “ethical”. Someone who finds pleasure in killing can never be ethical – they reek of dangerous narcissism and psychopathy. Maybe we should use these people in the brutal terrorist-inflicted areas of the world – they can hunt to their hearts content. We’ll all be very thankful.

Whenever the topic of killing animals comes up, there’ll always be some moron who talks about non-vegetarians. As a vegetarian, and as someone who believes in right of life for all animals – I find these morons as frustrating as the hunters. There is no comparison between maiming and killing an animal for fun, and humanely killing an animal for food. Even so, as a friend of mine pointed out, humans have reproduced exponentially, destroying the balance of our ecosystem. To feed ourselves, we have no choice but to farm animals in a massive scale for the meat. Well, when I say feed, nowadays this is not about sustenance – it is more of gluttony.

Even if you are a non-vegetarian, you still have an ethical responsibility towards your food. Some animal had no choice to life – it died to fill your plate. The least you can do is be aware of where your food came from. Was the animal allowed to live and die in dignity? You owe this to the food you eat. If an animal was made to live in the most despicable conditions, and was killed mercilessly – as is the case in most slaughterhouses in our country – then perhaps you should make serious choices about your food.

Don’t even get me started on killing animals in the name of religion.

As far as those hunters go – all I can do is curse them in my native tongue and hope the curse comes true - ತು! ನಿಮ್ಮ ದರಿದ್ರ ಜನ್ಮಕ್ಕೆ ಬೆಂಕಿ ಹಾಕ.

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Say What?

August 4, 2015, 1:05 pm

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That'll probably be your reaction if I declare I support The ban.

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Any debate on sex and sexuality in India starts and ends with the Khajuraho temples. Many eclectic explanations are available as to why erotica is depicted on a temple – from a general “Hindus were more matter-of-fact about sex” to the more abstract “it depicts tantric sex”. But the fact is we really don’t know, do we? I mean what made the chief architect wake up one morning and instruct the sculptor, “Hmm...okay...carve the picture of a woman doing four men. And a horse.” Yup...we will never know. These temples were built in the tenth century or so by the Chandela dynasty. They were quite powerful – in fact one of the kings – Vidyadhara, had even fended off the dreaded Mohammed of Ghazni. As a society, I suppose it was as prosperous as it could get – stable reign, art and architecture flourished – as a consequence, trade, employment was good too. As in the case of all prosperous societies...I’m assuming this one too had a happy, liberal populace.

Eventually, the empire did fall in the hands of the Mughal invaders. By the thirteenth century, Khajuraho was completely deserted – reports say that the residents voluntarily left the place even before the invaders reached them – it was their way of preserving their beautiful heritage. Soon, the temples were hidden by thick forests, and remained undetected by the looters. It was only in the eighteenth century that they were re-discovered by a British engineer – T.S. Burt. Bet the details on the temples shocked his Victorian socks off.

But I digress as usual. This post is more about the recent ban on porn. Khajuraho was thousand years ago. We are in 2015. Surely, if depicting sex was okay then, it should be good enough even now? Or so the argument goes. If one would like to elevate the argument to an intellectual level, then it is mandatory to use Khajuraho and Kama Sutra as evidence of “how liberal we all were”, and then proceed to blame all the invaders for turning us into ninnies.

In principle, I am against any kind of censure. But in this case, the issue is more complex than what has been discussed so far. Well, nothing much has been discussed really – the policy makers maintain a silence whilst the consumers make irresponsible statements like “rape will increase”.

The research into pornography and sexually aggressive behaviour is extensive. The unfortunate part is, all such socially relevant research rarely comes out of our academic institutions – so we don’t have a view on how India-specific cultural and societal factors influence such behaviours. Nonetheless, do take a look at some of this important research: (I have referred to a paper that conducted a meta-analysis of the relationship between rape and pornography. The paper is accessible here - https://www1.umn.edu/aurora/pdf/ResearchOnPornography.pdf. I have not followed strict APA referencing style in this post – but all the in-text references are cited from this paper).

In one of the studies, it was concluded that constant exposure to pornography influences predisposition to rape – it increases the desire to rape and diminishes the inhibition threshold to carry out rape (Russell, 1998).

In a damning survey carried out on female abuse victims who walked out on their violent male partners, it was found that a whopping 75% of them were shown porn, and were forced to enact scenes; 31% had been asked to pose for pornographic pictures and 81% of the women had been raped (Dines & Jenson, 2004).

In a study carried out on 256 sexual offenders, 56% of rapists and 42% of child molesters implicated pornography as one of their main motivators (Abel, Mittleman & Becker, 1985).

Studies have also indicated that viewing/collecting child pornography is a very strong indicator of paedophilia (Seto, Cantor, Blanchard, 2006). In Britain, some of the recent cases of child murders have revealed the perpetrators were consumers of child pornography. In the recent child-rape case in Bangalore, the perpetrators had child porn on their mobile phones. Mind you, the number of boys who are abused are alarmingly high – something that does not get enough media attention.

To further strengthen evidence between the pornography and rape link, a polygraph test was conducted on sexual offenders to determine if porn was indeed an influencing factor. 66% of the subjects responded with a positive answer, indicating porn is a causal factor in rape behaviours (Walp & Walden, 2006).

Consumption of pornography in formative years – teenage/young adult phases reinforces rape myths – women secretly desire to be raped; it is okay to force a woman into having sex; women enjoy being subjugated by sexually aggressive partners (Maxwell & Check, 1992).

The research linking rape/attitudes towards rape and pornography are exhaustive. These results are from countries where attitude towards sex and sexual choices is largely liberal. So when we talk of the same influencers in the context of India – the problem is epic. This is a society where even today, we are unable to have a meaningful sex education syllabus. This is a society which extends access to safe, legitimate sex only via the institution of marriage. Vulnerable women, men, children, and marginalised genders are still at the receiving end of sexual abuse without recourse to legal and social support. Access to pornography in this repressed mix is potentially radioactive.

You see, the demographic that consumes porn is not just you. When I say “you” – I mean the secure adult with a safe home, income, stable relationships and access to healthy doses of privacy. For this profile, enjoying hours of titillation and heading off to work the next day is perhaps no big deal. But this “you”...or even hundreds of thousands of “you”... is still a small slice in the pie in a country of over a billion. The larger demographic resides in the smaller towns and hinterlands where internet-enabled mobile phones have made an entry even if water supply, internal plumbing and electricity have remained scarce. For most of this population, access to porn is via their mobile devices. Indeed, many learn about sex only through porn. In a gut-twisting report published a few years ago – rape survivors revealed how they were abducted by gangs of young men in the village, locked and subjected to violent sex – whilst others of the gang shouted out instructions from the porn scenes on their mobile phones. Trust me, Nirbhaya case is not the first – what goes on in our backyards is enough to make you vomit every last strand of your gut.

In summary, what we have here is a research-backed proof that porn consumption and rape-behaviours go hand in hand, and a significant consumer base that is sexually repressed...whose only sexual education is via porn.

I know that a lot of derision on the ban, mainly on the social media, is because of “right to privacy”. But I can’t even make the attempt to pretend that I care about my so-called right to watch porn.

In the west, adult entertainment industry is regulated. Of course, by its very nature, it has its share of sleaze. Even so the actors have rights; they work in a safe environment. In India, how do you think the content is created? I am not talking about the verbal pornography – I’m talking about the videos. I can bet none of the women are professional actors – they were trafficked or forced into prostitution. If the banned websites contained videos of these women, then I gladly forgo this “right”. Also, remember that by law, anyone below 18 is a child? A while ago, when I stumbled across sleazy profiles on facebook, the frail girls looked hardly 16-17. If the videos featured such girls – you are consuming child porn. This is enough for me to support the ban wholeheartedly.

Is the ban a democratic way to control the problem of trafficking? In a complex ecosystem such as ours, perhaps stopping the content providers is a start, albeit a weak one. Just the way in the UK, Prime Minister Cameron called upon Google to take down all child pornography sites. In our case, there has to be a swift, multi-pronged approach to address the root problem. We need modernised, computerised police force. We absolutely need to grow up and accept that a regulated adult entertainment industry is the way forward – where everyone involved are protected by rights and have access to safe and healthy work environments.

Meanwhile, do educate yourself on the porn industry in India...it will give a wider perspective on what we claim as "rights".

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The Rebellious Manuscript - ENCOUNTERS

September 16, 2015, 3:00 am

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Between my academic deadlines and manuscript commitments, I’ve not had much time to lift my head and look around...and with kids being washed ashore...I kind of felt keeping my head down was a better option.

Right now...I’m in the throes of that familiar restlessness. The kind that makes you wish the earth could spin faster so that time (or at least our illusion of it) lapses faster. It’s a sense of urgency that makes you want to scream at a slow poke world. My second book is out there somewhere; the manuscript is being typeset...the space between alphabets and words and sentences and paragraphs are being meticulously measured...the printer all ready to transfer those bytes permanently on to paper....that final, irreparable act.

The gestation period for Encounters has been at least five years. Five. In fact, Encounterscame into its own shape and being only last year, after I managed to put together pieces of writing that I’d done over a period of time. These were stories that had started off as “warm-up” ideas. You know...the kind that occur to you as a fleeting thought, and the thought hooks on to a misshapen fold in your brain, refusing to go away. And so, you have no choice but to write it down. Your own escape pod from the (sometimes) overwhelming tediousness of the daily grind. Yes...that’s when you can sneak into this scribble of a paragraph, leaving the dishes, the laundry, the world ...to see what can come of those blurred outlines.

So, over the period of last five years, as the stories for Encounters emerged, I had a vague idea that I’d publish Encounters as a short story collection. Last year, when my dishwasher and washing machine broke down at the same time, and my flat began to look like a gym locker...I did the only thing I could. Escaped to shape Encounters as the plumbers took their time to swagger in.

It did not take much time for me to realise that Encounterswill not find any takers. Not a single aspect about the manuscript conforms to any commercial benchmark of the publishing world. At least Kaivalya, despite its complex plots and sub-plots, had some elements that rendered commercial viability. But Encounters has no such attractions. I suppose if you are a parent you’ll understand this – you might love your cherub more than your life...but hell...the little one ain’t never gonna climb those University steps. Not because s/he is dull – but because s/he is different. And different is not good enough in today’s template-driven world.

How on earth do I pitch something like Encounters? I did not want to use the word “collection”. A collection is a group of entities that have a lot of similar characteristics. The stories in Encounters are very different from each other – in form, word-count, themes, protagonists. They are not evenly measured out short stories...not in the sense of the word-count. From that perspective, some are novelettes. A “collection” also refers to a significant number of entities. I had only five uneven stories. So, I decided that Encounters is a clutch of stories in the truest sense. I’d been clutching on to them for so many years, like a forlorn lover holding on to drying stalks of flowers. But then, my small triumph was extremely short-lived. That very week David Davidar released “Clutch of Indian Masterpieces”. My word...taken away.

As if a great pitch line would solve my problems. Indeed, Encounters presented a more fundamental problem when it came to proving its commercial mettle. A story collection usually has an overarching theme. Encounters has rebelled even against that. No theme jumps out, even though a thread...a mere wisp of a paranormal hue...brushes past the stories.

That brought to the fore the second challenge. What genre do I slot Encounters in? It would be very wrong to wrestle the stories into the confines of a genre. The minute I stick a genre label on a story, expectations are set. If I say, hey, this one is a ghost story, then, there is an expectation of “thrills”. But that’s not what the story set out to do. Even though there are “other-worldly” phenomena, the anchor of the stories is the man-made strangeness of human existence...the fear, the disgust, the hope, the will to survive...all stemming from merely being a human.

So how on earth do I pitch this? Is it literary fiction? The narration is. But the plotline is horror? No...not in the literal sense. Is it romance? No...not in the commercial romance sense. In other words Encountersfiercely refrains from conforming to any template that can bring in profits. As you can see, creating a commercial story for Encountersis a lost cause. A false cause.

But you can’t abandon your child just because s/he won’t become the regular 9-7 employee bringing in the monthly pay checks. You have to cut the cord and set your baby afloat, to find his/her own way in the world. And that’s what I did with Encounters. I went back to CinnamonTeal. Built the ledge for Encounters to take off. Whether it soars or glides at the ground level...I don’t know. Only the readers can be the wind beneath the wings.

I leave you with a nugget of one of the stories...

If you are interested in an excerpt, you can read it HERE!

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