From a wanderer

Wave after wave washes ashore, 
Sea swells, the rising tide, 
I, a sojourner, stand on the side, 
Letting it wash over me, 
Sea breeze, time, life, the tide, 
Weather me, or take me adrift, 
But before oblivion swallows, 
Let me matter, just a little bit.

Tiny Tales #1

'What did the falling meteors say?'
'That some things in life are meant to last only for a few moments. Their beauty lies in brevity.'🌌

Train Of Thoughts

Under the bright afternoon sun, a train left Mumbai station, chugging on familiar tracks that led it to Delhi. Inside, snacks were served, tickets checked and a lull settled over the passengers. In one of the compartments, a young woman sat facing the window, lost in thoughts. At some point, instead of looking through the window, she started gazing at it. The train had moved past the city, suburbs, farms and was now crossing a river. Maybe it was when she had leaned to look at the river, trying to spot fishes, that she noticed a narrow brown strip stretched across the bottom of the window. 

At first glance, it seemed like an art work, a landscape captured against sepia backdrop, like the sun was setting on a forest. It was beautiful. She admired the patience of the artist who must have painstakingly painted minuscule trees, or maybe it was printed. Simultaneously, a voice in her head questioned if the Railways would ever actually paste strips of art on windows of a daily train. She leaned closer and realized that it was actually a strip of brown tape which had cracks that had appeared like trees, and at some places there were tiny patches of discolouration, leaving a tinge of blue.

'Ah! Silly me!' she thought. But the disappointment was short lived.

As she gazed at the pattern of cracks, a story appeared. It seemed like a view of a forest at a time when the sun has not quite set. At one place, there were a few diagonal cracks that looked like a man holding an axe above his head, leaning back, about to strike at a tree. Further ahead were two humans – a couple – holding hands, running away. A blue patch at the spot, made it look like they were walking into the sunset, having traversed through the forest. Perhaps, the man with the axe was not cutting trees but was chasing the couple to kill them and was striking the tree out of frustration as they had escaped. Or, he was helping them, cutting trees to block the way of their pursuers. Maybe the couple had eloped and the villagers, with misplaced sense of honour, were looking for them. But love had triumphed, they were walking into the sunset. They had escaped. At least for now.

And then, she glanced out of the window. The sun was setting, and the sky was more yellow than blue, very like the sepia background of the tape. She let out an inaudible gasp. The train was moving past a lush of trees, strikingly similar to the ones on the tape. How many times has this train crossed this route? It was a daily train to Delhi. Maybe it had witnessed something on one of its journeys which got imbibed on the tape as a memory, like it had clicked a picture, or painted one. Maybe there were other stories on other windows of the train. As it sped past the greenery, it would have mutely glimpsed parts of many stories. Did they all have happy endings? Or were there horrors too? Humans being human, or not-so-human? What did it see? Did it witness drudgery of everyday life, daily struggles of average humans, or were there extraordinary moments, too?

'Soup?'

Breaking out of the reverie, she looked about and saw an attendant offering her a tray. She looked back at the window. The sun had set, the pattern was no longer visible. She sighed, turned around and took the tray.

Play Review: Arth

Play: Arth
Director: Priyanka Pathak

I have not seen the 1982 critically acclaimed movie ‘Arth’, which was directed by Mahesh Bhatt. I did see its theatrical adaptation, directed by Priyanka Pathak, at SRC as part of Marasim festival on Sunday.

The play opens with Pooja (Padashree C R) sitting in the middle of the stage with a plate in front of her, apparently waiting. Enters Inder (Imran Zahid), her husband, making excuses for being late. As Inder, Imran seems awkward. It looked like he wanted to be somewhere else, but instead got stuck on the stage and forced to say the dialogues. Padashree seemed to have a sore throat and she, too, appeared to be just saying the dialogues she had rehearsed several times and moving as she had been told. The scene looked staged, unnatural and awkward. There was no chemistry between the two leads.

If I thought, the play would become any better as the story proceeded, I was sorely disappointed. While Padashree did get in the character and her performance picked up, it remained average. Imran was a disappointment throughout and made all the scenes he was in, seem unnatural. Unfortunately, being the male lead, he was in most of the scenes. However, the second female lead- Kavita (Moon Moon Singh) acted really well and all the supporting cast, particularly the bai (Rinki Singh) and Raj (Rahul Dhir) were also quite good. But they were in so few scenes that they failed to salvage the play. It wasn’t just the acting that made it one of the worst plays I have ever seen. It was everything – the set, props, music and, worst of all, the story.

The set looked pretty at first. There were three groups of lamps hanging low and with them were a set of white frames, which looked like photo frames. In the first and the last scene, the left side white frames played a clip of blinking eyes, the significance of which I failed to understand. The other frame was hardly used. There was also a scene in which Pooja moved to a hostel and her roommate was sitting on blocks of what looked like large gifts (or rather they were gift-wrapped blocks). Maybe there was deep intellectual or abstract meaning to all this that I failed to comprehend. But surely, there was no excuse for the absurd music which often missed cues, starting and ending abruptly. Some lyrics of the movie songs were used, but they miserably failed to add either to the scene or story.

As for the story, nothing gets established and the audience is left with a lot to assume. There is no flow to the story, like it was adaption of the unedited version of the movie, which left it with two-three good scenes and the rest of the rejected reel. In the original story, as per Wikipedia, Pooja, after being abandoned by her husband who chooses to stay with Kavita, is proposed by Raj but she rejects him. The bai kills her husband when he spends the money she was saving to educate her daughter on his mistress and she goes to jail. She leaves her daughter with Pooja who finds a new meaning – ‘Arth’ – to her life. In the play, Raj’s proposing and the bai’s story are left out. It ends with Inder returning to Pooja after Kavita ditches him and Pooja saying, “What if we were in each other’s shoes, what would you have done?” The light goes out, and for a moment I thought it was a technical glitch, but the actors go off stage and then suddenly the entire cast comes on stage for the role-call. It made no sense. If I were Mahesh Bhatt, I would probably sue them.

My friend, who had seen the movie, said the scenes were replicated from the movie, except the movie had much more depth and much better performance. The play was a waste of money and time.

Book Review: Baramulla Bomber

Baramulla Bomber
~Clark Prasad

A good thriller novel by an Indian author is hard to come by and Baramulla Bomber is one of the few. The first instalment of the Svastik trilogy is about a weapon developed with the help of Vedic and Biblical knowledge, secret societies that manipulate events in the world, international relations, the Kashmir issue and cricket. The book starts with J R Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, observing the first atomic bomb explosion – Trinity – in 1945 and remembering the lines from Bhagvat Gita: “Now I have become death, the destroyer of the world”. The book has mixed some real people with fictional ones. Oppenheimer becomes mentor to a fictional Dr Nassir (a Nobel laureate) who researches, with help of Vedas, about the nature of sound and how it can be used as a weapon.

The story moves to the present –2011. China is setting up bases around Indian border signalling an imminent war, there is a possibility of a military coup in China and Pakistan, there are intelligence inputs about ‘Project Babylon’ and somehow Mansur Haider from Baramulla becomes centre of international attention.

Meanwhile, in Shaksgam Valley, a team of mountaineers goes missing, followed by rumours about weapons being tested and UFO sightings. Baramulla Bomber has all the elements of a Hollywood movie and perhaps, there will be one someday.

The book is racy, well-researched and well-written. It is partly based on facts and actual scientific experiments as has been specified at the end of the book. The mix of facts and fiction makes it a thrilling read. The chapters are named like ‘The year “it” began’, ‘1947 to 1965’, ‘129 days to Event’ and ‘Cable: US Embassy Islamabad to CIA Langley’, impressing the vastness of the story which is spread over different countries and time periods. Then there are CIA, RAW, ISI and other secret agencies, carrying out covert operations, which provide gripping action sequences to the plot.

There are maps, illustrations and graphics to go with the story. The illustrations (like the Star of David) need some improvement as they become obscure in black-and-white print. All in all, a great book and I would love to read the next two books of the series.

SPOILER ALERT
On the downside, while there are numerous mentions of the sound of universe, ‘AUM’, powering the weapon, Prasad has not explained how exactly the word is used in the weapon. It talks about frequencies, but not about the specific word.

Disclaimer:
This was part of a book review programme of The Readers Cosmos Reading Club

Book Launch- This Place

“As a writer, I feel come, let me take you somewhere and you feel it, feel this place — you may never go there or care about it — but you feel it as you are reading the story,” says Amitabha Bagchi at the launch of his book ‘This Place’.

In ‘This Place’, Bagchi takes us to Baltimore. The story is about a man named Jeevan who manages accounts of his landlord, Shabbir, in return for a rent-free accommodation. Kay and Mathew are his neighbours. The city authorities decide to demolish a few buildings including the one in which Jeevan is staying and thus begins a conflict. In the meantime, a woman named Savita enters Jeevan’s life, making his life more complex. The book deals with various questions around morality, fidelity, masculinity, loneliness and the central theme — displacement.

Bagchi says he knew he had to write about his US experience, especially Baltimore — he has stayed there for around six years; he needed to get a few things off his chest. He had started writing his first novel in Baltimore and finished it while still in the US and he wrote ‘This Place’ before ‘The Householder’. He had gone back to Baltimore to research before writing the book, but it was more about “how the city feels” to him rather than physical research.

“Baltimore is like a child gone wrong. There is crime, drugs, prostitution... it is the inner city of America without the glamour of New York. People had been left to rot. No one cared. This book is to show that look someone cares. You can’t live in a city without getting attached to it in some way.”

Bagchi has tried to capture various hues of American life through his characters. Kay, for example, has a problem with fidelity — a common thing in the US — and she has to deal with the pressures of morality. Mathew is a failed computer science PhD student. He finds out that a problem that he had been working on has been solved by people in IBM. He gets this idea that he can improve their solution and goes on a wild goose chase. Meeting several people who had achieved more than him instils in him a sense of failure.

“Among educated middle class Americans, there are steep pyramids of achievement. While some people are extremely successful, some fall on the side. In MIT computer department, for example, only one out five joins the faculty while the other four are made to leave with a feeling that they are a failure, which is not always justified. It is true for all professions. The society is unforgiving even of its talented and educated people,” elaborates Bagchi.

Another character, a real life one, that appears in the book is Cal Ripken, a basketball player from Baltimore. That Cal would be a part of the story, says Baghchi, was something that he had decided at the inception, though it was much later that he figured out how.

“Cal was a loved figure, a high achiever; he was like Rahul Dravid. Dravid has qualities of being a man... For me, there is nothing more manly than Dravid on the field, killing balls, no boundaries... getting the job done. Someone has to take the responsibility... Cal was that kind of a figure— taking no injury breaks, went to work every day and dealing with the pressures that come with masculinity.”
Baltimore, according to Bagchi, is a working man’s town. With the moving away of industries and disappearance of jobs, the city has become a shell of what it was and it has become difficult for men to provide for their families, which, in turn, undermines their masculinity.

Bagchi was inspired by painter Edward Hopper and the influence is seen in some sentence constructions like ‘chair where the paper was read’. Speaking about the way Hopper’s paintings—landscapes – are arranged (around a slanted quadrilateral made by light), Bagchi says, “I see in Hopper the tension between humans and space. If the human is removed, the paintings still work which makes the presence of the human in that space extremely fragile. In the book, space exists independent of the character. It shows fragility of life. Hopper’s paintings try to capture that there is so much space but not enough people to fill it with; completely different from Delhi,” he laughs.

And while descriptions were inspired by Hopper, the story itself was inspired by Medha Patkar’s speeches and documentaries on Narmada Bachao Andolan and the problems related to displacement it brought forth.

“Novelists are the keepers of a species morality,” says Bagchi and adds, “I know it is naive, but I feel that novels are a moralist’s medium. You can be a moralist without moralising.”

The book was launched at MoonRiver on Saturday.

Man with a vision

Found this in my notes. This profile is an assignment I did in college.

Man with a visionFebruary 17, 2011

He sat cross-legged on a red sofa, his hands on the handles and head held-up high. His black hair had retreated to the sides and back of his head, revealing a large portion of his brown scalp, not an uncommon phenomenon among young. His brown eyes looked amused and a smile played up on his lips showing white teeth beneath thicket of black moustache. He had just asked me to guess his age. 35?

35, he heard the voice. He laughed as he looked at the blob of mass from where the sound had come. “My wife should hear this,” he said aloud. He called out to his manager, “Ranjit! Did you hear that?”

“Yes sir,” he heard a familiar voice. He looked to his left at the source of the sound. A new blob of mass of nondescript colour had appeared. He did not know how far it was as everything was two dimensional. But he could judge the distance to the voice. He got up and walked towards the blob. Putting his hands on where the blob’s shoulder should be he said, “And you say that I look old!”
“Sir, there is not much difference between 35 and 40.”

He disagreed, “Of course there is!” In his life every year counts. He let go of the mass and made his way to the sofa. He knew where it was.

For C. Gopalakrishnan, or Gopi as he is fondly called, struggle defines life.  As he sits in his comfortable office in Nethrodaya, a hostel for visually and physically challenged people that he founded in 2002, he recollects how his lifelong fight for the rights of visually challenged started.

The year was 1988. It was an early November morning in Chennai and the weather was moderately hot. A group of 150 college students assembled in front of the Central Government office at Shastri Bhavan. They were from College Students Graduate Association for Blind (CSGAB). At 8.45 a.m., they started shouting slogans and in less than an hour proceeded to block the road.

Gopi, then a first year student of English literature in Pachiyappa College, was one of them. The demands were simple. Allow the visually challenged to study all the subjects in college and not just English, Tamil and History. The police watched with disinterest. Such protests were a routine affair.

Two hours later the traffic situation had become worse. The police, after receiving orders from their seniors, arrested the students and took them to Nungambakkam Railway Station. From there the students were stuffed in police vans and sent to Nungambakkam Police Station. They were left off in the evening at half past six. A few days later government accepted their demand and opened up more courses for the blind.

“There was no looking back,” he says. Over the years he protested for various rights of visually challenged. He was imprisoned 16 times, once -- chained and beaten.

“The important part is not that I was hurt but that we won. We are like tea bags. Unless put in hot water we would not know how strong we are.”

He is aware that rights are not served on platter. One has to fight for it. But his fight against social prejudices has proved to be a tough one.

Nethrodaya was born of a similar fight. While doing a project in second semester of PG Diploma course in Social Entrepreneurship, he found that the blind beggars in suburban metro stations were not allowed to be vendors. They did not bribe the police as the ‘normal’ vendors did and hence they were reduced to begging. Surprisingly, most of the blind beggars were graduates who could not afford the cost of living in the city. Nethrodaya was started to provide free accommodation to visually challenged and later extended to include physically challenged. However, what had enraged Gopi, more than the living conditions, was the discrimination against the visually challenged.

“What right does anyone has to judge our capability? We can do what ‘normal’ people can,” he says. Gopi has never believed that he was blind and at times he has fooled others into thinking the same.

Last year in October, Akhil Ajit, a final year student of Bachelors of Social Work went to ONGC (Oil and Natural Gas Corporation) to apply for CSR grant for a certain college function. He entered the lift with Gopi on the ground floor. He overheard Gopi speaking about Murali, the person in-charge for giving CSR grants. “Sir, are you applying for CSR grant too?” Akhil asked. Gopi said yes and told him about Nethrodaya. It was 15 minutes later, when someone in ONGC office told him, that Akhil realised that Gopi had only partial vision. “I was shocked. I could not guess from his walk or anything that he could not see.”


Gopi was six years old when he was detected with Retinitis Pigmentosa. It is a genetic disorder in which the vision depletes with time. It is commonly found in communities that have inter-relation marriages. Gopi’s parents were Nairs from Kerala who practice endogamy in order to keep the property within the family. They had migrated to Chennai after marriage.

They were dejected when series of eye check-ups and consultations with doctors revealed that their son’s ailment could not be corrected. Only cornea related eye problems can be corrected. Mocking at the irony he says, “My cornea are in perfect condition. Believe it or not, I can donate my eyes.”

With blindness comes social untouchability which is more prevalent in the elite culture than anywhere else.

In 2006, Gopi decided to shift the Nethrodaya building as larger accommodation was required. The state government allotted them a land in an elite area in Mogappair where number of bureaucrats live. When the residents found out about the allotment there launched numerous protests filing 16 cases, which they won in municipal court and lost in High Court. They tried preventing the construction at every level by obtaining various stay orders. Their reasons ranged on degree of ridiculousness, from “seeing a blind person in the morning is a bad omen” to “we have invested lot of money in these houses, if you come the land prices will dip.” They said that seeing a blind person will lead them to depression.

“Education has not given them wisdom” says Gopi. “If they cannot be of any help they should not become hindrance in other people’s life. I don’t see why they can’t go about their work instead of cribbing about other people’s business.”

The new building was inaugurated in 2009. Since then Gopi has found many sympathisers. The vegetable vendor provides them free vegetables. There are others who support them, but were unwilling to stand-up against the bureaucrats.

In Nethrodaya, Gopi attempts to blur the line between ‘normal’ and ‘challenged’. Things are provided according to the needs. The residents are given classes in computer, music and yoga.

Gopi finds respite in his family. His wife, Usha, pampers him. Theirs was a love marriage. He dotes on his ten-years-old daughter Sethulaxmi, who chirps around the house. To him she is his sunshine. Sethulaxmi remembers the time when her father invited her favourite actor Surya to Nethrodaya. “I love Surya! He came and he hugged me. I was four then. He said nice things about my daddy,” she rattles her fondest memory.

Each year there are a number of things that Gopi learns and a lot of things he prefers to forget. It helps him win his daily fight with frustration. For now, he plans to start a high school for visually challenged girls. Gopi proves that vision has many definitions.