Back from Bliss

The only thing I hate about visits to Dharamsala is the fact that they always end. And way before you're prepared. Oh well, the transience of bliss and all such...

Prosaic.
The patterns life always falls into when you're at home. It's impossible to think poetry, unless its the slit-my-veins-and-watch-the-blood-pool-in-the-golden-sunlight variety (a borrowed image - thank you chaddimaster). It's not the physical space or the temporal situation - God knows both are bizzare enough to generate volumes of verse, or worse(sorry). It's just that you always get caught in the gravity field of the inane trivia of everyday things, and it sucks you in deeper and deeper. It tends to travel with you, so that when you are standing at the foot of the Great Pyramid at Giza, fighting so hard to hold on to (or create out of thin air) a wisp of awe, ignoring the swarming multilingual multitudes which are increasingly a fact of life on this, our overburdened planet, and pretending not to see the locals somehow allowed to break the 'no climbing' rule, clambering all over it with utter disregard for the fact that you are trying to have a polite conversation (of sorts) with the poor beleagured monument, your parents will pipe in with a perfectly timed query about 'who's carrying the sunbloc?', or 'has anyone seen my hat?'. Life could be so much larger than life if it just butted out once in a while.

So, bowing my head to the demigods of inevitability, here's a random picking from an endless list of pet peeves:

• those tricky little fliers that slip out all over the floor when you open the morning papers. Ugh, a mess of unwanted advertisements at my feet that I then have to get up to clear. It's not like mornings weren't tough enough anyway.
• Nails, no, growing nails. If anything discounts the theory of evolution, it's that. After years of clipping them, they still don't get the message. Whatever happened to adaptation for survival, and learning from experience. Nails are like the cockroach of the human body.
• People. Sometimes some of them some of the time, and sometimes all of them all the time. If there really was a god, we'd each have a planet all to ourselves.
• Relatives. Ok, this one's a little tricksy, and though its logical to assume the last one covers this too, I thought it deserved special mention.
• Objects getting ideas and wandering off into hibernation or on Grand tours so that they go missing for years and then suddenly turn up again, lying there so innocently, trying to assume an air of 'Who me, but I was here all along!' Really, who do they think they are fooling.
• Order, or our vain attempts at
• Sanity, or our pitiful pretensions to
• Lists, which sorta falls under both the last categories. Really, who do we think we're fooling.
• How the shirt you wanna wear is always at the bottom of the pile in a rucksack, or right at the back of a neatly arranged drawer... especially right after you've just spent hours arranging the damn thing to your satisfaction. It's either me or the universe's sense of humour, and I'd pick the latter everytime.

Ending on a less depressed note (I beg off with lack of sleep, and way more than a tolerable dose of social interaction), I still get high on treasure hunting through my parents' mountains of collected and inherited crap - thank god for those magpie tendencies). My grandmother died eleven months ago, and my father, while clearing out her stuff, rediscovered a pile of old LPs of his which he had written off as lost or whacked. Going through them today, I found an original pressing of The Sgt. Pepper's LHCB, with a perfectly intact cover, and, hidden among a pile of old abba, paul anka, reggae stuff, another of Dark Side of the Moon. Again Perfectly preserved. Glory be!

Am Back... and making you wish I wasn't

When traveling through foreign lands the first thing that tends to disappear is your sense of anonymity. You are no longer just another Indian amongst millions (or a billion and a half) speaking the same language, paying the same taxes, struggling against the same daily realities as everyone else around you. As a traveler your identity becomes a fluid, amorphous thing; something to be defined by every conversation you have, every move you make. An open space, filled with questions and possibility, and something you are sharply aware of at all times. It happens for everyone, but perhaps for an Indian the shift is more dramatic, more unsettling: huge crowds are a very essential part of being Indian, perhaps explaining the inherent insecurity that makes us form lines and rush to get a seat even when there is no need. The fear of being forgotten, left behind, or simply swallowed up in the mass of humanity that is this country is something we are all born to. From school admissions to job prospects, life in India is a constant round of musical chairs, with way too many circling the one available seat, hoping for luck and whatever else it takes to get ahead of the crowd.

Though my amusement may never fade, I have gotten somewhat used to the spectacle that presents itself without fail at the boarding gate for any flight into India: all it takes is one nervous Indian, usually a very old lady in a pink and yellow sari, clutching a pillow and what can only be called a trunk on wheels as hand baggage, to stand in front of a closed boarding gate an hour before the scheduled time. Faster than the smile beginning to form on your face, a serpentine line creates itself, straight out of some snake-charmers conjuring repertoire; complete with octogenarian couples, huge families struggling to keep track of their luggage as it heads for a collision course with the orbit of the twelve kids zooming around the nucleus of a mother clutching at the illusion of order and sanity, and the odd village or two. Though I may have been hallucinating, I swear I’ve even heard a moo or two, and seen the swish of the occasional brown tail. Of course they all know that the flight is not going to leave without them, and they’re pretty sure they’re going to get their assigned seat, and all the food and put-away-in-your-pocket condiments they could possibly need (you’ve paid for it, after all!), but better safe than sorry you know. The spectacle is familiar to seasoned travelers, and I’ve even borne indignant, and somewhat amused witness to airport officials having some fun with the phenomenon: at Yemen once, when the line resolutely refused to unform itself after repeated requests from the confounded official (we do have a long and proud tradition of passive resistance to live up to), the PA system crackled into life to announce that the boarding gate had been changed to another one. I have never seen such a mad rush, not even at Dadar when the fast local to Andheri arrives. Creaky joints, fragile bones, recalcitrant kids and monumental baggage notwithstanding, the line had reformed at the new gate within a minute. After a brief tussle and some reshuffling in the order, the disgruntled losers and the glorious victorious soon settled down in their hard won positions, reconciled to an hour of standing till the boarding call. But the wily Arabs were not about to be cheated out of a promising hour’s entertainment. They tried again, with the same announcement for the original gate. With the predictability of Halley’s comet coming to call, my undaunted countrymen launched forth once more into the fray, not to be stopped by mere scraped knees, elbows in ribs, embarrassment or common sense. I am proud to declare after an hour of watching my fellow-countrymen ping-pong across the terminal that either the officials tired of trying, or time ran out, but the line never gave way against the furious advances of the crafty foe. And of course, all of us seated spectators got seats on the plane too, but I doubt we settled into them with quite the same sense of satisfaction, of a hard-won victory to be savored.