Meanwhile....

Moved to new domain

2010-02-27T21:08:00.000-08:00

I have moved to my own new domain: www.vanidoraisamy.com. See you there!

A New York love story

2008-07-27T22:56:00.000-07:00

For those of us weaned on endless reels of filmy rail-gaadi romances, here is a New York version.

A train, a girl, a boy. Love at first sight. Girl disappears after train journey. Love-sick boy searches all over the city for her. Inspires everyone around to play Cupid. Finds girl. Starry romance. Everyone lives happily ever after. Ends. Right?

Would have been that easy if only life imitated make-believe. And that too, not if you lived in New York, where illusion is king.

When 21-year-old web designer, Patrick Moberg, hosted this site to become a cyber Taj Mahal, little would he have imagined the end.

Life, it seems, always has the last laugh.

Am predicting this would be made into another When Harry Met Sally. Any guesses on who should play Moberg and Hayton?

The Journey Within

2008-07-22T11:08:00.000-07:00

Ever since last week, I have stopped wondering how Alice must have felt like when she fell down the rabbit் hole.

I was on a journey unlike any other, exploring a destination where no one had ever landed before: my own mind, the unbearable lightness of my own being.

Only this time for me, unlike Alice, there was no White Rabbit or Caterpillar or Cheshire Cat or dormouse to encounter along the way. What I did come across instead was a 2,500-year-old rarest of rare gem, the ancient art and science of Vipassana meditation, distilled in its purest form and served in the same chalice that Gotama the Buddha drank from. Right down to the Pali chants the Wise One rang out to his followers and what echoes down unchanged through the centuries in the Vipassanic texts.

Some of life's most wondrous turning points, you find by stumbling across them rather than by planning. Thus it was that, two weeks after arriving in Chennai, I found myself in the womb of silence and surprises that is Dhamma Setu, the 26-acre Vipassana meditation retreat, near Thiruneermalai.

Two years back, I had been to the place to have an interview with S.N. Goenka, the pitamah of Vipassana meditation who had come down to Chennai to inaugurate the centre's pagoda. At that time, I had refused to look past the teflon coating my profession so liberally dabs me with. I was not a believer then, only an observer, something which Goenka himself would have had no trouble accepting.

Two years hence, gnashed about by an emotional turmoil I would never have dreamt would happen to me, I landed at Dhamma Setu not so much to look for answers but to shut myself away from all that was causing the anguish. I carried ( and still do) with me my pronounced distaste for any of the pop-spirituality that the Ravishankars and Mahesh Yogis and the Jaggi Vasudevs had made their millions out of.

What initially drew me there was the 10-day enforced silence: no contact whatsoever with the world outside, no telephone calls, no television/newspapers/internet, no notebooks, pens or pencils, no vacuous socializing, and no, absolutely not a single spoken word, not even eye contact with other meditators. All this amidst the rarefied resort-like surroundings of the Chettinad-style lushly landscaped Dhamma Setu (the Bridge of Dhamma), with you having to spend almost nothing. Perfectmente!

Instead, what happens is that within two days of the Noble Silence vow, your head starts exploding with the babel of inner voices, voices that you had never heard before, that you would never have heard otherwise, that come rumbling from somewhere deep within you, where they had been buried for so long under the mounds of noise you had choked them with.

But, let me, like Lewis Carroll, begin at the beginning: I had been adequately warned that it would be a self-willed prison. That for ten days, I would have to stay behind closed gates and that I would not be allowed to leave, however desperately I may want to.

And not without reason: to be able to even scratch the surface of the Dhamma that the Buddha gave, you have to put yourself through a gruelling schedule, from four in the morning till nine in the night, most of the hours being spent in meditating in a hall in which the fans would be switched off so that you will be able to hear your own breath better. In Chennai, that is roughly equivalent to walking barefoot on Arctic ice: it frightens you initially but very soon, simply doesnt matter.

Unlike the fluff that makes up the Art of Living courses (where they give you your own custom-made personal mantra and warn you it will lose potency if revealed to anyone else, and when, curiosity getting the better of you, you actually check it with a fellow meditator, you realise you have been jackassed out of your money), the Vipassana courses offered by the Goenkas throughout the world are blessedly free of commercialism: you dont have to pay a single paise for the ten-day course or for your lodging or for the simple and delicious vegetarian food. You can walk in and walk out with an empty wallet and need to make a donation only if you are convinced the course has helped you. The centres are run purely through such donations made on a voluntary basis by grateful former students.

The idea is to make you live like an ascetic for the course duration, totally dependant on the charity of others even for something as basic as your food, so that you totally lose ego. And if the ever-increasing tribe of Vipassana meditators is any indication, then shedding ego is the way to live.

The meditation itself is a precise surgical operation, performed on the mind by turning it upon itself. As your breathing settles down and the process starts, the technique slices deeply and sharply through the pus-and-memory-filled layers of the mind, peeling away strata after strata of anger, bitterness, loss, hatred, misery, pain and anguish. You smell, feel and hear the pus bubbling up and suddenly feel freer than you ever were.

And the best is yet to come: not only is Vipassana free of Guru or God, it also enjoins you to totally disassociate yourself from your religion for the course period: no rosary telling, shloka chanting, poojas, incantations, incense burning, namaaz, nothing ritualistic that would even remotely call attention to your religion. You need to suspend your religion to see who you really are. Not surprising, if you remember your history lessons: the Buddha's teachings were a direct antithesis to the orthodoxy and high-ritualism of the Vedic Hinduism of those days.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor amidst the heat that rippled through like a desert haze in the fan-less room, each one in the group of 50-odd meditators had come there on a personal quest:
23-year-old pretty Jewish lass Rotem from Tel Aviv needed to know what to do with her life after spending quite a few years in the Israeli army. She would go back with "very clear directions in her head" and a very stiff neck after trying too hard to sit erect in the lotus posture.
Forty-two year old Suchitra from Coimbatore had wanted to come to terms with her husband's detached nonchalance since he, a seasoned meditator, would never show affection to the family even as he made sure that all their needs were met. She would go back loving him more than ever.South Korean friends, Kim and Oh, would come looking for the peace and tranquility that kept eluding their country. From here they would go onwards to Auroville's Maitri Mandir where they would spend the next few years of their lives giving unto others what was given unto them.

For me, the near-nirvana experience would come rather suddenly on the third day: one moment, the still air in the room shudders with the vibrations caused by the roar of the airplane that just took off from the nearby international airport and the next moment, as the plane ebbs away, the gathering silence settles on you and covers you like a warm fuzzy cloud. Your body disssolves into the air around and all you feel is the lightness of breath passing in and out of you Nothing else. Bones, flesh, muscle..all are now luminously transparent.

Yet there is also the supra-real heightening of every single sensation: your skin is alive in every pore, your ears can clearly pick out the chirping of a distant cicada, your nose quivers with the trillion pulses that are zipping through. Suddenly, my emotional bleakness clears and my till-then pain falls off like a reptile's skin.

What you glimpse startles you. Raw. Uncensored. Stripped of everything. When you come out of the state a few minutes later, you realise life will never ever be the same again.

After that moment, you are led to steadily explore the interface between mind and body, your mind and your body. You learn where your pain comes from and where your smile comes from.
You start enjoying playing tricks on yourself: smiling away the pains and shrugging away the smiles.

You realise then that the Buddha had delved deep into and perfected a technique which modern science is just about starting to acknowledge the existence of: the mapping of the human mind. Into my mind springs suddenly a talk I had attended sometime back, in which Dr. V.S. Ramachandran (the Brain Man, as he is otherwise known) elaborated on something that now seems very clear: that it is always mind over matter. Or rather, mind matters most.

I remembered being intriguingly drawn to read more about Dr. Ramachandran's phantom limb experiment: how, in some cases, even after a person has lost an arm to amputation, he or she would continue to feel pain in the lost part and the 'cure' often is, parking the amputee before a mirror so that he sees there is only air where an arm once was. Read more on his work here .

When, in those Vipassana moments, I felt my own body dissolve into the atmosphere, I could clearly understand what phantom pains must have felt like.

One song which I have sung to myself in my darkest moments is Subramanya Bharathi's Nalladhor Veenai. The verses kept churning in my head every time I tripped on the mind and matter interface during my Vipassanic moments. Here is an English translation of Bharathi's prayer to the Goddess, by Sri Vidya :

All I ask for is—
A body that would obey the commands of my heart—with the swiftness of a thrown ball;
A clean enthusiastic spirit;
A life that springs anew into being daily: bright and energetic;
A pure soul—to sing Your praises even when the skin is scorched by fire;
An unshakable mind—
Do You have any issues in granting me these?

I may not have found my answers, but now I know where to look for them.

Whatever next.....I

2008-07-15T22:20:00.000-07:00

When I was young and more fancy-free, one thing I totally, totally loved was going for a swim in the river and having the little fish nibble you all over. I loved the way the tiny little things would swim close to you and if you stayed still, would slowly come over and get acquainted. Then the feast would begin. You had to be of a certain kind to enjoy it with eyes closed, several friends would shriek and run for cover, scaring the little pisceans away.

And now, the fish massage has become upmarket, commercialised and salon-ified. Imagine having to pay Rs 500 upwards for half an hour of fish pedicure in a posh boutique in aamchi Chennai.
I remember rolling my eyes in mock surprise when I heard of something similar being offered in Sentosa Island, Singapore.

And now, the fish have come closer home to nibble. Some fishy affair, this!

Adieu.....

2008-06-29T16:30:00.000-07:00

If, as they say, those that the gods love die young, then Vinay Chakravarthy must surely be amongst the ones that have an abundance of celestial grace.

In the few months that I have been living in NY, very few lives have touched me as deeply as that of this 29-year-old, who died in Boston earlier this week, after having looked death smilingly in the eye for nearly two years and never blinked.

I am deeply touched by the fact that mine was the last newspaper report on Vinay, and that despite his agonising last moments, he personally acknowledged it.

I first heard about Vinay from a doctor friend: about the young doctor's fight against his leukemia and his herculean effort to stay alive, his never-say-die spirit and how his story inspired thousands of fellow Indians to enrol for the US National Bone Marrow Registry so that, in future, those like him would be able to find bone marrow donors.

Before Vinay, there had also been young Sameer Bhatia and so closely were the stories and destinies of these two men intertwined that they became, to all intents and purposes, blood brothers.

Though Sameer had died only a few weeks before I arrived in the US, I was able to talk to his father, Kumar Bhatia and got to know more about his son's last moments. It also came as a pleasant surprise that the Chakravarthys were from my part of the world: Vinay's father, Parthasarathy, switched over to Tamil as soon as I introduced myself.

Throughout their darkest moments, neither Sameer nor Vinay stopped smiling or being cheerful.
Even after bone-crunching chemotherapy sessions, the families remembered the men never complained nor crumpled up. And they left records of their own lives in their blogs.

As for the Chakravarthy family, to simply say I share in their sorrow is not enough. I have a standing invitation from the family to come and visit their beautiful Californian home anytime I feel like it. I wish I could have gone when Vinay was still alive.

To Rashmi, his beautiful young wife, who held her husband's hand as he quietly slipped into death and to his parents who remained optimistic and cheerful even as they saw their son slowly sink, and to the thousands of his friends who will now carry on his work, Vinay will now be more alive than ever.

Below:
Vinay and Rashmi in the days before the leukemia struck and the couple, much later, together again in Vinay's sick ward. All photographs are courtesy Seshu Photography.

India's answer to Oprah?

2008-04-10T21:09:00.001-07:00

History, at times, is made in the most unpretentious ways. Looks like, in its own way, Vijay TV, is setting new benchmarks and breaking barriers with the launch of Ippadikku Rose, a talk show to be hosted by Rose, billed as India's first transgender celebrity host.

Bold and dramatic, Rose in no way fits the aravani stereotype and is honest enough to want to wear her gender on her sleeve and tell the world how beautiful it makes her feel. All of 28 years old, the US-educated Rose, with a masters in biomedical engineering, is to India what Oprah Winfrey is to the US, The New York Times would have us believe.

Watch her in action here and you would not be able to hold back your hurrahs.

Whether the show will match substance with hype or whether it becomes another Truman Show, this is the third dimension of Indian-style reality television.

Death by blogging

2008-04-04T18:44:00.001-07:00

I now dont need to look for an excuse to explain away my increasingly irregular blog posts. Looks like it is a going to be a question of life and death, literally.

In those heady days when I first created this blog, I just couldn't get it off my head. Wherever I turned, the world was full of blog-postisms.

I never became a blogaholic, like some of my friends did over the years, peace be unto them. Thanks partly to a large dose of inertia and mostly due to a cussedness in finding things worthy of blogging about, this blog never got around to grandstanding on anything. Back then, I would feel guilty and jealous when some of my more prolific colleagues averaged at least four posts a week.

Now, it seems as ever, the tortoise was indeed smarter.

Noah's Ark

2008-01-15T13:25:00.001-08:00

It only takes a few delightful days of purposeless ambling on New York's streets to understand what Noah's Ark must have been like....no, seriously, this is no intentional pun. I stumbled upon the near-homophone almost serendipituously.
It was in one such Eureka-moment that I received a link from Professor Sree Sreenivasan that led me to this Only in New York photo vaudeville. If you, dear reader, have any more of such once-only pics of any city in any part of the world, then please do share it with us. As for me, I am already rummaging through my photo files to find what I can dredge.

Slice of the Big Apple

2007-12-24T13:52:00.000-08:00

Now the rovin' gambler he was very bored
He was tryin' to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We'll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61.

Either he was eerily prescient or Bob Dylan was simply marking time. Whatever, this was my favourite growing-up song.
When it was finally decided that I would trade sultry Chennai for New York's iciness, this was the song that would keep swirling in my head. It simply refused to go away, like an old-aunt's lullaby. I let it stay.

Eight years back, when I had swished past NYC in transit to Toronto and saw, in my mind's eye, the still-iconic WTC towers lost somewhere in the folds of the clouds below, I remember making myself a promise: that I would come back some day and revisit Highway 61, pardon my muddled geography.

Much has changed, much hasn't. Cogito, ergo sum. Whatever.

If at Heathrow Airport, they rubbed your nose in the brownness of your skin ("In transit to NY? Doesnt matter, maa'm. British security is not the same as American. You need to clear us if you want to get there"), JFK was kinder, gentler, not at all like what Henry Miller's black-humour-served-with-coffee, An Airconditioned Nightmare, had said it would be. I cleared immigration in five minutes flat and customs, even less. "From Chennai, maa'm? Have a good day!"

This was not a new country. Eight years back, I had wandered the East Coast like a vagabond, backpack-bound and napping on the hard benches of subway stations, to stretch my overwrought-budget.
Much has changed, much hasn't.

Eight years back, as my train entered USA from the Canadian half, they would make one of my Indian co-passengers disembark at Sarnia-on-the-border, frisk him, detain him for over half an hour and would only let him board another train two hours later.

Now, India is the big story everywhere. Your brownness is your talisman. Your accent, it ain't matter no more.

Aah, the blessed anonymity of a great city. Walking NY's pavement in the icy cold of a December night, the wind lifting your hair and the chill spreading on your cheeks with the softness of a pigeon feather.
Riding the Manhattan train, emerging out of the earth's belly, into the labyrinthine concourse of glass and steel outside 49th Street.
Feeling so at-home in NYC's chaotic traffic, and laughing delightedly when your cabbie swerves madly to avoid a Land Rover, swears "Rattlesnake!" and turns instantly to apologise to you, "Sorry, Miss Lady. This city is full of cheapstake m************!"
Digging into a bowl of Puerto Rican rice and beans and a ketchup-drenched Corn Dog at the Rockefeller Center as the skating rink erupts in a dozen graceful pirouettes.

Sights. Smells. Sounds. Life.

You are your own Lonely Planet.

Aah...kozhukattais!

2007-09-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

Is there any other delicacy in the world that even remotely compares with those little, perfectly shaped widgets? The lusciousness of the sweet ones (their bellies bursting with the exciting promise of jaggery and coconut scrapings and the intangible whiff of cardamom), the wafery spiceness of the savoury variant, the near-perfection of the white wrap...nothing even comes near.
I trudged to the friendly neighbourhood sweet shop this Ganesh Chathurthi to buy a pre-assembled Chathurthi special sweetbox. Inside a box large enough to house a laptop, lay an assortment of sweets and karams. Wrapped in plastic. Phoney. Synthetic. Like lighting a diya with a cigarette butt. Or actor Vadivelu delivering a Parasakthi. Whatever. Take your pick.
For all that money they make you pay, you would at least expect a decent kozhukattai--that invention of pure genius--but what you get instead are two sad looking dumplings, spotched on the outside with scabs of brown. Deep-fried disasters.
Now, I am not particularly the sweet-toothed type, but kozhukattais? They are a different story, altogether.
It all comes, I guess, with growing up in a neighbourhood where, come Chathurthi, one unabashedly made a solemn pact of fidelity with the kozhukattai. That I used to live at the footsteps of one of the most beautiful Ganesha places ever--the Rock Fort in Tiruchirappalli--is only a helpful footnote.
Wafting through the fumes of disappointment at not being able to dig my teeth into the kozhukattai's soft underbelly this year, was the sepulchral memory of Padma maami who, unarguably, made the best kozhukattais this half of the hemisphere.
Widowed at eighteen, her whole existence came to fruition only during that time of the year when Ganesha came visiting. Padma maami was a classicist. Her kozhukattais were her ode to immortality.
Only the finest Ponni rice flour would do. She would sieve, sieve again and then sieve some more till the flour flowed like fine silk. It used to be great fun for us kids, thrusting our faces into the wafting white clouds of flour and come away with a nose that would have made Calvin proud.
The jaggery had to be the exact shade of brown and the coconut had to be personally sourced from Subbunni's grove on the banks of the Cauvery.
She would knead the dough with a karmic intensity--with the same mother-love that she would have lavished on a never-to-be-born child--and spread it out in mirror-thinness. Splay of the milk-white dough glistening with oil against the dark of the plantain leaf.

The dough would then be pinched with mathematical precision at exact spots to make the folds and held against palm. In went the stuffing. I remember she used to throw a fit if the cardamom was not from Jagannathan grocery store ("only he gets Ceylon yelakkai, the rest taste like goat's pellets").
She would never, ever have done a kozhukattai the ultimate disrespect of deep-frying it. They would be stacked, ten to a plate, on her copper uruli and steamed till the juices blended in perfect symphony.

She died a lonely death, in some faraway hospital bed in a Christian missionary home. No one came visiting. Alzheimer's can be turn-off for even close kin.

Of deep fried kozhukattais there will be plenty. But, what of the soul food?

Me is mighty happy.....

2007-09-11T09:36:00.000-07:00

....about my Wiki debut.

With Jana Gana Mana being the flavour of the season, it feels good to sing along. Thanks, whoever it is that put it there.

The Madanapalle trip was perhaps the best assignment I ever had....more so, because of the visit to Jiddu Krishnamurthi's house and meeting up with those who had shared time- space with him.
Am not the spiritually inclined type, but this was the closest approximation to an on-job pilgrimmage I ever had.

I stood before the phantomic Olcott house-- at the same spot, perhaps, from where the first-ever lilt of Jana...was heard--and shivered in the almost-summer heat. History lay before me, sunning itself like a familiar beast. At JK's ancestral house, impeccably maintained by his afficianados, I still remember the goosebumps.

The Wiki entry has only made the best of memories even better.

One for the road

2007-08-30T23:16:00.000-07:00

The Corolla's wheels splice through
like hammer in a maniac surgeon's hands.

He stares numbly at the orange-flavoured slush
at the Rasna sachets that are now withered metaphors.
He had been nowhere on the sedan's radar
when
its bumper seared his calves.

The passer-by's tch-tch hangs horrifically in the suddenly-still air.

He looks up at the car
only to find the chihuahua's interested eyes at the window.

At his feet
the fruity puddle has vanished.
A child's tuition, a mother's medical bill, a wife's once-yearly saree

He sighs, gets up, wrings his dhoti of the last few drops.

What angers more than the arrogance of the rich
is
the meekness of the poor.

Dappankoothu zindabad!

2007-06-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

Look at what Wikipedia has done to our very own gilli-danda dance!!Don't miss the section on Outfits and...

Am sure whoever inserted this was thinking of a Ramarajan-gone-wrong. Dance along, ladies and gentlemen...only this time, dont feel apologetic about your pattapatti (???!!!) showing!

Demolition Men

2007-06-07T21:09:00.000-07:00

What would you term an organisation that has only men as its members (and that too ONLY men whose marriages are in various stages of disarray, some of them going through messy divorces and some on the verge of getting there), that seriously advises men not to get married as almost every potential spouse is a manipulator?
That insists that family laws in India should be amended to keep pace with the US as it is easy to get a divorce out there in just six months?

This organisation, ladies and gentlemen, is called--well, you lost the guess--Save Indian Family.
I shall say no more than direct you to this blog, written by a young girl who, it appears, doesnt belong to the feminist conclave, but is horrifically disturbed by what SIF stands for.

I got to know of the existence of a rump of this organisation in Chennai a few months back, and had not paid too much attention for I thought it was just a gripe club. I couldn't have been more wrong. This is no ordinary support group for men who gather together to exchange notes about painless divorces. Rather, they seem to have a surefire strategy to boost membership-enlist more members, even if it means wrecking perfectly normal marriages. The law of averages, I guess.

Here is how it goes: a friend ( who till then had been quite happy with his marriage but had had a few heartburns in an earlier relationship) chanced upon this group and dropped in on one of the meetings just out of curioisity in "finding out how other men coped."
He was perhaps the only married man in the group who attended their meetings after discussing about the forum with his wife. There seemed to be no misunderstanding, at that moment.
The motley SIF, Chennai, comprises of men, who are gainfully employed otherwise but would rather stew in the stench of the past than simply get along with life.
For a few weeks, all was well with my friend. The indoctrination must have been ever so subtle for the man never showed up any trouble and even invited his wife to attend one of the weekly meetings.
Then, whoosh, the kaleidoscope changed. The trouble started manifesting in ways in which the couple could not have foreseen. From then on, every little domestic tiff became a potential minefield, every small argument blew up in their faces and they ended up averaging two fights a day.
To be fair to them, they did talk about talking and getting things sorted. Thing is, it never happened. All those women-hater tales about scheming, manipulative wives who were after their husband's pay packets, ready to slap a dowry harassment case at the slightest pretext and throw the man's aged parents into jail--had obviously found their mark.

This is not to say my friend is as impressionable as all this sounds. In his better avatar, he was a sensitive individual, well read and articulate and with a mind of his own. But then, you are what your peer group makes of you.

To cut a long story short: when the friend brought up the issue of his own troubled marriage amongst the group, one of the ever-so-helpful leaders promptly helped him find a lawyer and asked the friend to henceforth discuss (DISCUSS!!) all domestic quarrels with the lawyer first.
So, now, the lawyer has a tab on the couple's life.
And of the marriage? I'll save my breath.

SAVING INDIAN FAMILIES? Laughing out loud!

Playing Janus

2007-04-27T01:41:00.000-07:00

One always knew this was happening but one never knew it would be so close home. The latest figures to emerge out of a UNESCO study are scary enough to be believable: two out of every three victims of domestic violence in India is an educated woman. In fact, UNESCO even says the figures may be on the lower side because such women would rather smile and cover up rather than stand up and be counted, just because they wouldnt want to lose face among peers.
It is so much easier, you see, to pretend the monster doesnt exist rather than look it in the eye.
Am reproducing here a report on a study done a few years back that created enough ripples to eventually result in the Domestic Violence Act (emphasis mine):

April 27, 2007
In India, Domestic Violence Rises with Education
By Swapna Majumdar (Women's News)
Debates about domestic violence in India is being stirred by a study that found a woman's risk of being beaten, kicked or hit rises with her level of education.
In New Delhi, India, a brilliant doctor tries to commit suicide after her husband slaps her for contradicting him in front of his friends.
In Manila, Philippines, a former beauty queen tells police she was coerced into "entertaining other men" after being locked in a room without food for days by her husband.
In Santiago, Chile, neighbors respond to distress calls from a woman battered by her husband for refusing to let him watch a particular TV program in front of the children.
In Cairo, Egypt, the wife of a highly placed bureaucrat finally speaks up after enduring years of physical and mental abuse for being unable to bear a child.
The incidents were documented in a series of studies carried out by the Washington-based International Center for Research on Women in collaboration with independent Indian researchers. The cross-cultural study looked at the problem of domestic abuse in India, Egypt, Chile and the Philippines and found that violence against women was prevalent across regions, communities and classes.
While the findings are not new, the study has incubated a new round of debate about the cultural underpinnings to domestic violence, especially in India, where the study found a woman's risk of being beaten, kicked or hit rose along with her level of education.
In the aftermath of the report, advocates are anxious that the data not be used to retard the push for women's education. That effort was given new urgency this week with the release of a report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, finding that girls in many countries continue to face "sharp discrimination in access to schooling." The report also finds that girls in India had just a little better than three-quarters the chance of boys to receive a primary-school education.
"Interpretation of this data needs to be done very sensitively," warned Preet Rustagi, a junior fellow at the New Delhi-based Center for Women's Development Studies. "Education is an empowering tool for women and should not be seen as impacting negatively. In fact, this correlation points to the imperative need for an attitudinal change among men and society in general." Rustagi has analyzed crime records relating to violence against women and also found a correlation between education and domestic violence.
Risk Rises with Education
According to the 2002 study, 45 percent of Indian women are slapped, kicked or beaten by their husbands. India also had the highest rate of violence during pregnancy. Of the women reporting violence, 50 percent were kicked, beaten or hit when pregnant. About 74.8 percent of the women who reported violence have attempted to commit suicide.
Kumud Sharma of the Centre for Women's Development Studies in New Delhi traced the correlation between education and domestic violence to patriarchal attitudes. "Educated women are aware of their rights," she said. "They are no longer willing to follow commands blindly. When they ask questions, it causes conflicts, which, in turn, leads to violence. In many Indian states, working women are asked to hand over their paycheck to the husband and have no control over their finances. So, if they stop doing so or start asserting their right, there is bound to be friction."
Domestic violence experts say the problem in India stems from a cultural bias against women who challenge their husband's right to control their behavior. Women who do this---even by asking for household money or stepping out of the house without their permission--are seen as punishable. This process leads men to believe their notion of masculinity and manhood is reflected to the degree to which they control their wives.
"The behavior of men stems from their understanding of masculinity," said Nandita Bhatla, researcher with the International Center for Research on Women, "and what their role should be vis-a-vis women, especially their wives."
Problem of Perception
Men have always been taught to perceive themselves as the superior sex, said Jyotsna Chatterjee, director of the Joint Women's Program, a women's resource organization based in New Delhi. It is this conditioning, she said, that makes them believe they have to control their wives, especially if they are considered disobedient.
Although men's preoccupation with controlling their wives declines with age--as does the incidence of sexual violence--researchers found that the highest rates of sexual violence were among highly educated men. Thirty-two percent of men with zero years of education and 42 percent men with one-to-five years of education reported sexual violence. Among men with six-to-10 years of education--as well as those with high-school education and higher--this figure increased to 57 percent.
A similar pattern was seen when the problem was analyzed according to income and socioeconomic standing. Those at the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder--migrant labor, cobblers, carpenters, and barbers--showed a sexual violence rate of 35 percent. The rate almost doubled to 61 percent among the highest income groups.
Researchers have not determined why men with higher incomes and educations are more likely to be violent towards women.
Indian theater personality and feminist Tripurari Sharma was shocked to learn that a well-educated and respected actor in her theater group was abusing his wife, also an established actress.
"He was the most helpful, cordial and endearing man," she said. "His wife would attend rehearsals with bruises at times that she would cover up. Later, I found out she was being beaten. If the actress herself had not told me, I would have never believed it. So, I think it is a myth to think that the high education and economic status will lessen the risk of violence against women."
Equally disturbing is the finding that two of every five women in an abusive relationship in India remain silent about their suffering because of shame and family honor. The studies have also shown, nearly one-third of the Indian women experiencing abuse had thought about running away, but most said they feared leaving their young children and had no place to go. Activists felt that for intervention strategies to succeed, attitudes about violence would have to change and the level of awareness, among both men and women, about the negative impact of violence had to be raised.

*****

This is not something that you and I did not know before: domestic violence, like child sexual abuse, is a family's worst kept secret.

It simply does not help being Jesus Christ. Rather, if you are a woman reading this and are an abuse victim, please do me a favour by doing one or all of the following three things:

*Learn to pay back double--for every body blow, cigar burn, knife injury that you receive, deal back in double measure. If this makes you less of a wife to your husband and breaks up the marriage, then thou are blessed, for what are you still doing in it in the first place?''

*Cultivate strength, physically and emotionally. When a man hits you or threatens to do so, he does it so he can have the pleasure of seeing you cower and cringe. Instead, dare him and the machismo cracks.

*And never, EVER, show fear.

What colour is your blog?

2007-04-16T21:52:00.000-07:00

Exactly what kind of a creature is a blog? Is it gendered, as in, do women blog differently than men?
If your blog is your unmediated space, do you have to watch every word you write and not simply let go? After all, if you do not like what I write, be my guest and never visit me again, thanks be to you.
Does your blog need to have a....take two deep breaths...an ideology?

Received a rather longish comment from someone who claims to be a regular reader of journalists' blogs. Chap wants to know why we women journalists have to so compulsively write, when anyway we write a helluva lot of stuff the world does not want to read. And to, spice up the proceedings, he simply had to use those cute little four letter words. And ended up daring me to publish the comment, if I were 'man' enough (the exact word he used).
Sorry pal, the world has changed a lot since the time they dug you out of the dung heap. Your comment goes unpublished for I am blissfully un-man.

And then, friend Sanjeev is unhappy that I write too many PJs in my blog and not do enough original stuff. Which is on par for the course, for this blog shall remain adamantly eclectic and un-agenda-ed.
Just that my blog matches my mood which, at the moment, is too purple for comfort...

Looking for Solomon

2007-04-10T19:20:00.000-07:00

Was reminded of the King Solomon fable--albeit the rather tenuous connection and the gender switch--when I read this news report and the comments that followed:

http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=553622007

So, who does the baby belong to and where do the genetic footprints stop? Say pink, say blue, but all one can think of is what if the woman had simply told her ex-boy friend she would have the baby but would give a written undertaking that she would not demand any maitenance/child support from him, thus ridding him of any legal obligation for a child he does not want to share?
This is where the thin line between ethics and self-righeteousness blurs....

This PJ bites....!

2007-04-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

As far as poor jokes go, this was the worstest, but it still managed to sting....especially, as it was sent in by a Sri Lankan journalist friend. Gawd, what have we done to ourselves!

There was a couple married for quite some time and they had a boy of 5-6years old. Their relationship was turning sour. It finally reached such a stage that they thought it was better for them to be divorced than carry on such a relationship.
So they consulted a lawyer. But the big question was who would have the kid. In the hearing in the court, it was decided that this choice should be left to the kid.
So, the judge asked the boy: "Son, would you like to stay with your mummy?" Kid said, "No, mummy beats me." Judge asked "Would you like to stay with your papa then?"
Kid said, "No, papa beats me."
Now the judge was in a dilemma and was not able to decide what to do. After pondering for some time, he smiled. He had just had the best ever idea about who the kid would stay with......No prizes for guessing, though.
The kid would stay with the Indian cricket team because they NEVER BEAT ANYBODY, NOT EVEN BANGLADESH!

Only in America?

2007-04-07T20:27:00.000-07:00

Was actually enjoying my rather longish sabbatical from this blog, when a friend sent in this part-whimsical, part-roller coaster piece about life in the U S of A. All these, he claims, acutally happened...one didnt need his reassurance, though. In the land of George Bush, stupidity breeds like maggots.

Not that we Indians cant give Americans a run for their dollar when it comes to the silliness sweepstakes--remember that all-time Sardarji favourite, Rela-xing/Milkha Singh thing? Those of you who havent, blogroll me and ye shall be told...

Anyone out there who has come across anything closer home? Please let me know.

Meanwhile, here goes:

# 1 IDIOT OF 2006:

I am a medical student currently doing a rotation in toxicology at the poison control center. Today, this woman called in very upset because she caught her little daughter eating ants. I quickly reassured her that the ants are not harmful and there would be no need to bring her daughter into the hospital. She calmed down and at the end of the conversation happened to mention that she gave her daughter some ant poison to eat in order to kill the ants. I told her that she better bring her daughter into the emergency room right away. Here's your sign, lady. Wear it with pride.

# 2 IDIOT:

Early this year, some Boeing employees on the airfield decided to steal a life raft from one of the 747s. They were successful in getting it out of the plane and home. Shortly after they took it for a float on the river, they noticed a Coast Guard helicopter coming towards them. It turned out that the chopper was homing in on the emergency locator beacon that activated when the raft was inflated. They are no longer employed at Boeing. Here's your sign, guys. Don't get it wet; the paint might run.

# 3:

A man, wanting to rob a downtown Bank of America, walked into the branch and wrote this: "Put all your muny in this bag." While standing in line, waiting to give his note to the teller, he began to worry that someone had seen him write the note and might call the police before he reached the teller's window. So he left the Bank of America and crossed the street to the Wells Fargo Bank. After waiting a few minutes in line, he handed his note to the Wells Fargo teller. She read it and, surmising from his spelling errors that he wasn't the brightest light in the harbor, told him that she could not accept his stickup note because it was written on a Bank of America deposit slip and that he would either have to fill out a Wells Fargo deposit slip or go back to Bank of America. Looking somewhat defeated, the man said, "OK" and lef t. He was arrested a few minutes later, as he was waiting in line back at Bank of America. Don't bother with this guy's sign. He probably couldn't read it anyway.

# 4:

A motorist was unknowingly caught in an automated speed trap that measured his speed using radar and photographed his car. He later received in the mail a ticket for $40 and a photo of his car. Instead of payment, he sent the police department a photograph of $40. Several days later, he received a letter from the police that contained another picture, this time of handcuffs. He immediately mailed in his $40. Wise guy ..... but you still get a sign.

IDIOT # 5:

A guy walked into a little corner store with a shotgun and demanded all of the cash from the cash drawer. After the cashier put the cash in a bag, the robbe r saw a bottle of Scotch that he wanted behind the counter on the shelf. He told the cashier to put it in the bag as well, but the cashier refused and said, "Because I don't believe you are over 21." The robber said he was, but the clerk still refused to give it to him because she didn't believe him. At this point, the robber took his driver's license out of his wallet and gave it to the clerk. The clerk looked it over and agreed that the man was in fact over 21 and she put the Scotch in the bag. The robber then ran from the store with his loot. The cashier promptly called the police and gave the name and address of the robber that he got off the license. They arrested the robber two hours later. This guy definitely needs a sign.

ID # 6:

A pair of Michigan robbers entered a record shop nervously waving revolvers. The first one shouted, "Nobody move!" When his partner moved, the startled first bandit shot him. This guy doesn't even deserve a sign.

ID # 7:

Happens in Arkansas. Seems this guy wanted some beer pretty badly. He decided that he'd just throw a cinder block through a liquor store window, grab some booze, and run. So, he lifted the cinder block and heaved it over his head at the window. The cinder block bounced back knocking him unconscious. It seems the liquor store window was made of Plexi-Glass. The whole event was caught on videotape. Yep, Here's your sign ..... (Please note that all of the above people are allowed to vote)

FRIENDLY NEIGHBOURHOOD IDIOT:

I live in a semi-rural area. We recently had a new neighbor call the local township administrative office to request the removal of the Deer Crossing sign on our road. The reason: "Too many deer are being hit by cars out here! I don't think this is a good place for them to be crossing anymore." From Kingman, KS

IDIOTS....AT YOUR SERVICE:
My daughter went to a local Taco Bell and ordered a taco. She asked the person behind the counter for "minimal lettuce." He said he was sorry, but they only had iceberg. He was a Chef? Yep...From Kansas City!

IDIOT SIGHTING #1:

I was at the airport, checking in at the gate when an airport employee asked, "Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge? To which I replied, "If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?" He smiled knowingly and nodded, "That's why we ask." Happened in Birmingham, AL.

IDIOT SIGHTING # 2:

The stoplight on the corner buzzes when it's safe to cross the street I was crossing with an intellectuall y challenged coworker of mine. She asked if I knew what the buzzer was for. I explained that it signals blind people when the light is red. Appalled, she responded, "What on earth are blind people doing driving?!?" She was a probation officer in Wichita, KS

IDIOT SIGHTING # 3:
We were at a good-bye luncheon for an old and dear coworker. She was leaving the company due to "downsizing." Our manager commented cheerfully, "This is fun. We should do this more often!" Not another word was spoken. We all just looked at each other with that deer-in-the-headlights stare. This was a bunch at Texas Instruments.

IDIOT SIGHTING # 4:
I work with an individual who plugged her power strip back into itself and for the sake of her own life, couldn't understand why her system would not turn on. A deputy with the Dallas County Sheriffs office no less .

IDIOT SIGHTING # 5:

When my husband and I arrived at an automobile dealership to pick up our car, we were told the keys had been locked in it. We went to the service department and found a mechanic working feverishly to unlock the drivers side door. As I watched from the passenger side, I instinctively tried the door handle and discovered that it was unlocked. "Hey," I announced to the technician, "its open!" His reply, "I know - I already got that side." This was at the CHEVY dealership in Canton, NJ

A slice of sunshine

2007-01-19T00:37:00.000-08:00

Once in a very odd while, you feel like getting on to a rooftop and crowing gustily: "We still make movies the rest of the world can watch and feel proud of." And once in a very odd while, does a movie come that gnaws your heart so bad, you feel like rushing out of the cinema hall midway just because you can't take all that reality.
Veyyil should redeem that faith: neither the rat-infested aisles of Annai Abhirami nor the frequent drunken snithering of a lout seated halfway across mattered. The movie rises above cliches: neither is its realism stark nor is it stylised, it is realism as you and me live it.
One wonders what it is about Shankar that makes him such a good producer--first Kadhal and now this--but a kitschy director.
The day I went, there were hardly twenty people in the hall, and even that was a desultory crowd. Veyyil has had its run and will never be outwished.
There is a strong remembrance of Devar Magan all through--especially in the eerie presence of the irredeemable cycle of violence that sits across the protagonists' heads even at the most unsuspecting moment, and more so because, in Pasupathi, you have an actor who can out-Kamal Hassan anyone else--and (as friends point out) snatches of Cinema Paradiso, in the way Murugesan's (Pasupathi's character) first romance ends.
It is Pasupathi's movie all through and, according to director Vasanthabalan, Murugesan is his flesh-and-blood spitting image. And what subtleties the actor manages to weave into a performance that a lesser actor could have ended up hamming: the scene, for example, where he tells his father what drove him to run away from the house is an exercise in restraint and yet
chills you to the bones.
One tries in vain to look for a chink in the chain that tells you it is a movie you are watching, and one blessedly fails. Nor for a single moment does the director stray away from a relentless authenticism.
There are those opening moments that bring in a whiff of Azhagi, with all that bare-bottomed rustic humour. Then there is that heart warming sensitivity about life in the butcher's household, about the way life is shown amidst all that animal blood and gore.
The bonding among the boys is natural and never sentimentalised. Even the relationship between parents and offsprings is never overtly played upon. Thus, it seems the most natural thing to happen when little Murugesan, caught red handed by his father for flunking class and going to see a Em-Gee-Yaar movie and made to grovel naked under a hot sun as the whole village watches, scoots home with his mother's jewels and his father's savings, boards a lorry to come to Chennai but gets sidetracked halfway and ends up in a Tirukazhukundram talkies.
From then on starts the parabola of retrubutive justice for neither the family he left behind nor Murugesan ever manage to get their lives together again.
There are several fresh concepts worked into the movie from then till the end: the tender but ill-fated romance between Murugesan and Thangam, the shutting down of the theatre, a gaunt and hungry Pasupathi heading back to a family he had never contacted for nearly twenty years,
the unworked wrath of the father who refuses to take him back, the love of the brother and the coldness of the two sisters.
Dont miss this movie--it may be a long while yet before another one like it comes along.

Lest we forget.-II

2007-01-17T18:21:00.000-08:00

The day after I came back, feeling all knotty, at the splendid facilities one of the city hospitals claimed it had lined up for attracting foreign clientele, this photograph(if the link does not connect direct to the photo, click on the page 3 on the sidebar) that the Deccan Chronicle had carried of 16-year-old Kalpesh hit me with all its bone chilling pathos. One can debate endlessly over the shock value the paper must have been aiming it, but then this is `unprettified'
reality. If it was meant to disgust, then such disgust is a most welcome response.

******

Friend Sanjeev Ramachandran has done a fark and come up with this line up on the Ash-Abhishek engagement. Just waiting to see what they will do to Shilpa Shetty...

******

This is for all ye blogger-bashers: Kiruba Shankar has come up with this
which just goes to prove that the `Indian blogosphere', as Kiruba so lovingly describes it,
is, in reality, the commune of the future. This is as good as one can get.

Lest we forget.....

2006-12-26T08:33:00.000-08:00

They said she was barely four months old when they first saw her. The great wave had tossed her into a bramble shrub. There were thorns in her hair and scratches on her face.

Of her parents, there was no trace. Two days later, they found her brother who had sought shelter with a neighbour.

Today, Abhinaya is everybody’s darling. At the Cuddalore government orphanage, she is the prima donna. She is perhaps the most written about tsunami orphan in Tamil Nadu. When I first saw her, she was so fascinated by the camera of the photographer who accompanied me that she would let out a loud joyous cry every time the flash bulb popped. A child’s simple joy and behind it the greatest tragedy of our times.

One feels apologetic to write about the tsunami by simply saying, `Two years have passed….’

For me, it was a personal journey of self-discovery that took me to every godforsaken tsunami hamlet in the State, relentlessly looking for scraps of human dignity among survivors. My well-intentioned, but still-born blog notwithstanding, one day I hope to come terms with those memories which, for all of us journalists who were doing the rounds then, will be a curse we will have to bear till the end.

How does one come to terms, for example, with the memory of firemen pulling out from the sand near the Marina the bodies of six boys, who had been buried head first, and who had been playing boisterous street cricket when their lives ended?

Or a rescue worker in Cuddalore quietly carrying what appeared to be a white gunny sack and when you drew close, you found it was the wave-bleached body of a five-year old girl in a lace frock?

Or the surreal scene at the Velankanni shrine where, under all that Christmassy-glitter of the little coloured lamps strung across the shamiana, nearly two thousand bodies lay? Some of them had come from as far as Orissa and had to be buried almost immediately because their corpses had started falling apart.

Or the memory of the bleakness in eight-year-old Vigneswari’s eyes when she said her wave-dead father--a fisherman in Nagapattinam-- had promised her a gift for her birthday but now she did not have anybody who would ever buy her a gift?

Or the Christ-like stoicism of fisherman Victor in Akkaraipettai who, though both his children were still missing, had gone around collecting food packets to feed other frightfully hungry children?

Or the memory of the mass grave in Kanyakumari’s Colachel? We had been told there was a children’s’ grave inside the compound of the parish church and Father Stanley had pointed us to beyond a closed gate. We reached there and found just a raised Cross on a simple, cement platform. We looked around in vain for the graves when somebody informed us that we were already standing on them.

A cold shiver shot through us. Underneath our feet, behind the cement platform, lay the bodies of nearly 150 children. They had all been brought there to rest by their parents who had held decomposing son-flesh and daughter-flesh in their hands and still retained sanity to give them a decent burial.

All one can do now is crave the blessedness of forgetting….

Federer and friends

2006-12-24T09:07:00.000-08:00

Were it not for the jostling, pushing, shoving, screaming, ranting--in one word, playing true to form--media men, it was almost impossible to believe that a celebrity had come visiting. Federer, however, retained poise and grace and was more than willing to play from the heart in Cuddalore.
Children, it seems, are closest to his heart and the man had the humility to admit he can still learn from them. One almost thought one would see a replay of the Brad Pitt episode, but was glad that this time the mediamen were less paparazzi-like and not so celebrity-hung up.
All they had wanted was to do their job--capture Federer and girlfriend Miroslava `Mirka’ Vavrinec with the tsunami kids--and get out but were not allowed to as the UNICEF seemed to think every newsperson was a paparazzi and did their darnedest to keep the national media away while allowing Reuters and AFP free run.
It was then that all hell broke loose and one almost feared for Federer’s safety as the policemen (some of whom admitted they did not know who it was they were supposed to be protecting) seemed to enjoy the free-for-all. ``We will not let Federer get out of Cuddalore", yelled one scribe while another vowed he would snatch the Reuters/AFP cameras and break them to pieces.
"You are trying to sell photographs of our kids to newspapers abroad to grease your slimy fingers and raise money,’’ one said.
Finally, all was well that ended well. Am not a Federer fan at the best of times--am more the Stefan Edberg/Pete Sampras kind, with a dash of Agassi--but must say the children were taken in by his transparent earnestness and touching honesty and responded with a spontaneity only kids can muster.
``Do you speak Tamil?’’ one asked, "Have you seen Rajinikant movies?’’ another wondered and "Will you buy me a mithai?’’ one cajoled.
Little Abhinaya--by now almost iconic among the tsunami orphans, more about her in the next post--blew him a kiss and Federer was thrilled to bits.
Managed to get some cute pix. Will post them soon.

The strange case of Santhi Soundarajan

2006-12-19T08:43:00.000-08:00

Those of us who thought vultures were becoming extinct, needn't have worried: seems they have morphed into camera-toting newsmen, feeding off the last morsel of flesh. Vultures, may they forgive us, are noble birds and, am sure, have more finesse in them than what was on display when Santhi surfaced at the Tamil Nadu Secretariat.
Was not there myself but colleagues said Santhi, praise be to her, retained her composure and did not break down, even when the questions grew carrion-esque: ``The tests said you do not appear to be a woman....so what are you?" and "How does it feel to be called not-a-woman?"
And the headlines reeked of rotten flesh too: ``State government stands by shamed Santhi"/``Dude looks like a lady"/ "Middle distance runner caught in middlesex controversy"
There was even more blood-letting elsewhere: ``Indian runner Santhi Soundarajan has failed a gender test. Could this be a cause of global warming?" somebody asked on Yahoo!answers.
What were not asked were questions about the politics of testing for gender and personal identities.
Does "having more Y chromosomes than you are allowed" make one less of a woman, though Santhi was born a woman, lived a woman and almost never underwent a sex change surgery? If, as one vernacular daily claimed, she had never attained puberty, is she gender-challenged? For laughing out loud!
And pray, what exactly are `secondary sexual characteristics of a woman?' If a battery of gynaceologists, endocrinologists and hemotologists decrees that one is not woman-enough because of a fluky chromosome, then does it negate all those painful years Santhi went through, overcoming hellish odds, to get where she is? For pity's sake, and this in the age of post-Germaine Greer?
Somewhere along the way, there were helpful hints too: that Santhi could be the victim of malnutrition as she grew up amidst a very Indian poverty that suppressed certain gender manifestations. Santhi could most certainly not have competed with men and won, so how does one set standards for being a woman athlete? So, what happens if, for example, a male athlete fails a gender test (there are NO such tests for men, one is told) and is told he hits neuter-ground?
Amidst all this, Santhi has found support at home turf.. When Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi,before honouring her, asked her if her conscience was clear, Santhi replied with a simple, yet profound, `Yes.'
A lesser woman would have crumbled.

Dolce vita!

2006-12-06T07:30:00.000-08:00

Caught Russell Crowe in action in Rome....or rather a pathetic apology for him. A gladiator with a tattered gown, whose only sustenance for the day was a haggard cheroot which he kept drawing on whenever he could take a break from being killed.

A sobering snapshot just outside the awesome Colosseum. A reminder of how history pays, even today. When the boy in the picture had his fill of the sword and moved away, the man turned towards us and offered to get killed by us too. The kill would have cost us ten bucks. We move away, deeply insulted.
This is how Rome reinvents history, in very public spaces where Euro-wary tourists attempt to take back home vignettes of one of the world's bloodiest arenas. Sinatra would have loved the situational humour.
Elsewhere in other remote and forgotten corners, you find illegally-staying-on Bangladeshi hawkers littering pavements like discarded confetti. In one of the world's most culturally alive cities, the disowned migrant exists in a closed-out corner where neither tourist cameras nor the long arm of law can reach. The law knows they are there, but doesnt bother too much: the big city feeds on their horribly underpaid services for peddling its time-machine-ness.
But then there are the smart ones too: we come across one such, a Pakistani Big Boss who runs an umbrella store in one of the streets leading to Roma Centrale. Almost all of them under his employ are fellow Asians and living on in Rome illegally as unlike other European cities, the policia here leaves them alone. Every morning, they fan out across the city, selling everything from umbrellas to salted acorns, returning home at night to the memories of families that exist in an unreachable corner of the world.
You search in vain for their smiles, but find instead only the dark misery of a bottomless cavity.

Um...Hmmm...a blogger's block and why I am running out of excuses

2006-11-10T10:22:00.000-08:00

Yes, and a reason why I am unable to sustain the initial momentum I started out with on this blog.
To blog or not, is a question that every blogger has to grapple with sooner or later. I guess mine is now.
My blogger's block is growing by the moment and believe me, it aint no fun to see others racing ahead.
I guess it happens to most of us most of the time. In my case, just put it down to a whole U-turn my life took in a short span of just six months....a new responsibility, a new person in my life, a whole new role which I try my darnedst to make sense of.
Will be back soon (though no one seems to be missing me as yet--sigh!) with a bigger, better, brighter me. And knowing me, soon may just as well be tomorrow!
I sign off, for the moment, in peace.

Home is where etc, etc: A Srirangam story

2006-07-04T20:10:00.000-07:00

Went home after what seems like an eternity. Went to Srirangam. A place I hold so close to my heart that it has withstood all my bravura about being a failed atheist.
Never knew a homecoming would turn out to be a soul-therapy. All it needed was for me to take one look at the steamily dirty Cauvery to get this all's-well-with-the-world-and-god's-in-his-heaven kinda feel. Human floatsam and jetsam can never ever sully a great river. And she is the greatest there ever was...
Be that as it may, it is the town itself that gives me this time-machine experience every time I set foot there. True, one sees the same semi-cartoonish vertical vertigo that every little town goes through: where there were once sprawling naalu-adukku houses complete with a mitham, thinnai, vennir-ul and saami-room, all you now have are ugly pigeon holed apartments.
The real surprise of the town, however, lies protected in the womb of the temple, inside a small shrine near the sanctum sanctorum, around the magical-realist legend of Surathani, the daughter of Sultan Malik Kafur (1310-1311 AD) of Delhi.
Without sounding docu-drama-ish, the legend of Surathani (or Bibi Nachiyar as she is known) is perhaps one of the best examples of `secularism' (oh, that awfully-bandied, vilely-abused word!) that is cast in stone in what is considered to be the foremost Vaishnavite shrine in the country.
In a nutshell: when Kafur's men invaded Srirangam, they raided the ancient temple and carried with them the idol of the main deity--Ranganatha--as war keepsake to Delhi. So entranced was Surathani by the beauty of the idol that she refused to part with it. Following an appeal by devotees, Kafur decided to return the idol to Srirangam, but had not reckoned with his daughter who followed the idol all the way down south. Upon arrival, she prostrated before the sanctum sanctorum and died almost immediately. Till today, she retains her Muslim identity in an all-Vaishnavite temple and accepts only rotis as prasadam.
Not that the legend--or what we know of it today--is blemish-free.
But then what is a legend without some leeway?
A few years back, when I recited this legend to a gender studies researcher from the University of Pennsylvania--who had come down all the way to Tamil Nadu to do, of all things, a research piece on Avvayar--she chortled: ``Sub-ordination of the feminine! An extension of the Andal, Meera, Radha etc, etc concepts to a Muslim princess to prove the superiority of a male Hindu god.'' Hunh?
Maybe the Surathani legend was a construct of patriarchy, maybe the princess herself would have been none too happy to be thought of as a dim-witted, obsessed thulakachi.
But, the legend doesnt end there: thinking his daughter had been done to death by the devotees, an enraged Kafur once again ordered the invasion of the temple and what followed was perhaps the bloodiest period in the temple's history: the deity himself had to go underground, the temple was shut up and 13,000 devotees died in protecting the temple from the invaders. For nearly six generations, only a ghostly sliver of glory.
Sounds familiar, doesnt it, this vengeance-is-mine twist to the tale?
Whatever, when all else has been reduced to rubble and dust, legends will still rule the world and perhaps the princess will have the last laugh...

Stung by the camera

2006-05-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

Even at the best of times, am no admirer of kamikaze-style television journalism, having seen at disgustingly close quarters the near-cannibalism of some members of this tribe. If you have ever seen a chirpy young, brilliant-smile-in-place teevee anchor ad lib her piece into the camera minutes after she has tried, in vain, to grab a `byte' from a mother who has just buried the bloated corpse of her child with her own hands, then you too would know what I mean.
Am speaking of post-tsunami Nagapattinam and have no intention of sounding holier-than-thou. You've gotta been there, is all I can say.

It needed Times Now TV's Dhanya Rajendran to change that perception. It needed her kind of guts, presence of mind and sensitivity to try and crack the web of nepotism and cheapstaking that one of the oldest universities in the country seems to have fallen prey to.
Where others where thrusting cameras through bedroom keyholes, DR dared to turn it on to an issue that involved the future of lakhs of students.
Not that the varsity suffered a major shake-up after this. If anything, the wheeling-dealing seems to have only gone underground and more acrimonious. The behemoth bungles on.
But then, in the likes of Dhanya rests the future of teevee journalism. And I have never felt prouder in calling anybody `friend' than I do her.
Her stunner may not have created the kind of ripples that one would legitimately expect it to: had this been, say, the Delhi University or even a third-rung north Indian university, then hell-breaking-loose would have sounded quite mild. Despite a high-level DVAC probe and two
employees in the slammer, Dhanya's painstaking work seems not to have made it to the big league yet.
All the more is the pity. But then, she's still around...

Does getting hate mail mean....

2006-05-04T19:45:00.000-07:00

...you have arrived? If so, then friends, fellow-bloggers and all ye those who have cared to stop by in the past few months since I stumbled onto the infinitesmous blogosphere: ergo, yours truly is truly here and how!
A particular gent (why am I so sure it is a gent? I simply know, that's all) seems to have been so comprehensively offended by my post on Kushboo and the moral police that he has been shaken and stirred enough to fill my comment box with spite-posts at regular intervals. And he seems to have inspired a couple of others too--or is it him doing the Anniyan-thing?

Have never really believed in comment moderation on a blog but the venom and gross savagery in those posts has pushed me into doing something I intensely dislike. Would like to know of any other such experiences. Quo vadis?

In my thirties and loving it...

2006-03-16T07:07:00.000-08:00

Dunno if it is my presence that is causing them to behave this way but at least thrice in the last weeks, different sets of individuals on different occasions have wondered aloud if there was life in the thirties.
It is almost as if just by crossing the thirties threshold you have somehow abdicated your right to enjoy life. He may be just about pushing thirty, but friend and colleague Sudhish Kamath has this hangdog expression on when he sighs: ``Just eleven months to go...''. If you didnt know him better, you would have thought he was syndicating his own epitaph.
And then there is this friendly neighbourhood Anupam Kher-type upon whom I tripped one day during my morning jog. Still think it was his irritation at the way I outran him every time he tried to get in my way but he simply had to have this parting shot: ``You are thirty plus now, in a few years you will become like me (shudder! shudder!) and then you will know...''
Still again, there was this saturnine blop across the face of a fellow swimmer when she learnt I was thirty plus (somehow, me thinks, it is this plus thing that makes it even more rib-crunching) and still single: ``I am two years younger than you and my daughter is already in Std. II. What have you done with your life?'' she asked, trying to out-Hagar me.
My life, eh?
And thankfully, I am in good company: even super-successful Shashi Tharoor has had to console his fiftying genes by telling himself, ``Fifty is the new forty.'' And where does that leave me on a comparative scale?
Arundhati Roy understood when she said, ``Thirty is a viable, dieable age.''
Honestly, what is wrong with thirty? Me thinks the number has this beautiful pebble-smooth roundness about it, and suits my Meanwhile personality just fine: I can safely let myself be turned on by both Dustin Hoffman and Aggie Goldsmith.
And you dont have to worry about whether twenty is too early or forty is too late: the thirties offers you a range of possibilities for a range of things, don't ask me what.
What thinks you, reader? Wanna bet on thirties?

We are like this only...

2006-02-27T21:35:00.000-08:00

I reproduce here, without comment, an unparalleled collection of gems which friend and fellow blogger, Mehul Kamdar, has sent in. Have to wonder, though, if anybody has ever put forward something similar in Yankee-ish:

This is a collection of leave letters and applications written by people in various places of India ...
1. At Infosys, Bangalore, an employee applied for leave as follows:
Since I have to go to my village to sell my land along with my wife, please sanction me one-week leave.

2. This is from Oracle Bangalore, from an employee who was performing the "mundan" ceremony of his 10 year old son:

"as I want to shave my son's head, please leave me for two days.."

3. Another gem from CDACLeave-letter from an employee who was performing his daughter's wedding:

``As I am marrying my daughter, please grant a week's leave.."

4.From H.A.L. Administration dept:

As my mother-in-law has expired and I am only one responsible for it, please grant me 10 days leave."

5. Another employee of HLL applied for half day leave as follows:

:"Since I've to go to the cremation ground at 10 o-clock and I may not return, please grant me half day casual leave"

6. A leave letter to Mindtree Consulting:

"I am suffering from fever, please declare one day holiday."

7. A leave letter to a headmaster:

"As I am studying in this school I am suffering from headache. I request you to leave me today"

8. Another leave letter written to another headmaster:

"As my headache is paining, please grant me leave for the day."

9. Covering note with a resume to a shipping company:

"I am enclosed herewith..."

10. Another one:

"Dear Sir: with reference to the above, please refer to my below..."

11. Actual letter written for application of leave at Ranbaxy

"My wife is suffering from sickness and as I am her only husband at home I may be granted leave".

12. Letter writing:

-"I am in well here and hope you are also in the same well."

13. A candidate's job application:"

This has reference to your advertisement calling for a ' Typist and an Accountant - Male or Female'...As I am both for the past several years and I can handle both with good experience, I am applying for the post.

Whatever, I still think any of Mehul's contributions pale before this one:Leave letter from student to teacher: ``Dear Madam, as my grandmother is suffering from romantic pains and my grandfather is no more, I have to take care of her. So, please grant me, etc. etc," Yes, you guessed right: the leave-seeker was of course speaking of granny's creaking joints: rheumatic!!!

Meanwhile....a reader's choice

2006-02-25T02:47:00.000-08:00

A reader who says he stops by my blog every now and then has taken offence to my use of the m* word in one of my posts. The word does not need to be stated explicitly in that context when the word `self-pleasuring' would have served the purpose equally well, he says. ``Unless you want to go in for mere shock-value, I suggest you use the more tactful word,'' he says and has even threatened to stop reading my blog if I persist.
Since this is a very embryonic blog---only 368 hits in nearly three months, my merciless clicks counter tells me--that can't afford to lose any of its readers for now, I bow in deference and the word stands immediately replaced....

A V day story

2006-02-14T22:18:00.000-08:00

Under normal circumstances, I wouldnt have been caught dead blogging a V-day story (which is why, just to save face, I am doing this a day after).

But stranger things have been happening to me these past few weeks that make me wonder if....

Does love begin with a Chinese nose job? Or does being the world's most cantankerous millionaire also make women want to fall suicidally in love with you? I wouldnt have bothered to find out for I believe The Bard wasnt too far off the mark when he made the sanguine Prince of Denmark famously say, ``There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.''

So it was when I found my cynical edge getting blunted when a friend told me about another friend whose friend (well, you get the picture) had just been through this extra-ordinarily ordinary love story....

It all began (where else?) in a chat room where A accidentally stumbled upon C (an aspiring documentary film-maker) who was pouring his heart out about how his (self-confessedly) brilliant film on teen pregnancies was languishing for want of takers. They got talking, day after day, for nearly a whole year, without either exchanging mobile numbers or photos.

According to C, it was the singular most beautiful experience he had ever been through in his lonely 28-years and anonymity must have guaranteed a certain degree of intimacy. Very soon, he would spend the whole day in anticipation of the golden hour--5.30 p.m.--when A. would log in.

During the year, they may have even passed by each other in the market/bus stand/theatre (in true Tamil film fashion) but they would never know.

Then one day, they suddenly met. No lengthy preambles, no `shall I, shant I' fundas, just a simple `okay, lets meet.'

Now, after it is all over, C. wishes he had never suggested that: at least the beautiful fiction would have been alive.

Surprisingly for two people who had connected at the most psychic level online, the first meeting was a pathetic joke. They could never look at each other nor even know what to say to each other. So, an hour and three Cokes later, they decided to go back to where they were most comfortable with--the chat room--only to find that the magic was somehow missing.

Three months later, A. married. Two weeks after, they got back online and suddenly everything was as before. Last heard, C. is deliriously blissful: he may have lost the reality stakes but his luminescent illusion is alive.

When I heard this story first, I thought my friend was making it up. `Cyber adultery,' I remarked flippantly. But then one silent night, as I was driving back home, it occurred to me that I dont actually have to believe it. This story doesnt require a value addition in the form of third-party validation.

I dont have to meet either A. or C. to know if the story is true. In the end, it is a damn good story and that is all there is to it: a tale of bonding that has earned its right to exist due to its own sweet implausibility.

It's a woman thing

2006-01-17T06:35:00.000-08:00

Never thought I would end up having to defend being both a woman and a cellphone user. It took a--till now unidentified--reader of my reports on the cellphone ban imposed by Anna University to educate me on why the VC is so evangelical about banishing those pesky little gadgets from anywhere near his vicinity.
Seems now like it is all about being female: A R Rahman wasn't too far off the mark with his number in the movie Indian, me thinks.
Beats Mata Hari any day, doesn't it, this slinky little seductress that snuggles so suggestively in the small of your palm?
Small wonder then that the VC wants all such feminine wiles out of his jurisdiction. Not for nothing did he put cellphones and female attire on the same footing when he, Canute-like, pronounced his diktat...
Makes sense also as to why he would have his men go on a midnight raid in university hostels...
As for me, I sent back my well-meaning reader a one-word reply that simply said `Aargh!'
So then, brace yourself for the Eve-ing of technology.

Help! An identity crisis....

2006-01-14T21:10:00.000-08:00

This blog has trouble figuring out what it wants to be. Two months ago, it wanted to be a personal journal, kinda tell people about what it meant to be me, about where I went, who I saw,what I had for breakfast, about whether I preferred sundal-on-the-beach to coffee-at-Amethyst.In short, whether to tell the world how simply wonderful it was to be a journalist... In retrospect, all I can say now is OUCH!
I mean, who the hell cares? After all, it is not as if, simply by being a journalist, you get to wear a kind of magic spectacles that lets you see things in three/four/five-D when the rest of the lesser-evolved world has to stick to its broken fragments of looking glass. Sure, people still do think it is glamourous to be a journalist: I can tell by a certain look in people's eyes that, even when they are speaking to poor, sandpaper-skinned me, they are thinking Salam Pax. They imagine you get to go to exotic places all the time (with some poor infructuous schmuck footing all your bills), dine with the best, break bread with the powerful...in short, be all the things which their reading of John Grisham tells them journalists are. If only they knew...
Much as I wanted to, I figured I would wait a little more to let my blog be something of a kiss`n tell smorgasboard .
Then, I thought it could be made into a find-me-if-you-can Hyde Park kind of thing: you know, make it into a bulletin board for sounding off on everything that is going wrong but shouldn't.
Finally, it got to a point where my pomposity became too difficult for even me to swallow and so the idea died a deserved death...
Then someone suggested I make into a lonely hearts meeting point, where people could get together and just crib about why they never found better wives/husbands/bosses/dogs...
And I simply said, ugh...dunno if want to end up playing Freud everytime I logged in.

And so, finally, here we are...deciding where we want to get. May take me a couple of
days to make up my mind. But when we Scorpios finally do, we are pretty gung-ho about it.
Meanwhile, I am leaving you in much better company than mine....
Hearken to Calvin and Hobbes, ye folks, and ye shall never be alone...

Singapore soliloquies

2005-12-16T05:42:00.001-08:00

City of lights....and what lies beneath

Me back after a long absence. I know this may sound like I am boasting, but I have been zipping around (boy, does that sound good!) quite a lot and, I must admit, seemed to have lost the steam I started out with when I got blogging for the first time.
However, a couple of things happened (of which, more later) which have made me keen to get back on.
So, here goes.
First things first. Singapore (from where I got back a few days ago) is not a city I expected too much from
when I got a chance to jazz down there. My earliest memories of the city (``We are an island-nation-city-State'', my tour guide Carol informs me) were from the movie Ninaithalae Inikkum (in which a horribly bell-bottomed Rajinikanth tries to help a pathetically-mustachioed Kamal Hassan woo a short-haired and snappy Jayaprada in all the ways a woman would not want to be wooed) and that is saying much. A few years back, one of my neighbours showed me a woe-begone letter from a relative in Singapore which spoke of a pauper's life in Midas land. So, to cut a long story short, I was prepared to pick holes even before I set foot.
Singapore did not disappoint. It was everything I always thought it would be. Much too organised, much too governed, much too muchness of everything. Our car effortlessly touched 100 plus on the
superbly oiled roads, the cars were the gleamiest ever you would find, the buildings an architectural symphony of cement, concrete, steel and glass, glass, glass....
But then where are the people? In this city, touted to be Asia's richest and most futuristic, the buildings clearly have been allowed to overtake humans. Inside the befuddlingly vast shopping spaces on Orchard Road, for example, you try to look among the slim-waisted, hi-haute women to search for somebody with whom you could bookmark your memories of the city.
And then you find her....thirty-eight-year-old Valsamma, tightly-oiled bun, dirty saree hem peeping out of a fast food counter overall, silently and devoutly wrapping up tacos for Chanel-scented women who would have cared nought had they known that the Nagercoil native has been working here for nearly three years, earning a measly Rs 10,000 a month (of which Rs 4,000 goes for rent for a one-room apartment she is sharing with a Malaysian coolie), hoping to whip up enough to put her twelve-year-old daughter (growing up with grandparents back home) through medical school a few sweaty years later...
Singapore could not care less. It wouldn't want you to know the Valsammas existed, though. Every effort has been made to ensure that visitors breathed in opulence and breathed out the electronic baubles that choke the shelves of Mustafa's.
To know more, you would have to visit, what else, Little India. Finally, here I breathed free, surrounded by the sights, smells, sound and the utter (dearly loved, dearly missed) chaos. Serangoon Road is serendipity indeed, a nucleus of the promise that Singapore holds for the thousands of Vasus, Christophers, Shantis and Serenas....
Suddenly, it all makes sense. At the Night Safari, chef Mohammed (who worked for three years at Hotel President, Chennai) rustles up a quick vegetarian meal for me when he is told I am hesitant to choose anything from the 67-course buffet as I do not know what went into which...The hotel I am staying in takes special pains to ensure a copy of the overseas edition of The Hindu is delivered to my room every morning...Ricky, our driver, smiles when I tell him my car would crumble if ever I tried to top 60 plus on Chennai roads and says, ``But I am sure that has made you appreciate life more than I do...''Little acts of kindness from totally unexpected quarters....a city is after all, what its people make of it.
At Sentosa Island, after a high-decibel teen beach party, I try to make eye-contact with a Tamil-looking conservancy worker (his name badge simply identifies him as Cleaner 1) who is picking the litter off the sands where the rich kids have tossed them. He avoids looking at me, as if just by doing so, he could keep himself out of trouble's way. Does he have an ailing mother, alcoholic father, unwed sister back home who are depending on the few dolllars he earns cleaning up trash on a distant land?
I would never know.
I remember how, a few years back, I stood entranced when a blues musician strummed away on a guitar on a Toronto sidewalk. After five minutes of goosebump-inducing music, he held out his tattered hat and said, ``A few cents, please?'' There was such cool poise--SUCH DIGNITY-- in his voice. He was not asking for alms, but payment for services rendered. A great city is made out of the pride it makes its lowliest feel.
Will Valsamma ever be able to wrap her tacos with the same pride? I would never know. I never stayed long enough to find out.

Sex and the city: Part I

2005-11-24T09:03:00.000-08:00

Chennai, it seems, has suddenly become the most preferred destination for journalists from all over the country. In the last one year or so, this has become a very sex-y city indeed. Add to it a liberal a la carte' of filmy glamour and there is pretty much nothing else you will need. Your soaring circulation figures will tell the rest of the story. Little surprise then that tabloid journalism has well and truly arrived in the city.
First came the Sankaracharya story--a more perfect potboiler one could not have asked for--with its
cornucopia of religion, sex, films, murder and revenge. A journalist friend who had come down from New Delhi could not stop rubbing his hands in glee: ``This should keep us going for at least six more months.
Till now, the south (India) has been having too good a press while Mumbai and New Delhi earned the reputation of naughty metros. Time you got your due!''
Not that we did not have this do-you-know-who-did-it-and-how-with-whom style of reporting earlier. A magazine like Kumudham, for example, combined patches of serious reporting with kiss-`n-tell stuff. However, with the arrival of the eveninger Tamil Murasu on the scene, even that fig-leaf has been whisked away.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that in two out of the three instances of moral policing that have rocked the city in the past few months, the daily has played an agenda-setting role. In the Kushboo case, it initially lost the initiative to India Today and Thina Thanthi but made sure it caught up resoundingly.
In the Park case, it virtually taunted the police into raiding the hotel with its `What are you going to do now, Mr.Commissioner?" poser. So it was that Kushboo ended up skewered on the crosswires of an unholy, even cannibalesque, media feeding frenzy.
Be that as it may, is Chennai `having its due', as my journalist friend put it? In a city which is home to the world's most hang-it-all-out film industry, is sex-talk suddenly getting more open ( with all this talk of pre-marital sex/virginity/AIDS control/safe sex, if you block out the context, you could easily believe yourself to be in Bangkok and not in thayir sadham/filter kapi-loving Madras-going-on-Chennai)?
And what about this incestuous link between the `new morality' (which, the NDTV informs us, is what has taken over Chennai) and that insidious western import, keyhole journalism?
Even as I write this, Tamil Murasu has outdone itself this evening: in its latest caught-on-camera act, it has a woman journalist posing as a customer to nab a male prostitute (``I like rubbing bodies'', he says in a video clipping aired on Sun TV). The stated motto: to show that male prostitution is alive and well in Chennai. What you saw on the screen: the prominently displayed video-grab of the website offering male prostitutes (in case you did not want to miss the name).
What we read: women are asking for it these days (remember the ``Is this gender equality?'' poser which accompanied the daily's photograph of a lip-locked couple at the Park Hotel?). Tag to this the Anna University Vice Chancellor's quip that ``inappropriately'' dressed women are a threat to campus peace and
the vexatious petitions in various legal fora against Kushboo (one even said the petitioner had lost his mental peace because of her and that she was a threat to law and order) and what you see is not a city that is newly discovering its under-the-bedcovers identity but a schizophrenic metropolis torn between its wanting-to-go-global avant gardeism and a tortured socio-political legacy which preaches the one-man-one-woman ad-wobble foisted by polygamous male political leaders.
And so, more sex please, we're Tamils....

Oops, that S word again!

2005-11-20T12:56:00.000-08:00

Suddenly, everybody is talking sex in Tamil Nadu. Whichever place you go, there seems to be no escape from the humongously under-rated S word. More than a month after actor Kushboo unwittingly (?) rode the tiger, it is as if people cannot stop talking about whether or not PMS (pre-marital sex!! no punning intended) is part of Tamil culture.
Ironical indeed, coming from a population which has been almost single-handedly raised on a staple diet of bawdiliciously lewd Kollywood lyrics which foregrounded PMS in all its
here-today, gone-tomorrow suggestiveness. Remember *Kalyaanandhan kattikittu odi polaama's' `thaaliayadhaan kattikittu pethukalaama, illa pillai kutti pethukittu kattikalaama'? (For the uninitiated, this translates something like `shall we tie the knot before begetting children or shall we beget children before...well, you get the picture). Now, go beat that in the PMS stakes! And to think that this was the song on every Kandasamy, Munusamy and Palanisamy's lips till not long ago...
Well, what has gone wrong...(or is it right)? Just this: sex sells and nothing sells like sex.
And more so, when a woman is caught at the wrong end of this bottomline. It WOULD be interesting, wouldn't it, to see how the circulation figures of those vernacular dailies which spearheaded this new talkathon changed in those days they published the latest episode of the burn-Kushboo-at-the-stakes soap opera.
I should also tell you perhaps of the double whammy I have been facing ever since this thing surfaced. People think just because you are a woman journalist, they can ask you questions they would not have dared ask another woman. They expect you to
have too thick a hide that you are supposed to answer even the most supercilious questions with a smile (``You ask others uncomfortable questions...what's with you when you are faced with some yourself?'')
A few days back, I received this rather interesting series of SMS-es from a male journo who-- don't hold your breath--belongs to the liberal Left. ``What is your stand on the Kushboo issue?,'' the first one wanted to know. Too tired by then of having repeated the answer ad nauseum over the past few days, I nevertheless messaged back. The next one was more direct: ``Do you approve of PMS?'' Another reply sent. Then came the bouncer:
``Would you do it yourself?'' Oh, well?
So, that's it folks....so much for this libertarianarism. All it means is this: a woman is nothing but the sum total of her sexuality. As long as she is perceived to be liberated, she is game for anything and you can hit her where it hurts most. She asked for it, didn't she, so don't leave her alone, just spear her till she moans in pain. Then put her on show and watch the audience self-pleasure itself and climax.
In the end it is all about communal self-pleasuring....

To begin with....

2005-11-20T08:50:00.000-08:00

Never imagined I would get into this as quickly as I seem to have done. Where do I start? How do I go on? In a littany of voices, how I do raise mine loud enough to be heard? One thing though...they forgot to put in a `stop' button when they made me. So, here I am, in a corner of my own, trying to collapse the world into a single illuminated computer screen, revving up for something which I am yet to snatch on to, but terribly, wonderously, Potteresquely, excited...