On a busy street..

The street was painted with the myriad hues of a typical Anand Nagar evening, stalls spilled on both sides as vehicles sped through the bustling street with little space left for shoppers, pedestrians and passers-by. The ice-candy seller doled out handfuls of crushed ice pressed on sticks, and poured coloured syrup before handing them to little, eager hands. Green-grocers shouted out names of fruits and vegetables and threw them into open baskets for customers to pick and they haggled endlessly. Dogs kept themselves busy eating whatever they found around; while lazy cattle chewed the cud and plonked in oblivion. Monkeys waited on tree-tops seeking something to grab and diving at the reachable. Children sat on Ferris wheels and their screams intermingled with the fading bars of the October sunlight. One navigated warily through the street as the entire city flocked to Anand Nagar, the street-shopper’s paradise.

WHERE ARE WE NOW? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

The rule does not go away. Not too often. When we say it, they leer and jeer. They then go and break it.

The city is the way it is. And we do not say a word.

It is the way things work here. The bus man, the porter and auto man will tell you. The lady next door, who makes extra cake for you, will say. The guard, the bhaiyya, the bai, the dhobi, and the man in the lift; they are the city.

Was it like this before? No one knows. But this is how we are now.

This is how it will be for some more time. My city is tied to these million men. It does not know if it should march ahead.

It belongs to those in the high rise flat and to those in the slum. It will not be able to take more men.

It is in a race, a chase to be on top. It grows like a giant tree, with needy plants on its bark. It gives in to the men who come and go and stands what they do to it. It does not know where to go.

The Middle East Crisis: A way forward?

After the exchange of sparring words between Israel and Palestine at the United Nations Security Council, the Middle East peace process has reached a stalemate. In this last open debate on the Middle East before the opening of the next UN General Assembly, it was concluded that tensions were sure to escalate even more as September approached.

UN Special Coordinator Robert Serry said, “The Palestinian Authority has, in key areas, reached a level of institutional performance sufficient for a functioning state. The Palestinian Authority is ready to assume the responsibilities of statehood at any point in the near future,” referring to the recent security and economic gains in certain areas of Palestinian territory.

But Israel seems to have an anti-peace agenda with its continued building of settlements, attacks in Gaza and mistreatment of prisoners in what seems to be clear sabotage of the entire peace building process.

The West Bank killings of April 2011 sent shock waves across Israel. While some Palestinians still continue to believe in the non-violent approach, the Palestinian Authority (PA) President, Mahmoud Abbas, preaches nonviolence. PA security forces coordinate discreetly with Israeli authorities to suppress attacks. But Netanyahu found grounds to blame the Palestinian Authority, repeatedly calling on Abbas to cease "incitement" against Israel. Dmitry Dliani of the Fatah Revolutionary Council was quoted as calling the West Bank settlements "a massacre of the entire Palestinian nation" that "destroys the remaining hopes for peace."

The 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention regarding occupied territories to the case of the West Bank and Gaza Strip “is based on the assumption that there had been a sovereign who was ousted and that he had been a legitimate sovereign." In this case that would be the Jordanians who occupied the land through illegal warfare and subsequently relinquished all claims to the land. But there are no borders here. The land is still “in dispute” while we wait for the Armistice lines to be turned into “borders” through negotiations.

The endurance levels of Palestine have been high. Repeated Israeli occupation has resulted in Palestine habitants sans all civil rights. Their inability to live a life of fair and equal rights and justice in their own land has continued since the 1930s. Looking from behind a Palestinian’s back, almost the entire legion of Palestinian refugees has been excluded from the so-called negotiations. In the 44 years since, the geography has not changed but the threats have been rising.

Nevertheless, Palestine continues its attempts to restore peace with the normal characteristics of a state which according to it is the perfect set-up for the restoration of security. It cries for a border independent of Israeli occupation. The Oslo process that started off in 1993 has now deepened Israeli segregationist ideologies and policies. The strengthening of security amidst the Palestinian population as well as its geographical fragmentation are hence completely justified.

Binyamin Netanyahu of “Middle East's only democracy” uses the concept of "defensible borders" to justify Israel’s continued occupation of Palestine while staying adamant that a peace deal premised on returning to Israel’s pre-1967 borders poses substantial risk to its security. “Peace Negotiations” through the years, with the intervention of either the United States or the other European Union have always been rendered more or less null and void. The US has only contributed complication. A 2002 cartoon in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the Palestinian Authority official daily, showed blindfolded George Bush aiming missiles indiscriminately at a dartboard covered with the names of Arab states. It is only acceptable that the intervention of the United States is just one of their several moves that result in distortion and a painful low-intensity war. What constantly remains dubious is how Israel intends to carry its so-called resolutions forward if it is only prepared to look the American way.

The situation calls for some enlightened decision-making. The two-nation solution looks like the most plausible way in which a way out of this debacle of political failure can be found. Palestine should resolve its internal turmoil. Peace must be restored as all Palestinians living in Gaza, West Bank, those living in Israel and those in exile have a common future to look forward to.

Israel, Palestine and Jordan coming together for a peace deal would spell resolution. This would ensure security for the vulnerable Palestine-Israel borders, with a secure, Jewish state of Israel living side by side in peace and security with an independent, contiguous, and viable state of Palestine in this rapidly changing Middle East.

The journey…
I have left them behind.
Those days had come back in my mind. The floors felt like they would transform the whole world into the world of the past. And I want to talk to someone.
I am caught in the smell of the sheer mundanity of this train and its people. The unclean toilets emanate this terrible stench that is giving some sort of anaesthesia to my senses.
I float.
I feel that I am living in some sort of a reverie out of which I don’t feel like waking up.
Open eyes.
Obscured mind.
Maddening reality.

That same journey…
I am sitting in a train. The bustle of human presence and the smells of nature combine with the mixed moods here in this small box of this world moving on four wheels. I can’t stop smiling thinking of something funny my cousin had told me when we were swinging in our garden about twelve years ago. She had said about this man with horns who came in the afternoons at 3 o’clock, singing, with a huge shoulder bag, and took away small children in this bag if they got too naughty. And they never came back. And that night, I had dreamt of getting kidnapped, and in the rest of the dream I was Sinbad flying with a roc.

And I did not know that I was losing days.

The now…
I thought God existed. I thought he walked around amongst us, he breathed with each one of us, the same number of times. And he was us. But now, I don’t know where he has been buried. He has been buried, they say. And I want to believe them.
I won’t cry.
I will go back to that world. That without Pa. My Pa, who decided to bring me into this world, give me his little finger, protect me in the room called the-embrace-of-his-dark-hairy-arms, scare me with firecrackers, buy me cakes, sign my report card, read the entire newspaper and create a sight of it again and again, so much so that I would remember that sight of him leaning back on the easy-chair in that gray t-shirt even when I’d have developed non-functional sense organs and lost my memory at the age of eighty eight.
He went somewhere, without even telling me that he won’t be coming back. I don’t know where he is; in the ground, or with the planets, or walking aimlessly near some mountain. But this image keeps flashing in my mind like a film-without-sound, in which I see him sitting on a milestone. And I convince myself saying that he is on his way to some other world which he is supposed to reach, which is ’60,000 thoughts’ away from ours. Those priests had told me so.
Unsurmisable imaginations.
Blurry, colourless dreams.
I am still floating.
My knees still feel like iron.
It hurts, this.

Me. My Music.

It has always been a very important part of my life, this ‘Carnatic Music’. I should say it this way- It runs in the family. I don’t know if I owe this development in me, completely to my family. But yes, a part of it I have inherited from my grand old Dad’s and Mom’s, and their grand old parents. The rest of it developed because of my Mom. Not only because she is family(she isn’t into this!), but because of the gazillion times she has tried to put me in a music class, and found me back home, even before she got there. It was long after, that I actually started taking music a little seriously. I owe my Mom this entire world for having given me the opportunity to see this chapter that has opened since then.

It started growing up with me, little by little.

I was about fourteen when I actually started listening to various artistes sing, either on tapes and CD-ROMs, or on the radio. But then again, that wasn’t because I wanted to listen to them. There was music in the house all the time. You could always find songs being played and someone would always be singing along. Except for the time when we were supposed to sleep, music filled the place up. But it took some time to enter my being. It was ‘just some noise’ as I would put it to my Grandfather. To him, it was another one of his five children.

I used to think that going to ‘PAttu class’ (pAttu is the Tamil word for music, and in our context here it means Carnatic music. Yes) compulsorily for an hour every Sunday morning was a colossal waste of time and energy. Still, as me and my mates would come out after the class, we would walk back home singing the songs we sang back there, holding on to our notebooks against our chests with one hand, and clapping the other hand on the thigh putting the ThAlam, which gave a rhythmic pattern to the song. Family functions were a platform to showcase the singing prowess of the children of the family. The evenings were the time all the elders would sit in a group, and make all the children who went to music class every Sunday, sit next to them. I was one of the kids who came under this unlucky lot. Anyway, it was mandatory for each one of us to sing a song. The song was mostly the choice of one of the older people who sat there. And they criticized the performances. But the applause that followed, would set the mood for us, to not take any criticism. And then my taste for this historic genre of music, started to actualize. Still, there was music in the house all the time. Only that now, I had begun to understand it.

Attending live Carnatic music performances was what completely changed the way I looked at this culture. This whole performing group that sits on the dais has five people, and there seems to be this exchange of thought, clues, cognition, and music between them, all via subtle and compendiary eye-contacts. The ensemble of musicians consists of a vocalist, a person playing the primary instrument (violin or veena), a drone instrument (tambura, it gives pitch) performer and finally a person playing the rhythm instrument (percussion instruments-mridangam etc.). A typical concert lasts for about 3 hours or a little longer. And they are conducted in community halls or religious centres run by devotees of a particular saint. Most concerts are attended by listeners, free of cost. Various songs are sung, or played if it is an instrumental concert, and every time, it is a new, overwhelming experience. There is no introduction given about the rAgam. So finding out the rAgam after listening to the performer sing a general piece, which is basically formed by his/her imagination by combining the various notes the rAgam is constructed of, is one of the main attractions while seeing the virtuoso actually perform in front of your eyes.

Carnatic songs are sung in what are called as the ‘rAgams’. RAgams are melodic patterns. Each song is set to be sung in a particular rAgam, whereas the entire song is controlled by the rhythm given by ‘ThAlam’. ThAlams are regular beats given by the hand on the right thigh. There are about 72 parent rAgams and about 34,766 rAgams that are derived from the parent rAgams. There are 175 types of thAlams.

A live performance is different from listening to recorded music in the fact that here, you hear the music, you see it, and you get to feel it in your skin. The crowd that comes here is variegated in many aspects. There would be children from the age of 10 years, to very old men and women, who would have seen at least a few hundred concerts in all their life, and yet they come here because they know that the experience is going to be new, this time too.

So, it is the music. Everyone enjoys it in the same spirit but it transports and then leaves each one of us in a world of infinite bliss which is entirely our own.

BUS JOURNEYS AND EMOTIONS

An extremely damaged and worn-out foot board, an equally tired driver and an irritated-by-the-mundane-affairs and detached conductor. All this, plus a sitting junta, who throw these expressions ranging from pity to frustration and happiness, looking at the standing junta, for whom right then, right there, getting a seat is the sole purpose of life. All this and much more on a simple routine journey by the city bus irrespective of which part of India you live in and which place. Leaving alone the fact whether it is a village, town or a city, these experiences would be common among the entire fraction of the Indian population that have traveled, and continue to do so, by the great Indian mode of transport-Public buses. All of you will relate to this one thing, this one common race.

Now, the days when you are drained out of all the energy you embraced the day with, in the morning, traveling by the city bus can become very painful and emotionally torturing. That very day, all the unlucky stars in the cosmos, that belong to your horoscope, will look down on you and smile saying a NO to all your desires of having a comfortable seat to sit on, for the journey ahead. You stand there with all the hope (although there is an abyss down the hourglass of hope) that some one will get off soon and you can land your body there. This very magnitude of hope, which if invested in various other realms of life, wouldn’t get wasted this colossally. Anyway, you continue to stand there, sleep wades its way through your senses, and you start thinking about whom you got irritated with, in the college and which lecturer did something funny today to grant you your daily dose of mass-laughter with the rest of the class. Who said something funny, what would Mom say as soon as you enter the house, what food would be waiting for you at the dining table, how you would spend that evening, which song you’ll play and listen to and so on. First, you ran out of energy, then you ran out of hope and now it is the “thoughts’” that should possibly perish, because that is the only entity left.

Thoughts cease to run out. They are always there in abundance in your head and they continue to replenish themselves. Thoughts, nice thoughts, bitter thoughts, happy thoughts, short thoughts, endless thoughts, appalling thoughts, strange thoughts, scary thoughts, dreamy thoughts, beautiful thoughts, disgusting thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts…… And then, clinking of metal. You smell sweat, a day’s accumulated dirt, and Khakis. In a moment, you come out of the sea of thoughts and feel the ground. The conductor asks you where you are heading. End of exchange-cash and a few words. Thoughts have been interrupted. The bus stops and a stream of people rush in, not letting the ones who want to get off, get off. The conductor screams at the top of his voice, but no avail, it is just another human voice that will be killed in the sea of a hundred others. And then you see it- a seat- a short intense surge of bliss. You rush there and catch it. It feels elated.

Then comes the main part of the journey. Outside, you have a view of the other half of the world, that which does not belong to the population that is traveling with you in the bus, the world that belongs to the pedestrians, vendors, general men and women and finally movie posters that survive without purpose, on dilapidated compound walls. The objects near your sight and perish where your eyes taper, after succumbing to a blur. Everything is just the same as it was before. The semblance of the world creates the same air of nonchalance in you, every single day and the journey has to go on anyway. Some of us like to read during this time, while some prefer music, the kind of music that soothes the irregularities in emotions that you undergo over the time. Both these activities, as they will seem to you, tend to have this ability of dissolving the duration of the journey into them, so that you feel as if the entire thing was not a big ordeal at all. Nothing all that trouble-giving has happened just yet, and there is a lot more this life has in store besides insignificant bus journeys and the mood-swing-inductions entwined in them. Then your destination shows up and you feel that you had just started the travel a couple of minutes back. You pack yourself up and bid goodbye to the bus to which you are just another human being, just another one in a hundred thousand that it has carried over the years, with a plethora of ambitions, desires, dissatisfactions and woes. Home at last.

A day will come, and then some, many days. They will come endlessly. And there will be the same buses, bliss, emotions and music.

~~Random Feelings because of a random song~~

It began with the song running round and round in my brain. Green. But now, the symphony has been shattered and…it has flown into a hundred pieces in all directions. Can’t collect the pieces. Don’t want to. Brown. Started off on a beautiful, blissful note with that tune giving comfort and a feeling of peace which I could feel circulating in every part of me. And small emotions come and take their places in the most obscure, undesirable corners, in the vacant rooms of sadness, and spaces where complacence resided only minutes ago. Yellow. So many emotions and thoughts at one single time. Then, there is a point where all of them are put into one slot, confusing themselves, and us, to bits. Pink.