Life-en-treats

Just through with Black Water (1992) by Joyce Carol Oates. A novel of about 150 pages, that is also a serious critical comment on US politics and life. The novel was very refreshing after some of the recent fiction I had read, and I found myself wondering exactly what was refreshing about it, apart from of course the style of writing that held suspense, by going into the past, through repetition and so on. Perhaps what was refreshing was that the Senator (in this novel with whom a 26 year old girl drives a car as passenger and is drowned to death because of his drunk-driving) simply replaces the grey of recent novels to actual black! The Senator does not dive back into the water to his submerged car where Kelly (the 26 year old) is stuck, because he cannot bring himself to swim about in the dirty sewage water. Later of course, he would tell everyone that it was the girl who was drunk-driving and it takes him 40 minutes or more to call for help on the deserted road of an island, thro

This time during my stay in Bangalore for four months, I noticed a lots of things about Bangalore that were changing. Growing intolerance, judgemental attitudes, ultra-moderness, stricter assertion of the institution of the family, stronger sex segregation, moral policing by the khaki and much more. Part of me wants to label some of these things, even if in mild proportion, as Bangalore's first serious response not only to westernization, but to modernity and colonialism as well. The Bangalore I know was one that was very tolerant towards differences, along with being strict on discipline and personal values. It is a city that never needed rules about alcohol consumption, a very strict social abomination was present for anyone who exceeded the limits. But finally, people would just say its his/her own problem, what can we do? A kind of non-interference policy. In the public spaces, nobody looked or stared at anybody too much. The attitude of indifference and safe distance had ad

Just finished reading Toni Morrison's Love. Didn't like it as much as I liked The Bluest Eye and The Beloved . It could have been better written. Especially the last parts. I wonder if the person who wrote the blurb read the novel accurately! Towards the end, I just couldn't figure who or what was with Celestial Cosey! I liked the way the novel stored up its twists till the end, when finally the reader is told of the 53 year old man marrying the 11 year old girl! The pent-up denial of the common suffering that all the women go through, while consistently ignoring the man's faults completely, is beautifully truthfully portrayed. It opens up an unexplored ethical universe. There lingers some dissatisfaction in the reader that the authorial voice, both in the form of L's voice and otherwise too, would not punish Bill Cosey enough. But when you think about, the character's (L's) action, the action has indeed been strong --she has killed Bill Cosey. L's voi

Had never imagined that I would write this piece of writing that I am writing here today. My friend Leo, died. I have been trying to find out how and what happened...nobody seems to know and I have few common connections here in Lyon to find out more. But everybody, just everybody who knows he passed away has been upset. Terribly. I thought Leo very handsome (even those pictures in a friend's obituary demonstrate just that)...don't remember now if I told him that when he was alive though. The things we do and the way we live always eludes an acknowledgment of death...it’s the greatest of mysteries how we manage that, really. My friend Leo had worked for a long time in support of victims of sexual harassment and incest. Voluntary work, all of it! He had just finished defending his PhD, and that had gone great (I was in India then). He had a star supervisor. Apart from the volunteering and PhD, Leo worked as a translator and had translated for me the abstract I had to write

The many libraries I have visited in Lyon, France, revealed that the French (read Europeans), despite all their cartographic craze, do not know where the "East" is. In some libraries, its the Middle-East and then in others it is shelves after shelves of the 'Orient'. At other times it is simply only China and Japan. The shelf on Eastern Philosophy did not have a single Indian text, can you believe that? Do they think we never produced any philosophy, any systematic thought? Shelves marked Indian Literature possessed Arundhati Roy to Salman Rushdie and V S Naipaul! Rushdie, of all people, who resisted the 'commonwealth literature' category vehemently kind of squirms on that shelf. Europeans to this day consume literature and other objects from Asia like they were exotic stuff! It makes for a good reading on the metro, eh? Or perhaps, to sigh a the rich man's sigh and say--"'they' have more authentic lives, ours are empty!" In any case,

A recent short-lived tryst with the Bharat Matrimony website revealed, that while Male members had filled in information about their salary, women hadn't...they probably thought that it would be unimportant and indecent even! If you were on the look-out, by any chance, for a decent chap with or without a PhD...you would realize very soon that, none of the these men want a wife with a PhD. On Partner preference, Education always says: Any.

Yes, the quest to know what love is has always been there. When asked once, a friend simply replied, "that which is there between you and I", bowling me over. But that was a time when arguments were required for everything, such answers and experiences did not matter--I mean I was young and stupid! To be cynical of love was to be 'a decent person' in those times--that was somehow the moral spectrum of a young teen. Only now, as reasoning dominates my quest for arguments, do I realize, that we (my friends and I) were being critical of the love de Bollywood-style . Surely, we did love our parents then, as we do now. So what love were so puzzled about... The Bollywood-style love may have been the harbinger of modernity in India and may have benevolently bestowed upon us, some individualism along with importing some boredom from the western life-world. But its day is done. Today, we are able to look at both Bollywood films and its version of love far more critically

When we were school-going kids, friends would ask us to fold our hands and open our palms. The idea was that if you held your palms side by side and the two arches on your palm flowed in a connected way from one palm to the other, you would go to a coveted 'foreign' land. Mine would at times connect and at others would not. Those whose didn't struggled to make it work, while others busily boasted and showed-off. These lines are actually called the heart lines in palmistry...God, who teaches school kids these things! And it seems to have been doing the rounds in not just my school but a number of others too! The other thing we were told about was about love marriages. And these ideas were carried on from one classroom within the school to another more faithfully than any tradition would ever be! According to this one, if the lines off one palm met with the other, yours would be a love-marriage. Everyone wanted a love marriage and yet didn't want to upset their parents