knowledge is not your enemy.

in prayer

bowing
sometimes

not often enough

not nearly enough....

Pocketsongs from Amit Trivedi

Jeybon mein hum raatein liye ghooma karein.

I don't now if it's possible to adequately translate this line into the English language without destroying its essence. All it says is, “We used to roam about carrying the nights in our pockets.” Something about the way it sounds in Hindi. Something about the trace of an unusual metaphor. Any metaphor that contains a pocket in it brings in me the warmest of feelings. It immediately takes me to a place of childhoodness. Something also about Amit. His voice. Yes, a lot about his voice.

Sometimes I want to drown myself in his voice and call that life. All of life. Let that be a song where he never stops singing. And not just any song. But these songs from Udaan. Again and again, let him tell me of how nights filled all his pockets while he roamed the streets.

Sometimes I feel like Amit’s voice is god. You know, here and there, we find for ourselves traces of godliness. Most of the times, godliness visits us so softly, so subtly, in such small portions, in such tiny pockets of insignificance, that we let it slip by, brooding over life, distressed over life, disappointed by life instead, we miss what could have made life otherwise.

And at times, we are just lucky enough to encounter that godliness in something much more tangible, like the voice of this awe inspiring man inside a whole set of songs that you can play again and again, letting godliness envelope you infinitely.

I knew instantly how close it was to my own private sense of godliness—when you hear his voice, especially in these songs, you realize that they’re coming from the gut, not from the throat, not from the nose. They vibrate through his being, and reverberate in mine. It’s not just a voice, it’s this transference of energies. It’s an exchange souls make. I wonder if he’s aware of it. What it does to the people who listen to his voice. I don’t know if he’d be able to cope with knowing the kind of power he has on others.

It’s halfway between a song and a whisper. I don’t know how he managed to steal this kind of brilliance into Indian cinema. It makes my heart weep while jumping with joy. Maybe this is what bathing in the River Ganga does to pilgrims—something about it cleanses my innermost place, which, on its own, likes to remain murky, unclean. I am engulfed by this sense of purity, beauty, oneness. And I am enchanted by the modest and simple source of this kind of genius.

Yes, definitely godliness, if there exists such a thing. Thank you, Amit. My pockets are full of you.


(from the VENT Magazine of 2011...from those good, old times)

my love is

mostly assumption;

partly truth.

when questions have a life of their own

To which afterworld
do feelings
go

when they die?








And which hell do they return from

to haunt like this?

try as we may

What happens to our love when my insecurity meets


your doubt.

Abandonment

A single shelf takes up most of the eastern wall in my room. There was a time when it was tightly packed, radiated something of a military aura. Books standing erect, practicing self-discipline. Now there are gaps, like a wicked grin on an aging man's face. Whatever remains of the books now recline on one another; some tilt towards the left, others towards the right. All intoxicated beasts. A few of the thinner volumes crowd surf atop their friends.

There is a vulgarity about the way the books look at me. A haunted house? No, they don't speak the language of death. Abandonment is the word that most comes to mind. A spillage of half-attempts have made their home in different parts of my 12x14 room. Wobbly towers of different heights decorate what can be called a very messy room. I'm not much of a reader, you see. Just a hoarder.

My self-constructed idea of organised chaos tells me the very tall pile of books next to the shelf are the ones I'd like to read the most. Yoga books, books on poetry – Tagore and Rumi, some Thich Nhat Hanh, a Totto-chan. A smaller pile, hidden beneath a debris of paper, bills, and envelopes, has a Kurt Vonnegut and the diaries of Kafka. And since much of what Vonnegut writes is surreally autobiographical, why not call this the Column of Biographies? The five books on my table, sleeping under a tiny version of The Little Prince, are mostly books on Buddhism and buddhist practices. That's my spiritual reading pile. It's a really neat pile. Doesn't get touched much. At the foot of the bed is my collection of young adult fiction. The latest addition to my burgeoning city of unread books.

One pile – a random assortment that's taken a significant portion on the top of the shelf – is not my doing at all. It is the work of who can perhaps be called the only real reader in our home. There was a time when the contents of that pile would rise steadily. On a daily basis grandfather would pull out a book from the shelf and stack its predecessor atop the pile, making it rise higher. At one point, it became so tall I had to shove half the books back in the shelves below. But remnants of his reading still remain. India After Gandhi. Beat Diabetes Naturally. The BFG.

I continue to be baffled at the obsessive manner with which grandfather would gobble up every single book that came his way. It must have served some kind of need, but I've never met anyone be so dispassionate towards something they invested so much time doing. There is nothing to be said of his sensibilities looking at his indiscriminate encounters with the written word.

I've had weeping fits, sleepless nights, frantic dreams, nightmares, revelations, multiple conversations with friends, often a crazy impulse to write, reply, return the favour to the writer, while reading just some of the same books. But not him. Books had to be read and that was that. He never talked about them afterwards. There were no favourites. Favourite genre. Favourite author. Favourite book. He consumed them with the same steady deliberation with which he would take his diabetes pills. It was the same with the newspaper, the latest edition of the Engineering Association's journal, electronics manuals.

There are only a handful of instances when he has stated that he has not liked a book. From them I can gather that he is not a fan of the Morrisons, the Gordimers (“I don't understand how this woman won a Nobel prize in literature,” - his response upon reading Something Out There.) or the Murakamis of the literary world. Having read a handful of Murakami myself, I can understand his unease with the author. Pages of meandering storytelling that cheats the reader of any tangible conclusion. If I were to pinpoint, that is perhaps the only thing that binds our literary interests. A confusion over what to feel towards this writer called Murakami.

That's little. Maybe I'm trying to hold on to it as a way to subconsciously bond over grandfather beyond familial ties? Being family, by default, means living in the same household with the minimum of intimacies. Faces approached at face value. There is neither occasion nor interest in exploring other possibilities. Families don't sit and reflect on how they relate to each other. I always felt like there must be another side to him though. A side blindspotted by the things I am expected to understand, appreciate about him. Did Murakami help me see him as a person, like myself, independent of the myriad of roles he had to play? It was little, but it was something.

Things have changed now. On the table in the living room lies Gao Xingjiang's Soul Mountain. It's a slightly tattered copy I bought at a secondhand bookstore in Thamel a few years ago. Of course, I haven't read it. That's not what I do with books. I'm a buyer, a hoarder. Not a reader of books.

An airmail envelop, folded in half, serves as a bookmark for the 500 page-long novel. It's been slipped somewhere within the first 100 pages. It's been there for a while. Looks like grandfather isn't going to finish this one.

Elsewhere on the same table lies the real cause of grandfather's divorce with books. In its glossy rectangular casing, the laptop may be touted as modern man's greatest inventions. To me it's nothing more than an electronic contraption that houses all the demons known to destroy humankind. That wretched pandora's box. Modern man's greatest affliction.

It all started with innocent visits to setopati.com. Reading was what he was hungering for, after all. And then Google Chrome gave him access to the world's largest collection of videos. All it took was one click of that seductive red button, one pursuit in the direction of that unwavering white triangle, and he'd fallen into an abyss.

At first, evidence of his visits to YouTube would echo through the whole house. Following the devious breadcrumb trail YouTube laid out with its recommended videos, grandfather went through his share of whacky homespun videos. There was a time when, to my horror, he stumbled upon 'Top 10 Sexy Female Aliens'. It didn't bother him in the least. But I got him a pair of my old earphones. He could keep his YouTube exploits to himself.

To his delight, he soon found Hindi films. Then Tamil films, Telegu films, all dubbed in Hindi. Then Maithili and Bhojpure films. As with books, quality has never been a concern. Quantity is the priority. Which means he'll watch almost anything. It started with one screening a day. Then two. Now he watches up to three movies a day.

Has the internet and its evils ensnared grandfather? Sometimes, when the internet connection is slow or disrupted, grandfather becomes a bit of a bumbling fool, pleading me to help him connect to his YouTube account. There is a childlike restlessness to his demeanor. Newfound cravings have changed him.

On the one-seater next to him sits grandmother, effusing a self-discipline wholly missing in the old man. All day, while grandfather dips in and out of a sea of user uploaded videos, grandmother, hearing aid tucked into one ear, makes an art out of listening to silence.

There was one point when she could not stop saying, “Kati hernu hunchha. Aja lai pugi halyo ni.” By now she's stopped complaining. Resigned perhaps to the fact that she's lost her husband to a machine.

As people age, they lose themselves to physical ailments or dementia or senility. My grandfather's fate is of his own choosing. Sleepy siamese serpents slither across his belly and plug themselves into his ears, doing the devil's work. Slowly but steadily, they pluck away at grandfather's consciousness.

More than once I've seen him dose off whilst plugged in. A hand still holding the chin up, eyes resolutely shut. Sitting upright but unconscious. Like something picked from the garden and placed in our living room. My grandfather. A degenerating vegetable.

Recently I found a copy of Train to Pakistan that I'd hidden in a drawer from long ago. It was brand new when I bought and hid it. Unopened as it was, the book still looked compact. But the pages had begun to yellow. Abandonment. The fate of all my books. Not only had this one been abandoned, it had been imprisoned as well, in solitary confinement no less, to please my whims.

I'd been protecting the book from my incredible book eating grandfather. I was greedy about devouring a book in its newness. Its crisp, virgin pages, I'd wanted for myself. Deep down though, I should have known I wasn't going to read it. Ever. I've never been much of a reader. Just a hoarder.

Now Train to Pakistan lies within grandfather's reach, on a shelf in the dining room. But that copy is never going to be read, is it?

Maybe this would have been the one book he would have loved. Maybe this one he'd have held up to me and said, “Nanu, this is a great book. Do you have any more books by this writer?”

These days, I'm afraid of entering bookstores. The sweet smell of new books call to me. My hands itch to buy and hoard. Lifelong habits die hard. But I resist. There was a time when the comfort of knowing grandfather would certainly get his hands on my books would propel me to place one more book on store counters.

Now I resist. There's no saying for sure the books I buy will get read anymore.

(From Read Magazine, Sept 2014)

another epiphany-in-the-making

Is fear perhaps the result 

only of inaction?

only in avoidance
is there suffering.

Godavari

I've always thought of Godavari as a place schools used as a half-hearted destination for field trips. Yeah...I've been dismissive about it. The one time I ever went to Godavari as a kid was with my mom, a cousin and her adorable little daughter. I think I was barely six or seven myself.

My mother took me there because I'd missed a trip made by my class. I went with trip-sheet and all. But I don't remember whether I'd enjoyed it or not.

My second visit came last year when the school where I teach decided to take its kids for a field trip. Again, I was dismissive. Scoffing at the class teacher's decision to take the kids there. Why Godavari, of all places.

When I actually got there, what I knew of Godavari proved to be nothing but a concoction of my presumptuous mind.

What beauty. Godavari blew me away. Instead of taking pictures of the kids as the designated photographer that I was, I wandered off, snapping away at everything the place had to offer.

There's a quiet joy to holding a camera, taking it close to an object, letting it nuzzle what it intends to frame. There's an intimacy to the whole act. And suddenly, photography becomes less about capturing or revealing. None of that awkwardness of posing and being defined by the frame of a photographer. Natural poise meets curious eyes. Something comes of this. A kind of love-making, if you will. A kind of shared solitude.

Secret whispers. Silent gestures. Objects telling their authentic stories. That is what I am drawn to. And the closer I can get, the more satisfying the experience. I am a sucker for close-ups.

I don't own a macro lens as yet. But I try to make do with what I have.

Luck would have it that I visit Godavari again. And so, for the third time, again for a field trip, I happened to be there yesterday. 

My heart is at ease. I could live forever in places like this. How come it's only the third time I've been here? Misplaced priorities? I'd blame infrequent school trips.

--

So there's photography on one hand. And Godavari on the other. A place like this really puts the pseudo-naturalist within me in place. With Godavari, I actually get to put aside ideas and revel in the immediacy of all the life around me. For some crazy reason, it's always raining in Godavari though. The dull greens, the dull browns, and the dull greys. All make for a winsome combination.

Close to the entrance, you have what is probably the cleanest, most lush street you will see in our city. It gives me the shivers because it feels like a street from some exotic foreign land. Never corresponds with my idea of Nepal. I love taking a picture from the exact same place every time I visit. It's not as breathtaking as the one I took last time, but it's still magical enough to bring to life the goblin within me.

My love for macro combined with my love for neglected corners. There is something I love about this photograph. I showed it to my colleague at work today and she said, "Eh, yo ta bigrechha hai?" I can't explain it to her, but that's probably what I love most about it.

So I have a clearer photograph of the same place, but I prefer this one. I like that it is diffused and dreamy. Mostly because it captures this restless mind's elusive desires. And gestures towards something like home. Although it's a really just a shabby little office within the botanical garden complex.

This is a flower. To think of the mass-produced, wide-petaled, crayon-scribbled flowers from our childhood. Yeah, flowers can be rebellious too. Also, the colours. The contrast. This will have to do until a macro lens helps me get more intimate with flowery things.

Orchid ko bot. Something about things being jangly and disconnected really tugs at my heart.

The lady conveyed such a strong sense of belonging to the nursery with all the baby plants. I like that she is turned away from me, ready to be consumed by her foliage-coated world.

Fern. Stylish. Sprigs of happiness. They give me so much comfort, sprouting here and there, reconquering the earth the way they do.

Another flower. This time the darkness in the background does the charm for me. Darkness - always so eager to tell its stories. If only we cared to listen.

Yet another flower. So we were inside the greenhouse aptly named 'decorative plants'. Looks like it'd make a fine print on one of Nana's kurtas. So pretty, in this translucenty way.

How did I manage to stumble upon this plant? It doesn't even look real. I love how much charm those little pale flower pods carry. An artist I met last January taught me that everything in nature gives colour to its neighbours. So when we draw, we must take care to colour in the reflection of certain things on certain other things. That's probably how this photograph managed to acquire a fourth dimension-like green-gray colour scheme.