Chronicles

Tag: writing

  • A mirror held against the soul

    A mirror held against the soul

    We celebrated every moment
    Of our meetings as epiphanies,
    Just we two in all the world.
    Bolder, lighter than a bird’s wing,
    You hurtled like vertigo
    Down the stairs, leading
    Through moist lilac to your realm
    Beyond the mirror.

    Andrei Tarkovsky placed Mirror (1975) onto his life. A life he knew through sepia-tainted memories, winter-green deaths and rainswept conflagrations. It reflected the contours of imperfect lives and their spiritual innards, unrelenting and unflinching. The montage of art, history and spirituality went right through the soul, as if a million rays converged to immortalize a human being.

    When the movie begins to unreel, we find an adolescent overcoming his stutter under a spell of hypnosis. That is where Andrei wanted us to let the magical hold of Mirror unwind us. You let go of your fears and the handicaps of inert words, and your soul begins a journey of self-expression. When you do, you become kind and empathize; you sense the flow of time, feel the pangs of waiting and despair, and then you just be.

    Word is the last to die.
    When the drill of water pushes up
    Through the subsoil’s tough integument,
    Sky will stir.

    There are references to two Russians in the movie: Pushkin and Chekhov. At the beginning, we see a doctor passing by who strikes up a conversation with Andrei’s mother, Maria, waiting by the fence of their house. When the doctor contrasts plants and trees with humans, who rush about and speak in platitudes, Maria mentions Ward No. 6, Chekhov’s short story dealing with conformity and the perilous boundary between sanity and insanity, implying that the doctor is insane. He says, don’t worry, he is immune to all that—”Chekhov invented it all.”

    Another reference is to Pushkin, who, in a letter to a friend, wrote about Russia’s cultural and spiritual contexts being distinctly different and alienated from those of Europe after the invasions of the Mongols and Tatars. Andrei is prodding us to look at the Russian landscape with another eye.

    The narrative of the movie is cyclic. You keep coming back to the same windswept green fields around Andrei’s childhood home. You find Maria sitting by the fence, waiting for her husband, and then years later, death. The walls made of logs. Sudden cuts to fire burning at middle distance in a field and the dark green woods behind.

    We were led to who knows where.
    Before us opened up, in mirage,
    Towns constructed out of wonder,
    Mint leaves spread themselves beneath our feet,
    Birds came on the journey with us,
    Fish leapt in greeting from the river,
    And the sky unfurled above…

    While behind us all the time went fate,
    A madman brandishing a razor.

    Andrei’s memory of his childhood and troubled marriage is a blend of impressionistic painting and profound photographic interpretation of dreams.

    Night. Interior of the dacha. Maria walks by the door and towards the window. An almost unnoticeable freeze of the frame, the color turning into sepia. The child in bed sits up. Maria washes her hair with the help of her husband. She goes towards a mirror and sees herself as an old woman. The house crumbles down in slow motion. Later, Maria lies suspended over the bed, in black and white.

    Dreams are given expression. You are awe-struck by the sheer contemplative detachment of the narrator from events. Music and poetry evoke such depth that nature—with its elements of fire, rain and wind—brings about the organic evolution of this miracle of a movie.

    The usual autobiographical ingredients are there as well: scenes of childhood memory intercut with newsreel footage; contemporary scenes examining the narrator’s relationships with his mother, his ex-wife and his son; child-custody arguments; and fragments from the history of the period—Prague Spring, Mao, border disputes with China, the Holocaust, the Leningrad blockade. The imperfect lives of Andrei, his parents and the people around them are given an ethereal expression.

    The last scene shows Maria leaning on her husband’s chest. She sits up. He asks, “Do you want a boy or a girl?” She looks down and smiles, then tears cross her face. She looks away.

    The camera cuts to the woods and pans left across the garden, where the mother—Maria as an old woman—is seen. It continues along the riverbank under trees, past insects, fallen trees and rotting trunks. The mother walks to the right, meets the child, takes his hand and walks on. Cut back to Maria, still carrying that mingled joy and sadness on her face. Then back to the mother, still walking across the field with two children. The camera pans back as mother and children walk away, accompanied by the sound of the bird the boy was imitating.

    Through the trees, the image fades to dark.

    And that beauty I witnessed in Mirror shattered me.

    A man has just one body a solitary shell
    The soul thinks it quite shoddy
    as many know so well
    With ears and eyes outfitted
    to cover bones and loins
    So fly out through the cornea
    into the vaulted sky
    Up to those ice cold wheel spokes
    where bird like chariots fly
    And listen from the shackles
    of your living prison room

    Note: All the poems are by Arseny Tarkovsky, Andrei’s father.

  • Sven Nykvist

    Sven Nykvist

    Watching old classics brought me back to Sven Nykvist and his magic of light and darkness. It also brought me back to an old post, written when I came across his obituary while waiting in a doctor’s office for my turn.

    The post certainly was not about personal bereavement, but about something relatively abstract, more personal than a bio, and literally about seeing inner and outer worlds from the vantage point of the lens underneath the iris.

    Sven knew where and when to look through his darkly lens. Of course, you would know that more than anyone else when you have Bergman and Tarkovsky in company. How do visuals make you forget the composition, the chromatic metrics of lighting, and the whirring ascents and descents of tripods, and lead you instead into an atmosphere so ethereal and tactile that you are wary the dream you conjure up with eyes wide open is about to vanish? How much do we miss of this world, its blinding beauty and the colors of people’s minds? Sven’s art made me visceral about the crushing beauty of everything he captured on camera, including tragedy.

    I watched Cries and Whispers (1973) in an auditorium for a makeshift theatre on top of the Ernakulam Public Library. The rental chairs and the projector were disconcertingly rickety. But that didn’t stop me from being absorbed in the majestic denouement of crimson red on the screen. I was lost. I began to think in color. If the soul had a color, it had to be a dragon’s red.

    The tortured, poignant, and sometimes wailing relationships were portrayed in color. Though Bergman cleverly sketched the backdrop in fleeting beauty—the fall, the traditional European setting and period—Sven’s art stood out. In the last scene, after her funeral, Karin reads from her diary about a charmed moment when the three sisters, clothed in silken white, stroll through a sunlit park. They sit beside each other on a swing. Karin remembers it as a perfect moment of anguish and happiness, and how she cherished its perfection.

    Sven made the scene absolutely out of this world.

    I took the last bus home that night as a believer.

    Bergman’s trilogy of faith was another astonishing feat of Sven’s art. Those who watched Winter Light cannot forget the frigid winter outside and the interior winter of Pastor Tomas, nor the long close-up of Ingrid Thulin as she waded into their soulless existence with her monologue. Who will forget the pointless meanderings of Johan along the hotel corridors and the echoes of God’s silence in The Silence? In A Passion, Sven deconstructed color and eventually the coherence of visuals and senses to portray the emotional isolation of Andreas and his violent resistance to Anna’s efforts to break through the ice. His experiments with color and visual fragmentation were unlike anything I had seen.

    The human face was as wide a canvas as the landscape of Gotland overlooking the Baltic Sea. Persona (1966) was a case in point and a consummation of Bergman’s idea of the movie camera as “an incredible instrument for recording human soul as captured in the human face.” Despite the open-ended plot of the movie, Sven’s camera displays extraordinary control while moving between alienation and intimacy, abstraction and the sensitive portrayal of the Nurse and the Patient within a seemingly linear and natural narrative. The movie remains one of the great marvels of modern cinema.

    Fanny and Alexander (1982) was a retreat for Bergman and Sven to the common sources of their shared fascination. The magical world unleashed from the perspective of a child showed an unbridled curiosity to go beyond the limits of adult memory and perception. The child’s amazement at the wonders of everyday discovery, the home theatre that became a playground of dreams, the lantern-lit nights, the kaleidoscope, the festive family dinners, the sudden death of the children’s father marking the end of an era, the ghostly fantasy world, the defiant confrontation with the stepfather, the terror of growing up, and the realization of anguish through wisdom—all were observed through the eyes of a child.

    Childhood could never be dull. Sven captured the ephemeral world of a child’s life with all its incomprehensibilities, delights, pain, and wisdom.

    The Sacrifice (1986) was Tarkovsky’s final film. In many ways, Sven lived the grandeur and abomination of a cameraman’s life during its making. The long shots that were Tarkovsky’s wont achieved an extraordinary grace through Sven’s camera, even when Alexander burned down his house as a sacrifice to redeem the world from nuclear holocaust.

    And then the camera jammed.

    The single camera Sven had at his disposal failed while the house was being charred. When the rebuilt house was burnt again, midway through the blaze, the camera ran through an entire reel, breaking the crew into tears. Sven gave Tarkovsky his meditating lens to draw the twilight zone where humankind’s loss of spirituality was acknowledged, leading to repentance and the ultimate offer of sacrifice.

    The wide landscape, Bach’s music, the Japanese flute, Leonardo da Vinci’s chiaroscuro in The Adoration of the Magi—all were pointers to the creative sources of this astonishing and grandiloquently flawed masterpiece made for posterity.

    Perhaps Sven, like Tarkovsky, should be remembered not only for the spectacular triumphs but also for the spectacular failures.

  • Philadelphia

    Philadelphia

    Philadelphia is a city where the dwellers seem gripped by a recurring sense of having lived the exact moment before. The same conversation, the same person with a smirk on his face, the same weather — precisely when your neighbor locked his apartment to leave and the mayor was having a nightmare about his house being bugged by the FBI. Or you might hear the jumbled voices on the radio discussing Dalí and the death of a jazz singer in your car while a Black man walked across the street with a beer bottle in hand.

    It’s a city that has been aging ever since Ben Franklin dreamed that, on the day of his funeral, leaders — thirty-four ministers, preachers, priests, and at least one rabbi — marched arm in arm behind his casket as it was carried to the gravesite. He even dreamed of the Liberty Bell crumbling.

    If you sit in one of the chairs in the old assembly hall of the Constitution House, after climbing the sturdy wooden stairs, you could still sense the rustle of tunics and sombreros worn by your fellow legislators. Perhaps you could still argue with them to make Gujarat the fifty-first federal state.

    If you walk through Center City along the sun-soaked brick buildings, you might meet travelers from neighboring towns afflicted by bouts of insomnia, lost in the constitutional walking tour of Philadelphia. And if you drift down toward the inner city along the Delaware River, you might find Lila, the aging and desperate wharf-bar pickup, and hone your ruminations on life and civilization into something understandable and real before you sail back out to the outer seas again.

    Further north, you might find Mr. George Tharakan stepping out of his Mercedes-Benz in a suit, entering his four-bedroom house, then later emerging in a lungi to inspect the fence he shares with his fellow native. If you glanced through his family album, you would find him wearing the exact same lungi, inspecting his fence on a similar sunny evening in Thiruvalla, Kerala.

  • Debating AI

    Debating AI

    The content below is a summary of the arguments I presented during my debate with Gemini AI. Summary is also a product of Gemini’s infinite wisdom in TPUs.

    ————————

    …that was a very detailed and nuanced discussion. Your arguments focus on the critical shortcomings of the Nehruvian project and the idea that Nehru’s political choices inadvertently created and sustained India’s core internal and external challenges.

    Here is a summary of the main arguments you put forward:

    1. The Danger of Flawed Idealism (Nehru vs. Patel):

    The Thesis: Idealism, when based on a wrong hypothesis and neglecting ground facts or the policies of rivals, is more dangerous than pragmatism.

    The Critique of Nehru: Nehru’s idealism (e.g., in foreign policy) led to a strategic failure (e.g., ignoring Patel’s warnings on China and the security of Tibet) and favoured a moralistic approach (UN on Kashmir) over a decisive, realistic, and preemptive one.

    The Counter-View of Patel: Sardar Patel’s pragmatic, realist, and less state-socialist approach would have been more progressive and beneficial for national security and economic growth, despite being deemed “less progressive” by the prevailing socialist ideology of the time.

    2. Intellectual Inflexibility and Image Maintenance:

    The Argument: Nehru’s deep intellectual confidence and commitment to a specific ideology (democratic socialism) may have functioned as a shield to avoid honest debate and critical engagement with policy failures.

    The Consequence: This created a risk where unchallenged ideas and policies amounted to “gambling” with the future of one-fifth of the world’s population, leading to the institutionalisation of detrimental systems.

    3. Bad Policies vs. Good Intentions (Institutionalising Corruption):

    The Critique of the Economic Model: The construction of modern infrastructure and scientific institutions does not excuse the creation of the “License Raj” and the institutionalisation of corruption.

    The Mechanism: The excessive centralised state control and bureaucratic intervention required for Nehruvian planning created endless points for rent-seeking and stifled private enterprise and genuine growth for decades.

    4. Failure of Secularism and Internal Fragmentation:

    Flawed Secularism: Nehruvian secularism was not a tool for genuine reformation and integration for all minorities, but rather one of non-interference (e.g., failing to reform Muslim Personal Law while reforming Hindu law).

    External Exploitation: This selective approach created a sense of an “unintegrated” population (especially in regions like Kashmir and Bengal), which became the ideological justification and strategic leverage point for Pakistan, despite its meagre resources, to challenge India’s integrity and prosperity.

    5. Conclusion on Gandhi’s Vision:

    The final summation is that the implemented hybrid vision—a mix of Nehru’s modernism and a diluted version of Gandhian pluralism—led to the creation and sustenance of intractable enemies both internally (communalism/fragmentation) and externally (unresolved conflicts with Pakistan and China), ultimately hindering India’s true potential and security.

    —————-scary!!

  • Up and Onward, Jemimah

    Up and Onward, Jemimah

    Jemimah hit a hundred chasing a mammoth score, with tough-as-nails women from Australia standing between her and victory. She did not raise her bat to soak in the glory. She knew the fight was far from over, and her team had folded a few times already in the tournament with the finish line in sight.

    She became the cheerleader for her tiring self, her team, and a nation that barely rallies behind its daughters. She had spent almost the entire game from the start in the hot and humid cauldron. The steely look in her eyes, the muttering to herself, and the chatter with her mates falling midway in the fight played out before thousands of compatriots. Yet she found an ounce of energy for a few more hits, as if she were riding the crescendo of a symphony.

    The symphony was made of human frailties. Losing to three of the SENA teams in the lead-up to this game had sullied expectations for this side. Their bowling barely inspired confidence. Fielding was in disarray—dropping simple catches, conceding overthrows, stumbling over balls hit straight to fielders. Jemimah herself had failed and been dropped from the team a few times already, and she didn’t even know she was one down until five minutes before she was sent out.

    Her captain and the oldest player in the team, Harmanpreet, was a complex soul trying to break the karmic cycles of those who walked ahead of her out of the park and toward an assured oblivion.. She carries a tortured look, as if fighting a demon that never lets her be. She, too, was cramping, but decided to lash out, believing Jemimah would anchor the ship still teetering in the tempest with a prayer. The match could very well have been her last had India lost. But the partnership with Jemimah became their ticket to redemption. Other batters brought much-needed wind to the sails, even as they faltered along the way.

    There is no video of Kapil Dev’s 175 against Zimbabwe, when the World Cup-winning team was on the brink of elimination. But that team of 1983 changed the destiny of Indian cricket and the spirit of a nation. Yet it was still a man’s victory.

    Women’s team coach Amol Muzumdar, too, has his tryst with destiny. He never got the chance to wear the blue, waiting in the shadows through a long career despite being one of domestic cricket’s greatest run machines. He started his career waiting for a chance to play for India, padded up and waited for an eternity and a day, while Tendulkar and Kambli batted to glory.This was his Chak De moment—seeking redemption alongside the girls who know what it means to be so near, yet so far.

    But this is Jemi’s time—to change the destiny of millions of girls and help them chart their own course to the future.

    It is already late.

    Photo Credit: Emmanual Yogini

  • A house in dreams

    A house in dreams

    Every member of the family carried a house within them—a dream shaped by their longings, fears, and memories. Though they spoke of walls, windows, and rooms, each vision revealed not bricks and wood but the architecture of their own hearts.

    The father, who had already traveled a million miles, thought about the house he was going to build:

    The house is where I would find my moorings at the end of a hard day. At night, it takes the form of a ship anchored at the wharf, leaning into the widening shimmer of the ocean. The balmy breeze across the yard would unfurl the sails and carry us a few more knots.

    I want the entrance to rise into a cathedral ceiling, with glass windows all around and a den in front where I can watch storms and lightning pass by. The dwellers of my Ark would hold onto one another until morning breaks—and then I can let them fly into the bluest sky. Perhaps I need a longer glass to see far enough.

    Shrugging off the captain’s apprehensions, the daughter dreamed instead:

    My house begins in the attic, where I have a bird’s-eye view of the landscape beyond the fence, where I can listen to rain rattling on the roof and feel the moist nights tick away as water drips from the drain. Then the sunshine flutters its mosaic across the slanted windows. I want to walk down the stairs into the living room where the family gathers. This house of my dreams is grand and old, and I sense a déjà vu—of being transported to a timeless time.

    The son, impatient with his sister’s hopeful reverie, thought to himself:

    The idea of a basement comes from human fear of death and an expectation that bad things will happen. A dingy crawl space would be preferable. To me, the house feels like a mausoleum built upon such a basement. I know the trusses and walls will crumble someday, and there will be an onslaught of dust until everyone inside turns ghostly. The laughter, sobs, and voices trapped in the air will die a natural death, and I will want to go far away. I would erase every trace of my footprints, too.

    The mother, who packed their belongings from rented apartments time and again, always returned to her own dream:

    This house is a refuge, a boundary drawn against the melancholy of the world. A shelter for the displaced and broken human spirit to restore body, mind, and soul. There should be a dining area beside the living room, ready to welcome and nourish those who come home battered and bruised. And in the bedrooms, soft light will heal them.

    post script:

    Together, their dreams did not form a single blueprint but a constellation of desires—an ark, an attic, a mausoleum, a refuge. The house in their dreams was never just a dwelling; it was the story of who they were, and who they hoped to be.

  • In Light of India – Part I

    In Light of India – Part I

    It rained.

    The hour is an enormous eye.

    Inside it, we come and go like reflections.

    The river of music

    Enters my blood.

    If I say body, it answers wind.

    If I say earth, it answers where?

    The world, a double blossom, opens:
    Sadness of having come,
    Joy of being here.

    I walk lost in my own center    .

    The essence of Octavio Paz is captured in the short poem: existence as a reflection, time as mystery and the world as duality. As a reader, I couldn’t help but notice Paz’s polemics on existential and reflective differences between civilizations and how oriental was time as a concept in his poems and other writings. His inimical vision of history as an imagination of time had parallels in ancient Indian philosophies. Today, he is being rediscovered not only as a poet of great vision, but also for his scathing criticism of modern democracies for their development model and establishments of greed.

    In Labyrinth of Solitude, Paz has argued that the Mexican civilization had come to a stasis, abandoning its glorious past to withdraw inwardly and self-deprecatingly looked up to its neighbor in the north. It was fairly easy to recognize Octavio Paz’s affinities and insights in the book, In Light of India.

    As anyone who visited India would vouch, India gets through your senses much before your brain begins to register all your preconceived notions of her. You will realize that the teeming reality around you will soon blur its contour to leave you in a daze. Paz spoke about the India he encountered in the bustling streets of Bombay of yore:

    “I put my things in the closet (at Hotel Taj Mahal), bathed quickly, and put on a white shirt. I ran down the stairs and plunged into the streets. There, awaiting me, was an unimagined reality:

    Waves of heat; huge grey and red buildings, a Victorian London growing among palm trees and banyans like a recurrent nightmare, leprous walls, wide and beautiful avenues, huge unfamiliar trees, stinking alleyways,

    Torrents of cars, people coming and going, rivers of bicycles,

    in the doorway of a shack, watching everyone with indifference an old man with a noble face,

    Another beggar, four half-naked would-be saints daubed with paint, red betel stains on the sidewalk,

    Turning the corner, the apparition of a girl like a half-opened flower,

    Stalls selling coconuts and slices of pineapple, ragged vagrants with no job and no luck, a gang of adolescents like an escaping herd of deer,

    A magnificent eucalyptus in the desolation of a garbage dump, an enormous billboard in an empty lot with a picture of a movie star,

    More decrepit walls, whitewashed walls covered with political slogans written in red and black letters I couldn’t read,

    As night fell I returned to my hotel, exhausted…but my curiosity was greater than my fatigue. I went out again into the city. I found many white bundles on the sidewalks: men and women with no home…I saw monsters and was blinded by the flashes of beauty. I strolled through infamous alleyways and stared at the bordellos and little shops: painted prostitutes and transvestites with glass beads and loud skirts. I wandered toward Malabar Hill and its serene gardens.”

    Paz goes back to his hotel but decides to take another walk toward the coast and there he tries to take inventory of all that he has seen, heard, smelled, and felt. He thought of dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea, and an inescapable attraction to explain his state of mind as a “young barbarian poet”.

    If we chop and change some images here and there, contemporary India despite the double-digit economic growth would not be too far away. Paz gets down parsing his newly found exhilaration in the rest of the book which took decades to complete. One doesn’t read Octavio Paz as an academic exercise. One reads him for his insights, provocations and his attempts to engage civilizations in a constant dialogue.

    Even in the opening chapter, Paz reveals his sense of history and uncanny gift for archetypes. According to him, wandering in New Delhi is like passing through the pages of Victor Hugo, Walter Scott, or Alexander Dumas. For him, it was the most ancient of cities – Indraprastha of the epic Mahabharatha where legendary battles of power and ethics played out; and also the city of serene Muslim mausoleums. He writes about the unforgettable moment when he wandered into a tiny empty mosque whose walls were made of marble and inscribed with passages from the Qur’an. Above, the blue of an impassive and benevolent sky was only interrupted, from time to time, by a flock of green parakeets. He stayed there for hours. According to him, it was a vision of the infinite in the blue rectangle of an unbroken sky.

    Years later, Paz would return as the ambassador to India, travelling across the country, collaborating with poets Agyey and Shrikant Verma, and writing East Slope, a collection of poems on Indian themes. He would also talk about his experiments in collaborative poetry with Agyey and Shrikant Verma on Friendship. At Rajiv Gandhi’s behest, he gave a Lecture on India, which he revisited later to write In Light of India. The book makes no sweeping claim of anything in particular, yet it remains a treasure for its insights and tenacity to seek answers in an unfinished quest to make sense of civilizations in conversation.

  • Hope Springs Eternal

    Hope Springs Eternal

    My aunt’s husband left the city of Kochi (Kerala, India) after retiring as a Deputy Revenue Officer. He relocated his wife, and children, except for the oldest daughter finishing college, to Chelakkara in the early seventies, a sparsely populated boondock northwest of Thrissur. After a day-long journey by bus, I had to walk for miles on a rough, winding road flanked by undulating paddy fields on either side until it became an unpaved but equally wide rugged rural pathway, leading to the gate bearing their family name inscribed.

    The house stood in the middle of several acres of land with a bamboo fence. The yard was filled with various fruit trees – many mangoes, jackfruit, guava, gooseberry, cashew apples, and Sapodillas. I was told my uncle even attempted farming paddy once. The original owner of the land was his neighbor. The house also had a cavernous well with nothing but rock at the bottom which my cousin wistfully described as a money pit where his father threw away a fortune over several years hoping for a spring. Now it was just a reservoir for rainwater that dries up in the summer for snakes to snuggle in the damp and shade.

    The house was spacious with a room full of antique cupboards where I found a treasure of his collection of books and audio cassettes. In a chest, I found an official invitation to the first show in Shenoy’s theater in Kochi for its grand opening which someone kept as a souvenir. Uncle had diaries with quotations from and annotations on Malayalam poets, mostly by G. Shankara Kuruppu and Vallathol. It also had notes and tips on farming. I realized the books on Physics and World literature belonged to his brother who died young when he was a lecturer at Brennen College. The complete collection of Yesudas’s Hindi Songs too was his legacy. I never met him. I saw my uncle only twice, of which the second meeting was when I traveled for almost all day in several buses with my parents for his funeral. He visited us a few months earlier to seek my parent’s help to dissuade his younger son from marrying a young girl he met near the dorm, having decided to drop out of college.

    I observed none of my cousins were interested in the books or farming. No one else studied beyond High school or basic trade school while their cousins in Kochi were known for academic excellence including post-doctoral degrees. The older daughter got a job in Government, married, and continued to live in Kochi. They sold the property by the end of 1999 back to the neighbor for a price. Until her last, my Aunt, who retired as a teacher ages ago, lived with the younger son who became a primary school teacher in a small town closer to Kochi. He divorced his first love and is separated from second wife. The other children too found their place now closer to Kochi even though they are still a few hours away.

    I remember watching a French film starring Gerard Depardieu – Jean De Florette (1986). Depardieu played the character of Jean, the Tax Collector and son of Florette who returns with his wife and daughter to the village to claim the land he inherited from his mother to begin the life of a farmer. Ugolin, his neighbor and local farmer who fought with Jean’s uncle earlier for not selling the land, realized that Jean too did not intend to sell. Despite all the efforts to make Jean’s life hell, Ugolin couldn’t make Jean sell his house. He along with an accomplice blocked the spring that was the only source of water forcing Jean to begin digging a well to collect rainwater at least as long as that lasts. Unfortunately while trying to blast open the well, Jean gets hit by a rock and dies. Jean’s distraught and orphaned family sells the house to Ugolin and leaves the village. Soon after, Ugolin unblocks the spring and begins to make a good profit.

  • Atlantis, the lost island of childhood

    Atlantis, the lost island of childhood

    In the beginning, as far as I can remember, the lush green strip of land was ensconced by the Arabian Sea and a thin river line that was lost into an estuary. A billion species of life thrived in the tiny whirlpools. Sunshine fell on the flowing waters in every fissure. When it rained, the natives who lived in the shanty could see the silver lines of thunder afar and scampered to bring the cows and kids home from the field and the wantons of country roads. The wind wove a symphony across the countless coconut trees that arched over the white and golden sand dunes. Folks called the place – an island, with no name, perhaps to remind the sovereignty of the land that leant over the timeless ebb and flow of the ocean.

    I used to visit my grandparents’ house during our summer vacations. We, the boys from the city found our space and deflated the overcrowded time from our senses on the island. The travel included trekking by bus and ferry boats, finally walking more than a mile passing paddy fields and country roads paved with soft red soil and sand until we reach the Riverbend and holler for the ferry as we soak in the wet breeze wiping away the last trace of fatigue.

    The folks in the house had to paddle across the river for everything that they ever needed, and every household had its own boats. The nights were dense and we could see each other’s faces in sepia sitting across the kerosene lamps for dinner. Eight siblings and dozens of grandkids thronged the spacious and benevolent home during those unforgettable times. If I close my eyes, I can still see the shimmering torch lights of solitary pedestrians on those rugged paths by the river and fisher folks rowing by.

    It must be right after the famine in the forties, my grandfather and his brothers left their misery to follow a dream of a piece of land to call their own. I never asked him to chronicle the events or timeline. They had nothing and everything to fight for. The island was waiting for them to build the Promised Land, and the earth was nubile and feisty. He had plowed his way and unleashed the raw power of farmers and fishermen to build the house, cultivate the land and build boats to fish with a lot of camaraderie with his brothers and natives.

    As kids, we spent the summer vacations in exhilaration, playing on top of the piles of coconuts and grains; canoeing up and down streams; gathering around the table where everyone assembles for dinner and woke up with the roar of waves retreating from the back of the house every morning. My grandfather looked like Odysseus who just came home to Ithaca, having done his journey.

    I spent a lot of time with him listening to his monologues on movies he watched from the country movie theatre or the quality of carpenters who worked on his boats. He also spoke about the murderous sea storms and fights among fisher folks who haunted the evening taverns with a kind of defiant nonchalance. He was Hemingway’s Santiago who came from the sea with the biggest fish I could ever imagine sculling the boat from the horizon, but he was not weary.

    I never asked my grandfather about his journey, rather I was basking in his days of glory. But then things took a different course ever since he folded himself into retirement. My aunts were all married off and had more significant issues in life and kids to gather around, my uncles vanished into the crowds in different parts of India and outside in search of jobs.

    Society itself was undergoing the customary changes as always has been. The deluge of foreign money and pomp of Gulf country residents rolled over the spirit of the land. The old house was abandoned and the grandparents were transplanted to the new home built near the highway and surrounded by walls. The rain, the wind, the undulating expanse of coconut trees, and the waves from the ocean were shut out for the rest of their lives.

    Grandma died first and Grandfather followed her soon. Even the new house looks so old now, occupied now by one of my uncles. He might probably visit once in a while from Dubai where he found a job. The dilapidated and moth-ridden old house bid the last moments of its existence before it was smashed down, probably to build a concrete warehouse for fertilizers. Now that the island has been named and electrified.

    Atlantis, the lost continent is considered to be the source of all Religion, all Science, and all races and civilizations. As we enter the third millennium, the Age of Aquarius its discovery is deemed to cause a major revolution in our view of the world and of both our future and past. I found my Atlantis on that island a while ago when I was a kid. The hearts and minds of the dwellers who built a brave new world over there, though lost, would still speak to you if you listen. That this world can still be mysterious and beautiful if you can spare a moment to grasp.

  • Invisible Cities

    Invisible Cities

    Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a skinny book that condenses the experience and idea of living and feeling cities in abstract and manifest ways. It has been a prized possession since I was a student even though I read it a long time ago and still read random chapters. I got hooked by the matter-of-fact, almost parable-like but incisive visions set ablaze in each chapter of the book, which unveils a different city as narrated in an imaginary conversation between Kublai Khan, the Tatar emperor, and Marco Polo, the traveler. Marco talks about the cities with such great tangents and flourish, leaving you gasping at the delightful insights.

    The lyrical narrative of cities is replete with symbolisms and metaphors. These serve as the readers’ devices to begin their treatises on reality and fiction, memory and desire, and past and present. Calvino masterfully writes about the limitation of communication and power, ephemeral but universal cycles of urban living among the ruins and glory of concrete columns, cities as projections of human psyche, and the possibility of whims and greed as cogent sources of creativity. You could try and ponder over Calvino’s dispatches from the book on some of the real cities and their architects – the tunnel cities in China, Berlin, Turkey and those under Gaza and South Lebanon, Ghost city of Pripyat, Ukraine, and Fake cities in North Korea.

    Calvino belongs to the OULIPO(Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle – Workshop of Potential Literature), a group of writers, logicians, and mathematicians whose primary objective is the systematic and formal innovation of constraints in the production and adaptation of literature (they also define themselves as rats who themselves build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape). The Oulipo believe that all literature is governed by constraints, be it a sonnet, a detective novel, or anything else. By formulating new constraints, the Oulipo is thus contributing to creating new forms of literature.

    Calvino’s fictional cities delve into the mind of each city that you and I have known or could have known from our personal view of the immediate outside world. The personal account of your life could exactly sound like someone else’. Or the kind of experience and people that you met at the first job that you had done in the city would sound agonizingly similar to someone else if you shift the time a little bit. There must always be someone who fought your fights, cried your cries, dreamt your dreams, and lived your life in some city that you think you lived and known for a lifetime.

    For example, the invisible City of “Armilla has weathered earthquakes, catastrophes, corroded by termites, once deserted and re-inhabited. It cannot be called deserted since you are likely to glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stature, luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at a mirror.”

    —If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. . . . “You can resume your flight whenever you like,” they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.”

    “Eutropia (a “trading city”) is made up of many cities, all but one of them empty, and its inhabitants periodically tire of their lives, their spouses, their work, and then move en masse to the next city, where they will have new mates, new houses, new jobs, new views from their windows, new friends, pastimes, and subjects of gossip. We learn further that, in spite of all this moving, nothing changes since, although different people are doing them, the same jobs are being done and, though new people are talking, the same things are being gossiped about.”

    From their conversations which began with signs and sounds unintelligible to both, to perfecting each other’s language, to the numbness of understanding through silence, Marco Polo the traveler and Kublai Khan the Emperor have sailed through a lot of cities. Kublai asked Marco: “You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us.” Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylong, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.

    He continued: “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us. “And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become so part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, amid the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

    I have had my fair share of cities. You leave a part of you every time you move on to a new destination, hoping you will find what you think you need! eventually, you might visit these cities at some point, hoping again to relive the life and time for a moment with a sense of detachment. Looking back I can see the trail I trod from the walkways in Cochin to Bangalore where the job hunters’ hopes, despair, and celebrations with friends were drenched in rum, to the long and sweltering bus trips to work in Chennai, to Chicago where everyone read something in the commuter trains and Fridays were an onslaught of adrenaline, to New York where you find countless people and cars travel all around you and yet you can listen to the tireless voice of a subway singer with his violin, to the laid back life in small town Pennsylvania and now in this aged, withering city of Philadelphia.