what is poetry but the joy of

Ironical to have not seen everyday life in normal curves

our statistics teacher gives us an opportunity

to write about a thing which gives us joy;

she must have had a hundred answers by now

and she must be exclaiming differently to each

the joy of visiting bolivia

the joy of sitting on a beach

the joy of imagination

the joy of sleeping for eight hours without an alarm

the joy of scoring a hundred out of hundred

the joy of getting to see a child smile

the joy of having done something for someone

the joy of having a cup of coffee after a walk on snow

the joy of teeth touch with ice-coffee

what is poetry but the joy of putting a misplaced metaphor amidst the order of language

what is music but the joy of putting a dissonant note in the sea of consonance

what is life but ...

Nintendo Gamecube

From the flash game mentioned in last class, I progressed to Nintendo Gamecube. Thanks to first seeing two young players Jojo (7 yrs) and Lala (6 yrs) play it, and then with their help finding my way through the some games in ‘Sonic Adventure Two Battles’ like ‘Metal Harbor’, ‘Emerald Finding Race’, and ‘City Escape’. While I tended to enjoy the more slower analytical game of finding the emerald, Jojo and Lala yearned to play the racier ‘Metal Harbor’. The former is a treasure hunt, probing for the treasure in oceans and caves; the latter is a dizzying race in a harbor with many obstacles on the way. With the control in ones’ hands vibrating giving a tactile sensation, when one was hit helped because an inexperienced player like me could not always be sure of where and what I was on the screen. Also, though there was violence involved, the visuals were rather calm and soothing, and not gory.

I especially liked the ‘story’, which came in as a kind of ‘cut-in’ between two games when the Sonic or Metal Sonic (player character in the game) can go to Chao garden where eggs are kept. The story for the same goes like this – you can either choose to be Hero Chao (in which case you will be saving the world) or a Dark Chao (in which case you will be destroying the world). You get to have a hand in the Chao selection if you can make your way to the Chao garden where the eggs are reared. You have the Hero Garden and the Dark Garden for the respective kind of eggs. What was funny as well as clearly palpable and that drew laughs from both my young fellow players were the contrasting scenes of the two gardens. The Hero garden with flowers, butterflies, greenery and blue streams resembled ‘Heaven’ and the Dark garden with red black flowing streams and caricatures of devils dancing resembled ‘Hell’.

For my next Gamecube experience, I have decided to photoshoot Jojo and Lala playing, and improve my motor hand and finger skills with the control if I have to beat Jojo in the games.

Jhadoo Maro flash game

‘Jhadoo Maro’ flash game takes place in a situation, which takes its context from the larger narrative of protests and negotiations that have taken place between Dow Chemical officials and activists involved with protests surrounding Bhopal Gas tragedy. The game is rather simple to play with the game player being a woman hitting with a broom an official of Dow Chemicals. Dow Chemicals took over Union Carbide whose industrial plant in Bhopal had led to the disaster. One tends to get points based on the timing of the broom hit as well as the force with which the hit is affected.

It is interesting to observe that the player is impersonating a woman and there is an identification that is being asked for from the player/audience because a majority of the survivors/victims of the Bhopal Gas tragedy have been women. One can also find pictures of women with Jhadoo in their hand protesting outside Dow Chemical office buildings in the earlier demonstrations undertaken by the Bhopal activists. Thus, while playing the game, one could experience oneself being an activist. In addition to that, I did experience a certain thrill in perfecting the art of hitting with the broom.

However, if it was meant to be a complete resemblance, one would have expected the woman in the game to be wearing a sari or a more authentic indigenous Indian costume. That is not the case. Though, one should be cautious of reading too much into this, the fact that the women is wearing an improvised ambiguous costume, it could mean that the character has been kept open and the player could fill in his/her own interpretation. It is also possible that with the local movement in Bhopal getting allied with transnational advocacy networks throughout the world, the representation of the woman is left ambiguous in the hope that more multiple fluid identities of the character can be formed, thus reaffirming that local disasters could have global answers and people in developed countries as global citizens can play their part in speaking against MNCs like Dow.

and the book we could not read together

She came to me

so that we could read a book together

She wrapped us around a shawl

We had returned from mountains

Somehow we could never read the book together

Her hands traced the alphabets in black slower than mine

I would end up wanting to talk about what I saw in them

She would put a finger to my lips

and then she went to sleep

A deep sleep and I could not go to sleep

So I sat and looked at her

and the book we could not read together