my father opened the window as we skyped and I heard the Dhak

The three pictures are of the construction site of the Pandal, I saw in the lead up to the Durja Puja. I never could see it completely built because I was not there for Puja. I had hurried back to Santa Barbara, a bit nervous about TAing for a silent film class, to get the class schedules and be done with all the formalities for getting a phone. However, thinking back I regret not having stayed back for the Puja -- my third successive year of missing it. As I write this post, and i know you (my readers) will realize, I should be careful about not lapsing into the all too familiar "longing and belonging" that not-so-often-great Diasporic writers are guilty of. And yet, perhaps I have of late been too harsh on them.

With the winter vacations having set in, there is immense time, especially since I ended up striking off all plans to go anywhere, partly because of meagre dollars and primarily because I cannot but remember. I write this blog, therefore, to fill time, the time it takes for a YouTube video of Kandukondian Kandukondian to buffer. I promise this is not going to be long. In fact, when I started blogging, people would say it was a way to make ones' narcissistic self reach out to others. Nowadays, trite smart facebook status postings serve that purpose/motivation well enough. Shorter the posts, better chances are they will be judged as being well written. The ecstasy of speed is doing overtime nowadays in all walks of life - scatter-brained and limping, I am always left looking for prosthetics. Forgive this aside.

Before I forget as to why I wanted to write about these pictures and memory, I must mention they are related to the conversation I was having with my parents today. All of these pictures have been taken from my second floor balcony adjoining the room from where my parents video chat on skype with me, on a static desktop pc. As they talked to me today, they opened the door leading to the balcony and I could hear the man coming to sell fish shouting Mach Mach. My parents talked for a while and then I asked them to wait because I needed to go the kitchen and set the potatoes to boil. When I came back to resume the conversation, I could hear the Kashmiri shawl and sweater sellers calling out to people in the apartments - it is winter time there too.

I came back to SB seven days before Puja - the pandal construction finished soon. I knew it when seven days later, my father opened the window as we skyped and I heard the Dhak.

of fables by a sociologist

A first time experience of taking an AC bus from Jamshedpur to Ranchi brought more surprises : Samsung LCD TV showing Sunny Deol- Karishma Kapoor - Salman Khan - Tabu starer Jeet. The AC trip was partly spent sleeping in the comfort of the conditioner and the rest of the time was devoted to watching Jeet and having just read books on Ambient Media though I feel tempted to write about In-Bus entertainment, it is best saved for another entry. So, it was the journey from Ranchi to Jamshedpur with my friend who just passed out from IIM Ahemdabad in a ramshackle bus that felt more like a journey with lively conversations, the yet thought of pristine beauty of the land of forests (Jharkhand) enveloping our thoughts and the bus driver's occasional bravados with the steering wheel. Having more than two hundred common friends, the conversation often seemed like a report about the lives of our friends - small fact finding missions about their place of work, marital status etc. etc., a laugh about remembered idiosyncrasies , small surprises at changed attitudes, gentle judgements and twisted gossips.

And then some issues on which we have differed all these years. Chetan Bhagat - my friend who took to him since "Five Point Someone" and who believes I have not given Bhagat a fair chance blinded by elitism. I continue to find it difficult to get on with more than 15 pages of CB. Don't get me wrong, when Chetan Bhagat comes to public forums and says that the basic problem of our higher education system is not class 12 syllabi/board question papers but lack of good universities to catch up with the growing educated population, I love him. When Chetan Bhagat talks about the strategic pricing of his novels at Rs99 and making his ideas accessible to a wider Indian audience, I want to hug him. But when he says and then keeps maintaining that most so-called great English writers in India basically write to get a Booker prize or be read by international readers and not for Indian readers, I can't contain an annoyed chuckle.

The other contentious issue being the problem of Jharkhand, its continued underdevelopment despite having abundant mineral resources. My friend sticks to the dominant development paradigm as he keeps identifying the illiteracy of the tribals in Jharkhand as the main cause of their being fooled by activists, who he says, are ready to protest against any new industrial project in the state. What he is oblivious of and which i continue to emphasize, is his stubborn insistence to not see the tragedy of displacement such projects hold for the tribals. To continue to equate their "desire to live their lives in the intimacy of familiar soils, waters and trees" to "illiteracy" is an illiteracy of another kind.

We reached the Jamshedpur bus station and then took an auto-rickshaw to the XLRI management institute. Found ourselves immersed, the next few days and nights, in parties, having inimitable chicken rolls @ Dadu's, looking at the never sleeping Tata factory resembling thousand fireflies from the terrace and walking the campus seeing students gazing over Powerpoint presentations waiting in line for Chai. After returning home, I chanced upon this article written by a professor both me and my friend studied under. The writer is a sociologist who has never stopped inventing fables for our times. I wish we lend an ear to the wisdom in tribal stories and consider our education as always incomplete without these stories.

Not only because it was plain maths without calculators

Just out of a popular Mexican film
in which beautiful people made love to each other,
the woman from the land of Hans Christian Andersen
is having tea with her boyfriend from the land of Dalai Lama

She is soon shifting to pursue a Masters,
and is going to see less and less of him
He is upbeat about his getting a job next to the university,
about being able to continue to sleep by her side for many more years to come

He is saying something...She cannot hear
this music from the land of elephants is too loud
But would listening help - how could they understand each other
Not only because that writer who loved peeling potatoes in his novel Women in Love said so...

She had met this cute little Buddha four years ago,
He was 19, she was 31, she was 31 after a 12 year old relationship
with a man from the land of Euphrates and Tigris...of Saddam Hussein
She had gone through his papers 12 years ago in the embassy-he was 5'10'',he was 31

Little Buddha shifts his gaze from Chicago Cubs on the giant screen
He is looking at her - her white wrinkled skin, her blond hair, her blue eyes
traces of cinnamon from the pastry on her lips...her lips quiver to tell him that
they would never understand each other,
Not only because it was plain maths without calculators,
but also because that writer roaming the streets of Prague said,
almost said, oh why did he say that in No Saints or Angels

For Ivan Klima, D.H. Lawrence
Picture : Anant A.

So this blog

So much for chain of thoughts. I just took out my Berkeley shirt from the washbasin. The green mark won't go away from the white shirt. A mark I put on it as I celebrated my first touchdown rolling without any reason on the green green grass. A trinket seller in Berkeley, who had his stall next to where I had bought the shirt, told me about Lalu and Indian elections. He gave me his card and promised to call me regarding Dalai Lama's visit to Santa Barbara - he never called. A trinket was taken from his place; a peacock feather in the form of an earlet found its way to my friend's hands and then to K. Writing on Walter Benjamin today, and hearing Kabir Suman mentioning the grammar of words in heart gone wrong, I remembered the trinket seller again and looked for his card, I had lost it. So this blog.