lifeplan

If I took up pilates, it would strengthen my core. This would ease up the pressure on my spine, thus alleviating the excruciating lower-back pain I suffer from. In time, this will lead to a writing job that will win awards, which will in turn ensure that I find the perfect man and have interracial babies. Eventually this will result in a lower BMI & I will successfully escape my genetic disposition towards diabetes & the chronic inability to read a map.

I'd Avoid This One If I Were You

I started blogging at a point in my professional life, which one might politely describe as a 'pregnant pause'. I was hoping that the result of the seemingly never-ending gestation period would be a spectacularly well paying writing job. Instead, what popped out after hours of yelling, screaming and bloody mayhem, was this blog.

The momentum was brisk, the writing came fast & fluid. The mind, numbed by hours of watching television, was ready to indulge in creative pursuits. It was unselfconscious, it was honest, it was fun. Quality standards met most of the specifications of its sole reader, who coincidentally happened to be its writer.

It seems now that the blog has reached that point in its life when it wants to stick its head in the oven: not necessarily to annihilate itself, but perhaps to see how it'll all turn out. It's not the best way to go about business, hoping a sexy firefighter (the kind that only exists in American sitcoms) comes and rescues it, but its the most fun thing this blog has done in a while.

Yeeeeaaaaah. So. Like. Whatdja wanna do? I don't know, whaddooyou wanna do? I don't know.

Ok, my television is dying on me. Let me get up off this bed and go slap it on its side.

Migraine - 9.1.2008

She felt the first stabs of pain ten minutes away from home and braced herself for the evening ahead; all the while cursing her luck as well as the sea of harsh headlights she had to drive back in. By the time she reached home and ran to the medicine cabinet the pain had progressed from a vague dullness to a living, breathing, pulsating entity coursing through the electronic networks of her brain. As she took off her shoes and had a sip of water the nausea began rise up in her throat. She made a beeline for the bedroom and wasted no time in getting under a thick blanket.

The Hunt for Weapons of Mass Destruction

Agent P had been happy living the semi-retired life: waking up late in the morning, having leisurely cups of coffee, reading the horoscope and closely studying her stretch marks. She had reached a stage in her career where the days were mostly hers except for the rare occasions when Command Centre called her in for a special consult.
Like today.
"Agent P. We have information."
"Awesomeness."
"Information about the missing weapons of mass destruction."
"Really! You mean they're real?"
"We (cough, cough) don't really have that information."
"Then what information do you have?"
"There are rumours that the WMDs might be in your sector."
"What? How is that possible? I thought their elimination was virtually complete."
"Heh. That's what we thought too. Not the case."
"Well. What do you want me to do?"
"Find them. Smoke them out. And Agent P?..."
"Yes?"
"We're counting on you."

******

Agent P set out. The streets were eerily calm. 
"If they're anywhere, they'd be here." she thought, recalling how earlier, WMD's had been openly brandished at traffic crossings, "...pulling at my clothing, asking for a rupee."
But no need to worry anymore. There was nothing left here.

Nothing left, that is, except the Horses

    

Agent P knew she'd have to conduct a thorough sweep of her sector but she was confident that it was clean. Sure, this place had seen some dark times. But those days were gone now. The city had been sanitized overnight. "Oh that lovable lion!" Agent P thought fondly. No WMDs here for sure. The good Agent plodded on.

Behind the Panels: What the Drone Attacks Left Behind

"Hmmmm...what about that biological WMD, from down the road?" she thought, "Wait, I have some images of it from the last reconnaissance mission!"
She scurried to unearth them.

The Sabziwala: Or is He?

With lightening speed, Agent P sprinted to the secret location where the above WMD had often liked to sit & hum sad Bollywood tunes (the coordinates of which she'd secured, not with a little arm twisting of the local Aunty Brigade's head honcho).
Now when she returned to the spot, she found: NOTHING.

Nothing, that is, besides the Dog

Agent P was beginning to doubt Command Centre's suspicions. She was surprised at how little faith they had in their own ability to eliminate those pesky warheads. "Maybe, they've been misled by the fake WMDs - decoys, red herrings and all that. Heheheh. "

This may look like a WMD but don't be fooled. The presence of the Quadriped makes all the difference.

At some point Agent P realised that it was creepy to laugh alone in a crowd so she decided to move on. It was time to take the Metro.
"I really don't understand how any WMDs can get through THESE many personnel," Agent P murmured to herself. Of course, she was referring to the Red Brigade. And unlike the WMD's they were friggin everywhere.

Blotches of Red Everywhere

But ooh look! So shiny & new everything was. So clean. So airconditioned.

We love this, so shut up

"Aah, with better-than-phoren trains like this, who would want to bother with WMD's?" exclaimed Agent P as she confidently strode into the Women Only coach. As her body swayed with the gentle motion of the train, she began to feel sleepy...sooooo.....suhleeeeeppppyyyy. 

And then - snap! 

"What the faarck! I believe someone has attempted to hypnotize me into abondoning my mission.... NEVER!"

She proclaimed: "I will proceed by bus. For that is the best way to find WMDs - and see the sights."

So she did - but not on the famed HOHOs that everyone was talking about. Partly for investigative reasons and partly because, well, she didn't think the term HOHO would be appropriate to use in mission reports.

Turns out, it was great decision, because look! A real WMD!!

"But I was just going back to my village!" HA! A likely story

Agent P got off and followed the WMD (because they can walk - shut up). Past the thick foliage of the urban jungle...

Past the cutely-plump-now-but-prime-candidate-for-cardiac-arrest-later young boy....

Dodging the perilous traps that the captain of the Red Brigade had promised would be taken care of.

Yo Kalmadi, you missed a spot

Vietcong-inspired Installation Art

And finally stumbled upon this:

Long shot of Terror Groups determined to ruin the CWG

"Dang! I have them in my grip," exulted Agent P as she got ready to speed dial the Command Centre. "Crafty little buggers eh? The perfect disguise: construction workers. Respect."
Within minutes (well, half an hour to be precise) the cops were on the scene.Within minutes after that, the WMDs were dispatched to the railway station & put on trains to nowhere.

All Izz Well. Kinda, Sorta...We..eee..lll

Agent P smiled contentedly as she looked upon the scene. Order had been restored.  Her sector was now clean. (Except for that dirty police fellow digging his nose & leering at her from a distance.)

What could possibly go wrong now?

******
For more adventures of Agent P (well, just one more) click here

Reminiscing

I may be over-reaching here but I do believe John Lennon knew my heart before I did. His music did, at any rate. For the longest time I carried his songs with me wherever I went and like a UN interpreter, they had the ability to translate emotional experiences into bite-sized chunks my mind could easily digest. I told no one.

I grew older & did the things I was supposed to do - scrape past the big exams, get a job, be reckless with my heart etc. When I was 28, I willed my circumstances into buying me a ticket to New York. Incredible things had happened to me on the inside. No one knew on the outside.
For some reason, even as young as 10 years old, I had hitched my hopes on New York City. As if it were the promise land. What does a 10 year old Indian girl (pre-cable television, pre-Internet) want from New York City? I really don't know. All I had was a withered, worn out air-ticket with the letters JFK etched out next to my name. When I was one my mother had carted me along when she visited her sister in the States. The ticket, which she'd allowed me to keep, had grown into a myth that I could barely contain.

New York City was everything I'd imagined and I could hardly stand it. I went numb. I would walk the streets of Manhattan everyday. Penn Station was the imaginary pole to which I tethered myself, stretching the imaginary rope as far as I could, as I wandered around. There were the crazy Doomsday roadside fatalists, the pavement artists, the musicians, the flirtatious doormen, the snobbish salesgirls, the nice salesgirls, the Bangaldeshi umbrella vendors. My crazy would have fit right in there. But I told no one.

And then one day my friend took me to Central Park West. We stood outside the Dakota Building for what felt like eternity. Wasn't that long at all, actually. I didn't really want to stand where John Lennon was shot dead. We crossed the street and entered the park. It's funny now, looking back I have to remind myself that my friend was with me. It played out so differently in my head. I walked into the park, walked down the path and came upon this:

Strawberry Fields Memorial to John Lennon: Central Park, NYC

There were a few benches around the Imagine mosaic. Not too many people - a backpacker with a tiny boombox playing Lennon's songs, a balloon vendor, a father explaining Lennon to his son, a vagrant and me. The numbness inside turned to something else and began to swell. Lennon's music had always been my permission to feel. Now I was here. He was all around. And no one knew.

I sat until sitting there lost all meaning. Until it became just another bench in just another park and it began to get dark. I guess my friend & I must've walked back to his car, we would've stopped by for dinner somewhere, then driven straight on through to his home in New Jersey. The heartswell would have settled into numbness again by the time we reached. We would've both sat on his balcony and puffed our cigarettes. Him inhaling smoke in his corner & I, exhaling, in mine.

What's Your Poison?

I sit in a roomful of people chanting. Eyes shut, palms together in absolute concentration. They are keeping time with each other. Pitches that began on different scales have now homogenized into one mesmerizing incantation. I am at the back of the room, constantly tucking and untucking my legs beneath me uncomfortably, until I too start swaying with the chant.
This group, congregated in upmarket South Delhi, practices a form of Buddhism. It's a faith-based practice that I've observed from the periphery for over a decade, watching my sister go through the motions and gradually become stronger & stronger in her belief until it became interwoven into & inseparable from  every aspect of her life. I, meanwhile, have consistently resisted it. Today I have been invited to attend a discussion meeting by a dear friend of mine.
After the chanting is over, ladies from the Women's Division of the practice begin to read passages from prescribed texts, then discussing & interpreting it in their own way, applying the teachings to their own experiences. It is powerful to hear how faith moved them out of personal hells into a more hopeful place.
These are privileged people - we are privileged people. At least, materially speaking. We are all educated to a fair extent, we're aware of the smorgasbord of faith-based options that lie out there. Yet, we choose to spend our Sundays here. Chanting, studying philosophical texts and reconnecting with our insides.
Afterwards, some of the members ask me how I feel. They impress upon me how the practice has revolutionized their lives. They interpret my resistance as a pit stop on the way to becoming a true believer. Although their words convey that they don't wish to coerce me to join,  their reluctance to understand the nature of my resistance & accept it, begins to alienate me.

Unlike several people who are now part of this practice, I have no catastrophe that needs solving. Nor do I feel completely lost for answers or devoid of hope. Over the years, I have developed my own little system of faith (yes, yes, evolved after undergoing certain 'catastrophes') - one that I find very difficult to explain to others, one that is a combination of the mystic and the very earthbound rationale that accompanies intense introspection. It's a mish-mash of many different ideas I picked up along the way. It requires the stringent discipline that most faiths require - especially when ones circumstances are truly in the crapper and none of the sunshiny promises of 'keeping the faith' seem to be making good. So far, so good. As much as I can tell, having a system of faith which doesn't begin & end with the individual self, has not killed me yet.

In short, I don't yet understand how being part of this particular practice (or any school of organized faith) will benefit me any more than what I'm doing now. At the same time, I can't understand how people go through life without following some system of faith.

****************

It is Eid in India. More importantly, it is Eid in Srinagar. On this day of religious importance, certain political leaders have decided to carry out a peaceful rally through the streets of the city. Thousands end up converging at Lal Chowk. As this peaceful rally progresses, pent up rage is deftly channelized (or let loose) into violent intent. By lunchtime, images of burning buildings fill television screens, the way black smoke is filling up the beautiful Kashmiri sky.
One wonders: Did everyone do their Eid prayers before leaving home to join the angry mob?

****************

Someone built a temple. Someone broke the temple, murdered innocents and built a mosque. Then someone broke that mosque and murder followed again.
Someone set fire to a train. Before we could know who or what or why, a city - no, much more than a city - was in flames.
Three years on I am in a cab being a driven by a man, who wishes to take me through a ghost-town, razed to the ground because it was inhabited by a religious minority. I don't know why he thinks it's a tourist spot. He's hardly trying to highlight the tragedy (whose echoes I still hear in these abandoned galis). He seems quite matter of fact about it all when he says, "No Muslims came back.".
"Like the pest-control guy," I think, then stop. I don't know anything about this man or his life to judge him.
Here in this city, development & religion are strangely interlinked. I have heard about this phenomenon, now I am seeing it first hand. To the residents, it is a matter of mere, unquestioned routine. To me, it is sinister.

*******************

Meanwhile on Twitter, where I live out this other life, there are strong, very persuasive & highly well-informed voices that question religion & the idea of God. Their absolute certainty (seem familiar, this certainty?) confuses me. With the result that I no longer know what I thought I knew. What does religion mean? How does one define God? Here, religion sounds (to me) like a needless organ - like the appendix - that's now gotten infected and needs to be done away with. No relevance, no importance, no requirement any longer. Banish it now and stand by for world peace, gender equality, alleviation of poverty & all-round freedom from general acts of human stupidity.

I walk the periphery of this group too. Of course it is ridiculous for me to infer what being an 'atheist' means from a microblogging site that forces ideas to be condensed into 140 characters.
Perhaps, I am too lazy or too uneducated to know better: whatever the reason, I don't belong here either.

******************

I am driving through Orissa. Deeper into the villages, one finds that religion is not a matter of choice or opinion. It informs how people live, behave & get from one day to another. There is extreme poverty here and very little faith in the State as a machine that makes their lives easier. The articles of India's Constitution (that document the rest of us hold so dear, so indispensable to our society's functioning. That book, which is occasionally twisted & misused but is inherently true and - yikes - 'good'.) mean very little here. The instruments of the State built on this book also hold little meaning (especially when this law is often invoked to exploit & undermine them).

The only law here is the law of religion. These gods, goddesses and mythology are machines that make lives easier. When all else fails, it is this faith that people turn to, to get from one day to the next. It is this faith that they perceive as the harbinger of good things. And yes, it is this faith that probably gets twisted & misused as well.

In this context, I struggle to find the relevance of arguments like "Yes, it is a convenient belief to have but is it true?".

*******************

At around age 25, I began to seriously study my life & the world that I had built around me. By age 28, my building projects seemed to come crashing down for lack of a solid foundation. It was - to put it mildly - a complete, tectonic shift in all that I knew to be valid.

The idea that I was the primary mover & shaker of my life was something I held dear. But was I to be the only mover-and-shaker? I wasn't so sure anymore. Mostly, I realised, because I was exhausted. I could no longer understand how one could possibly do this job of living one's life, absolutely alone, while crazy things beyond ones control kept happening. Who's got the remote? I thought I did. Don't I? Do I? Can I change the channel please?
And so I chose from a menu of 'truths'. I went down the list and decided to pick & nibble from all the items available. A little bit of reading (yes, some self-help books too), a little bit of therapy, a little bit of Vedanta from my college days, a little bit of syadvada, a little bit of science and a little bit of what the atheists & agnostics say. A LOT of what my own instincts were telling me.
As I said, I've come up with a system that seems to work for me. The journey that I have undertaken to develop this system has led me to believe that 'faith' lies somewhere between convenience & what the combination of my mind & heart says.

For me, it is tiring, meaningless and eventually dangerous to find & live by one practice or one belief system that promises to 'apply to all'. I'm just not built that way. So now, because I have the luxury, I shall go out searching some more.

...to my girls...

The girls met at 15, 15 & 16.
They giggled, wept and held hands through their 20s.
At 30, they exhaled
And became Shakti.

Hat Yogini Shakti -11 by Gogi Saroj Pal http://tiny.cc/lcm8q

(*Dear D & N, I picture us at age 105, dancing pagan dances around pagan fires, still laughing our sagging, wrinkled asses off. Much Love.)