ദൈവ വിചാരം

എപ്പോഴും കറങ്ങുന്ന ഒരു ഗോളത്തിന് മീതെ നടന്നു ,
ഒരു സ്ഥിരതയും ഇല്ലാത്ത വായു വലിച്ചു കയറ്റി,
പ്രാണന്‍ നില നിര്‍ത്തുന്നവര്‍ നമ്മള്‍.

വെറുതെയല്ല,
നാഴികക്ക് നാല്പതു വട്ടം നമ്മള്‍ ദൈവത്തെ വിളിക്കുന്നത്...

Slowdown Snippets

Ok, fine! So the world is 'slowing down'. And things won't look up anytime in the near future. demand is low, exports are hit, production faces a slump, factories get redundant, so workers are needed no longer and hence, pinkslipped...And all this has happened because some people in the other end of the globe went greedy and invested in unreal prospects so the bubbles popped promptly. And what do the world do? We reduce interest rates, increase credit flow-to pep up demand and put the growth plan back into action, among many other measures. But one sec, something is missing here, rt? Just the other day we said greed is bad and caused all this nonsensical melodrama, and quoted MK Gandhi big time (to the effect of, "the world has everything for our needs but not enough for one person's greed"). We blamed people for growing suicidal due to hyped up pressures of a consumer society and Kerala, especially, is being blamed for being a blindly consumerist state. But what we to do in order to get out of the crisis is induce once again this very greed, rt? To increase manufacturing, production, exports, there has to be demand, and to increase demand, there has to be some disposable income in people's hands, in order to provide this, they will be paid hell lot of money as salaries, commissions and perks once again as soon as the economy shows signs of slight recovery-bcoz only then does one think of upgrading one's mobile phone, or buying another car for the 15-yr old of the house and plan a vacation to Uganda. Rt? So in the end, we are caught up in the same old vicious circle? and there is no getting out? Or should we just sit back and relax as these are simply economic processes-for every boom there is a doom? Or even better, watch the 'maya' of time while it is turning the king into pauper and vice-versa?
On the brighter side, some economists say this is the best time to recognize the 'power of ideas'. That is, channel funds for green energy; fight global warming and climate change effectively using the newly-found slow pace now that economic growth is slowing down; spend more on social sectors such as basic sanitation, healthcare, drnking water and education; start up new enterprises with extremely good talent sourced cheaply from the laid-off lot, so on and so forth. But again, aren't these our immediate concerns? And remain so for at least a few decades more?Once boom-the-pied-piper comes back, should we stop all the good samaritan activities we are doing and join the mad rat-race again--make more money, more fame and even more money in whatever way possible and label ourselves a success? What about people getting left behind? What about those who don't possess the grit and sheer thick skin to make it to the top? What about those who prefer to be remain backstage, but are the pillars of outwardly success? So what is this ray of hope in distress mean to us? A temporary break to the back-breaking hardwork for looking good for the outer world, at the expense of feeling miserable inside.
To summarise, "Jai Ho, Let's be human for a short while"

My take on The White Tiger

The White Tiger defies conventions; shatters myths of a new India shining. Almost abuses the most fertile landmass on the banks of the holiest of holy rivers of an ancient and extremely religious country: he calls the Ganga belt The Darkness. Before the dust settles, the book attacks the very essence of Indian existence—our family system—because the protagonist, Balram Halwai, ruthlessly describes it a Rooster Coop, where millions are trapped like chickens.
The book won this year’s Man Booker Prize for the right decision of a debutant author to portray a ‘wrong’ India. This India doesn’t have those mystics, nor the enlightened middle class, who are fast growing to reach the portals of the global elite. This shockingly fresh, yet depressingly redundant ‘reality’ of an India in English writing is opening up another layer of a sublime Indian literary experience to the outside world. This surprise element, surely, is one of the catalysts behind The White Tiger winning the prize, surpassing even grandeurs like The Sea of Poppies by a very seasoned award-winner Amitav Ghosh.
The title itself glares at the reader as out of the box and almost revolutionary in its attempt to dare the hierarchy and nick-name a lowly-placed, servant-class protagonist by the rarely-found, ever-elusive genetic wonder, called the white tiger.
And to think that he didn’t even have a name at the time of enrolling in his local school. The journey of Munna to Balram to The White Tiger marks the milestones of the novel, to put the story in a traditional nutshell.
This tiger chooses to play devil, challenge the system—only to climb on top of it and get sucked into its soft upper crust and enjoy the promised icing of a luxurious lifestyle and allied exigencies. This tiger writes a letter to none other than the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao and preaches to him the great Indian entrepreneur trick, during the course of seven nights.
“In my way sir, I consider myself one of your kind,” he says. He is so sharp-witted as to laughingly express his complete disdain for the All India Radio in the very second page of the “first night”. He goes on to say that the only three nations he admires in the whole world are China, Afghanistan and Abyssinia—for the singular reason that these countries never let themselves ruled by foreigners. And he has no false-pride when he reveals, “I was a servant once, too, you see.”
It is very interesting that the novel begins and runs along till the end in the form of a letter, that too, addressed to a living leader of an emerging tiger of an Asian country. We readers, in our day-to-day lives, are repeatedly bombarded with reports on China and India pitching to be the next world leaders—be it politically, economically, culturally and technologically. While India braces to be a China, it is also a known fact that China does not even look at us. She wants to do a US, at any cost—the recently concluded Olympic Games may be a pulsating example speaking for itself. But Balram the sweetmaker does not buy the myth of the West. For him, as long as Indians are out of the Darkness, we, together with the yellow-skinned, will rule the world.
The most enchanting chapter of the book, the First Night, is very refreshing with plenty of imageries thrown in. It owes a lot to the wall poster announcing that Balram, the murderer is missing. The power of its sentences—rather the powerlessness of it, for had anybody been heeding any interest in its content, Balram wouldn’t be writing this letter in the first place—is so potent that we begin to wonder how much information and enlightening a wrting-on-the-wall can contain.
In another characteristically non-benevolent action, Balram kisses all the 3,60,00,004 arses of all Indian gods, 3 among them Christian and one, Muslim. While conforming to the ritual of pleasing gods before starting any venture, he describes that in the most embarrassing fashion for the devout Indian living in our time and space, irrespective of classes.
The narrative grows quite poignant in many a turn. It shoots an arrow of guilt-pang directly to any normally higher-educated middle-class Indian who reads it—“no boy remembers his schooling like one who has taken out of school, let me assure you,” he tells Jiabao. But the hero is quick to come out of his past with a self-righteous, unapologetic, “entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay.”
The philosopher in Balram comes out first when he as a boy goes to cremate his mother on the banks of Ganga. There the corpse’s toes refuse to be licked up by the pyre and he realizes why: “this was the real god of Banares, this black mud of the Ganga into which anything dies, and decomposed and was reborn from, and dies into again. The same would happen to me when I died and they brought me here. Nothing would get liberated here.” With that, the cunning entrepreneur in him leaves Ganga to the American tourists!
Balram’s world has just a few women in it. And in his opinion and experience, they just serve to perpetuate the permament misery the Indian lower-class willingly submit themselves to. His mother comes across as an intelligent woman, but she hardly stays to influence Balram in any pious way. Although it is she who instills the yearning for an education and knowledge in his tender mind that his father takes on as his duty after her death. “I have always been a big believer in education—especially my own,” he says later. Kusum, his grand mother, is a nagging presence in the entire story. She is the one to send him to work in tea shop for an extra buck, from where he eavesdrops on a conversation and decides to learn driving and subsequently moves to Delhi. His cousin-sisters are a burden, for whose dowry the family has to tie themselves to the vicious circle of debt and servitude.
Some of the observations that this half-baked Indian—who considers himself educated through overhearing conversations in the tea shop, his master’s car and the roadside—make are disturbingly accurate. For example, how he sums up caste system and class struggle for Jiabao: “In the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat—or get eaten up.”
And he makes no attempt to hoodwink the Chinese leader about the true nature of Indian democracy. Because, in The Darkness, people often say: “I have heard the people in the other India get to vote for themselves.”
The novelist caricatures Indian slums in a different light. In his lines, they almost become one of the characters in the novel—the way he describes workers, who build up big malls and apartments in Gurgaon, sit in a line to defecate and does not even bother to look at a stranger joining them.
It is often said, “society makes a criminal.” Adiga seems to hint, in the Indian context, that it is a crime to be poor and getting out of it requires the sheer grit and mindless ambition to do whatever it takes to come out of an animal-like existence in The Rooster Coop with destinies burnt hard into the foreheads.
Balram doesn’t pause to think and shudder at what would have happened to his family back in Gaya following his master’s murder. They must have been destroyed, hunted, beaten, burned alive by the masters. But he being “a freak, a pervert of nature social entrepreneur” will never say he “made a mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master’s throat. I will say it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means to be a servant.”
And as we shut the book, realizing for a brief moment our numbed complacence with life, we also feel a déjà vu, and continue feeling the same for the rest of our smug lives, in all prospects. May be this mild itching will grow into something of a larger scale, and quite literally, we may challenge the rotten system, however convenient it seems now for the average middle class. Whether that achieved or not, White Tiger has surely left a lasting roar in the hallowed portals of Indian English literature.

I don't will this illness to go away

Here I am writing after a long time, and the blog is not opening! Is it a sign? Is it a sign like the foggy days in Delhi that seem to say "Go in, you have no right to be roaming about. The Earth is mine: winter rules." But since when did i start believing in signs? I know it's all my illness. All through August, I was praising winter, how gracefully it will trasform this sultry place into a dream city. But I was the first one to sneeze, cough, itch and grow weepy at the thought of amma!
Though I have been observing myself quite a bit. How I have slowed down while climbing the stairs, how I have put my generally high volume of speech down, how I eat so slowly-unlike a glutton who somehow knows her days are numbered (!). And it is quite amusing. I even laugh at myself. What was I hurrying for all this while? I could have always talked softer, walked in measured steps, ate 'lady-like.' Did it bring me any sense of achievement? May be it suited this maddening crowd that I am a part of. And once in a while it's worth it to fall sick (not seriously) and look up at the world rushing past you, like a helpless child! And bug the near and dear, and get pampered. Until the day when I find myself running up the stairs again- and feel well and thankful and happy and light that finally I can breath fully. And simply forget all these revelations and feel perplexed whether I was suffering from some kind of a Stockholm syndrome :)

മിഡില്‍ ക്ലാസ്സ്

'മധ്യേയിങ്ങനെ കാണുന്ന നേരത്ത്'
നമുക്കു മത്സരിച്ചേ തീരൂ.
നമ്മില്‍ ഒരാള്‍ക്കെന്കിലും ക്ലാസ്സ് കയറ്റം കിട്ടുന്നത് വരെ!

കുമിള മനുഷ്യന്‍

ഏഴ് നിറങ്ങളും പോരാഞ്ഞു

എട്ടാമത്തെതും തെരഞ്ഞു നടക്കുമ്പോളാണ്

കാല്‍ തട്ടി വീണു

കുമിള മനുഷ്യന്‍ പൊട്ടിപ്പോയത്!

ശരിയാണ്,
പകല്‍ എന്തായാലും വരും.
എങ്കിലും
എന്തൊരു നീളമാണീ രാത്രിക്ക്!

ചിതറിയ ചില ചിന്തകള്‍ - രണ്ട്

കടുത്ത പാടല നിറമുള്ള പുതപ്പു നനച്ചിടുമ്പോള്‍ അരികിലെ നൂലിഴകളില്‍ നിന്നു ചുട്ടു പഴുത്ത ടെറസിലെക്കു വാര്‍‌ന്നു വീഴുന്ന വെള്ളം നോക്കി കുറച്ച് നേരം നിന്നു. ഒരു പാടു വര്‍ഷങ്ങളായി, മനുഷ്യന്‍ സൂര്യന്റെ നിഴല്‍ നോക്കി നേരം അളക്കാന്‍ പഠിക്കുന്നതിനും മുന്‍പ്, ആ പുതപ്പു അങ്ങനെ അവിടെ തൂങ്ങിക്കിടന്നു നീര്‍ വാര്‍ക്കുന്നുന്ടെന്നു വെറുതെ സങ്കല്പിച്ചു നോക്കി.. സ്കൂളില്‍ നിരന്നു നില്ക്കുന്ന അസ്സംബ്ലി വരികളോട് വര്ത്തമാനം പറയാന്‍ വരുമായിരുന്ന പള്ളീലച്ചന്റെ അരയില്‍ മോടിയോടെ ചുറ്റിയിരുന്ന അങ്കിക്കും ഇതേ നിറമായിരുന്നുവല്ലോ

അന്നൊക്കെ അവിടുത്തെ ചെറിയ പള്ളിയില്‍, തണുപ്പും ഇരുട്ടും വീണു കിടക്കുന്ന ചാരുബെഞ്ചുകളില്‍ ഒന്നില്‍, ക്രൂശിത രൂപത്തെയും നോക്കി തനിച്ചിരിക്കുമ്പോള്‍ പള്ളീലച്ചന്മാര്‍ക്ക് ഈ സംഭാഷണ സ്ഥലതെന്തു കാര്യം എന്ന് തോന്നുമായിരുന്നു...വല്ലപ്പോഴും ധൂപക്കുറ്റി വീശി മറ്റൊരു ലോകത്തിന്റെ പരിമളം പരത്തിയിരുന്ന സഹായിക്കും, പിന്നെ വലിയ പള്ളി മണിയടിച്ചു മേഘങ്ങളെ തടുത്തു കൂട്ടുന്നവനെന്നു ഞാന്‍ കരുതിയിരുന്ന കപ്യാര്‍ക്കും മാത്രമെ അവിടെ പ്രസക്തിയുള്ളൂ എന്നും...!!

റോഡില്‍ അലറിപ്പാഞ്ഞു കൊണ്ടിരുന്ന ഏതോ വാഹനത്തിന്റെ പൊടുന്നനെയുള്ള നില്‍പ്പും മുരള്‍ച്ചയും കേട്ടാണ്‌ വര്‍ത്തമാനത്തിലേക്ക് തിരിച്ചു വന്നത്. അപ്പുറത്തെ ഗുരുദ്വാരയില്‍ നിന്നു ഗുരുസ്തുതികളുടെ നൈരന്തര്യം..

ഇതാ, എന്‍റെ പുതപ്പ്‌ ഉണങ്ങിയിരിക്കുന്നു..!

ചിതറിയ ചില ചിന്തകള്‍

"കിഴക്കേ നട വിട്ടെങ്ങും പോകാതോരരയാല്‍ മരം ഇലക്കൈ വിരലാലെണ്ണി നാമം ചൊല്ലുന്നു രാപ്പകല്‍ .."ഒരു പാടു ഓടിതളര്‍ന്നു ശരിക്കും യന്ത്രമായി മാറിക്കഴിഞ്ഞോ ഞാന്‍ എന്ന് സംശയം തോന്നുമ്പോള്‍ അറിയാതെ ചൊല്ലി നോക്കാറുണ്ട് ഈ വരികള്‍.. പെട്ടെന്ന് മനസ്സു നിറയെ തണല്‍ വിരിച്ചു കൊണ്ടു വിറയ്ക്കുന്ന ഇലകളുമായി ഒരു വലിയ മരം സങ്കല്‍പിക്കാന്‍ പറ്റുന്നു എനിക്കെന്കില്‍ ആശ്വാസം തോന്നും. ഇലക്കൈ വിരലിന്റെ ആ ചിത്രം എത്ര ഭംഗിയാണ്‌ ....അകത്തേക്ക് നോക്കാം ധൈര്യമായി എന്ന് തോന്നും ..
മാധവിക്കുട്ടിയുടെ "രുഗ്മിനിക്കൊരുപാവക്കുട്ടി" അവസാനിക്കുമ്പോള്‍ പറയുന്നുണ്ട്: "ഇന്നു എന്റെ ഉള്ളില്‍ എന്തോ മരിച്ചു.." എന്തൊരു ശക്തിയാണ് ആ ചെറിയ വാക്യത്തിനു..എങ്ങനെയാണ് ഇവരൊക്കെ ഇത്ര ചെറിയ, ലളിതമായ വാക്കുകളില്‍ ഇത്രയും വലിയ കടല്‍ ഒതുക്കുന്നത്‌!

എസ് എസ് എല്‍ സി

പരീക്ഷ കഴിഞ്ഞു ഇന്നലെ.
പേനയുടെ മുനയൊടിച്ചു ഞാനൊരു റോക്കറ്റ് ഉണ്ടാക്കി
കണ്ണീര്‍ വാര്‍ത്ത എല്ലാ പുസ്തകങ്ങളെയും അതില്‍ കയറ്റി യാത്രയാക്കി
പത്തു കൊല്ലം ചുമലില്‍ ഞാന്നു കിടന്ന സഞ്ചി പറിച്ചെടുത്ത്‌
അന്ന് വരെ ശേഖരിച്ച ബസ്സ് കണ്ടക്ടര്‍ തെറിയെല്ലാം പെറുക്കിയിട്ടു...
ഒടുവില്‍ വഴിയിലേക്കിറങ്ങി.
ആ നിമിഷം സൂര്യന്‍ അസ്തമിച്ചു.

പണ്ട് പണ്ട്,

ജീവിതം തുടങ്ങുന്നതിനും ജോലികള്‍ പകുക്കുന്നതിനും മുന്പ്,

തിരമാലകള്‍ അസ്തിത്വ ദുഃഖം ഉണര്തുന്നതിനും

പക്ഷികള്‍ വിമാനങ്ങളെ ഓര്‍മിപ്പിച്ചു തുടങ്ങുന്നതിനും മുന്പ്,

ചെമ്പിലയുടെ കറുത്ത പച്ചപ്പിലേക്ക്

ഒരു വെള്ളത്തുള്ളി വന്നു വീണു;

അതിനുള്ളില്‍ ഒരു മന്ചാടിക്കുരുവും-

അപ്പോളാണ് ഭൂമിയില്‍

ആദ്യത്തെ കവിത പിറന്നത്‌.

My Green Demands!

I want to see some greenery...
Not the lush, dark, rainy green of imposing evergreen forests;
But the humble, pleasing light green of wild grass full fledged...
And I dont want it wet with dew; and specks of tiny flowers, too.

That way, it will not intimidate my walking, rolling, flolicking on it...
The green should be so green that it should contrast well with the rocks nearby.
And above us, the sky should spread all over-letting in Sun.
It should not be deep blue- it should be as clear as the eyes of the baby i saw yesterday on bus.

Reassuring Raspberries

Do u remember that story, where the king's son had a stomach ache after eating so much of raspberry tarts? We studied it in school (and thus lost all its fun and imagination!). I guess in the end a wise minister convinces him that even after u remove the moon from sky, next night it will be replaced...(Again I dont recall what was the moon for, to make the boy drink his bitter medicine?SCHOOL, I must say!)

Anyway, in so many stories, from where I didnt have to answer questions in two sentences or in a paragraph, I have come across children going to pick raspberry in the wild-and it simply thrilled me..!! I have developed a fancy for all berries-mulberry,strawberry, blueberry, blackberry, gooseberry........my mouth-watering berries!

So, on the day of New Year, we were walking down CP (Delhi's famous acronym for Connaught Place) and found ourselves beside a foreign-fruit vendor. among strawberries, taiwan imported sweet tamarinds and green apples, he had this bunch of orangish yellow fruits, the size of grapes. Me and my sis, given the gluttons that we are, asked what it was and got enlightened about raspberries-till then a mere word of childhood reading. We bought it and started to eat immediately.

It tasted very nice-and familiar. In fact, it brought memories...of childhood, of our carefree vacations, of my long long reading time on bed on those asthmatic days...It reminded us about our time at ammachi's place, with all our cousins, how we used to turn an ordinary hybiscus tree into the most marvellous fir during christmas, and many, many more...

Later, in the room, we examined the bunch and found it resembled NJOTTA NJODIYAN!!(Now, its a wild fruit that amma taught us about-one of the many edible 'kaattupazhangal' we never knew existed). And finally we concluded this so called raspberry is nothing short(or tall) of njotta njodiyan!!only they are a lot bigger. even its outer cover was the same...We were so excited about this discovery that we popped the berries one after the other into our mouths all too fast, and it got over in a giffy!

And that was how my New Year began- with the reassuring note that i can still revel in the small things in life...and feel complete.

Flames...

Flames...flames all over...choking; suffocating; emaciating flames...
Smells...all kinds of them...burning, nauseating, debilitating smells...
Thoughts...painful, tiresome, never ending thus...

MY FIRST EARTHQUAKE IN DELHI

I got up from my sleep, from under my so poshly warm rajai, with a jerk. First I thought I was shivering due to some terrible dream i saw, which i couldnt recall, anyway(humans are so stupid!)Then I realized it was not me alone, but the entire cot!

Things were clanking in my room, and i felt the cot shivering underneath. it was at 4.45 in the morning. the best part is, my room mate didnt wake up! i woke up and lied down for some more time.

I tried to gather my thoughts; I was observing myself, judging, so to say: not my crisis-management skills; but what kind of thoughts i had then..I thought about Lathur, I thought about family-the one I already have; and the one I long to make!! I thought about love, thought about the warmth of my rajai-"would it leave me as warm even after its all over?!"I thought about people who did not have a home, who had to live on the pavements and crowded slums, people who could not even make room to escape from debris since they live in the middle of it...I thought about all the inmates of my hostel-their dreams, plans, careers, tears..

And then i heard one by one girls starting to come out of their rooms. i too went out.hearing all this, my room mate got up at last!!I listened to their 'quaky' experiences(from all over india-truly cosmopolitan!) for some time, and went bak to sleep!! In the next morning attendance was so very less in the mess for breakfast-since all girls were sleeping into late morning to make up for their disturbed sleep!!

so... thats all abt earth quake...my first earth quake in delhi!! (nice title for a novel- now i just need to write the rest of it ;)

Five things I hate the most

1. Filling out forms
2. Mistaken for things I never intended to say or do
3. Being taken for granted
4. Women Being Apolegetic about being women
5. A nervous break down!

FIVE THINGS I LOVE THE MOST

1. To be understood fully without uttering a word
2. Feel amma's touch, achan's grip, muth's reassuring naughtiness
3. A Pleasant evening
4. Atmosphere just before it rains
5. Green, dark, imposing trees

five years have past..............

i guess there is no need at all to act what u r not. or attach paraphernalia so that u seem gr8. isnt it ok to be u? just u? but some ppl are so strange. they would want u to associate urself with so many other things- they simply refuse to accept u as u. if u dont go by the tags of profession, family and status, u are in for trouble indeed! i seriously dont see the point. we r here for being ourselves- not to play out roles for others simply bcoz the world demands it. NO WAY!

between, i am so happy to have come bak and i actually went thru two gr8 blogs. alas! one of them has called it quits with the blog that had been in existence for five long years-on the brighter side, now i am reminded of these lines from wordsworth which i tried to learn byheart for a competition but failed- five years have past, five summers, with the length(? )of five long winters...feeling soo gud to recite it now- for no reason!

balanced...finally!

At last...
I learned-to balance on two "inflated egoes"!Yes, now i can ride a bicycle.At least I can cover a distance on two slender wheels, pedalling away without help!

So world- both virtual and real- listen: I have learned a new act, a new technique, rather a unique art-because being able to ride a bicycle has been my dream for the past so many years...

So here I am..cycling into my latter twenties!!

lessons

Blooming full fledged