Changes in the Air

It is baking hot in Bangalore. Old-timers reminisce about ten years ago, when the weather never went beyond "slightly warm", even at three on an April afternoon. They speak with horror of the traffic, and the pollution, and the heat, and the dust. Walking about in the hot yellow afternoon, it is quite an effort to remember that Hyderabad must be hotter, Delhi must be dustier, Chennai must be muggier.


Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day 
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way. 
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way. 

Time feels strange these days. Maybe it always does during periods of change, if only one weren't too busy to notice.

Next week, after three years of corporate life, I am taking a break. Life will no more be split into five days of work and two days of relaxation. No more of hurrying to catch the 7:30 bus, no more coming home late, no more office food, no more of sitting hunched in front of a laptop.

I have to admit - it is damn scary. Life is easier when there's a set routine. And the easier the routine, the tougher it is to get out - of the rut or comfort zone or whatever you want to call it. People tell me it was a brave decision to make, but I did it without even thinking much about it.

I already know, of course, that it will require a lot of willpower. It is going to be a torturous year, where I will almost certainly be wracked by doubt, by a sneaking suspicion that I'm not doing what I actually should be doing, that I should be doing more than I currently am.

The other change is that we are moving to a new place. Not our own, though. We realized that we were doing the whole house-buying thing too hurriedly. After all, a house is a life-long investment - it's almost like deciding whom to marry. It's not something that should be decided with a deadline in mind.

So we are moving to a rented place as of now. The guy who showed us the place kept using the word 'penthouse', but all that it means is that it's on the same floor as the terrace. Which is actually good - I am looking forward to the monsoons, and to seeing black clouds massed up against the afternoon sky. People crib about having to shift houses, but I find myself excited about it. I guess mostly because I've never done it before and I don't know any better.

Hunting Again

And so we are back in the hunt again. Less than a year after we moved into the current place, we are looking for a house again - to buy, this time. With a year's worth of earnings in the bank, we have become so bold as to  think we can own a house.

Of course, we are low-budget buyers. We can't afford the Sobhas and the Purvas of the world. So we try the not-so-high-name builders, and the slightly older flats.

As before, it is a disheartening and dispiriting hunt. There is something extremely depressing about entering other people's houses and lives. The stained toilets and the washed underwear hung out to dry. The framed wedding photos and the multitude of gods on the shelf. The realization that this is how our lives would look to strangers, too.

And the houses themselves make the hunt even worse. Our spirits go down as we are asked to cross the posh locality mentioned in the ad and enter the not-so-posh locality nearby. The roads get narrower, the buildings closer together. There are no trees, there is no wind, there is nothing to see except buildings and clothes lines and electricity wires.

The flats are dim and ill-lit, the cupboards are of plywood. Children's voices echo from outside, women pace balconies and fight on the phone with distant people.

We leave each house dispirited. Our budget looks increasingly puny in this crowded and dusty city. On our way back, we stare with envy at the huge white houses of the posh locality. When, we wonder, will we live in such houses?

We will, of course. We are young. We are up-and-coming. We'll get there. In the end.

But till then, wish us luck. Wish us a cozy place close to the main road, with lots of natural light, and enough water, and maybe some open space around. Wish us a home.

Murakami - Running, Writing and Life

I gave up on Murakami some time after I finished reading Kafka on the Shore. Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed the book hugely while I was reading it. But a couple of days after I finished the book, while I was in the 'digestion' phase, I suddenly felt like I had missed a lot of layers and meanings in the book. Why had such strange things happened? What did this incident mean? I suddenly felt I had read a different book from the one that Murakami had written. And that completely threw me off reading any more of his books.

But a colleague of mine, who had got to know about my new found habit of jogging, lent me What I Talk About When I Talk About Running last week. I had seen it in book-stores a couple of times, and had been vaguely thinking of buying it, so she definitely picked  the right book for me.

WITAWITAR is very different from his other books (no cats, for instance!). It's a short book, quite introspective, and quite philosophical. He is mostly talking about running - about marathons, about triathlons, about the emotions in his mind when he's running, his experiences. But at the same time, he's also talking about writing, about willpower, about ageing, about life.

For a new runner jogger like me, it's extremely interesting to know the 'behind-the-scenes' story, so to speak. What goes on in a runner's mind during those grueling miles of the marathon? When I read about Murakami's first 'marathon', which was a solo run from Athens to Marathon on the Greek shore, and how hot it was, and how he had to push himself to finish the last few miles - well, I looked at myself and my puny 5 kilometers a day in the pleasant early morning weather of Bangalore, and felt rather foolish.

Murakami also expounds on his theory that writing is in general such an unhealthy profession, that writers need to do something intensely healthy in order to re-create the balance in their lives. Otherwise, they would burn out from sheer exhaustion.

The one thing I have realized after reading this book is that I will never become a marathon runner. I don't think I have the willpower to push myself to those limits. Murakami may be able to push himself to run the second half of an ultra-marathon (which is 62 miles as opposed to the 26.2 miles of a normal marathon) despite suffering from cramps. But personally, I would have just taken the cramps as a very welcome excuse to stop running. (I expect that's why he's a best-selling author and I'm not.)

Okay, I've just looked up the Bangalore 10K run - it's on 27th May this year. I may not be a marathon runner in the making, but a 10 kilometer run looks manageable, right? Let's see.

Gender Disadvantage and Class Advantage

Wow. I'd never thought of this that way.

Co-incidentally, just after reading this article, I saw the bookmark I was using. Flipkart has this series of bookmarks on the theme of 'Reasons to use the bookmark'. Reason #10? 'Your mum is vacuuming the sofa, and you are on it.' Never the dad.

The Hindu : Today's Paper / OPINION : The everyday embrace of inequality:

A professional woman who wants to have a serious career learns to use her class advantage (the ability to hire a worker) to minimise her gender disadvantage (the inability to insist that your husband do his share of the housework and childcare). To put it bluntly, men simply won't do housework and women don't feel they can make them. The dominant ideology continues to be indisputably that men are responsible for life outside the home and women for life within the home, even if women work outside the home. The presence of a servant simply mitigates the need to insist that men do their share at home, and because it is the servant that does the housework, it continues to be devalued labour.

'via Blog this'

How Much Should A Person Consume? - Ramachandra Guha

I picked up this book because of the intriguing title. And also because it was Ramachandra Guha, of course. Guha is one of the very few Indian intellectuals who write well enough to make their subjects accessible to the layman. His India After Gandhi is a masterpiece on the history of India after independence.

In this collection of essays, Guha introduces the reader to the history of environmentalism  - mostly in India, but also in the West. Three of the nine essays are profiles of prominent environmentalists - Lewis Mumford, Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Madhav Gadgil. The others are masterful criticisms of the hypocrisy of certain types of environmentalists. 

The unifying theme of the book is the close relationship between environmentalism and the rights of the poor. There are three main ways, Guha says, in which the two are linked. 

The first is the hypocrisy of the West, when it comes to the rest of the world. Over the past two-three centuries, the countries of the West have enjoyed high economic growth, and the associated socio-economic development. They were able to achieve this mostly by exploiting the resources of the less well-off countries of the southern hemisphere. These countries have managed to protect their own ecology, but have destroyed that of the countries they colonized. And now that they have achieved the requisite levels of development, they preach to these same countries on the virtues of protecting the environment.

The second linkage between environmentalism and the poor is the tussle between the government and the indigenous people. The government, says Guha, is a centralized, bureaucratic entity. In trying to protect the forests and the wildlife, the government creates insensitive policies that trespass on the rights of the poor. The indigenous people have used the forests as the source of their livelihood for centuries, but are now restricted from even entering these forests. Not only that, the government displays its two-facedness by denying the people access to  the forests, and then allowing businessmen to cut down the trees for their own ends.

The third issue springs from the previous one - the contradiction between the needs of the rural millions, and those of the smaller number in the cities. The cities over-consume, and the government takes away rural resources in order to satisfy the needs of the cities. An obvious example here is the building of large dams in order to provide electricity to the cities. Millions are displaced in the process - the government does not provide adequate rehabilitation to them. They end up in the slums of the nearest city.

Guha does not just proscribe - he also prescribes. The solution to the problem, he says, lies in decentralizing our systems. We should devolve power to the people. Each village or community must have the rights to manage its own forest resources. The government must not interfere unless absolutely necessary. 

In the eponymous essay, the final one, Guha points out the contradiction between the West's over-consumption (an average American consumes over 20 times the amount an average Indian consumes) and its arrogance in preaching to the developing countries that they need to reduce their population. 

He also quotes Gandhi, "God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts."

Believe it or not, he said that in 1928. And that's exactly what's happening today. Two gigantic countries, India and China, are scouring the world for the resources needed to meet their growing energy needs. Over-exploitation is hitting an all-time high, as the people of the world's largest countries (by population) start aping the consumption patterns of the already developed countries of the West. A scary prospect indeed.

The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch

The book that this novel reminded me of most was Alex Garland's The Beach. Those who have read both the books will wonder why, because they have nothing in common except vaguely similar sounding names. One is about a famous play director who decides to retire and settle down on the cold and grey coast of Britain, while the other is about a group of hippies who set up an alternative community on a remote island in Thailand. One won the Booker in 1978, while the other was written almost twenty years later. On the surface of it, no two books could be more dissimilar. 

The similarity, I think, is that both books chronicle the slow disintegration of the main protagonist's mind. In The Beach, it's a disintegration of the wild sort - the human mind slowly loses the rules and principles that it would normally live by in society, and becomes wild. In The Sea, The Sea, on the other hand, the disintegration is within the bounds of human understanding - a man trying to come to terms with sudden anonymity, and with the sudden re-entry of an old flame into his life.

But let's start from the beginning. Charles Arrowby is the play director in question, who has decided to withdraw from the glamour of the stage in London, to a quirky house in a remote village on the sea coast. He plans to read, to write his memoirs, to enjoy the sea, to cook for himself. Little does he realize that he will soon run across the old love of his life - 'Hartley', a girl who left him when he was seventeen, for no reason that he could understand. 

The book is divided into three parts - 'Pre-history', the bit before Charles runs across Hartley, in which he is writing his memoirs; 'History', in which the main events unfold; and the Epilogue, what happens after. 'Pre-History' is a slow read - Charles describes his house, his daily swims, his food - and we wonder why. The author is slowly building up the atmosphere, but to what end?

And then, in 'History', the book kicks off. A few more characters come in. And finally, from them, we get a better understanding of Charles - how insanely jealous he can be, how he breaks up relationships just to feel the power of it, how much he hates women. Were these characteristics, we are forced to wonder, caused by Harley's inexplicable abandonment of him? 

In 'History', Charles describes his increasingly desperate attempts to get in touch with and talk to Hartley - asking her son to stay at his place, asking her over and then lying about how late it is, and finally - kidnapping her. The reader becomes increasingly aware that there is something wrong with Charles. Surely his actions are not those of a rational man? 

His friends try to counsel him - not least his cousin James, a retired Army man. James seems to be another person who has had a tremendous influence on Charles' personality. Of the two cousins, James was always the more privileged one - whether in terms of money or liberal parents or grades at school. But it is finally Charles who has achieved country-wide fame, and that makes him feel superior to James. But one can't help feeling that there is a peculiar symbiotic relationship between the two, almost as if they would not exist without the other.

The strongest element of this novel is the complex characterization - whether it is Charles or Hartley's husband, or James or Charles' many friends. The only character who is left a bit blurred, intentionally or otherwise, is Hartley herself, the center of all the action. Perhaps it's because we only get to know her through Charles, and he is a bit ambivalent about her himself. On the one hand, he proclaims over and over again that he loves her. Then again, he can't help focusing on her imperfections - how old she has become, her inept makeup, her large body. He can't help contrasting his own youthfulness with her old age. 

The novel ends on a strange note, with a mysterious Eastern touch. Has Charles found himself at last? Is he content with himself at last? Read to find out.

Sammy and Me

"So what was I supposed to do, let them kill me?" she asks.
"There were other options, Sharmishta." It's only when I'm angry with her that I use her full name.
"Such as what? It was either run away or become one of them. And that's the same as death."
"It's not so bad."
"Of course you would say that."
"But what do you expect me to do? The first thing they'll do is call here."
"So tell them you haven't seen me."
"I can't lie to my own sister!"
"Fine. You want me to go away? I'll go away." She makes a move to get up, but I know it's just an empty threat.
"No, that's not what I'm saying."
"It sounded like that to me!"
"Okay. Stay here tonight. We'll figure it out in the morning."
"No, Maasi. I need an answer tonight. If you don't let me stay here, I'll have to find another place."
"I've already told you you can stay here."
"But you'll give me away, won't you?"
"I won't."
"Promise?"
"Promise. Now come on. I'll prepare Anu Didi's room for you. It's two in the morning and I have to go to work tomorrow."

***

"And that was the last I saw of her. I changed the bed-sheets in Anu's room, and I left her there."
"You didn't check on her in the morning before leaving?"
"I did, but the door was locked. I knocked, but she didn't answer. I thought she must be exhausted from her journey. I prepared her breakfast and left it on the table with a note. And I left."
"When was this?"
"I knocked on her door around seven, and I left around eight."
"And you didn't think of calling her parents?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I had promised her."
"Come on, Mrs Varma. Only kids believe in promises."
"No. Sammy and me... She has always trusted me. I couldn't let her down."
"Clearly, she didn't trust you. She wouldn't have left otherwise."
"No... I don't know. I still think that something must have happened that made her leave."
"But what could have happened between two and seven in the morning?"
"No.. I believe she was still in the room when I left in the morning."
"Why? Did you hear any noises from inside when you knocked?"
"No. It's just a feeling."
"And you used the word 'locked'. Was the door locked or bolted?
"It was locked. The door doesn't have a bolt. It's just a latch with a key which is usually on the inside."
"But she could have locked it from either side?"
"Yes, she could have. And that's what she did - whenever it was that she left."
"Okay. So you returned home when?"
"Around five."
"Was that your usual time for getting home?"
"No. I usually return around seven. But I was worried about her. I had tried calling home during the day to check on her, but she hadn't picked up."
"Maybe she was worried it was her parents calling?"
"Possibly. But I do have caller ID on my phone. So she could have seen it was me."
"And she didn't have a mobile phone?"
"No. That was another reason for her rebellion - that all her friends had mobile phones, and that she didn't."
"Okay, so you came home at five, and found what?"
"I found the door still locked. And..."
"Go on."
"Well, I was suddenly very scared. I thought maybe... she had done something. I tried to force open the door, but I couldn't. Then I remembered that there was a common bathroom between this bedroom and my son's bedroom. That door has a weaker bolt. I tried through there, and it gave."
"And the room was empty."
"Yes."
"And the bed had been slept in."
"Yes."
"And the balcony door? Was it open?"
"Yes, it was. But she couldn't have climbed down through there. It's a sheer drop to the ground."
"But you have a ladder in your garden shed, don't you?"
"Yes, but the ladder was down there. How could she use it to climb down?"
"Maybe there was somebody who helped her. Maybe somebody used the ladder to climb up, spend the night with her in the room and climb down again."
"Mr Singh! Please!"
"Okay, okay. But all of you seem to believe she was just a child. You need to realize that she was fifteen years old. And we live in a country where girls get married at eleven and have babies by the time they are thirteen."
"I don't care. She was intelligent enough to know what was good for her and what was not."
"Yes, running away from home seems like a very intelligent thing to do."
"She had her reasons."
"Yes, so you tell me. We'll come to that in a while. So where was it that you found the note?"
"On the bedside table."
"And this is the note? "I'm leaving. I don't want you to suffer because of me. Sammy. P.S. - I've borrowed two books."
"What did she mean - suffer?"
"My sister and her husband are - well, possessive. They wouldn't have forgiven me for not telling them she was staying with me."
"Well, her leaving seems to have had the same effect anyway."
"Yes. I suppose she was hoping it wouldn't."
"Did you find any money missing after she left?"
"No, I didn't. But then I hardly keep any money at home."
"Was there anything else missing - jewellery, other valuables?"
"No. Only the books."
"Ah. The ones she mentioned in the note. Which ones?"
"Anna Karenina. And Pamuk's The Black Book."
"Pretty heavy for a girl her age. Was she a reader then, our Sharmishta?"
"Yes, she loves reading. And she has also recently started writing."
"What was she writing? Stories? Poems?"
"A bit of everything, I think. And she has kept a diary since she was eleven."
"Yes, I've seen them. She has taken the last two with her, though."
"Mira and Ankur showed you her diaries?"
"Are you surprised? They are prepared to do anything to get her back."
"I suppose I'm not surprised. They never did understand her."
"What does that have to do with showing me her diary?"
"She really values her privacy. If I had been in Mira's place, I wouldn't have shown her diaries to anybody."
"They don't really have anything particularly private in them, you know."
"That's not the point. Letting a complete stranger go through them is like..."
"I understand. But obviously I had no choice - going through other people's lives is my job. Anyway, the fact that she took the last two years' diaries proves that she knew somebody would go through them."
"Yes, I suppose that's true. She knew her parents well enough."
"So was that one of her reasons for leaving? This trouble that she supposedly had with her parents?"
"Yes. She was afraid they weren't going to let her do what she wanted to do."
"Which was?"
"Read books. Write. Think."
"And who did she think was going to pay for her while she did that?"
"I don't think she had got that far. She was just thinking of the next few years - about what she wanted to study. She wanted to take up Humanities after tenth. And then English Literature in college. Mira and Ankur had other plans, of course."
"Oh please, Mrs Varma. That's the typical Indian middle class story. The parents who want their kids to become engineers and doctors, never mind what the kids want. That happens in thousands of Indian families each year. It happened to me; I'm sure it happened to you. You can't tell me that makes a girl run away from home!"
"You don't understand, Mr Singh. Sammy was an extraordinary girl. She had grit, yes. She could stand up for the things she believed in. But she was also extraordinarily sensitive. The thought of spending the next few years of her life studying biology and medicine must have terrorized her!"
"But surely she must have grown up knowing that was her destiny? With doctor parents and a doctor aunt and doctor cousins? And doctor grandparents, for God's sake?"
"Yes. Poor thing. Imagine how it must have worried her for years."
"Just as it worried you in your teens, I suppose?"
"I..."
"Never mind. Forget I asked that. Anyway. My next step is to find out where she went from here. Interestingly enough, I have lots of witnesses for her journey here. But none for her journey ahead, wherever it was that she went."
"Perhaps she changed her clothes. People must have noticed her because of her uniform. She must have changed.
"Possibly. One last thing, Mrs Varma. Where do you think she has gone?"
"I don't know, Mr Singh."
"Oh come on. You seem to be the one person who knows her best. Give me your best guess."
"I think she's gone somewhere where she can be herself. She won't come to a bad end, I'm sure of that. She knows how to look after herself. She won't end up on the streets. She'll be somewhere where she can be surrounded by books. Where she has enough paper to write on. And I'm sure you'll hear her name somewhere in the future, Mr Singh. You'll hear her name as a new young author, and you'll remember this unsolved case of yours."
"Well, don't be so sure of the unsolved part of it, Mrs Singh. I'm quite sure I know where she is. Or I know who can tell me, if I ask the right questions. Whether I choose to ask them, and whether I choose to tell her parents - that's the question."
"May I ask you a personal question, Mr Singh?"
"You don't need to ask - I can guess. Yes, I went through the same thing. I did serve my four year sentence in an engineering college. And then I worked at an IT firm for about five years before I started doing what I really loved. And that's when I started living, I suppose."
"So you do understand what Sammy is going through."
"Yes, I suppose so."
"Are you going to continue the investigation?"
"I will, for a couple of days. And then I'll tell them I can't find a further trail."
"Thank you, Mr Singh."
"Nice meeting you, Mrs Varma. Say hi to Sharmishta for me."

***

"But suppose they find out? Suppose they come here and discover me?"
"They won't. Once they get to know that you came here and I didn't call them, they won't even talk to me."
"Won't you be sad about that?"
"I will. But I think I'll be sadder if you waste your life the way I did, Sammy."