A for apple ....B for ball ...C for cat ....

Chilu was a nice little girl. Then , she had to go to school .The niceness.. gave way to bewilderment , a sense of loss and she saw what she had never seen before , a huge question mark , a big question mark before her existence. The world of “comprehension’ was suddenly put before her .No meaning was ever made clear. . Infact, she was barged with it . The funny thing was that she realized it even then but she never spoke about it. She did not have the words to talk about it . She did not know how to say it. It was something like a lexical short coming. She did not know either how to use a dictionary.

She was given toys to play with and told how to distinguish green from red. She learnt slowly that green was found in trees and leaves and red was found when she hurt her knees playing or when mother wore a flower in her hair. Her mind was battered with repeated images and then in a few weeks time she knew it. It constituted knowledge.

After a brief tryst with the creatures called words, came the time for numbers. There was something even more mysterious about them. They came from no where and made no sense what so ever . She wondered why two plus two could not make five. Why were those symbols made just like that, why were they not red or green . Why did it not matter whether at all they were red or green? . The mysticism of numbers grew as the teacher began to do something with them. Why did she do this, what was the thing in manipulating symbols and looking and feeling great about it . It was such a waste. Why did she not let her play out in the rain, wouldn’t that make her so much happier . Why was maths more important than happiness. ? But then shed do it for mothers love. She would laugh at this idea several years down the line but that is a different story. Right now, mothers love is very important. So, she sat down to write. Mother gave her the pencil in the right hand. She learnt to write with the right hand . Why did God make the left one then, she thought. Again, a waste. After all, learning was the most important thing a child is supposed to do in her life and her entire physical and mental faculties must assist this process . The right hand was such a waste. She continued, anyway .

The problem was that if a car covered 2kms in 10 minutes, how much time would it take to cross 5kms . What are kilometers, she thought and what does it try to measure .Why does it measure distance only and why not mangoes . What does distance mean , does it mean to walk, to move or to fly . And why is this a problem at all . In her mind it was not a problem, neither was it mathematical . But the teacher said it is maths. So, Chilu was confused .

Chilu grew up like this , with an utter sense of bewilderment that was very different from a sense of wonder . A sense of wonder is blissful , bewilderment is troubling . She swung between little moments of ease and discomfort . She did not know what to do about it neither did she really want to do anything about it . She thought she was alone in this tragedy . It was her mind alone that did not ….understand . It was about intelligence quotient , again measured in numbers and percentages . So it was not her realm .So she stopped to think about it and just followed processes at school .Moreover , she realized that that was the only way she would be able to be a part of the prize distribution ceremony and her mother would so love to see her with that shining silver around her neck . ………

thoughts for a lark .............

She walked alone on the road as if she was searching for something .Even as she had learnt to give , she was learning fast to keep more and more to herself .
It was cold but the city was lit up in red lights like concentric circles on the doors of heaven . Then there were the added affects of crackers up in the air . They showed in all colors but then when they went out , you couldn’t see the moon or the stars . It seemed to her like the civilization , the people of her times had to make a choice between the two .
As she walked she saw two tiny children , performing on the road . The girls body twisted in loops like rubber as if she had no bones . Probably she dint have bones . The boy who was a little taller than her collected the money later from the people on the street after the random twisting of the girl . He also provided some background music with a huge drum that slung around his slender neck and she thought about how much it must have hurt him to carry it on his back all the time . But she wasn’t that correct about it . After the round pieces of metal had been collected , the face of the little girl spoke of something that she hadn’t imagined . It wasn’t miserable , there was a lingering smile . A sense of victory over the worlds harsh ways . After the initial slathering of her body on the street , she looked into the eyes of the people on the street and had smiled . She dint know what worked better. The body or the smile . But, it did not matter . She used both .

The search continued . She looked at the road , then up at the building, then at a tall man on the road who stood right next to her . Her gaze shifted from hell to heaven to the mediocrity of the earth. For a moment , she thought of where she really belonged . What did those spaces mean?. She felt a sense of vacuum as if she had been dead for a long time. The height of the sky scraper was enormous , it was fascinating but still scary . She could never have clung to those heights even though she had visited them a few times . It was painful to stay there. So , all in a puckish and innocent way she had come down . Now she stared back at it , wishing she could be there again . But life doesn’t bring back the same things . It brings new things in the same old packaging and sometimes the freshness of it is difficult to interrogate or even identify.

She moved ahead and entered one of those huge coffee shops with glass walls so you could sit alone and stare out . It was fine for women to visit such places in the middle of the night and look out of the window without fear of being taken for being there for any business in flesh. The world had begun to liberate itself after all . She ordered her favorite mocha over which the waiter made the face of a beautiful woman with hair like waves and a faint smile. It was made in dark chocolate . She dint feel like disturbing it but finally picked up the spoon. And so she wished that her tears were just like this . That they left no marks and no proof and just merged with the merciless flow of the drops of pain that kept on collecting in this world. Perhaps, she thought, that is what water really was . The oceans were really only a collection of the pain in this world. That is why there is so much water . The coffee was over but in this charming world , they wouldn’t ask a pretty lady to leave even if she had finished her coffee.

Outside the window she saw a lanky fellow arm in arm with a fat and very fair girl . She wore a hat and had green eyes, so large that they shone up and were visible from behind through the glass at the distance . They were dancing eyes . She picked up the phone and said in a confident voice that she was on her way to a class on psychology. Then she giggled with pride . An air that said that her she could not be caged . The silly arrogance of a woman who could not even identify her chains.


She came out of the coffee house and walked on, her mind flooded with thoughts that made her miserable . The way he had beaten her up last night , how she had cursed him and how she was degraded in the process . Her words that had always been so polished and fine were now only an array of hurled abuses and those words often lost their direction .They were hurled at the wrong people and the process left her like a heap of mess . Her mind was just like her hair , tangled within its own fine strands …

of beginnings n ends...

A spark of god , is the earliest answer I had got when I had woken up one night suddenly throwing my hands and feet around asking myself who am I . A spark… a tiny spark with light, energy, color, vibration and sound. Is that me? For a moment I agreed, I was very young then, very negotiable. But then where does god come into the picture..if I am a spark of god , then god must be made of a million sparks and nothing more . Then why worship him, hes like us, like me, like you. If I choose I may try to communicate with him, if I choose that is, and he must choose a relationship with me too. It is contractual then, like every thing else. We strike a deal, do we? If that’s true then it is trivialized like other mundane negotiations of life, ordinariness creeps in again. Not that I have any enmity with the ordinary, I have no special relationship with it. Its strange that I have mastered the art of neutrality at least in some sphere (a worldly asset for a not so worldly person, an absolute attribute). Again coming back to god and me, I have often wondered why my existence has always been explained as a creation , why in terms of god . Why would he create me , the grand master , what benefits would he have ?. And if he did create me , did he also create the millions of thoughts that blaze my mind every day , did he create my smiles and my tears as well , is nothing my own ? ………….

The images that I have loved and tried so hard to capture for my self , in my eyes , my soul , did god create that as well . ? The soul has often interested me , I think when my father had told me that im a spark of god he had referred to this thing called the soul . They say that it goes out of the body when one dies . A scientific experiment conducted in the USA put a dying person in an air tight coffin , within moments a ball of fire like thing broke through the glass . They called it the soul . I wonder if the same fire like thing will pass my body too when the biological process of death happens to me . May be my fire is pink, may be I throw up ice , may be my soul is icy …….
Now if at all there is a soul , then what will it do without the body , will it drift along on misty flats , lonely and of no worth . Will it exist just for the sake of existence , why will it make such a bad choice if that consciousness is really conscious . Perhaps the secret lies in the idea that consciousness is above emotion but to me it is emotion . Emotion is consciousness , devoid of it is not detachment , it is hollowness . .who am I again ..words are easy to use sometimes , but do I understand when I say I , I centre myself down , I reduces the radius of my existence because then im not you , im not a butterfly and im not so many other things which I could have been , I can be you , I can be a mother , I can be child and I can live a better life , qualitatively with more variety . My world of I on the other hand restricts me , it dictates and confines my range of thoughts and emotions . I is therefore restrictive. The spark of god is limited , will god still own it ..is it still a spark of god . Therefore, I am …I live on …this voice is mine , a result of a process of evolution and not sheer miraculous creation . Miracles belong to this world, I wonder why we make them so special, I wonder why we have a word such as miracle in our language. Is it about mere frequency of occurrence of any event , if something occurs once in a million years it is miraculous …may be it is sheer probability , co incidence , contingency . My existence could be just contingency, which I think it is …I could have been someone else, some thing else . …I wish I was a tiny dark blue bird against the light blue sky …but I cannot be that because I am I …….

THE POLITICS OF THE curly and the straight

The school Christmas Cantata was the grandest event of the year. I clearly remember, it was 1993, the class teacher asked me to join in it. It was quite a privilege since not everyone got to participate. I was rapturous inside though on the surface I only pretended to be obedient to the teacher. It really wasn’t that plain.
But…….a shepherd was not the role I was mentally prepared to play. A dull, brown, solemn looking shepherd was what I was to be, surrounded by pretty angels, very fair with curly hair. They looked divine to me and suddenly there came an air of inaccessibility about these chosen ones.
Well, this is what I wanted to be - an angel with curly hair. But whom could I say this to?
December came; the auditorium looked resplendent with Christmas lights and was reverberating with the sound of laughter and applause of the audience. No one noticed this solemn looking shepherd in a brown cloak. I didn’t even have a dialogue. The photographs taken later reflected how my glum face spoke of nothing that was ‘Christmassy’ in spirit.
I returned home and told my best friend over the phone, how much I had hated being the shepherd. She told me with her usual naughtiness, “At least you were not made a tree! Look at Parul, she had to get a huge dress stitched just to be a tree!!” But this was no help. I had to be a fairy with a long white dress, a crown and a wand and above all curly hair.
Next year it came December again and I was shepherd again this time. That evening I came back home and sulked, deciding never to be part of this event again. It took me two years to tell my mother that a fairy was what I wanted to be. An angel with curly hair! I learnt my first lesson….’voice yourself’ and there came the rewards…
She divided my hair into six parts and put paper rollers into it. Maa did it with an expertise that I could never have trusted her with. Within a few hours I had the locks of an angel, I danced around the house and even showed it to daddy who looked rather amused.
I went to bed feeling like I had won it finally. Next morning, the first thing I hurried towards the mirror and it was once again a flat mass of hair that fell poker straight on the face and then the eyes swelled and tears rolled out. No one could understand why??..........the magical mom who had created the curls last night too looked disappointed with herself and her creative sensibilities.
“It had to be temporary my child, it was only for a few hours”, she tried to explain. But the rationality some how did not permeate the flat mass of hair into the mind.
I got into the desperate explanation mode instead and told her that all my dolls had curly hair, the actresses in the movies had curly hair and the angels in the Christmas cantata too had curly hair. Maa looked wonder stuck for a while but then came up with an argument that was to stay with me for the rest of my life. Perhaps I can now look back with a certain mature detachment and understand the purpose of this incident being vividly and yet so hatefully etched in my mind. We have our lessons to learn.
Ma had told me, “But…you are a real girl!”
That said it all….
So here I am maa…your real girl ….with strength of mind and courage to see through life …the simpler things that stay within and are my driving forces!

oN mY WAY...............The journey from being an autonomous unit that moved around like a bubble hitting the floor and rising up by itself to an indi

The journey from being an autonomous unit that moved around like a bubble hitting the floor and rising up by itself to an individual who is trying hard to be part of that super glue in society which the theorists call “social capital” has been made rather briskly.

But somewhere it feels incomplete…I see myself as a loner ,as one who is still complete by herself ,who is self sustaining and whole ,I like to call myself independent.

Lately I saw the need to balance the weight of this sensibility by a counter practice .One that incorporates, that pulls people together and quite essentially breaks that cocoon which we build in years, that super ego which sometimes becomes the only thing we possess.
I had quite honestly been disastrously bored with sitting in the class room trying hard to get principles and ideals of social work in my head .When you are not practicing something and the words being used to explain the idea are dull and don’t even sound weird enough to attract your attention , you sure are in a mess. It spells the absolute collapse of all pedagogy.

Well, in some saner moments of a lower degree of frustration , I decided to give the idea of a social worker a chance and take a deeper look into the intricate details and the sustaining mechanisms of this market .I choose to call it a market that buys and sells suffering, not just the cure to physical pain that a doctor will sell nor the mental agony that is a psychologist s means of living but the whole and all of suffering in all its shades .When there is no problem there is still perspective that looks at the “problematic”…so the woes never really go away, happiness remains illusionary and temporary only to be soon replaced by a new Sinicism, a new skepticism and a new doubt. I remember Marx….and the call for the new critical mind, the idea that one should and must doubt everything. I was a product of that doubt.

Now as I look back I see the harm that that trail of thought can do to someone, it can keep you in the cupboard and keep you happy too. There has been attempt, irrespective of the silly space called the class room to be at least a molecule in that great adhesive.

There are spaces that are creating alternatives to society that already exists and this is not the highly educated crème de la crème; as they sip their special coffees and talk about revolutionary theory, there is thought and action being put together by those who go through the pain and the anguish. Those whose fears are invisible and whose voices have gone unheard .The insecurities which have never been articulated are suddenly vented and then there is visibility all of a sudden of things that have always stayed in each individual ,relegated to the dark corners of the mind and captured by the chains of self denial .These are spaces where tears and trauma become tangible, they stare you in the face like they are your own, with capacity to be part of your own emotional baggage ,more precious in many ways; unlike media coverage where they appear to us like stories of a distant land, of an alien set of people.
.

They called it a workshop in training HIV people how to lead their lives and deal with the stigma and the discrimination that it brings along. ”Workshop” sounds mechanical, clinical to the last bit, perfectly manageable and without any errors. Sadly, life is all about imperfections………….but that’s what makes it beautiful and keeps it going. I tried to tap into those imperfections, the details of a raised eye brow, the slight flicker of a suppressed smile, and the pair of moist eyes. The way sita had felt scared of going out of her house to look for a job, a dead husband, the “dirty” disease, a child who is also a victim and the added burden that came to her from birth, that of being a woman, no degrees, no education, no green paper, and she had said with a glitter on the face” you just have to be brave sometimes”. What happened when jhanki lost her husband and was turned out by her family, abused and hurled? Her fears translated into strength not due to some great external forces but simply a result of the force of circumstances. She believes in that, “once you start doing things you learn gradually”, she told me with an air of simplicity and conviction. Then came the lioness ,I call her so because that is precisely what she is, you must know Pooja to agree with me ,she loves red, like she loves life and she is not afraid of her blood any more even though as a child she ran away crying at the sight of it. They are bound not by misery but by their common pursuit of happiness.

In the class room they call it “process”; I hate that word .To them it is the creation of “social capital”, to me they are women who have conquered life.

the ScriBBle

This is of empty corridors and broken lamp shades,of the everyday search for love and the regular reconciliation with the hollowness within.....of strings of words in which i searched for
meaning ...of illusions and dreams in which i lived and hoped to make it come real........

They say places are spaces of brick n stone and something inside me revolts cause i have known what red brick and 56 pillars can do to your existence .It can make you think and feel..like the texture that it involves,of the colour red and hard earth that was once upon a time ,soft and wet,waiting to be moulded.It happened to me some three years back ,as i sat on the little lush green manicured hill top on which were written the three golden letters..carved out letters...i tried hard to capture and store forever what i could see before me and sense inside me,it was the tranquility of the Gods,the peace that gives you strength and so i made promises to my self ,,may be the kind that every nineteen year old makes to herself.

Several promises of mountains to be conquered,of charms and glamour,of princes and fairies,of compromises never to be made,of oaths always to be kept and lanes never to be traversed again.I have not kept all these promises which i made to myself ,was it just a flash,a momentary happiness that i gave to myself,was it a recluse,a vagabond away from from the civilizational realities....was it me!
The red brick and 56 pillars...one pillar whispered to me one day ...and told me of all the tales it had been witness to ..the toil and the rewards,the tears,the burns and the bruises.Those tales have lived among the walls and left their essence there to be relived with greater vigour once again...

it is of...ringing cell phones left unanswered,of cups and cups of tea,of a ceiling fan with one wing and the failure of repair.....