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January 31, 2009
Through Someone Else's Looking Glass
Sometimes, when we see ourselves through others’ eyes, it can be quite a revelation; especially when what those others’ see are dancing bar girls, cavorting around you and I.
Three years ago, I was in Raipur, along with two other colleagues from Mumbai, lecturing at a State level professional meeting. After we reached the hotel, the organizing secretary proudly told us that he had arranged some really exciting entertainment at night, which he was sure, would not disappoint us. We expected an orchestra or perhaps a ghazal session to accompany the dinner buffet, as is usually the case at such meetings.
Around 9.30PM, with dinner well underway, one of the organizers came on stage and announced the start of the anticipated event. Through the haze of a thick fog of liquid ice, a woman, dressed in a tight, bright, plasticky dress, started slithering and gyrating to one of the popular “dhin-chak” numbers of that time. Apparently, the great piece of entertainment that we were so breathlessly awaiting, was…get this… “dancing bar girls”!
Within half an hour, all the women and children had left. As we too were making our way back to the rooms, we ran into the chief organizer who asked us whether we were enjoying ourselves. Without waiting for a reply he said, "I couldn't get dancing bar girls from Mumbai (this was around the time they were banned), so I arranged them from Nagpur" and then without batting an eyelid, came his kicker, "But I guess this must all be so routine for you...do these girls meet the high standard of the ones you normally see in Mumbai?"
Routine? High standard? Dancing bar girls? I personally have never been to one of these bars, but I couldn’t care less if this is how some people get their highs (which I guess would be both literally and figuratively). My problem is that our hosts in Raipur actually, truly believed that our main form of entertainment in Mumbai was to go and see dancing bar girls. For a long time I tried to understand why they would form such impressions and I could only guess that this may be due to a combination of Bollywood movies, reality shows, television soaps and Ms. Rakhi Savant’s media antics. It is so easy to form such weird impressions of people and places; even today, many people who have never been to the US firmly believe that it is a land of easy XXX chicks, eagerly waiting for us outside JFK, the moment we disembark.
I thought this was an isolated incident. However, the more I narrated this story to other colleagues and peers, the more it became clear that this was becoming a routine phenomenon, which became quite clear when I was in Patna two weeks ago attending our National level conference. Each night for three nights, for entertainment, there was an orchestra along with dancing bar girl types in low-cut cholis and ghaghras, swaying to the usual "beedi jalaile" numbers. This time, three years later, even the women and children hung on, without any embarrassment, almost as if such shows have now become a way of life.
At the cost of sounding repetitive; dancing bar girls surely have their place in the scheme of things, serving the needs of a specific target population. But when they start occupying the top of the non-cinema, non-television entertainment pyramid, perhaps it’s time for some soul-searching and interrogation?
Or maybe it’s just me being naďve?
Posted by bhavinj at 04:02 AM | Comments (0)
January 24, 2009
Open-Air Haikus
"Simple soft leaves
And branches holding them
Hey, don't pluck them"
This is a haiku that my 8-year old daughter wrote, with help from her guide (thanks Anita), under a large tree, in one of the "Five Gardens".
When I was 8-years old, I didn’t even know what a haiku was, let alone trying to write one and understanding its rules and cadences. Is this the same generation I talked about last week that is supposed to be living in a digital world? Or are these a different bunch of kids who will embrace everything equally and turn out to be more holistic that today’s 20-somethings and 40-somethings?
The haiku writing was part of a multi-weekend art and writing course called “The Flying Carpet” that my twins have enrolled in. To make the exercise really interesting, the haiku writing and painting were conducted in one of the Five Gardens, in the open-air. Though activities like these are extremely common in the Western world, we rarely find our public spaces being used for such purposes; there aren't too many gardens around and those that are available are often just too crowded or dirty or sometimes just not open to the public.
The Five Gardens have no such restrictions. Nestled between Wadala, Matunga and Dadar, they provide much-needed greenery to the residents of these central suburbs and are an integral part of the daily lives of a large number of people, having something for everyone, throughout the day. To illustrate this, in haiku…
In the mornings,
"Walkers, show-offs
Seniors and their bowel-talk
Breathing the air"
As afternoon comes...
"Stragglers catnap
The rhythm of life ebbs
And lovers hide"
And in the evening...
"Children on slides
Balloons and cheap China toys
Horse rides in traffic"
The commonest activity is walking. Some walkers are serious, some are just out for the fresh air and some use the perimeter as a place to preen in and to be seen. The central garden is out of bounds, but the other four are open to all. One of the gardens has decaying and decrepit slides and swings, but is still very popular with the kids and goes full in the evenings. Outside this garden are the horse-rides and toy-vendors. The other three are used for a variety of activities including football, cricket, exercising, sleeping and sky gazing. The railings are popular too, used mainly by teenagers, who again are often just hanging around, doing nothing really in particular, chatting, smoking and sometimes eating from the food-carts, which in turn are quite popular at night for those out for a quick bite. Lovers find their small, little niches as well and though some well-meaning, “social-worker” types have often tried to curb their “menace”, inventive couples always find a way of coming back. Let’s face it; they are also an important part of the scenery.
The whole essence of this verdant circle of circles can be summed up in 14 syllables.
"Five green gardens
Circles of vibrant life
One lung, one thought"
Posted by bhavinj at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2009
LOL???....Ha! ROFL!!
Within two hours of my joining Facebook, my 20-something nephew wrote on my wall.
N: "really din expect u here mamu...welcome..."
I retorted : "Why? Is this a hangout for only 20-somethings?"
N came back with: "oh no not at all...rather i wud say u can fake ur age here n enjoy ur freetime...dreams are definitely better than reality..."
I: "But why would I want to do that! The 40s are the best times to be in."
N wittily (my niece actually thought he was wittier): "that means the past 4 decades werent good..lol (lol means laugh out loud)..."
What piqued me at this stage was the fact that my nephew seriously thought he had to explain what "lol" meant to a 40-something like me. This was the instinctive, automatic reaction of a 20-something believing that today's 40-somethings don't really get it!
He’s not entirely wrong, though! My generation is a sandwiched generation. There were no computers in school; neither in junior college; nor in graduate or post-graduate college. I first came across a PC in 1991...it was a 286 with a 5"floppy drive and storage of a few MBs. DOS was the operating system and everything was done in Wordstar or Lotus. From then on, I caught on fast, but for many of my peers, the wait to get introduced to PCs was even longer.
Irrespective of how tech-savvy we might all be today, our minds are just not wired the same way as those of the 20-somethings who have grown up with PCs as part of their school, college and everyday lives.
And funnily, their minds are also wired differently from those of my 8-year old twins, who have no concept of a non-digital world. We used to play gully cricket, "thappa", "gotis" and sometimes spin tops. My kids play "thappa" as well, but marbles and spinning tops have gone the way of the 286. For them, the IMac at home, the Wii and all similar gadgets are part of the furniture. Even without training, they can navigate their way around any device, including a universal remote, which my wife, even after multiple rounds of patient explanation, just can't get. It's all about the neural networks that are laid down early in life. Ours are just different...
And, it’s not just about the hardware. I resisted joining Facebook for a long time, because I just couldn't get the whole "social networking" thing. Eventually, after my wife joined and a couple of others made it a point to keep asking why I wasn’t on Facebook, I succumbed and have now become one more of those million odd profiles, writing on people's walls, commenting on friends' comments, asking to be friends, approving friend requests, uploading photos, videos, links, adding links from this column, etc. I'm still not sure I quite get it, but since a few of my school and college friends are on FB, at least it’s a nice way of keeping in touch.
And I doubt I'll ever get Twitter. Why would anyone want to know what the other person is doing the whole day? I barely have the time to figure out what my right and left hands are doing as the day progresses, let alone having to bother about someone else's angst on having to spend five minutes extra outside the office toilet door.
Yet, despite all our differently wired brains, I did "gotcha" my nephew after his "lol" comment.
I replied: "rofl..."
N wrote back: "i give up..wats rofl".
I cud tell u, dudes, but m gonna let u get dis on ur own.
Posted by bhavinj at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)
January 10, 2009
The Lands of Darkness
According to the Wikipedia, the original "Land of Darkness" is the Forest of Abkhazia, popularized by the medieval writings of Sir John Mandeville, where God created an impenetrable darkness around the forest to trap the Persion Emperor Saures' army that was persecuting Christian subjects.
The "Land of Darkness" is now a popular phrase, coined by Mr. Aravind Adiga, in his novel, "The White Tiger", when referring to Bihar. The book is definitely readable, but like most "Western" centric, Booker-prize aimed, Indian author novels, it uses the shock value of life in poverty-stricken, cow-belt villages to get into the Western mind. This is a great marketing strategy for many Indian authors and if it comes with a Booker, then that's icing on the cake.
I am actually writing this from the Land of Darkness, specifically from Patna, sitting in a hotel room, with a working Tata Indicom wireless connection, facing the Mahatma Gandhi maidan, where a large number of men and women of all ages are walking, waddling and running, a scene that resonates with what Five Gardens in Dadar looks like in the morning hours. And thought Patna is like any other tier II/III city in India, with dusty roads, hanging wires and crumbling facades, poorly connected by air, with a ramshackle airport and hotels that don’t recognize PAN cards as photo-IDs, people today, after the departure of the Great Socialist, feel safe, walk around freely and are out till midnight.
And yet sitting in the hotel room, reading today's, i.e. Thursday’s Times of India, I feel a gnawing pit in my stomach, as I realize that a small part of my earnings has just vanished without warning. The headline says "Satyam: A 7000 crore lie", followed by a description of the Darkness created by Mr. Raju Ramalinga, which knowingly or unknowingly, obviously needed some help from his management team, directors, auditors and various analysts. Imagine the Darkness that has suddenly enveloped those who had invested heavily into the company, or has covered like a shroud, its employees who seem to be staring into an abyss of unemployment with no possible job forthcoming in these recessionary times. Given the facts, I fervently hope that Satyam’s principal auditors are also soon consumed by a permanent Darkness for having allowed this to happen.
Then, as I put on the television to get a shriller picture from our loud financial journalists, there is news of the sacking of Mr. Durrani, Pakistan's National Security Advisor, for telling the truth about Kasab's nationality. Though Mr. Durrani lives in a country that has been perpetually hovering on the brink of Darkness, Pakistan is now slowly becoming a true Land of Darkness with the advancing Talibanization of large swathes of the nation.
In contrast, our terror-created Land of Darkness that was Kashmir, is now a Land of Light, more so after Mr. Omar Abdullah’s election. Though there were soldiers stationed on the road, every 100 meters or so, and the city looked right out of a 70s retro film set, when I went there last year, I found the people were upbeat and quite confident that the worst was over and those Dark times would never return. It is only a matter of time before the city is overrun by film posters showing shirtless, muscle-flexing Khans.
What contrasts. In the Lands of Darkness, there is light, while a guiding Light of the "India Shining" story has slipped into Darkness and worse, a country, whose destiny is inextricably linked with ours is slipping into a Darkness that will try and consume us as well. Such is the chakravyuh of life. Darkness to Light and Light to Darkness.
Posted by bhavinj at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)
January 03, 2009
What Olive and Indigo need to learn from "badam-nu-shaak" and "idli-stew"
I had a "must-attend" wedding reception to go to, at the Turf Club/Racecourse, on Monday. I also had a friend visiting from New York, with only Monday night to spare for dinner. To make the best of a complicated situation, we booked a table at the Racecourse Olive. The plan was to wish the couple and then walk across to Olive for dinner.
As luck would have it, in the late evening, my friend called to say that he was down with a bad cold and he wouldn't be able to make it. Disappointed, we canceled the table at Olive and decided to have a quick, light meal at the reception and to then call it an early night.
But fate usually has a trick or two kept in reserve, and in retrospect, it was downright amazing, how a supposed moment of disappointment could turn itself around and become a moment of pleasure. As things turned out, not only did we not miss going to Olive, we perhaps had a better dining experience, as well!
As soon as we finished wishing the couple, we made our way to the buffet. The layout itself was unassuming at first look, especially since most weddings these days anyway feature large spreads, with multiple tables or stalls serving a variety of different cuisines. However, once we started sampling the food, all comparisons ended.
In most weddings, irrespective of the cuisine, the food at all counters pretty much tastes the same; Punjabi, Punjabi Gujarati, Punjabi Chinese, Punjabi Italian...basically oil and masala drenched Punjabi food, with a slight twist, depending on the cuisine concerned. This one was different.
I am going to exaggerate a bit here, but that's just to push a point. Imagine having a Trattoria, a Golden Dragon, a Muthuswamy, etc, all in one food court. The risotto was actually better than in most so-called Italian restaurants; the pizza slices were just right; there was something called an "idli-stew" that I, of Matunga Udipi restaurant lineage, had never heard off or sampled before in my life; there was a divine "Indian" dish called "badam nu shak", which again was a first for me; there were above-average dim sums, in three flavors, including one great tasting Jain one...I can go on. We approached the cuisine like a tasting menu (Bellissima style, but without the wine pairing), trying just one little portion of each item, but I still had to pass over most of the Indian dishes, including the Amritsari dishes that my wife thought were the highlight of the spread, for lack of gastric space.
And imagine...this was all vegetarian, a good part of it Jain-compatible.
Sure, this kind of wedding spread doesn't come cheap. But then our fine-dining restaurants are also exorbitantly overpriced for a vegetarian dining experience that nowadays probably needs to be a little redefined and perhaps shaken up a bit; if this city has to depend only on mass wedding caterers (and perhaps Ms. Vijaya Venkat and her team to a certain extent) to invent and reinvent vegetarian dishes, then it is time that the Olives and Indigos of this city came up with better and more interesting vegetarian menus, like Alinea (www.alinea-restaurant.com) or Green Zebra (www.greenzebrachicago.com), which even though located in the US of A, present a vegetarian dining experience, that has no equal in this country.
Else, who knows! All interesting, vegetarian, fine-dining in Mumbai, may one day be available only at weddings or in Ms. Venkat’s lunch dabbas!
Posted by bhavinj at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)
