Please vote for me

Please vote for my blog Short and Sweet which has been accepted in the Original Poetry Contest category on Indiblogger. It will take you a few minutes to vote, or create an account if you are yet not on Indiblogger...

Also, may I go a step ahead and say that I would be grateful if you ask your friends on the blogroll to check out Short and Sweet and vote for me...

Here's the voting link..

Wish me luck!

--Gauri

Broken April, Books...

Of kanoon and love: Have I told you Broken April by Ismail Kadare is one of the most beautiful, poetic books I have ever read? I first read Kadare's Palace of Dreams, for the blurb seemed to give away a vague similarity to Orwell's 1984. 'Palace of Dreams' was good enough to pursue Kadare. Luckily, I found him in the British Council. I read 'The Pyramid' and 'Spring Flower Spring Frost' but while these three novels make fast, tense reading, they are not the kinds to haunt you. Broken April unsettles you with alien codes of conduct (Kanoon) in the backdrop of silent love in the misty mountains of Albania.

Just when Gjorg Berisha is walking up the mountains, racing against time to pay the blood tax, and as he makes his way back home, the black ribbon on his arm constantly reminding him — and others — of the death that he may soon deliver or take upon himself, the newly-married couple is wandering off in a pretty horse-drawn carriage somewhere nearby. Their eyes meet briefly and their paths take different destinies. In this brief moment the story takes a desolate turn. The description is so vivid, I could actually see the towers of refuge and the carriage chugging along the lonely road. Read this book to know the fascinating variety of life, culture and codes exist in the world we live in.

PS: I have been trying hard to buy a copy of the book, but am told its not available in India. Other two books I am hunting for since long (on recommendation by some dear blogger friends) are The Dharma Bums and Big Sur by Jack Keroauc. Anyone, any information on what store in India has a stock of these books, please let me know. I would be very grateful.

***
Just bought: The cover and blurb of Rooftops of Tehran, Mahbod Seraji's first novel, enticed me enough to buy it. I am down only some 40 pages, but don't like the second person present narrative style. I know I have read it before and liked it, but in this novel, it does not seem to fit. I am off all books for now for a novel that disinterests me halfway leaves me feeling too dejected, shall I say cheated? Saying this, I reserve all my rights to absolutely adore Rooftops of Tehran and change my opinion by the time I reach the last page. :)

***

Getting to know new writers: I consider Baruk's blog my window to a unique, different world I would not know of otherwise. The other day, I read up on Maori writer Witi Ihimaera and today I read about Kynpham sing nongkynrih who writes in Khasi and English. Baruk has posted a beautiful poem by Nonkynrih here. Read more about him in the article 'I write in a language that the elite frowns upon' by Trisha Gupta.

Handmade bookmarks

This September was special for me. And to express my gratitude, I was on a bookmark-making spree for almost two weeks. Here's what I made:


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

These are a mix of Peyote, Ladder and Brick stitches. The last round one is a favourite. Still not decided if I should make it a bookmark or use it like a button...

With the high power that I have, after every fabulous brush with the minute needle and seed beads, my right eye begins to ache and I pray to God to let me keep on at this thing at least till I am 50 and more.. :)

Let me know how you liked these.

Related posts:

Learning peyote stitch

My necklaces

Eye donation

I noticed that many people have been directed to my blog while searching for links on eye donation. I wrote this article (Hope amidst grief) way back in September 2006 and posted it on the blog after failing to get it through newspapers. That many people are curious to know about eye donation, and that my post might be useful in some way even today, is heartening.

My brush with the process, I still consider too personal to put it on the blog.

Now, when I think of those moments when the decision was made, I wonder if I myself would be comfortable with donating my eyes. I am not sure. To be honest, we tend to have too possessive a connect with our bodies, at least I do, and the idea of my eyes being plucked out unnerves me.

I hope with time, this silly preoccupation will wane of and I will be ready in the real sense for there's this very scientific, practical and noble angle to organ donations. It is a beautiful, extremely tempting proposition to use a part of your body — that will anyway turn to ashes, or be eaten up by bugs underground — to show someone a world he has yet only heard of.

Why just eyes, doctors say even other organs can be used if the decision is taken well in advance, say in the cases of persons on life support. The eldest member of Gharpure clan donated his entire body to a medical college. He had conveyed the decision and it was honoured.

So, for all those wanderers who come to this blog looking for more reading on eye donation, here's my advise. Follow your heart, for most often, it will get you to do the right thing.

For those who have not read the two said posts, take sometime to read, and pass on the message...

Related posts: Hope amidst grief: Eye donation

The end of an era

Also read this interesting conversation on eye donation on Manju's blog

Why has English become a necessity?

I came across this wonderful article on Mint and it's a must read.

Freedom to study: Anil Sadgopal


“I will take this chit, take a bus straight to Rashtrapati Bhavan and ask the President why we ever fought for our independence when I don’t even have the freedom to study in my mother tongue.” he had said when he was being denied admission to St Stephen's College, Delhi, apparently because he had studied in a Hindi-medium school.

But, our preoccupation with the language continues. It crops up everywhere, ever so often...

The first thing the NGO person said was, "Hamare bachchon ko English nahi aati. Aap bas unhe English sikha dijiye."

"Our children don't know English. You just teach them English..."

He said a lot other things, in a tone I disapproved of, of how pathetic the kids were in the said language.

So, the emphasis was English... And I wondered why, for the students of an Urdu medium school, should English be imposed with such a fanatic reverence.

The students who came up for the class were indeed extremely weak. The attendance has dropped as days have passed, but one Class V student is persistent.

I have taken a special liking for this girl because she turns up regularly two days a week, with her books and pens and sits expectantly. She struggles to read basic English words like his, this, with, that, the, is. Her face cringes with effort to recollect a correct meaning, to pronounce w-i-t-h and yet, she labours on.

The first time she began reading, she spelt out each single letter- I-- T--- IT, H--I--S HIS and so on. In this manner, reading one and a half paragraph took one and half hours... Also, her writing is all jumbled up, with no space between different words. I am basically a lazy person, but if I have stuck to this class for one month now, it is because of this girl.

I wonder how she was promoted to class V without being able to read that, when, why, what or know what these words mean.

What her teachers do in class? Do they eat from the children's tiffins and polish their nails? (A very smart girl in Pune indeed told me this. "I left the Zilla Parishad school because the teacher doesn't teach there. She eats from our tiffins and paints her nails in class."

I have digressed. Lax education system in our country is not a matter of debate anyway. It is a taken fact.

The thing that disturbs me is our preoccupation with English. Take Japan for example, the country has excelled beyond excellence without being crippled by English.

In India, English has somehow become irrevocably linked with the confidence and job prospects of a student. It has become a standard benchmark to judge capabilities.
I remember my parents, who struggled with the language and often felt snubbed because of their inability to speak 'posh English'. The idea that English is the only way to surge ahead has somehow taken deep roots. This mindset, coupled with the pathetic tribe of teachers, is set to ruin our country.

Related Post: Speak Correct, O Really?

Beheaded

Every once in a while, I come across news of witch-craft murders in rural parts of West Bengal. Such incidents are alarmingly common in villages of Orissa too. Like yesterday, I was particularly disturbed after reading about a man who beheaded his aunt with one swift lash of his tangia (an axe-like tool) in Mayurbhanj district.

That was not the gory part that upset me though:

The man actually walked about 8 km to a police station, with the severed head in one hand, the axe in another, and surrendered himself.

I asked someone to read the copy and his reply humbled me.

"This is very common there. The tribals, they are so simple people, they do such crimes on an impulse, and then don't know what to do with the head. So, they walk all the way with it and submit it to authorities."

Simple is the word my father also often used for the tribals of Panchamahals in Gujarat. He had spent the best, brief years of his childhood in a place called Dahod. Dahod was teeming with wilderness and tribals then and joy of his association with the innocent folks — with all their poverty and superstitions — has not faded till this day.

"They are very simple people who do not know greed," he says.

When I used to read about such witch-craft murders earlier, I was revolted with the sheer violence of the description. My immediate reaction was one of disgust and reproach. Last evening's brief conversation has changed the way I see things.

The act is not as violent as the ignorance, the haplessness of people staying in such remote, neglected regions is...

Anonymous Smiles updates

These are the postcards that have been recently sent to Mumbai, Mangalore, Pune, Delhi and other places...

This one, is a little special to me:



For details, visit Anonymous Smiles

Related posts: Click this link

Kinley Ad: 'Vishwas kar'

We were told something about emotions manipulated in advertisements in college. These days, I am seeing more and more such ads that are targetted on unsuspecting, sentimental, rather foolish people who have a lot of money to spare.

Take the new Kinley advertisement for example. It starts off with a rucksack-totting young man in some village where little boys are having a gala time at a tubewell, bathing with absolute relish. This youth looks thirsty but unsure. Then an old man gently calls him to his shop and hands over a Kinley bottle. Problem solved, the best of human bond established. The young man holds that bottle close to his heart for the rest of the journey. Trust, motherly love perhaps and all the good things in life packaged in one bottle of water. Give me a break!

Let me tell you how trusting one bottle of Kinley won't put the problems of a huge chunk of people at rest.

In Kolkata, on my way to office, I come across at least five roadside water pipes lined with jerry cans, women waiting in queue. Forget roadside, even in my building, which is huge, the water supply is far from good. It is full of iron and the dal used to take a long time to cook even with the Aquaguard and iron-nil. I, and many others, have got a RO machine to solve the problem. Many people get a supply of those huge Bisleri jars every day or two. Some send their maids to a water pipe near the main gate to get 'sweet water'.

But, this is the easy way out, the kinds you and me can afford to take and take. What about the rest whose monthly income equals less than my restaurant bill? To supply good drinking water is the government's responsibility and it has since long washed its hands off the issue. May we assume that a huge nexus of multinational giants, RO companies and bureaucrats is working hands in glove to further the manipulative economy of clean, sweet water? Ah, that reminds me of the famous question MP Hema Malini asked in the Parliament. Read Hema Malini in soup over water purifier ad

After Aila struck, an acute crisis of potable water was highlighted by major dailies.

(Access article on e-paper Water Crisis Deepens in Sunderbans on page 4, TOI Kolkata, issue dated June 25, 2009 to view story and accompanying photos)

The fact is, and it was duly covered, that the Sunderbans had a pathetic network of drinking water facilities much before Aila struck. Women and children had to walk miles, they still have to, to get a pot full of murky water pumped out from a tubewell.

Read on e-paper Sunderbans: Island of Despair on page 3, TOI Kolkata issue dated March 17, 2009.

Move on to Murshidabad. The district faces an alarming crisis of arsenic content in water. Most of the villages rely on hand pumps to get their supply of drinking water. We saw quite some photos of boys having fun, bathing and drinking water from the hand pump in Murshidabad villages, quite similar to the scene depicted in the idealistic ad. But not all can trust (or afford) a bottle of mineral water to solve their problems.

Read e-paper article Poisoned Water: Dying on False Promises on page 2 of TOI Kolkata issue dated March 22, 2009

An expert voice to sum up this article. Sunita Narain: Bottled water costs us the earth

The article mentions how the mayor of San Fransisco banned the use of bottled water in government buildings and how the mayor of Salt Lake City asked public employees to stop supplying bottled water at official events. Narain goes on to say, 'But in India, bottled water is growing as an item of necessity: private industry is meeting the drinking water demand left increasingly unfulfilled by public utilities. In most cases, people are paying prices that they cannot afford to because they have no alternative source of clean drinking water.'

The Kinley ad, and many other such manipulative commercials first fool me into tears and then wake me up to reality. As I write this post, I wonder what my rant will achieve? But then that is what we can do best. Write our anger off, spread our indignation to more and more people and hope it boils down to something concrete. Journalism cannot propel issues beyond a certain point. But within those boundaries, perhaps it is our duty to get frustrated and spread the word, even if it may seem as mundane as ads that anger you.

Names Changed...

Here's something that I have been pondering over since some time.

You must be aware that newspapers should withhold the name (and any other information that can reveal the identity) of molest or rape victims. In one particular instance, I felt sad that the same standards were not applied even when the story seemed as scandalous, or at least with similar possible outcomes — something that would bring shame to the victim and the family. Why? Because the concerned person was a man...

A senior citizen was operated upon after he shoved a glass tea cup up his ass. The news was published with the name and photo of the withered old man with salt-pepper beard on the hospital bed, visibly in pain. Even if we say the act was pervert, the act of publishing the news with such relish (and visual aids) also perhaps bordered on pervert lines. In my view, his name also should have been concealed because the publicity was sure to bring him and his family the same kind of scandal that a rape / molest victim needs to be sheltered from. Also, the old man was a victim himself, his act had caused no one but him a lot of pain and shame.

Besides, what was achieved by publishing the name? Is information for the sake of it justified? What was achieved by publishing his photo? All his shrivelled face must have served for would be as an excuse to crack lewd jokes.

Now, consider the issue with a hypothetical twist. Imagine a 60-plus woman had shoved a glass up her ass. I am sure, some hypocritical sense of dignity would have prevented her name from being revealed. I use the word hypocritical because the same standards were not applied to the old man, just because he was a man. An interesting instance of gender bias, isn't it? Who knows, if the incident was published even minus the woman's name, moral purists may have lambasted the newspaper with expressions like Scandalous, Against Indian Culture, Against Indian pride and all such crap, refusing to believe that Indian women could ever indulge in bizzare acts of sexual gratification...

This incident, which happened quite some time ago, came back to my mind after another news came up recently. A middle-aged married man, with two kids, was tonsured and his face smeared with vehicle oil for reportedly harassing a married woman with obscene calls and messages over the past three months. And yes, his name was not changed in the report. Anyone who has faced such calls, or been molested on crowded buses may have vehemently wished for such, or worse public humiliation for the accused. But, actually seeing the photograph on page — a scared, shamed man, his face turned grey with humiliation — didn't exactly elicit a reaction of feminist jubilation.

While we safeguard the honour and dignity of women who have been wronged, perhaps we can be a little more sensitive to those whom we think have wronged. At least in the first case. In the second case, I am not really sure. What do you think?

Gayatri Devi passes away

A little over a month after Congress issued a circular asking its cadres to shed off their royal hangover — to be more precise, to stop using titles like Maharaja, Maharani, Yuvaraj and so on, a Maharani who stood up against the same party, and won with a landslide margin (recorded in the Guiness Book!) whose elegance and charm got her a place in Vogue's list of one of the most beautiful people in the world, is no more.

 

Read Obituary
 

Life in photos

A thoughtful post

I found an interesting piece on religious conversion written by Manju Joglekar on her blog. Please share your views / comments on her space.

Read article here

Learning Peyote, Brick and Ladder Stitch

One big accomplishment over the past month is that I have learnt three basic bead-weaving stitches. This is something that I have wanted to learn since a long long time, but could not find anyone to teach me. Then, I chanced over a jewellery-design book and things changed. :)



I have made the large earrings using ladder and brick stitch based on the instructions on this site

I have made an even-count peyote stitch bracelet with small earrings to go with it. These are made from a very basic ladder-brick stitch combination, also used in the large earrings.

The bookmark is made from three small peyote stitch segments woven together, the instructions for which are in the book Jewelry and Beading Designs for Dummies by Heather H Dismore and Tammy Powley that I got from the British Council.



I found a lot more books on jewellery making in the library, but this book was the only one in which the three stitches (peyote, ladder and brick) were mentioned with instructions. However, after I spent quite some hopeless hours trying to make a simple even-count peyote with instructions from the book, the internet came to the rescue. These are the sites that I have referred to for brick stitch and peyote stitch

Here are the things you need to start any jewellery project:



Seen here is a reel of nylon thread (called Nymo in all western jewellery-making sites), a long-nose plier, earring hoops, hooks, a very fine needle, Fevibond to secure the knots and assorted beads. All sites mentioned them as Delica beads, but in Indian stores, no one recognized either the name Nymo or Delica. In gujarati, we call these as 'kidia' moti. The best quality that I have come across yet is in a shop called Bhavsar in old Ahmedabad. All other packets I got have a somewhat irregular size, and so, the slightly small beads tend to get stuck in the needle and you have to rework. You can find most of these materials at a shop that sells embroidery materials.

Bead-weaving in particular and jewellery-making in general needs a lot of concentration. Way too often my mind wanders and I make mistakes, have to start all over again. However, it's fun, how one small project involves you, and how making a small earring becomes your mission for a day. You sit occupied with colours and patterns, and once a design is done, the joy of creation leaves you with a silly smug.

Related post: Some necklaces that I made

Hooch killed him eventually

I remember the tired man

with a cycle cart.

He took us four-year-olds

On a joyride round and round

on days when he was sobre.

On days he was high on hooch*

He used to swear and make a scene

And snatch her home at odd times.

As hundreds die in my city

I remember him, long dead now;

He didn't die in a mass tragedy, no

But hooch killed him eventually.

*Hooch: Country-made liquor / spurious liquor.

Ahmedabad death toll crosses 100: Read article

Where they go

Read here

Being comfortable in your skin and Michael Jackson

I never saw MJ moonwalk till news channels filled the piece on TV after his death. Never is an exaggeration. May be a glimpse of the amazing feat once or twice, but that's all. I always used to get saddened every time his face flicked on TV, was splashed in the newspapers...

'What has he done to himself??? Why is he like he is?' I remember wondering with a disapproving shrug. Yes, I had read about the many surgeries, but I still couldn't fathom why someone, especially someone as high as him, on such a pedestal of fame, was plagued with a dissatisfaction of the superficial kind, being obsessed with 'how i look' instead of may be 'how / what / why i am'...

Pouring over the photos, the only time he looks alive and kicking to me is as a kid, a part of Jackson 5, then may be till the 70s. That's when his skin looks fed with real blood, real emotions, love or hate. Proceed to the era of white face with red lips — the star value is there, the life force is missing.

How plastic surgery changed his face

I read this article that state's what a mess MJ had become when he died and it sent a whole lot of gloom down me. One little lesson I learn from the moonwalking giant's life and death is to be comfortable in your skin. Otherwise, no matter what giant you become, you may end up pained and plastic.

Looking good is important. But feeling good is much more crucial. And feeling good should not lean too much on one's looks...

Few quirky, lovely poems and how poetry can breathe free in face of censorship

It's strange how you read what you do. Looking back, I realise that my appetite to read and my choice was directed by a series of coincidences — due to statements made by the way, interesting blurbs, names referred persistently by disconnected sources...

It was through one such convoluted reading spree, that I got curious about Allen Ginsberg. Having read Jack Kerouac's On the road, and having finally decided that I wanted to read more of him, I began surfing the net for beat writers. A series of web links enlightened me about people like Ken Casey, beat weirdos like Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg rang a bell for some reason.

After a very long time, in Ginsberg I have found a poet I quite enjoy. Here's an except from A Supermarket in California:

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit
supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles
full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --- and you,
Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the
meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price
bananas? Are you my Angel?

Ginsberg has that typical focussed link between him and his words — he seems to obliterate everything else. There's no room for explanation, he doesn't bother to cut out ambiguity and his thoughts flow unrefined and unmanipulated. That Ginsberg saw Whitman in the supermarket may be due to the psychedelic drugs beat writers indulged in to get 'poetic visions'. But the fantasy has been written crisply, with a sense of real time and humour.

I tried to see how many figures of speech I can find in the lines and here's what I got...

In my hungry fatigue

Metaphor, Personification: Fatigue given the animate quality of being hungry

Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands- Hyperbole

Wives in the avocados, Babies in the tomatos- Is this Assonance? (the sound of avocadoes and tomatoes)

And you, Garcia Lorca- Apostrophe

I saw you, Walt Whitman..... Apostrophe

...and eyeing the grocery boys- Perhaps hinting at Whitman's (debated) homosexuality

Who killed the pork chops?

Synechdoche: Pork chops mean pigs
Personification: The idea that pork chops can be killed...

Another racy poem is Velocity of Money. An excerpt:

Now everybody’s atheist like me, nothing’s sacred
buy and sell your grandmother, eat up old age homes,
Peddle babies on the street, pretty boys for sale on Times Square -
You can shoot heroin, I can sniff cocaine

Reasons why I liked this:

1) Brevity: Thoughts are short and crisp, the flow is quick.

2) Vivid imagery- Peddle babies on the street, pretty boys for sale...

3) Conflict- While he says everyone is an atheist like him, there's a pinch of regret in the statement, nothing's sacred.

4) The poem is full of metaphor, including the title...

5) The economy Ginsberg complains of is all the more relevant today...

Other (tad lengthy poem) that caught my attention was September on Jessore Road.

Jessore Road is near the airport and stretches all the way to the Bangladesh border. That it had caught Ginsberg's fancy made me curious about the poem. Here are the lines that touched me the most:

Where are our tears? Who weeps for the pain?
Where can these families go in the rain?
Jessore Road's children close their big eyes
Where will we sleep when Our Father dies?

This site has 48 poems written by Ginsberg.

Some other refreshing poems come from D H Lawrence.

The ones I particularly enjoyed are Lies about love

We are a liars, because
the truth of yesterday becomes a lie tomorrow,
whereas letters are fixed,
and we live by the letter of truth.
The love I feel for my friend, this year,
is different from the love I felt last year.
If it were not so, it would be a lie.
Yet we reiterate love! love! love!
as if it were a coin with a fixed value
instead of a flower that dies, and opens a different bud.

Good Husbands Make Unhappy Wives

Good husbands make unhappy wives
so do bad husbands, just as often;
but the unhappiness of a wife with a good husband
is much more devastating
than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.

I love these poems for the bold, sweeping statements Lawrence has made.

Such a non-committal, nonconformist streak is the reason I like the medium of poems. Here, writers can seize their right to speak their minds off without bothering to leave trails of explanations and footnotes. This kind of freedom of creativity — that includes the acceptance of the ambiguous and the abstract — is accorded to no other medium.

A reason why poets may evade the 'scanner' is perhaps because no one ( or certainly not many)takes a poet quite seriously. Poems are passed off as art, and given the belief that 'all art is useless' the controlling mechanism doesn't quite bother to eye it with such zeal as they try to keep a tab on journalists..

In this context, let me quote some paragraphs George Orwell has written in his essay, The Prevention of Literature:

..It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any rate a lyric poet, might possible find it breathable..

..There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet, than for a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with, bureaucrats and other 'practical' men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much interested in what he is saying. Secondly, what the poet is saying — that is, what his poem 'means' if translated into prose — is relatively unimportant even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is simple, and is no more the primary purpose of a picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and association, as painting is an arrangement of brush marks. For short snatches indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether. It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects and avoid uttering heresies: and even when he does utter them, they may escape notice. But above all, good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily an individual product.. (Here, Orwell cites examples of ballads)

.. And the destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic and the poet, in that order..

While Orwell has written the essay with the thrust being on prose, the above words show that the position of a poet is relatively safe.

Of Brainvita, drawings and home

Though I checked my blog very frequently, a somewhat moody mindset kept me from writing anything. This also explains why comments remained unmoderated for quite a while. In between my no-write phase, I noticed my blog had jumped a page rank and now stands at a presentable 4. :) All in all, it's time to fill in here again...

My trip back home was good, but this time I realized with an errie finality that now my mind is quite settled here in Kolkata. More so than the touchy topic of choosing one of the two cities, it's about getting used to a particular lifestyle. I have become too used to my independent existence here and a little departure from routine, from my seclusion in the quiet afternoon hours makes me go very edgy.

I talked for long hours with my sister and tagged along with her to the many malls that have insanely cropped up in the city. In a few years, it seems malls will be within a hopping distance of everything and anything.

Aaji had kept aside a lot of precious little nothings for me to take away. So, I came back with a splendid wooden Brainvita plate designed on order. I always managed to leave one marble every single time (i regret i was just too lazy to use my 'genius' elsewhere) and the stall-owner at a school fair shooed me away after I won four Kit-Kats in a row...

She had also kept aside two drawing books. There were some incomplete drawings, one of which sis absolutely loved. I took out the book today and started completing the drawing. It's still not done, but looks cheerful.

How wonderful it would be if we could resume all things after such a silent, forgotten break?

And I am thrilled...

This drawing I had done quite some days back, when I was pessimistic, a wee bit cynic and quite confused.. I have never thought of consciously making myself aware about politics, but by the virtue of the place I live now, talks, discussions and reading a large number of political stories by the virtue of my profession, I was quite more in touch with the happenings — and the speculations — than I have been all my life. (Otherwise I used to skip news on politics quite conveniently)

I still have no clear political ideology.

I love Modi for the change of face Gujarat has seen and I grudge him for what happened in 2002. I hate BJP and its allies like RSS, VHP for giving a fundamentalist slur to a religion as free and beautiful as Hinduism. I think Congress could have done a lot more than it has done, given the kind of trust people had (and continue to have in spite of many odds) in the party...

Initially, in West Bengal, the Left seemed to me an unusually principled, organized party — perhaps the only one that had such a clear set of dos and don't, so to say, a clear-cut party line... Trinamool seemed hopeless as an Opposition, with Mamata's shrill, often extremely illogical arguments.

But over a period of time, I was stumped by the single-minded allegiance pledged to the CPM by hoards and hoards of people. Something seemed grossly wrong. I was not ready to believe that such collective masses could be so in tune with the ideologies... A spin-yarn seemed to be working somewhere, and quite strongly at that.

Singur and Nandigram served to show people just to what extent the Left front takes itself to be superior to everything else. Highhandedness seemed at its peak in that period. Mamata Banerjee, for all her shrill, illogical rallies, had touched a cord somewhere. May be I could not relate to her but some people, who were disillusioned with the trust they put in the other fold time and again leading to nil, could. After 32 years of rule, people perhaps suddenly realized they need a change. May be they even felt they have been fooled by the hammer and the sickle... (It's a different thing that Mamata has given Singur the slip all throughout her campaign. The last she went there was in February)

As I see the projected results: Left 15, Trinamool 19, Congress 7, BJP 1 (at 11.46 am) I am thrilled, jubilant. Time for change...

It is quite possible the choice could turn out grossly wrong... Some people I know are of the opinion that come Mamata and industries will plummet, there would be a full-stop to any sensible development. But then, going by the things I have seen in the three years of my exposure here, it seemed the Left front was banking on all the development in its 32 years' tenure on Singur, Nayachar and Nandigram...

The choice may be wrong. But give me my right to choose. Perhaps, the people of Bengal took a chance this time. I love them for that.

And yes, the next time there's an election, I am reaching home in time. I am now hooked to the fascinating dance of Indian democracy.

Related post: The Good Governance

And that's where I come from...

Under the car was a baby cobra
Coiled with a hood of beauty and shine...
Alarming woofs of my playful, silly dogs
Made him rush to that garden of mine...

Leave him in peace and away you go
My little naughty ones,
You need not be with creatures divine, not just yet.
And away you go dear baby with no fear
Waiting is your mother with siblings nine..

He then slithered somewhere far away...
With my gentle push and a touch.
Happy were silly dogs, so was the baby cobra
These are the real pleasures of mine...

-Baba-12-05-2009

Dear Gauri,

Last night, a baby cobra of about 20 inches length came and
thrilled all of us. His hood was very cute, hardly measuring about
1.5" in width....

Some six months back, Lali* had cornered a six-inch baby cobra. I had pushed it away with a mug full of water to let him to go, as a
stick would have injured him....

Of late, i have realized one thing...all babies, living beings should be
nurtured equally, loved and protected with care.

Baba

*Lali is one of our four pet stray dogs

Lonely dark night...

This lonely dark night knows no God.
The church looks spooky,
temple sad; mosque uninviting.
This night has no religion;
It's just you and me.