Drink This

My mom would give the award to most endearing musician who bops his head of bouncy curls to Zakir Hussain--for me, it’s always been about A.R. Rahman.

And for as long as I can remember my dad’s tried to get me to watch soccer, claiming that it was “like a dance” (most of that line's poetic cache was lost when he re-used it to try and get me to watch boxing, but…).

So it was nice to be pointed (thanks, Narain) to this Volvic ad featuring Zidane and the music of A.R. Rahman--if it weren’t so short, it would be a decent Sunday family activity. Kinda kidding! : )

On a side note, I wonder if Zidane (whom my dad, a true fan, calls “Zizou”) would have been as incensed if his father and brother had been insulted--surely, even mothers and sisters stopped being sullied by mere words like a hundred or so years ago?

Desi Writing of the Giddy Sort

Check out Anokhi a flippantly south asian version of Vanity Fair/Cosmo. Do it eventhough the current edition places the words “Does Not Have” in front of the word much beloved of glossies-- “SEX” --making for an unwittingly ethnic-ironic headline.

And also, Virgin Comics --an unholy alliance of the multinational maverick, Richard Branson, and Deepak Chopra, my favorite Desi proponent of mucho mumbo-jumbo including intelligent design. Virgin Comics offers Indian themed--er… ummm... rather “Hindu” themed--comics with titles like Ramayan Reborn, Devi, and Sadhu. Despite my misgivings about the fundie potential of the subject matter, i have to say the artwork looks amazing.

Not entirely edifying news. True. However, it does signal a deeper Desi engagement with alternatives to traditional publishing--publishing that actually has the likelihood of commercial success unlike literary publishing that looks for recognition via big businesses with the big bucks.

Best Form of Flattery and All That

So M.I.A. couldn't make it across the pond, but it seems her music did; odd how much this summer’s catchy radio favorite--London Bridge--sounds like Galang.

SOUND ASLEEP

Sound
(for A.D.L.)

Asleep and I think to walk on by
but I walk right on in
the sky comes over to me
shy and smiling--soft eyes, soft hands

the sky comes over me like new skin
and I get so happy I just can’t say it.
Running through my brain
is new sunshine and shiny rain

the world alight and waiting, birds
released barely beneath my breath.
Until the sun goes down fighting
(a little like a painted picture

cracks freezing through the skin)
the world slowly turns then hits me
handful of teeth, pomegranate seeds,
alive red tendrils at the end of each.

I don’t know why I don’t run or cry,
just watch as the world begins to hum
packing exactly the things it needs. I—
tell all I know of love to pass the time


Asleep
(for Joy Wang)

And a god could still be
in that familiar caravan
running through my brain

writing beautifully in bloodstains
And in this memory of birds
not perfect, not free, but

clearing the first horizon
While I still sleep
dreaming that they know

all they once wanted
to be--
they are now.

Back to Bom(bs)

Seven bomb blasts in Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay) yesterday. Police found and defused the eighth bomb before it went off. The death toll is at 183 with 700 injured.

It feels unsavory in an Arendt-enthused way to sit down--with a bowl of your favorite cereal and too much milk as usual--to work, which today = call photographers to set up shoot dates.

Though it feels a little better to know that that’s exactly what the resilient people of Mumbai are doing as well… As Dilip D’Souza reports it, the newspaper, milk, and bread were delivered on time in Bombay.

__________________________________

Other things that are flitting through my mind at random:

--That close to a 1000 families have undergone an overnight change.

--That the news channels need to stop calling it "7-11;" it sounds like a very annoying joke.

--That yesterday just before the news broke, I e-mailed my friend Deesh who was in Mani Ratnam’s film Bombay, which is about the 1993 Bombay bomb attacks, to tell him that I had been talking to people about him and that we were going to watch the movie.

--That the death toll is comparable to the London and Madrid bomb attacks, but news media in the U.S. don't seem to be paying any attention/giving enough information.

--That Auden does somethings so well.

--That “Back to Bom!” is the chant of the Sinai children in Midnight’s Children and how it just won't sound as innocent anymore.

Life and... you know, the "Other Schtuff"

I'm terribly insecure about Life--have been for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, I used to visit my parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night--not for a snuggle--but to check if they were breathing properly… I’d look for their chests to rise, their nostrils to flare, I wouldn’t even giggle at the whistling sounds my mother made until the next morning. I thought that my parents looked so perfect--my mother’s curly head often rested on my father’s right arm, which had huge pillowy muscles from his days as a college weightlifter. I’d trot back in the soft darkness that terrified me to the bed I shared with my sister, and fall asleep listening to the rhythm of her breathing while trying to get her to hug me back.

I worried about earthquakes, vengeful snakes, kidnappers, tidal waves (my favorite uncle was a mercantile seaman), gunmen, communist revolution (my father got carried away with the lecture on Marx), bolts of lightning, falling trees, imprisonment (because my father fired some caps into the trees surrounding our bungalow on five acres of prime Waltair Uplands)…

I don’t know how I got the reputation for being sunny… because being a city kid, I also cried if I saw dead birds, and on one memorable occasion in Bangalore, a butterfly. And as if living on my little island of entitlement wasn’t bad enough, one day I happened upon the BBC and African famine--enter weltschmerz, weltschuld, anorexia, and the lasting feeling that I was just not doing enough.

There are of course coping methods: yoga, meditation, muttering sanskrit slokas, just being with the very people you also worry about so much, having an old printout from the alt.suicide.methods website just so i can laugh at the suggestion that covering yourself in household paint would kill anyone, reading epics--like the Mahabharata--to remind me that our human life is but a speck in the cosmic vastness, doing something about world hunger, working hard at the things i love, watching sitcoms and kid movies and comedy shows and rom-coms that i can't cop to in pretentious company :)

But it's still bothersome when even a moment that otherwise feels so much like a freefall into delight--like the time i had Li'l A--is tempered by the fear of loss. I don’t think “it’s because you love so much” should be a get-out-of-this-hell-free card--it’s still downright silly and unhealthy and pretty self-absorbed. It’s surprising that I’ve gone without therapy or that I laugh so easy--i guess I should be thanking my short attention span and my fickle mood memory, because, thankfully, “constant” isn’t a word that either of them seem to recognize.

Marriage Equality (plus Pat Parker poem)

There’s been much disappointment over the decision of the New York courts to reject the rights to same-sex marriage.

Marriage, invested as it is with all sorts of emotional and social resonance, is substantially more satisfying than cohabiting or even a civil union. Somehow no one I’m around these days says it, and back when I used to know people who said that, I used to look on them as anti-feminist fanatics, anti-intellectual dingbats, religious lemmings, or Hallmark-brainwashed crazies.

In campaigning for the right for homosexuals to marry, I think we’ve somehow been caught up in trying to make the argument as rational as possible by inserting legalistic reasoning and contentions. For instance, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) argue that “only marriage provides a legal safety net protecting couples emotional bonds and economic security.” How about they get to do it like heteros--just 'cos they want to; what if they do it in "the pursuit of happiness." At core, rejecting the right to same-sex marriage is denying a fellow human a fundamental source of emotional fulfillment and well being. Obviously, no has that right, though unfortunately many seem to have that power.

Even folks who aren’t “against” gays and lesbians feel all uptight and anxious that same-sex affection or the demand for marriage equality is somehow exhibitionistic... In other words, as some of my freshman students in South Carolina used to say, “I don’t care if he’s fucking another guy or a chicken or a tomato--I just don’t want to know about it.” For them, I have Pat Parker (1944-1989)’s funny, poignant, cheeky poem:

FOR THE STRAIGHT FOLKS WHO DON'T MIND GAYS BUT WISH THEY WEREN'T SO BLATANT

You know, some people got a lot of nerve.
Sometimes I don't believe the things I see and hear.

Have you met the woman who's shocked by two women kissing
and in the same breath, tells you she is pregnant?
BUT gays, shouldn't be so blatant.

Or this straight couple sits next to you in a movie and
you can't hear the dialogue because of the sound effects.
BUT gays shouldn't be so blatant.

And the woman in your office spends an entire lunch hour
talking about her new bikini drawers and how much
her husband likes them.
BUT gays shouldn't be so blatant.

Or the "hip" chick in your class rattling like a mile a minute
while you're trying to get stoned in the john, about the
camping trip she took with her musician boyfriend.
BUT gays shouldn't be so blatant.

You go in a public bathroom and all over the walls there's John loves
Mary, Janice digs Richard, Pepe loves Delores, etc., etc.
BUT gays shouldn't be so blatant.

Or your go to an amusement park and there's a tunnel of love
and pictures of straights painted on the front and grinning
couples are coming in and out.
BUT gays shouldn't be so blatant.

Fact is, blatant heterosexuals are all over the place.
Supermarkets, movies, on your job, in church, in books, on television every day
day and night, every place-even- in gay bars and they want gay
men and woman to go and hide in the closet.

So to you straight folks I say, "Sure, I'll go if you go too"
BUT I'm polite so, after you.