Self, Sardarjis, Madrasis & Bollywood - Part 2
After the friendly Sikh neighbor left, my next encounter with the other supposed Indians was at school in Grade 4. Yes, this in the form of two “gori”* Punjabans, Pooja and Meenu. O! how Clavin & Susie like were my tangled relationships with them?! I can still see those young faces before me, tart Pooja with her high brow and insouciant mouth (she was a debating champion, and I was then a painfully shy, glasses wearing nerd, who hated public speaking) and sweet Meenu with her very delicate aquiline face and twin plaits.
And these two girls were designated enemies of a gang of boys I was a part of. Apart from a "Lord of Flies" meanness young boys can display towards girls (I leave speculations on power & relationships between sexes at a young age to more qualified folks), Pooja and Meenu got the enemy status because we perceived them to be the unfairly advantaged outsiders. They were both teachers’ pets, and I intuitively ascribed this to their "fair" skin color, and generally more "cuter" appearance. I think there are some formal studies around that show a positive correlation between how attractive someone is and his or her performance at school.
In hindsight, I now think some of this was also because of their mothers, wives of Indian Army officers, who taught in the same school. But apart from that, in the eyes of those “provincial” boys, they were also perceived as putting on airs; this because they sometimes came to school in chauffer driven cars (this was just a perk of their fathers’ army careers), lived in a trendy area, went to “parties” etc – you know, just regular vanilla envy that comes, as the Christians would have it, from our fallen state. So that school year was spent in attempts to take these two girls a notch down.
The boys did this by being wantonly unruly when a teacher was absent, and Pooja, who was the class leader (Yes, she was also perceived as power hungry! And patriarchies don’t like powerful women), was policing the class. And soon after got caned because Pooja always dutifully “snitched” on us. Recently, my sister also recalled how our gang of boys invaded her class on Teachers Day – a day when senior students become teachers to junior classes, and teachers officially goof off – that was being presided over Pooja, and induced chaos. How my chest swelled in pride on hearing that early 'manly' exploit!
I, as the smart boy, also keep the flag of revolt flying by beating them in class quizzes – I still remember one of those winning quiz answers, “Vladivostok” – and trying to attain that elusive first rank. Alas! In that latter abmbition (my mother's as much as it was mine) I was thwarted again and again by Sonal, a beautiful and quite (how we desi men, even at such a young age, prefer our women to be demure and quite!) Sindhi girl, on whom I think I had a minor crush. So, in such a fashion that year of “Punjabi-Madrasi” wars came to an end. Subsequently Pooja and Meenu left town when their fathers were transferred out, and in a class shuffle, Sonal and I found ourselves in different sections. And now, nearly twenty years later, sitting in the memory's laybrinth, I wonder where these former enemies of mine are, what they might be doing, and if they remember me as I remember them?
*Take a look at this blog post for some outsider observations on the desis' “gori” prejudice.
My Daily Notes
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Notes On Boredom & Berryman
What follows is an approximate reconstruction of an IM conversation:
She: "Hi. I am bored. I hope you are not boring today." He: "Isn't this the apogee of boredom? Talking via typed text?" She: "Anything new going on in your life?" He: "Same old, same old." She: "Hummm." He: "Did you try masturbation?" She: "Come on! I don't like that word." He: "There are many varieties of masturbation; textual, religious, the one handed clap etc. Besides isn't masturbation an aspect of life?" She: "It maybe but I am not interested in talking about it." He: "Why not? Even Walt Whitman was interested in talking about it." She: "Are you busy?" He: "Yes, I have work to do." His Inner Voice: "Work that is one part ennui, one part boredom, and one part an attempt to float, in a Vikram Seth's phrase, the flotilla of my PhD."
Exit all
...
John Berryman in his "Dream Song-14", which begins "Life, friends is boring", gets to the heart of this country called Boredom. The speaker of this poem begins by recalling a motherly warning from his childhood, and concludes that he has no inner resources that would keep him "un-bored":
and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored means you have no
Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no inner resources
The speaker goes on to say, in the middle stanza, using the hybrid literary minstrel speak Berryman invented for writing these Dream Songs (note the use of “heavy bored”, “peoples”, “Achilles”):
...I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as Achilles,
I think this was also in "he" mind (the "he" in the above conversation) when "he" desisted from recommending literature, especially great literature, to the "she". What about a dose of tranquil hills, or gin then? Should "he" recommend that to the "she"?
But no, the speaker (who, according to Helen Vendler, is the taciturn 'straight man' of the two 'end men' in an American minstrel show, and who usually speaks to Henry - the voluble, infantile, and plaintive chief speaker, the lyric ‘I’ of the songs - in Negro dialect) of this Dream Song makes that boring too:
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into the mountains or sea or sky,
What then is left behind by this hellhound of boredom?
...leaving behind: me, wag.
Or to make the speaker sound contemporary, one might re-say the above as
" ...leaving behind: me, a blogger".
My Daily Notes
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Snippets: Cut & Paste
A Turkish novelist Elif Shafak on languages within herself:
"It was a choice motivated more by her passion for language, by the search for new modes of expression. "There are certain things I'd rather write in English, certain others I'd rather write in Turkish," she explains. "English, to me, is a more mathematical language, it is the language of precision. It embodies an amazing vocabulary and if you are looking for the 'precise word', it is right out there. Turkish, to me, is more sentimental, more emotional." English seems more suited for philosophy, analytical writing or humour, "but if I am writing on sorrow I'd rather use Turkish."
This also points to the idea of contamination or spillage, to use a Rushdie's turn of a phrase, with one language spilling into another, contaminating it. And also why doing translations from Urdu etc are useful in forging a kind of hybrid sensibility, similar to that of Agha Shahid Ali's "Ghazalesque"
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt's metaphors for the human condition
So here we are: not charioteers in charge of wild horses, but a self-reflexive rider sitting atop a large and lumbering automatic elephant that has plenty of its own ideas on how to do things. What has this got to do with happiness?
The answer to that is at the crux of this marvellous book. Haidt's key insight is that emotion is just the expression of the mechanisms by which rider and elephant interact. Happy people are the ones in whom the interaction is smooth, in whom the gears mesh, in whom the different levels add up to a more or less coherent whole. Unhappiness occurs when rider and elephant have major differences about how to do things, a fairly common situation since, while the rider tends to be more interested in happiness, the elephant is bent on achieving prestige and the possibilities for gene dissemination and survival that it brings.
In my case, the rider must be saying "Thou shalt think, create, and write", and the elephant perhaps is saying, "Enough of this monkishness. Let's get us some babes already yaar - we have gene dissemination to think of!" Or as Woody Allen put it more succinctly, in "Love & Death",
"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness."
From John Updike's latest novel, "The Terrorist",
Shaikh Rashid recites with great beauty of pronunciation the one hundred fourth sura, concerning Hutama, the Crushing Fire:
And who shall teach thee what the Crushing Fire is? It is God's kindled fire, Which shall mount above the hearts of the damned; It shall verily rise over them like a vault, On outstretched columns.
This is line that I have to, have to, use as a refrain somewhere: "Who shall teach thee what the Crushing Fire is?" This could be a line straight out of that an old Anglo Saxon epic.
Binyavanga Wainaina on "How to write about Africa" says
"Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans."
Substitute spices, curry, mangoes etc for desi writing, and you are on your way.
Book Posts
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