Total Control

Soft as a whisper the idea came to my mind
Without any qualms I hid my find

As the sun rose bright and red in the sky
I gathered everyone and took up the cry
We were too great a force to be stopped
Before our determination authority melted
Our aim was to change the world
Bury all the dirt and bring out the gold
But not everyone was convinced
Now was the time to reveal my find
With my help everyone could be wise
No need anymore to live under a constant guise

The world overwhelmed by a simple truth
Followed me like a curious child everywhere

(26/08/2000)

You And I

If you and I were married,
You would be Vikram Seth
And I, Sylvia Plath;
We would weave elaborate webs
That choke and kill and feed
On each other’s fires.

While you try desperately
To find your meter
I would have already dipped my sword
In ink and killed myself
Without any hope
Of resurrection.

You would then publish me
After you have happily wedded
A second time,
And my Pulitzer will hang
Like a noose
Around your neck.

Fame will pursue you
Yet you will keep wondering
Whether you have lost your music
Along with your unsuitable girl,
Whether the glory
Is truly yours or mine alone.

The Interview - Take Two

This multi-speaker narrative follows up on Geetanjali's The Interview. Am I being a presumptuous insect?

The Male Gaze

The next candidate comes in. It's a woman.

But what a woman! Great figure - Thin waist, busty. Long hair. Sharp features. Incredible - she could have stepped straight out of a Japanese manga comic.

Her hair brushes against her shoulder, with a hint of caress.

Carmine red, body-hugging waistcoat. A bit of cleavage, a sparkle of button-diamond earrings. Absolutely stunning.

"Please have a seat..."

"Thank you sir." Even the tone has a husky, dreamy quality. Finely cultured, like the rest of her.

As she sways forward to sit, her skirt shifts - it's a rich purple silk - and the hem lifts just above the knee.

Does she notice me looking at her legs - is that a tensing up I saw, or is it just my imagination?

"My Curriculum Vitae, Sir. As you can see I completed my Masters from..."

I am looking up from the nip of her waist to the bulge in the waistcoat to the proud tilt of her chin. There is a smouldering intensity in her gaze. Men have drowned in them, and she knows it. I feel a knot gathering in my stomach.

I lean back in my chair and smile. I am thinking - "How nice to have met you darling, except it's across this desk! Quite competent too perhaps. But could she be too hot for this office?"

"... my project on Oraon phonology under Prof. Ulhas Rao." She stops and looks at me.

I had better pay attention.

The Female Gaze

Its a big desk, miles long.

He looks up from the papers as I come in. I wonder if he can feel the tension brooding in me. PR trainee -- is this the job I really want. . .

"Please take a seat," he says. I feel his eyes looking at me. After all these years, why can't I get used to it?

This coat is four years old. Wonder if its getting a bit tight? I wriggle a bit, loosening the fit. I feel the waft of my hair.

"Thank you, Sir." I sit down. He has a slightly faraway look. I sit up straight.

I can hear the creak of the fan. There is an intensity to every moment.

I give him the paper in my hand.

"My Curriculum Vitae, Sir. As you can see I completed my Masters from..."

Even as I am speaking, I can see his gaze running over me. What a nuisance men are. This guy may turn out to be a lout. Or maybe it is all men. God! Should I even be looking for a job?

Hey! Girl! You better focus on your work.

"... my project on Oraon phonology under Prof. Ulhas Rao."

Finally, he is paying some attention.

The Limits of Endurance

This is no time for flowers, my sweet:
they sear in the winds of shattered trust.
The air hangs heavy with the musk of heat:
sluts and vampires rage in lust.

****

Final Light

The auditorium is huge. It is an ocean of space built in three levels. Diffused lighting lights the whole place. The light makes the space expand further, pushing the corners in and masking the details. The light lacks quality but makes up with its evocative display of vast space. The stage is the focus of the brightest lights. It shimmers like a mirage. The curtains hide in the corners like nervous stagehands, streaked with fine dust. And it is totally quiet. Quieter than even an empty house. The silence covers everything like cold dew. It drips from the dangling microphones, it fills the chairs flowing in like waves and it gives shape to the shallow shadows hiding under the seats.

I’m lying in the center of the stage, stomach ripped open. My fingers clutch the intestines crawling out of the jagged hole. I want to scream but the silence is on me too. It covers my mouth with a dry kiss and the screams struggle at the back of my throat. I do not want to fight it. I want it to engulf me. I squeeze my intestines harder.

Everything explodes.

Space expands and then contracts into a thin but intensely white line. I close my eyes and embrace Death.

(final part in a trilogy of short pieces loosely based on the themes of light and death)

Springcleaning

Fragments, flotsam, detritus from the diaries. Perhaps one day i'll find a use for them. And then again, perhaps they just needed to be swept out to make place for new ones. Or, perhaps, they'll spark something off in you. Here they are, my stunted children.

On finding an old diary
Old lines
Old loves
Raw words
Raw emotions
Wish i could feel them now
that i know how
to write
and love.

Last lines
In love for the first time...
Been there, done that, wrote the poems
Now, i’m ready for the last time.
Don’t want to write any more poems.

All 4 you
Today was a 4 poem day
’coz that’s the way i cry.
That makes you a 4 poem girl.
Happy?

The pain
the lies
The whens
the whys.
I’ve been there
before.
So why
do i
when i’m safe
and dry
want to dive in
again?

You’re everything I want to be
Do all the things I want to do
I’m consumed with jealousy
For a little while, can’t I be you?

Missing the bus
Do we settle, some of us, for someone
who loves us,
giving up hope that the one we love
will settle for us?

she who painted
Put some blue in the sky
A smidgen in your eye
Then do the same for all of me

There are two things
I still like to do
with my eyes closed.
Sit down beside you.
And sleep.

You
no money
and a deadline.
Why is it
always a
gangbang?

Found her.
But she,
she’s not
looking for me.

A teddy bear
is always there.
Around somewhere.
Whether or not
You care.
A little threadbare,
a cut, a tear.
Teddy bears
are always there.

The Interview

34-24-36. 5’6”. Shiny black tresses caressed the curve of her neck, brushing lovingly against her shoulder, much like a lover would. The red waist-coat faithfully moulded her body, highlighting her assets beautifully. She wore a skirt that stopped just short of her knees – some silky material that shifted sensuously against her legs with each step she took forward…
"Please have a seat..."
"Thank you, Sir." Those husky tones could do a lot for a man’s imagination, not to mention the libido. As she sat down, her skirt shifted higher drawing the gaze down to her thighs. She shifted, her spine stiffened as she straightened in the chair.
"My Curriculum Vitae, Sir. As you can see I completed my Masters from…"
Her voice droned on in the background as his gaze drifted idly upwards taking in the nip of her waist and higher up, the proud tilt of her chin to the kohl-lined deep brown eyes that were sparkling indignantly with fire. If looks could, he would have burnt at the spot. He leaned back in his chair and smiled.
"She would do. Oh yes, she would do alright..."

(Inspired by John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” – an influential book, in which he talks about the male gaze. He argues (successfully) that “men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Women continue to be “depicted in a different way to men - because the "ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him” Berger was speaking with art in mind, yet his arguments are highly applicable in a quotidian situation – aren’t we as women, constantly aware of the male gaze, perpetually modifying our appearance to please it?)

Liquid Silver Dreams

Yesterday, I got drunk
On-
The staccato rumble of
God's laughter

Igniting pillars
Of crazy thoughts

Consuming
With a passion
The rare bliss
Of heavenly communion

There were angels
Dressed like drag-queens
Smoking pot and
Drenched in cool acid

The Old Man
Lay in four dimensions
Absorbing-
Layers of Earthly sin

Weird sounds
Grew from his ears
Blowing holes
Through the fabric of logic

I sifted
Through the sand
Under his feet
And found the spirits
Of mortality and immortality
Lying side by side

A curious copulation
Of beautiful extremes

We were surrounded
By a band of satyrs
Sampling the delights
Of drug induced paranoia

There was a crowd
Behind us
Filled with
Schizophrenics and hypochondriacs
Crazies and homos
Prostitutes and publishers
Capitalists and Christians
Pornographers and politicians

All chanting
The true name
In unknown harmonics

God smiled
And created a new world
Out of the surreal images
Floating in his blank eyes

I touched
His cloak
Made of lightning and thunder
To glimpse a vision of bright orgasm

It smelt
Like burnt ozone (there)
Oozing through
The leaky holes
Of my shattered brain

Wicked laughter
Echoed around me
From time to time
Pulsing like young stars
Shattering the crowded silence

I was restless
To undream
These fantastic visions
From heavenly hell

A slow dance
Of deep bass
In the confines
Of my confused mind
Disoriented, vague

I realized
The cruel weakness
Of proletarian mortality
A class struggle
Even in utter infinity

(24/04/2004)

Laughter and Art

The following passage from a book titled “Immortality”, written by a Czech author I admire greatly - Milan Kundera - gave me some pause and I have been thinking an analyzing this for days until an engaging discussion on the difficulties of writing when ecstatic appeared on Ryze.

“A face is beautiful because it reveals the presence of thought, whereas at the moment of laughter man does not think. But is that really true? Is not laughter a lightning thought that has just grasped the comical? No, in the instant that he grasps the comical, man does not laugh; laughter follows afterward as a physical reaction, as a convulsion, no longer containing any thought. Laughter is a convulsion of the face, and a convulsed person does not rule himself, he is ruled by something that is neither will nor reason. And that is why the classical sculptor did not express laughter. A human being who does not rule himself (a human being beyond reason, beyond will) cannot be considered beautiful.”

Could this be true? Is this the reason we cannot create beautiful magic with words, with colors, with clay or stone in those cyclical periods of ecstatic joy, or in those fleeting moments where we are probably so “convulsed with laughter” that all rational thought has left us?

Our muse deserts us and forces us to choose between joyful creative impotency and melancholic fecundity!

Fruits Of The Earth

That's the title of an extra-ordinary book by the
French philosopher and writer Andre Gide.
This is not a book review -as the response to
my first book review here was negligible, so
I am avodiing it.

However this is all about how the book hit me hard
when I was a struggling university student, with a
bleak future staring me in the face like a wolf with
a week old hunger. Engineers were during those days,
jobless by the millions, and it is a telling sign
that badminton and tennis took up more of my time
then, rather than completing mechanical drafting or
applied maths -two of my pet peeves.

The first chapter begins dramatically, in an unforgettable
manner with a couplet from the great Persian poet Hafiz

" My idle happiness that slept so long
Is now at length awaking "


One can hardly believe that Gide wrote this book in 1897, for I am
a contemporary literature freak -having had no exposure to Shakespeare
not Milton nor Blake due to a science background that looks askance
at classical literature... and the fact that he wrote it whilst he
was staring at death without blinking. He had tubercolisis, completely
without a cure then.

"I will teach you fervour" Gide says addressing the faceless nameless
reader and goes on to sing the praises of body electric like Walt
Whitman did, or even Carl Sandburg did in their own inimitable styles
much later. One can get high on plain water, Gide mentioned, in this
wonderful dialogue between Nathaniel the student and Menacles, a sort
of caricature of good ole Oscar Wilde -one of my perennial favourites,
due to his irrepressible humour and his razor sharp pithy witticisms.

Menacles, goes on narrating his own fantastic story, and there is this
magic realism interwoven in a book predating the later masters like
Gabriel Garcia Marques -antoher favourite of mine- because of this
fable like quality to the tale. Fundamentally, in the hoary tradition
of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarthustra and even Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
this book also treads the familiar path -though a comparison between
these three would be entirely unfair.

To the serious reader then, Menacles is nothing but Gide himself, as
he used to be before the dreaded disease made him a wraith who allows
the philosopher-writer to stop exalting the ego and embrace physically
and spiritually, pure joy. Easier said than done, I thought then, as I
think now : though there are decades separating the two events.

This then is an amazing book that could leave the reader badly smitten.

cheers !

Last Words....

Written by a young lady relative, one who had everything going for her, suddenly faced with imminent death...

REFLECTIONS…….

“ Why me? Why did it happen to me?”- the most inevitable reaction to any fatal terminal news given by the doctor.

I sometimes wondered what would be my reaction if I am ever faced with such an life-threatening situation any time in the future. Little did I know that such a challenging experience was awaiting me not very far away.

No I never even thought of that question or uttered it.

I teach in a private university. This year , after the Spring Semester finals were over, on 12th May , in response to my cousin’s and few colleagues concerned query, at a university seminar, I visited the dermatologist about some allergic skin reactions on my face and arms the very same evening. Of course, for the past few months, I had noticed the red rashes on my face, arms & legs. However, I was too busy with the end of semester work load to bother about such trivial matters. My face also looked puffy. Therefore I visited a reputed ENT, who diagnosed I had developed sinusitis , and treated me with antibiotics.

The visit to the dermatologist yielded the answer that I had been having allergic reactions due to hazardous environmental working conditions. I was advised to avoid working in such hazardous area. Fortunately it was summer recess time, and since I would be going to USA to attend the 57th Zonta International Convention in New York , and to visit my daughter and brother, I need not have to worry about being in that poisonous atmosphere for the next three months! In the Autumn semester my considerate university manager would arrange another office room for me. The doctor’s advice made me think that a genuine situation has fallen into my lap to get the university to sue the unfinished building construction on the left side of my office room. I was not aware of this hazard, but I knew this company was not following the stringent Rajuk policy about using a safety net, even if it is made of burlap. Already , once their rickety ladder had fallen against my window, shattering pieces of glass shard all over the room. Fortunately I was not physically harmed , as , you can call it good luck or destiny. I had left the office fifteen minutes early that day. Furthermore two times bricks had fallen on the guard. He narrowly escaped injury. Even on Sunday ,4th Sept he told me about the second brick which nearly missed hitting him on the forehead, with concern in his voice about how damaging it could have been to the university, in case it had fallen on a student. I had assured him of taking necessary steps to inform the university authorities. Unfortunately the next day, on Monday ,I had to return home after the morning 9.30 class, as my body was getting ready to be assaulted. Inspite of guilty feelings about letting my students down, good sense prevailed.

After requesting a helpful junior colleague to deal with my next class at 12.30 I went home.

Assaulted. It is too forceful a word. But, please read on.

I survived a brush with death. On 6th Sept night I ran a temperature of 104 F. No amount of cold pads could bring down the consistent . Here I should mention that the previous evening I visited a chest specialist who had started me on high dose of two potent antibiotics . The next morning I told my husband I could not see my beloved daughter’s face just cupped in my hands in front of my nose. That was one second of panic I suffered during my ordeal. Little did I know how bloated and ugly red my face had become. They quickly called the doctor, and I was immediately admitted to hospital.

Bombshell. My immunity system turned upon itself. My body faced concentrated attack... resulting in facial cellulites, pancreatitis, nephretitis, sinusitis ( which could have resulted in brain death, lung effusion, heart effusion ( short of heart attack)fungal infection... you name it I had faced it. Quite bizarre. Reminded me of that scene in an old movie, Fantastic Voyage , where , the doctors become miniatures and enter the body after being injected through the vein, to treat a body disorder but all the T-cells became its own enemy and commanded “Attack’’ During my twelve days hospitalization over here everyone failed to understand. The doctors tried to make a diagnosis , but could not. Perhaps they looked at one aspect of each symptom that I had..,

Therefore on the advice of each loving relative, friends , and well-wishers on the 18th September I had to be flown to Bangkok , with lung effusion, and emergency oxygen arrangement with the airlines authorities.

I am grateful to God who decided to give me a second lease in life. On arrival over there ,a team of seven doctors took charge of my shell-shocked weak transitory shell of a body, and monitored me round the clock. The disease has been diagnosed as the auto-immune disease SLE ( Systemic Lupus Erythomus ) a rare genetic disease,from which unfortunately my younger sister has been suffering for the last 14 years. However her manifestation was different.It began with fibromyalgia, and now it has become full-blown lupus. She has survived ,although the ordeal is not over. In those days the treatment was not that effective even abroad. Nevertheless my doctors have assured me of hundred percent cure in six months time if I respond to the treatment, citing mathematical ratio of totally cured disease. Fortunately I have responded positively to the treatment, another potential hazard to the body- steroids. The one and only alternative. available. Definite side-effects which I am braced for are diabetes, hypertension, ostoporeosis, hair loss ( also due to lupus), increase of Levianthan appetite resulting in becoming moon-faced and humped .

No one is prepared to see me like that , I’ve always been petite. However I am prepared.

The purpose of writing this reflection is sharing my actual challenging experience with all my traumatized, loving , caring , relatives, friends and concerned colleagues, management , staff, the humble people I interact with in all walks of life , from all over the world, who suffered by agonizing over my condition, prayed for me day and night, and are still continuing to do so . I have been strengthened by this uplifting experience.

This rare heredity disease is supposed to attack once in three generations. Now I am certainly going to research why two sisters got afflicted in one generation. Is there going to be another victim? Perhaps my research or this article could help another family which harbour this hazardous gene.

I thank each and everyone for your tears, support , care and love.

I invoke the merciful god’s kindest blessings on all of you.

..

.
.
.
----------------

footnote : Jesse was diagonosed with a malignant brain tumor, she is in coma for the last two days at a hospital in Bangkok.

Lets all pray for her.

Interlude

I must set this down, I must. But I face
the problem of every vexed chronicler:
event erased by the fickler
tides of caprice. And so must base

this traveller’s tale on no more
than the scattered flotsam of a wreck,
the spars and bobbing bits of deck
that once briefly bore

our cargo. So here a book, bought
for someone else, now bearing
Eliot paraphrased in a caring
line of love; there, a medal fraught

with shared memories of ancient wars,
perfect gift for marchers of the mind –
on such are built the blind
buttresses of faith, a fool’s recourse.

But there is, beyond this sad detritus
of a voyage, against a baleful dawn,
your face whose image is all but gone.
And a magic moment or two that knit us.
***

Pretty Flower

Pretty flower, I watch you
Rose, in petticoats of passionate pink
Holding your head up, indifferent
To my admiring gaze
Perhaps if you were still
Adorning your branch,
Not rotting away
In this swan-shaped white vase
You might have reciprocated
With shy acknowledgement

A bit more....of regional poetry

This should have been written as a comment in reply to my fellow-blogger Arundhanti, but for some quirky reason I am here... might as well the best I can.

And there is a reason too. I had done a painstaking translation of a modern Gujarati ghazal, and it got deleted from the caferati board. Rather depressing.

Well, Urdu/Hindusthani [let us not squibble over the epithets] throws up some hugely intriguing shairs/couples. Having watched the re-digitalized Mughal-el-Azam, I am in the mood to write a bit.

Aparna, a sensitive singer and one who loves Urdu despite Marathi being her mother tongue had sent me by sms a fitting reply to a sort of shair in English, two lines saying something similar to 'flowers never bend with the rainfall' which occurs in a song by Simon and Garfunkel.

Here is that massive missive :

Gul-se lipti titli-ko girakar dekho,
Aandhiyo[n] tum-ne darakhto[n]-ko giraya hoga !

I get goose pimples, writing this.

Rough translation :

hey you power-crazy winds who may have felled huge trees, show me how you separate the love-crazed butterfly from the flower....

Cheers !

The Universe According to Kids

Speaking to children with serious expectant faces, about the space travel and our solar system can either be a daunting task or a trifle… depending on how one approaches it. For me it was the former because diluting my talk to a level where 10 to 14 year old kids can understand the complexities of the Galileo Mission to Jupiter and its findings, seemed like a topic that had been eating chunks of my brain off for days. I decided to improvise according to their response.

The dreaded moment arrived and I started the power point presentation. It was a huge relief, as the talk progressed, to realize that kids who sign up for a model making workshop to produce a strikingly realistic model of the satellite that NASA designed, curiously the whole model was also from NASA, have to be familiar with planets and their moons. So Io, Callisto, Europa and Ganymede were not entirely unknown to them. Some had even seen close-up images, and some had information to offer too -pretty accurate information at that.

As I plodded through the entire solar system, and focused on Jupiter and its mysterious Red Spot and its many moons, curious faces sparkled and shone with question marks superimposed on their pretty little heads. Twenty-two eager kids, perhaps the brightest from each school, with an impatience that flipped and flopped underneath their stiff postures, and shone through their iron-clad discipline. So I dropped the plan to allow them questions at the end of the two hour presentation –and the kaleidoscope of child-like queries, started churning out like a roaring volcano.

Looking back, I feel very proud of their unbridled imagination, the uncorrupted romance and the inquisitiveness that fuels the fire inside those minds… I encouraged them to ask me the silliest questions, and they stumped me with highly sensible ones! One little girl who looked barely 6, though she was 10 years old, Rucha, asked the sharpest queries and added the juiciest portions to the explanations. For instance she wanted to know if there was a possibility of life on the cold moon Europa, where scientists have suspected liquid water… due to heaving up and down of the thousands of kilometres of thick ice sheets, sometimes cracking up.

I said it may be possible for organisms that thrive on anything but oxygen to survive in these inhospitable climes –don’t we have trees and micro-organisms here that thrive on carbon dioxide? Methane consuming bacteria have also been found in deep seas. She then wanted to know, if micro-organisms could derive oxygen from water –and I had to admit yes, electrolysis is a process that does precisely that.

Why do the ice-sheets heave, she wanted to know. Because of multiple-pulls from the neighbouring satellites or Jupiter's other moons and also the huge planet itself which is a failed star. Had it been hotter and larger, it would have been a sun itself, I replied. Why did we abandon the spacecraft that worked for 14 years?
Well by then it was one third of what we had sent out... and it could have never
broken off from the huge gravitational pull. How did it die? Not by high temperature
as we think, but due to immense pressure... Jupiter exerts millions of time higher
pressure on object near it than the Earth does...

Other kids wanted to know about aliens and life on Jupiter or its planets. Many seemed excited obviously –so I had to explain how hot the gaseous planet is, and the lack of rocks or mountains or terrain… also ruling out life on planets due to their very cold and very hot atmospheres. A small boy then diverted us by asking is it true that aliens came to the earth to teach the Egyptians how to make the Sphinx. This brought back fond memories of intellectuals sipping coffee in canteen at the Medical College in Baroda, and of late night issue-based parties, with my internship-doctor friends whiling away the hours during the interminable night duty. I have a lot of stories to tell about those… but lets focus on Jupiter. Well, I had to explain about he excitement brought in by Eric Von Danniken – a Swiss archaeologist who has written probably seven or more books on this controversial topic. I am a diehard agnostic and I hate to contradict anyone who has an exciting hypothesis till it is proven correct or otherwise. The kids seemed a tad disappointed that aliens may not be peeping into our workshops and taking digital videos of the proceedings… but then Carl Sagan also asked why would anyone on our planet bother to teach the ants our alphabet? If the aliens are here, why would they bother to stop us from being at one another's throats all the time? It is up to us to.....

Don’t know how many will become astrophysicists or astronomers –but I had a sacred glimpse into the young psyche –and I was pleased as punch by the peek. I came away with the resolve to do this more often and rope in the grown-ups who have equally guileless queries and that spark of learning still burning bright inside. Like my close landscape artist friend Satish Patel now lost to the US of A, asked me when I wanted him to join a stargazers club : how can we afford to be ignorant man, under this wonderful night sky?

cheers!

Second Light

The chairs are empty, three of them under the lonely spotlight. All three are draped with a white cloth. One is slightly in front of the other two as if wanting to stand out solely in the light. One is without a cushion and is made of pink plastic. The other two are wooden and have cream-colored cushions. They do not look too old and appear to be waiting for someone. Someone to come and occupy the empty space and throw an additional shadow taller than that of the chairs but blending in with their manufactured uniformity. Perhaps they are like the Sirens of Circe placed there for people fate has abandoned in the alleys of failed ambition.

Time passes. Now there is a man. He is sitting in the plastic chair, the least comfortable of the three. He is foaming at the mouth. His hands are clutching a thin black rope made of plastic. At his feet lies a disposable syringe, old and ugly. His eyes try to concentrate on the spotlight as if by doing so he can find all the answers he ran away from every time. But it is too bright for them. His pupils dilate suddenly. The light overwhelms him and rushes through his open mouth, up his nose into the brain. As everything turns a brilliant white he sees a young child walking away from him, hand in hand with his mother.

(part of an eventual trilogy of short pieces loosely based on the themes of light and death)

Catullus

You died young. But in your life the seven hills
rang with your love and filth:
lyric passion laced with sleaze,
fair Lesbia weaving perfidies.

***

Writing with by a computer

Consider this passge:

Dave Striver loved the university - its ivy-covered clocktowers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. The university, contrary to popular opinion, is far from free of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world: academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as any in the marketplace. A prime example is the dissertation defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one's dissertation. This was a test Professor Edward Hart enjoyed giving.

If it hadn't been for my corny title, would you have guessed a computer program wrote it? Bad scene for us aspiring writers? In The New York Times, Daniel Akst's essay is reassuring.

Fortunately, flesh-and-blood writers are nowhere near having to hang up their turtlenecks. When I called Steven Pinker, the Harvard University psychologist whose research focuses on language and cognition, he pointed out that the human brain consists of 100 trillion synapses that are subjected to a lifetime of real-world experience. While it is conceivable that computers will eventually write novels, Dr. Pinker says, "I doubt they'd be very good novels by human standards."

And there's this:

It was Simon's ideas - particularly his notion of "satisficing" - that first got me interested in fiction-writing machines. Though in theory a person shopping for new shoes could consider all the pairs on the planet, in fact, the cost is way too high - an entire life spent shoe-shopping. So in the real world we visit one or two stores, try on a few in our size and buy a pair.
Satisficing in this way - settling, or even sensing, what is good enough - is something novelists must do as well. We think of an idea and go with it because pausing to systematically consider every plot twist, character or phrase that might come next would lead nowhere.
Computers are just as subject as humans to Simon's "bounded rationality." Computers cannot create narratives by using brute computational force to mindlessly try every alternative. It may be fun to think that 10,000 monkeys typing for 10,000 years will sooner or later randomly produce "Paradise Lost," but evidently this is no more plausible for silicon than simians. Computers don't even play chess this way, Dr. Pinker told me, having noted elsewhere that the number of possible sentences of 20 words or less that the average person can understand is perhaps a hundred million trillion, or many times the number of seconds since the universe was born. "The possibilities boggle the mind very quickly," he says.

Whew. For a minute, i was wondering if we'd have to dump the Stories at the Coffee Table project. Can breathe a little easier now. [Link via Amardeep Singh.]

Glimpse of a story: "Savera"

I love mornings. Always did. Even in this humid and hot room in a semi-private ward of the hospital, which my father once owned. But they could throw me into the general ward and I couldn’t care less because, I’d still have my mornings. It was morning when I met her. I remember it as if it were yesterday: her disheveled apparel, hurricane hairstyle and ruddy stench. I love that image more and more with each passing breath and I nearly forget what I was doing that morning. Of course, my morning walks with my father were among my most painful adolescent experiences. But that’s the rule of life and religion: to get your shine, first grapple with grime. And so this lackadaisical youth, that was me, eventually found that I had in me that which loved her dress, that which loved her hair, that which loved her, that which loved mornings.
There goes off the six o’clock alarm. Not mine. It belongs to, used to belong to my roomie, Richard D’mello. So it is morning! And there goes off the natural alarm. It belongs to, still belongs to nature (at least as long as she is around). The buzz of this one is composed of the irksome chirping of seemingly a hundred birds shrouded within the foliage of the peepul tree right outside the window that WAS next to Richard’s bed. Someone told me that all that noise is a kind of feedback for the birds, helping them to maintain their population levels. I haven’t a clue as to how they do that but I do have something on how humans do that. They just die. Pop! There goes one. POP! There goes a huge one. Pop! There goes Richard. Pop! There goes Zubin, me.
The birds in the peepul tree seemed to be gradually popping off too ever since Sheila moved in with us. You can almost feel the decibels decreasing by one bird on a daily basis. Sheila was Richard’s cat. She’s more a cat with a personality, if you could ever have one like that. Her personality would probably match that of Richard’s wife but he hadn’t had one. I think that being able to share in bachelor bliss made sharing our room more tolerable for both of us. However, there were more things uncommon between us, especially his visitors, or guests, as he liked to refer to them. He had come in only a week ago but I can call him my friend. He was one of those people whom anyone can call a friend instantly. Maybe that’s why he had so many visitors. I had none.

Heart-break

Dealing with heart-break is something the teenagers
try to come to grips with and usually fail. The adolescents
are slightly better at that, and practice makes one perfect.
But what about the emotionally brittle ten year olds and
slightly older ones?

Mimi my daughter is a versatile girl, one who is so busy
scoring up high marks in every endeavour that it came as
a shattering realization to her when she missed being chosen
for the national meet on archery.

First of all she had been imparted hardly a month's training,
we had been away on a long holiday and later on, she had
bunked the practice sessions with a cavalier attitude all
along, due to the unrelenting piano practice -she did well
there; quite well indeed.

When she found that she missed the boat by only 12 marks
out of a whopping 780 maximum possible, tears flowed...
nay poured. Strangely if one little girl simpers, a
whole group gets into the act like apes and there is
utter chaos then. It hurt her bad, since it had been
a neck and neck affair with Nikita her classmate who
was slightly more consistent all the time. Archery is
a complex art and science indeed.

I had spread the word around and was deeply touched by
a high voltage shair that my good friend Alok Shukla, a
management expert sent by sms in sympathy :

Girte hain shaho-savar hi maidan-e-jung mein;
Woh tufl kya girenge jo ghutnon-ke bal chalé ?

It means : Only kings and emperors fall in the battlefield,
Those slaves who creep on their knees, can never ever fall.....

It is amazingly heart-warming to see the effect of this sort of thinking
on even a child's mental make-up. One who has not learnt to cope up
with failures will never be able to digest success.

Cheers !
(c)Max Babi Nov.2004

An-O-Philis

I love watching a mosquito
torpedo to death

hands like stealth bombers
coming together at the point-of-impact
like a eunuch on Fridays
or any other day for that matter...

The fool spares the mosquito,
contemplating,
after all, it is my blood
that runs through
its veins
blood relations that count
for nothing,
a family lineage you hold on to
more out of habit than longing or
belonging for that matter...

Anopheles Confucius
That bastard philosopical insect
sat on your thigh
contemplating
how many of my brothers
and
sisters must have tasted of this
delightfully bitchy, Mangalorean blood.
It convulsed at the thought
and you unwittingly slapped your thigh
like a high-five
to long lost relatives

It was, in some way, even though
it was sucking your blood. More like...
at long last!
than long lost
Anopheles Confucius
That bastard mosquito on your thigh.

That Young Wind

at the Read-meet in Delhi on November 20th; an unedited piece I wrote 26 years ago

There's a wind that is blowing
It's puffing its' way through my life
Dust in my eyes
And weed in my mouth
I'm walking with it - turning blind.

There's a wind that is blowing
into the corners of my mind
clogging up my dreams
bursting at the seams
I'm thinking with it - turning wild.

Stop.
Let me walk against it.
Can I think without it
Can I possibly catch all my dreams
stitch back the seams
Can I wander alone
in a vaccum?

Stop this wind that is blowing
and puffing and hawing
Stop my mind from blowing away.
It's moulding my body
damp patches of moss
are starting to fill up my soul.
Stop this wind that is blowing
I'm searching for paths again.

(c)Anita 1979

did you?

did you know?
that behind every sigh
is an unanswered reason why

people mottle into greys and blues
and why fictional sob stories often turn true

that under each crushed fallen leaf
you may find a spider's web

a overturned fiasco
for you may have just erased a creature's bed

that in every misty-eyed deer
you will find the ode of a fallen mate

who was laid seige to by braggarts in a stupor
and was felled by their inanimity and the cruel twist of fate

that in every drop of morning dew
you will find a whispering of a star

that deigned to lie there at your sodden feet
because you could not admire it from afar

that pandora's box was not to be opened;
it was only a test of temptation

that a flowing honest river of life
is not to stain or pollute;

it houses now, the graves of a million drinkers
a cesspool of filth and a mire of refuse...

that a piece of wood fashioned into a chair
is not to be fought over;

it now resembles a design of the godly powers
that is used to lord us over...

utekkare,

pranay

Musings on the Readmeet at Manisha’s

Manisha and Mahesh have what I have wanted all my life. A home by the sea and a balcony looking into the sunset. Some day I would like to retire to a house like that by the sea and gaze into the sunset sitting on a cute wicker chair.

The fiery sunset and cool wind blowing just overwhelmed me at yesterday’s readmeet! I had read about Manisha complaining about the smell of drying fish near her home. I said I would endure fish smells and the loss of my right limb to see such divine sunsets from my own room. So I thought I would attempt a little reporting, though I guess the detailed one will be posted by Avi Das, the coordinator of the readmeet event.

“Gold Mist” it said on the nameplate. When I was directed to the entrance, I saw Basu Bhattacharya’s name written beside Manisha’s and Mahesh’s names. I knew I was in some distinguished company. Seeing Manisha in her gown and hair clipped on top of her head, I thought she was getting ready for the event. I said if I were early I would loiter around the seashore and then come back later when all was set. I didn’t realize from her posts on caferati that the lady was so charmingly and delightfully informal. She remained in the gown the entire evening, this good “bad” girl!

Indeed the golden rays of the setting sun had caused a mist to rise over the Arabian Sea when I watched it standing in the balcony with Vijay, Ratna, Manisha and Avi. We were the early birds except Manisha, of course, who was the hostess of the event.

6:30 no sign of people. The wait irritated Ratna who in her best schoolmarmish tone said later that we should all be present on time or not come at all. The problem with us Indians is that after several on-time appearances where we find the host having a bath or a harassed servant running around making arrangements we take it for granted that 6:30 means 7 or 7:30. So thank providence for people like Manisha and Ratna who, when they say 6.30, mean 6.30. I guess one should mention “Time 6.30” and “Reporting time 6.15” so that people do not assume they can saunter in by 7.

Aside from the four of us, the first to arrive was our “Zorba the Fenugree” Ajit Jani. Whipping out something that looked like a scrapbook he read his minimalistic poem “Etlo.” “Etlo” in Gujrati means, “that is.”

There was a longish short story, haiku-like poems about mobiles, a poem about a journey on the Bombay-Pune expressway, engineering-sounding poems, poems about seashells, my own short story, and the grand finale, a play reading by Manisha, Peter and Vijay.

Participants came from as far as Jaipur and Pune. There was Vincent who is an intelligence officer in the revenue department who wants to open a chapter of Caferati in Jaipur. He came with his wife who is a forensic expert specializing in genetic coding and their 28-day old daughter who never even once made a noise and was rapt in a world of her own throughout the event (talk of early initiation into the readmeet culture!).

That makes me wonder, why people meet to read an almost dead art form commuting long hours when they could have sat in front of a television and enjoyed inane recycled serials and skimpily dressed girls dancing suggestively? Why do people like Manisha open up their homes and their hearts to kindred souls who need a refuge from the overpowering cynicism of the world around them?

The answer is we humans have an innate need to communicate, as the ancient cave dwellers did. After a hunt they would gather around a campfire (remember, we have a campfire event coming), eat the cooked meat and talk (mostly in grunts and sign language) about the hunt and visualize about the future where their future generation would gather in a largish drawing room, sit on stylish mats and listen to others read their delicately created works. Have a heart writers, poetry or prose will never die with people like you around!

So what if an unkind word was said in criticism, an unguarded comment, or offense taken over a misinterpreted meaning? Let the writers of the world sink their differences and be bonded as one. After all when they need to write content for a website or copy for an advertisement or script for a play they have to depend on us. Writers today are paid well by the technology freaks and they had better do that or we would sabotage their software programs and dollar-dreams of BPO bliss!

As a people we no longer have the time to sit together and tell anecdotes, or read carefully written and edited stories and poems to each other. Our lives are like one long succession of routines where we do what others expect us to do. We do the obvious routines, even writing for a living, quite easily. But the challenge comes in writing with a purpose, to discover the beauty of nature, write about interesting people we have met, to encourage and to enlighten and to break barriers and experience the writer’s words as our own. The creative urge takes us away from this stereotypical life and makes us think, dream and discover new worlds. I think that objective was achieved at yesterday’s readmeet.

Later we dispersed to the dining room to feast on samosas, cutlets, and brownie cakes (mmmm!).

Chat Window: A drop of sky 14th December 2002, 18:36:41 IST

restless : u there?
restless : r u?
restless : < ding >
restless : whr r u?
neon memory : sorry sorry ...here...ekhanei...bz with sending some mails off...u ok 2day?
restless : so much work? U hardly have time these days! n see…it’s been raining here since dawn...pouring…
neon memory : ? ?...why?
restless : there was a storm here…just b4 sunrise…and since then...it’s just been pouring...all over the place…books, my records...the cushions I keep in the corner of the blue room...everywhere...
neon memory : hmmmn
neon memory : why do u? u know...right? U sure know. I have no options open right now. U know.
restless : yep. I do. makes it worse.
neon memory : I don’t know what to say here. May be someday…u wont feel so bad over the nothingness we have here/?
restless : haha...see ...just these few words brings back the sun ...I can almost feel the warm slices of the sun pour over me…soft and light orange in colour…
neon memory : hmmmn
restless : ok…see u then...i just came to find my sun here…had lost it to the storm…just come once in a while and thaw the chill away...if u can...
neon memory : u will go now? So soon? U just got online, right? Just came for your sun and running away with mine in a split second ?
restless : I gave u too...no? clouds, storm, all the rain that was mine. Room full of darkness...go now...back to ur work…
neon memory : < ding >
neon memory : < ding >
neon memory : u there? u?
(Your message has not reached 'restless' as 'restless' seems to be offline)

(P.S. The way technology influences and changes language and expression fascinates me. Sharing a 'chat piece' with Caferati, hoping to receive comments and criticisms from fellow writers. )

Disadvantage

Over the wires your sun-flecked laughter mocks,
its ripples teasing, "You deserve it!"
Pity I can't trap it in a box
and preserve it.

***