Swimming

I was reading an article about James Agee in The New Yorker. It quoted something that he had written as a film critic, about Bathing Beauty, a film featuring Esther Williams:

I could not resist the wish that Metro-Goldwin-Mayer had topped its aquatic climax -- a huge pool full of girls, fountains, and spouts of flame -- by suddenly draining the tank and ending the show with the entire company writhing like goldfish on a rug. But M-G-M resisted it.

Naturally that reminded me of a poem I wrote several years ago. I don't know what inspired it, but it came out weird, and it's still weird, and here it is:

Swimming to Shore

We show good form,
try not to flail.

A few tread water;
then Esthers
with beautiful breast-strokes
surround them
swimming in sync,
singing high and sweet:

Honey, just don’t think
don’t think
There’s no time to cogitate
it’s late
You have a hot blind date
with fate
Come on! The water’s fine!

and a grinning dolphin leaps at the end
to make sure.

We're praying to reach
that blessed Shore
where we won’t have to breathe
anymore.

Metroblogging

Chennai has just joined the cities which particpate in Metroblogging:

With almost 40 active sites, Metroblogging is the largest and fastest growing network of city-specific blogs on the Web. From San Francisco to Bangkok, from Karachi to Toronto, Metblogs are a hyper-local look at what’s going on in the city. Our hand-picked core of regional bloggers give each site a new perspective on daily life; less calendar listings, more friendly advice. With Metblogs, you can read about life and times in your neighborhood, your favorite places to visit, places where you’ve never been, or get a feel for them all with the daily “best of” blog on the hub at metroblogging.com.

I am one of the bloggers who is contributing to the Chennai Metroblog site -- if you go there, you can see the current list of participants. Like to join? If you would like to write regularly about the city for Metroblogging, please contact chandrachoodan[@]gmail.com.

Coconuts and Poochis

Like many, many households in the south, we have coconut trees in our garden. When I look out the window I can see our three, and four more from the houses beside and behind us. For years our trees provided us with all the coconut for our chutneys, and for the occasional glass of tender coconut water.

Lately, though, a lot of the coconuts have fallen from the tree before reaching maturity; some the gardener has cut down only to find that they had turned to dried husks. Last week one of the garden contract laborers who's been doing some temporary work here shinnied up to the crown of a coconut tree, and declared that it was infested with poochis (insects). He told Mary that if we purchased the ingredients, he would make them into a sort of poultice and apply them around the coconut stems, to kill or drive off the poochis. Rs. 25 per tree, plus a tip, for the labour and expertise.

Here's what Mary bought:

rock salt
mothballs
sambrani (a kind of incense)
turmeric
edible camphor (used here in some sweets)

The work was completed very quickly. I don't know how long it will take for the results to show, but we are well-poulticed now.

come to think of it

I've been posting photographs and things he has written to r's website. R enjoyed doing his own advertising for the company he founded and ran, and created a new campaign every year. Today I pulled out some advertisements he had devised in the mid-eighties.

It begins in a way that was not done in those days, with a negative statement:

COME TO THINK OF IT
THERE IS MORE TO LIFE
THAN PLASTICS

and continues with a poem:

THERE IS MELLOWNESS OF TWILIGHT
AND MUSIC TO SOOTHE, ROUSE OR PULSATE
AND THERE IS YEARNING FOR A NEED TO BE NEEDED
LOVING TO BE LOVED
LIFE IS LAUGHTER AND DESIRE
IT IS THE CRY OF A NEW-BORN CHILD
IT IS AN ECSTASY AND A WOUND OF HURT
IT IS A PARADIGM OF COMPASSION
AND FREQUENTLY A RESERVOIR OF SUPERSTITION
HATRED AND VIOLENCE
IN THE FACE OF EVIDENCE OF DESOLATION AND FUTILITY
LIFE IS HOPE
AND A COVENANT OF FAITH
LIFE IS A COMBAT, PERPLEXITIES AND DILEMMAS
AND SOMETIMES, TRIUMPH OF UNVANQUISHED WILL
IT IS UNQUENCHABLE THIRST FOR KNOWLEDGE
IT IS AN UNENDING SEARCH
FOR THE ELUSIVE MEANING OF FREEDOM AND TRUTH
IT IS IDEAS WHICH LEAD TO ARGUMENT
AND MORE IDEAS... (read more, and see photographs of the series of ads)

Alien Landing

I had another go at some ancient rock shrines in Mahabalipuram (my first try was here):

This one looks sort of brutal and cartoonish, as though the shrine nearest to the viewer were actually an alien deathray, trying to disguise itself as its neighbour. I should have worked on it more (a cloud or two might have been nice), but I got fed up. If I try this subject again, I think I'll try to do it as if I were the alien.

That nice green grass is imaginary: actually there's a bit of grass and a lot of sand, and litter and traces of shit, human and animal. If it were my deathray I would have kept the environs tidier.

Some Links

Sharad Haksar - Chennai-based photographer. His portfolio is stunning - mostly advertising photos, some more personal. Many will be familiar to Chennai-ites, who will have seen them in print and on hoardings (billboards). You have to chase the links in order to click on them, but it's worth it.

Speaking of photography, the website of my husband, Ramesh Gandhi, has a large section on photography. He's had many photographic exbitions, and won prizes. Both the colour and black and white sections have been updated recently with new photographs. Take a look!

Ashokism - an architect from Madurai, now working in Kabul. Eating pulao, longing for puliyogarai. Interesting photographs of Kabul today.

My Mylapore - a new blog centred around Mylapore, one of the oldest parts of Chennai

Sula Satori

This is a half-bottle of wine from Sula, an Indian winery. The label says that it is Satori (a zen term for enlightenment) Merlot; and the picture on the label appears to be a flamenco dancer. Figure that out!

And also figure out why you can't buy wine, even Indian wine, at the so-called Wine Shops, which is what liquour stores are called in Tamil Nadu. Oh, I forgot about Golconda Ruby (great name!), which is sweet and port-like. That you can get.

I painted this before drinking it, if you were wondering.

Morning Raga

Thanks to yesterday's rant I received more visitors than ever before on a single day (309). Today I resume regular programming, with a little poem I wrote.

Morning Raga

It’s a dazzling solo
demanding complete concentration:
nudge the sun higher

cue chittering birdsong
offer yellow-skinned bananas
to a blue bowl.

All my arms are busy.
I hum a sloka of great power.
My feet trample the hell out of
demon Inertia.

It’s a virtuoso turn
and I dedicate it to you
with a cup of coffee.

You receive it and smile
holding your hand above my head
in the gesture which means
‘Daughter, be always victorious.’

Thanks to Murugan, who gave me the link to The Advertising Standards Council of India. I made a complaint there about the advertisement I described below.

The Cashless World

I saw a TV commercial that enraged me. The first time I didn't pay a great deal of attention:

A man, an impoverished laborer, performs a long series of heavy tasks - he pushes a laden hand-cart; tries to drink water from a dry tap. The colours are dull and heavy. The camera lingers on him, on his worn chappals. He carries a big sack on his back up a staircase of raw cement in a partly constructed high-rise building. It goes on and on; it looks painful. Finally you see the man squatting and eating something off of a cheap metal plate. I thought it was going to be a social message from an NGO about labour, health, education, improving people's lot, something like that.

But then, beside his face, you see the slogan "Welcome to a cashless world." And a picture of a State Bank of India (SBI) debit card! My jaw actually dropped. What was the message of the ad? That this miserable man can get a credit card and improve his lot? Not possible. That he is cashless and so are we, but in a parallel universe of plenty? how crass, even cruel can you get?

The ad came by again, and this time I paid attention, because I really wanted to understand it. The second time I saw that, as the man is eating, and just before the SBI slogan comes, these words appear (very briefly) beside the man's face:

Bholu [his name]
Ex-pickpocket

Even then it took me some time before I realised that the message is that the pickpocket can no longer pursue his trade because people don't carry cash anymore - they carry the debit card. So he is condemned to a miserable life of honest labour.

Am I missing out on something here? I'm still angry - was it meant to be funny? Millions of men and women in this country -- who are NOT thieves -- spend their whole lives doing backbreaking, soul-killing work, and remain pretty much in a cashless world -- while we lucky few can buy things with plastic cards. Let's make jokes about their misery on top of it. State Bank of India is at least partly owned by the government, too. Shame on it, and on its advertising agency.

update: My husband has constructed an alternative to this ad. He was consulted, when he was running a factory, by the topmost advertising agencies of the country in the capacity of a friend and consultant, and was relied upon for his uncompromising sense of honesty, aesthetics, probity and humour. I will provide samples from his work later on.

Timepass

One of my favourite Indian English words is timepass (I just googled and found 185,000 references to it).

"What are you doing?" "Nothing much, just timepass."

"So, what do you do for timepass?"

Our entire lives, most of us, could be summed up just that way; and, looked at in that larger sense, it acquires a kind of poetry.

riverrun. timepass. the end.

A few years ago a minor celebrity with a colourful life, Protima Bedi, published a memoir and called it Timepass. I admired her for that clear-sightedness. (The memoir was actually put together from a draft by her daughter after Bedi's sudden death: she went on pilgrimage to a shrine in the Himalayas. While she and her group were camped out for the night an avalanche came down and buried them. Her body was not found.)

Why did I write this post? You know it already, it's there in the title.

And a Little More Rain

And a little more rain, in the afternoon. I was sitting alone at the dining table, eating some soup, when the sky darkened several shades, and the temperature dropped. A breeze stirred up the trees so that a delicate shower of yellow eucalyptus leaves fell against the general green. The gardener was squatting on the lawn, one knee down, one up under his chin, trimming the grass with secaturs. He looked at the sky when the breeze gusted, but did not stop work when the little drizzle began. Five minutes later the sky began to lighten again. These are the showers of summer – few and far between, and leaving the air more humid than they found it, but still very welcome.

And then I had to go out, and it began to drizzle again, very lightly, and I had some slow-motion cello music on the CD player – Bruch’s Kol Nidrei – and it felt as if I were driving underwater or in a dream, and then a crow glided with wings fully extended right across my windshield, and it was kinda sublime. Then back to normal: weaving through traffic; visiting the DVD library, where the girls behind the counter were so raptly involved with a Tamil movie playing on the TV mounted high on the wall in the corner that they could hardly remember to collect my money. Drove past the old Hotel Oceanic, which has finally been reduced pretty much to rubble (soon to become an IT park, I’m told). Home again.

Here's the link to Greg Chappell's March 1 interview in the Guardian, in which he spoke (too much) about former cricket captain Sourav Ganguly:

Chappell rides bumps on road paved with passion and pop-star idolatry

Several Things

It rained last night – the first rain we've had in 2006. It was about 10:30 p.m. I walked out of the drawing room into the atrium, and heard it drumming on the glass roof – and dripping through several cracks too, onto the leaves of the plants inside. I've never gotten used to living in a place where rain is an event, something fleeting, to be savoured. In half an hour it was over.


In the bathroom I was startled by one of those big, pale spiders which can grow to the circumference of a saucer. This one was only about 3 inches in diameter, but it disconcerted me. When I was travelling here as a student, and stayed in the cheapest possible hotels, I would go down the hall or across the courtyard to bathe, and find one of those giants sharing the room with me. I knew they were harmless, but they scuttled, and I felt they were staring at me, though I couldn’t see their eyes. They seem to like the damp air of bathrooms. This one, which was the first I’d seen for years, reminded me of those poor but exciting days. It’s still there. I’m not able to kill it, but I do hope that it will decide to go somewhere else.


I’m scanning some photographs that R took as a boy, when he was too poor to own a camera – some friend would lend him his, so that he could shoot a roll. The prints came back in these small envelopes, about 2"x3". Who knows, the shop may still be there - Calcutta seems to bring all of its past along with it, in many and varying shades of decay. (I'm talking about the fifties, mind you - not, as you might gather from the illustrations, the nineteenth century.) Update: Balaji informs me that the camera in the illustration above is a Voigtlander Brillant. Which I wouldn't have known in a million years. Thanks!

In the Waiting Room