The Pause Button

 

Some days, life just cries out for a pause button. Or is the pause button that cries out to one? 

Either way, you know you simply have to walk away from all of it--at least for a while, if not forever. The work. The responsibility. The thinking. The planning. The organising. The worrying. The stretching of the brain to accommodate all requests. 

The last straw is loaded. It is just too much. It is time to shed whatever one can. 

But if one cannot, one searches frantically for the pause button, hoping that somehow the whole world gets the message and stops the relentless assault, knowing it doesn't, hoping that one simply ceases to notice, at least for a while... 

The Magic Hour

5:16 a.m. and it is  still pitch dark outside. I have been up for an hour, attempting to go back to sleep. 

This is the magic hour when sleep is most delicious and waking up makes for a day of endless possibilities. What to choose? On days when I have to get going, I know sleep is the better choice. On holidays, I am up bright and early, my brain cranking up that long list of tasks that make it impossible to return to sleep. 

And there are the many discomforts that come with age. I won't listen them but at either end of the night, they will not let you sleep. 

So, early mornings. Dark. Quiet. Cooler than the rest of the day. Secret, because no one knows you are awake. A magic time that is all yours. 

What will you make of this magic? 

Recoleta's Atlas

July 14, 2024, Buenos Aires. Photo credit: Swarna Rajagopalan

Outside Buenos Aires' famous Recoleta cemetary is this amazing, old gum tree. Beneath, you are surprised to see someone carrying, dragging it, a little bent under its great weight. 'Recoleta's Atlas' was sculpted by Joaquín Arbiza Brianza from over 3000 car parts, welded together. 

Sometimes, we are each Recoleta's Atlas, carrying the world on our shoulders, trying to drag a much larger tree, deeply rooted to the ground. 

Polyglot Power

I like language. I like words. I like written words better than spoken words. I also love silence but my love for language remains. 

This was not always so. 

Tamil is my native language. Growing up in Bombay, I spoke it in a stilted way and although my mother taught me the alphabet, remain largely illiterate. 

In school, we started Marathi first. I never heard anyone speak Marathi and this was a whole two years before Doordarshan's Bombay station was launched so I had no exposure to Marathi. Suddenly, one day, we were asking Aai to look at the lotus and the next we were reciting Manimau. For the most part, I was swimming blind. That cluelessness remained all the six years I studied Marathi in school, never quite catching up. 

Hindi followed and was somewhat easier thanks to cinema. Still, as a native Tamil speaker, I was self-conscious about aspirated sounds and gendered nouns. I think this remains throughout our lives. With my friends, I did three levels of the Rashtrabhasha exams and I will say that despite my self-consciousness and my deficiencies, the coursework of the third exam gave me an appreciation of Hindi that I had not considered. 

I started learning French before Std VIII. I wanted to be a diplomat and French was a diplomatic language, I had heard. It was also better taught, taking nothing for granted, so finally, I did well. I learned French for many years in school, college and at the Alliance Francaise. I was once decent at it and am now rusty, but I treasure my ability to read in French and occasionally surprise someone with a word or two! 

You notice I have not mentioned English. Even in my Tamil speaking home, everyone read in English. There were English books and magazines everywhere. English was just there, taken for granted. Everyone read in my family so book recommendations (and very rarely books) got handed down. 

The other language in the shadow of my family's history was Burmese. An entire branch had done their schooling in Rangoon before the Japanese invasion. They were fluent and one branch famously could only do multiplication in Burmese. I tried to learn phrases from my uncle and though they were pedestrian, I liked to think it was our secret language. 

I may not have excelled at language learning, nor pursued literature as my field of work. However, what I treasure, even with the little bit of every language I have learned is the way they allow me entry into other cultural universes and the way they enrich each other. 

On short visits, I like to learn how to say 'Thank you' in the local language. Nothing connects you to another human than your brave and sincere if disastrous effort to speak with them in their language. I would say even that our mistakes build bridges. 

When I started working in the social sector in Chennai, I brought with me my imperfect Tamil. What was perfect was my wish to connect and communicate. I spoke as I could, accepting the chuckles as well as the corrections as gifts. I was not reviled for making mistakes but indulged. I speak a little better now but I don't hesitate to speak. 

I want to say here that I wish I had learnt better and retained more of all the languages I learnt. However, even the smattering of this and that has enriched my life immensely. Perhaps in the years I have left, I will find a way to go back, start over and do better. 

Learning languages is very, very important. I am not an educational psychologist or any other kind of expert. But I think that the ability to code switch (that is, to speak a sentence in Tamil and then English and then Tamil again, or any other combination of languages) gives you mental agility. 

Knowing multiple languages opens multiple universes for you. Just think of the joys of listening to multiple genres of music! It's like that! 

In all the language politics in this country, generations are growing up monolingual. This means they cannot learn beyond what is published in their language or from people speaking other languages. 

Learning more than one language allows you to get better at each one. Each one deepens your understanding of the other as you learn a new rule and say, aah, in the other it is... 

And this is why it bothers me that so many colleges and universities do not require language learning. The 3-language formula, which now seems discredited, forced us to have some sense of our own regional language. Young people these days know English, and because they only know English, they do not seem to know it very well. Hindi survives this somehow thanks to popular culture. But the divide between those who only know English and those who only know their mother tongue is going to fracture this country further. By sidelining language learning in colleges, we are raising a generation of rootless people who cannot communicate with each other. 

There is no age for language learning. Online courses and apps make the opportunity accessible to everyone. At the very least, we can return to what we did in the early years of Doordarshan--watch programmes, news and films in every language! Now we can do that on our phones! 

And now I am going to do just that. 😉 I will have fun and I hope you do too! 

PS: Sometimes, you write something and it turns out to be a first draft of many other things that you may never get around to writing. (20/1/24)

Obstacle Course Days

Today was an obstacle race set in a maze. The obstacles and disruptions were minor, when you consider the state of the world, but they felt like a minefield. My stress level kept spiking. My patience was in smithereens. My spirits were weighed down by anxiety. And the frustration of encountering a hundred little irritations that would not let me think or read or write or do anything substantial, decimated the rest of the day. What was the purpose of such a life? 

Outside in the world, which may or may not be the real world, people did earth-shattering things that strangely, still left the world much as it was before my irritating day started. Nevertheless, these brilliant things (for no one is ever less than brilliant any more) made my day seem even worse. 

What is this life, I wanted to scream, if full of domestic disruptions, we cannot find time to blog? (Sorry, WH Davies) Just simple blogging.

This insane, disappointing day is done. The truth is that in the cracks and gaps between its annoying disruptions and despite my dramatic feelings about them, I did a great deal of work today. I got many things done that were important and essential. 

In women's lives, the clear work-day does not exist whether you go somewhere to work or you work from home. Responsibility stalks you, and trips you up, and lurches into your path from the shadows, and just when you think you've figured things out, the earth shifts. Most of us have learnt to persist and to work like thieves, stealing the time and bandwidth we can from here and there. 

It is truly a miracle that most of us manage to do what we do. When I was very young, a working woman said to me that she needed a wife who would make chapatis for her when she came home. I mocked her later. She was so right! Every working woman needs the kind of support that wives have provided in patriarchal societies. It's not just chapatis, which we can now order, but the entire gamut of backend logistical management and emotional labour that has freed men up to think deep thoughts without a care. 

When women aspire to do other things, it becomes a zero sum game but the inevitability of care responsibility removes the element of choice. They want to and should have it all but the cost is very high and often paid as poor mental and/or physical health. 

As for me, today, I will have to console myself on the tasks I completed and take some comfort in having survived the domestic obstacle course still calm enough to write this post. 

A labour of love

I have had the best teachers. This is one of the huge blessings of my life, along with an incredible (far from perfect but incredible) family. 

I have not always learnt perfectly from my teachers. Sometimes, I have been less prepared coming into that year's curriculum and sometimes, less prepared for class. Sometimes, I have been distracted by the drama of life. Sometimes, I have just found the subject tedious (sorry, Econ, I really tried!). Sometimes, I have been slow to grasp. Sometimes, their pedagogy left something to be desired.

But when I say I have had the best teachers, I mean that I have learnt from some wonderful humans all my life. They came in to teach me a particular topic, in the formal classroom or as supervisors. But from each of them, I learnt how to be. Each one showed me a dimension of how to live. 

Sometimes these were concrete tips that I still use. How to construct evaluation in a course so you create a learning path. How to continue to work (especially on a paper) even when you are blocked. The importance of legible fonts in a submission (sorry, sorry, sorry!). How to hem so neatly you can barely see. Really, the sum total of whatever I know, I know because of my teachers. 

I treasure too the example of the professor would quote Moliere's Sganarelle in the middle of a discussion on realism in international relations. I treasure the professor whose week included a jazz gig. I treasure the school teacher who turned every poem into a song and the one who had an anthem for her maths class--which made us smile but also ready to learn. I treasure the brilliant mind of my dissertation advisor that would find PhD topics in the strangest places--the limitless imagination and the creative play. (We read a book on play in our epistemology class but sadly, we did not play at all.) I treasure the years in a teaching-first college that freed me of the need to control my class (age and experience also help).

Most of my teachers have had this in common--they have been good, caring people. They have not needed to control their students' choices. They have been content to free us to grow while being present during our journeys. They have been secure humans--this is so rare, so rare, in education! 

I have noticed that my favourite conversations now are about teaching. 

This is because I treasure the gift of being in a classroom more than I can express. 

I played 'school-school' all through childhood. In fact, you might say, I am notorious for having schooled many generations of visitors to our home. Greatgrandparents, great-aunts, great-uncles, uncles, aunts, cousins--many, many are graduates of my school. My family will tell you that as my great-grandfather lay dying, I taught my great-uncle (his son) arithmetic on the lawns. I was four, he was a senior civil engineer. He was also my most difficult student. He got all his sums wrong (deliberately, indulgently). I was so concerned about his education that for months I sent him postcards with homework that he returned with mistakes! He may have been the student I have loved most in my life. 

As a teenager, I wrote the prospectus of a school I was going to start with all the elements I loved from schools in story-books (about schools). I made sure to bring in my other blessing--my cousins--by giving them all jobs and building rooms for them in campus plans I would love to draw up (in my next life, I will be an architect and in this, I enjoy admiring my architect friend's projects). 

I have tutored (badly) and I have run peace education projects on my own before I really knew the term. 

The linear path out of a PhD was to a teaching job. I taught through graduate school and four years after that but then for more than a decade, the teaching I got to do was repetitive training workshops and some mentoring of interns. 

The peace education programme at the NGO is for me the heart of my NGO--my heart too. We do other things and we are known for other things but this is the centre-point in my vision. In the years in which we imagined it as a classroom and school-centred programme, I got to talk teaching with my Montessori teacher cousin who is a classroom rockstar--sure-footed in what she wants to teach and secure enough to also become a student. I loved this. I still love talking teaching with her though she has moved on from our project (she is still a teacher).

The gift of being in a classroom has returned to my life in bits and pieces. I have come back to regular teaching, enriched by every life experience. I channel every good teacher I ever had into my work and hope to be somewhat as effective. 

Again and again, when I am preparing or when I am in the classroom, I think: This is what they mean by "labour of love." To do something you love. To do something you can do with love. To do something that fills your space with warmth and affection. That is something I have learned from my students who ultimately are the best teachers you will ever have. 

I started writing this post thinking that I love teaching and talking about teaching but I never blog about it. Then I thought of my wonderful teachers and this is where the post has meandered. It is guru dakshina and it is also gratitude that I get to be a lifelong learner in the satsang of my students. It is a prayer that the gift that has taken its time to reach me, stays with me for a while. 

Father's Day Reflections

At my thottil, I think.

When we were growing up, there was no 'Father's Day' in India. Patriarchy made everyday Father's Day, in a manner of speaking, and if you were fortunate to have a real good person for a father, everyday was Father's Day anyway. In our house, everyday was also Daughters' Day, given how our parents were. As a result, I learned about some of the obvious elements of patriarchy rather late in life.

Including male child preference, which I only learned about when paternal relatives visited and said, ostensibly out of earshot, that it was sad that my father had no sons. When I was about 12 and we began studying reproductive biology, I went to my father one evening, as he stood in our 14th floor balcony and said to him, "In case you have any regrets about having daughters, you should know that it is up to men to provide a Y chromosome." I think he muttered, "Okay." I don't think I hung around for conversation. At my present age, I can only imagine that he would have been in splits at that moment.

My father had deadpan delivery of his one-liners. The first time I bought dangling earrings, I wore them and went to him. He was sitting on the guest room floor doing something--he was always doing something--with great attention. I asked him, "If I wear these and say something to you, will you laugh?" meaning, do they shake a lot when I speak?) Response: "Depends on what you say."

Appa was part and parcel of everything we did. Getting ready for school. Sunday breakfast. Watching movies on Doordarshan and then, cricket. Shopping for clothes. Buying vegetables. Braiding our long hair when Amma was ill. Polishing shoes, making beds. Cooking everyday food. Cooking the best chakkarai pongal and aama vadai ever. Leaving books with plane tickets here and there. The works. Almost thirty years after his death, we miss him everyday.

When he passed way, my other wonderful uncles stepped in in their own ways, to encourage and indulge and shelter us. The men who married sisters became friends and brothers; we were that fortunate. We have now lost all of them.

When Appa died, people asked whether he was insured. Whether he left us property. It was hard for some to understand why it felt like the floor, the ceiling, the walls had all fallen out in my universe. It was hard for me to feel like I could still make the choices that in his presence, I would have made without a second thought. This was not something I could easily share, I realised, with most. Appa was an enabler, a magic person. (I did get past that moment, by the way.)

After he died, I realised how unusual he was and what a great, rare gift we had been given. I came to learn about all the awful things fathers can be and my gratitude has deepened--not just for him but for all the really good fathers I have known in my life. 

Father's Day. A day to give thanks. And a day to remember the lessons of Appa's life. Give--of yourself. Love. Live in the moment. Do what you do with all your heart. Have so much faith that your courage never falters. Have the courage to fail. Be honest. Keep moving. Be love. 

A Promise, Just for Today

Why is it so hard to keep the promises one makes to oneself? 

I think it comes from the way girls are raised in patriarchal cultures: to adjust, to yield, to step back, to give in, to give up, to efface themselves, to set aside their dreams, to minimize their needs, to not be while being. In the most liberal households, we still learn to tiptoe around men. Around others, really. We mould our days around others.

We are not meant to matter. Not to others. Not to ourselves. 

Sensitive to the slightest shift around us, we abandon the promises we may have made to ourselves. That cup of tea after everyone has left the house. The everyday yoga or meditation routine. The promise to write. Something. Anything. Just to know we are still alive. 

As we grow older, we are lost in the debris of the promises we have made to ourselves and broken, the detritus of our abandoned dreams. 

Reiki practice begins with affirmations that repeat the phrase, "Just for today. " This is a promise we can keep--just for today. Not for weeks. Not for years. Not forever. Just for today, at this moment, I will give myself the gift of.... whatever it is I want or need. 

 

And that one instance is so much easier to pull off, start to finish. One promise, one task, one workout, one sketch, one blogpost... fills you with satisfaction, accomplishment and confidence that if you want, you can do this all over again. And again. Just for once, each time. 

Something there is that doesn't love a lizard

Something there is that doesn't love a lizard. (Sorry, Robert Frost!)

I do not remember lizards in my childhood, strangely enough. They must have been there in the days of living closer to the ground and with open windows without meshes (a given in our Bombay life). For some reason, I did not notice them. My earliest memory is of a lizard on a hotel wall somewhere near Hubli when we drove to Madras for a wedding. I must have been under 2, going by photos of the time. 

And then, the rare visitation to our 14th floor residence which would cause a panic and have men working in neighbouring homes "rescue us" by driving the interloper out. That's when I learnt the Hindi word, "chipkali." 

There were lizards in the army home we visited at Sagar, and frogs too. But somehow I do not remember panic. I do not know what accounted for that rare moment of valour.

During my time in New Delhi, lizards outnumbered humans. They were bold, even reckless. They were all over the walls. But they also walked on ceilings, approaching fans that were running at full speed. Then and now, the thought of lizards getting caught and shredded on speeding fan blades and getting scattered like Sati's body parts or splintered atoms in a centrifuge, makes me shudder. Much to my family's amusement, I bought and placed peacock feathers everywhere but they just walked in and out of them like they were merely garden follies for their pleasure. 

The Lizard shrine at the
Varadaraja Perumal temple. Kanchipuram
Source: https://blog.yatradham.org/wp-content/
uploads/2023/12/Golden-Lizard.jpg

In Sri Lanka, where I did my dissertation research, they are everywhere, equal occupants of human-owned spaces. People do not seem to care when they perch close to the rice cooker or wander by the vegetables. Hambantota is where I first saw a lizard cross the road. (No, I do not know why!)

But me? Over the years, I realise, they bother me more. And more. And more. 

When I was a child, I remember being told that my great-grandfather--who knew everything and remains one of the two best people I have ever known and will ever know (the other is my great-grandmother)--would reassure children that since we came from Kanchipuram, no lizard would hurt us. Well, I am only 1/4 from Kanchipuram and I was over 40 when I went to the Varadaraja Perumal temple and touched that famous lizard. This did not reassure me very much.

I don't think lizards actually bite or sting humans. They are just plain creepy and dirty. Animal-loving, nature-loving friends remind me that lizards consume smaller pests and so they are good for the environment. I agree. In my view, all animals (and now I include humans, especially the animal-loving evangelists!) are wonderful at a tremendous distance from me and nature is best experienced through photographs! And I wish them all very well and far away from me. 

Anyway, with climate change pushing temperatures through the roof, the season for lizard refugees in cool human homes is growing longer. To be honest, they still creep me out and I fear one running over my toes and blot out the image of them walking over my soap or shoes (the latter, I have seen). 

But I feel a little sympathy for them too. It is beastly outside and we are responsible. They come in search of food. Outside our always-closed kitchen window, we have dinner-time visitors. I don't want to see them. I don't want to see proof of their visits. I don't want them near me or my stuff. But, where else will they go? (Well, we do have a massive arasa-maram outside our windows, but maybe there are too many people at each banti there?) 

This is a long post to write about something you really detest. But strong feelings fill the soul with words and these are words stockpiled over a lifetime. Take them or leave them. And if there are good lizard exclusion remedies, please share! 

The Utter Desolation of the Handicraft/ Handloom Exhibition

When I was growing up, handloom and handicraft exhibitions were one of our favourite places to go. My mother introduced us to the wonders of Indian artistry and we had an early appreciation of the great variety and the exquisite handwork that was before us. Going to these exhibitions, which usually took place in open maidans on uneven ground, was something everyone in the family seemed to love. 

By extension, one bought gifts at Cottage Industries or in the various state emporia which were then full of wonderful products and found in almost every Indian city. My favourite among these was Gurjari, with its gorgeous fabrics and those folders we all wanted to carry to college and joothis and jholas. 

And then "ethnic" became fashionable, around the time I was in college or a little later. From initially meaning that the exhibitions were a little more crowded, it came to mean the gentrification of "ethnic" products. First, the boutiques came up. Small stores run by entrepreneurs who would travel and source lovely little knick-knacks. Then, some of them grew into large stores. And finally by the early 1990s, the big "ethnic" chains came up. FabIndia is one example but so are places like Good Earth. "Ethnic" became a little unrecognizable to old-timers like me and also, unaffordable.

Thank god for Dastkar and Dilli Haat. But I never seem to make it to Dastkar exhibitions any more and on my last trip to Dilli Haat, apart from the great canteen section, it was hard to distinguish many stalls from the ones in INA market across the street or Sarojini market a little further away. 

We can see this in Hindi movies and serials where the very poor, have empty canisters (but lovely, shiny designer brass ones definitely not purchased four generations ago from the village store) but designer curtains, "ethnic" furniture and very nice clothes. (Take a look at this song.)

Yesterday, after a very long time, a couple of hours opened up on my schedule and I visited two handloom/ handicraft exhibitions. The first was by Poompuhar (or rather, the Tamil Nadu handicrafts commission). It had large metal sculptures and small ones (very poorly cast), Kondapalli toys (actually the prettiest part), a few sarees, tacky jewellery and agarbatti (which I bought out of sympathy and was quite nice!). I was the sole visitor. In a large hall, full of objects, I was the sole visitor. The staff were torn between eagerness and hopelessness. Someone walking in, casually clad in a salwar-kurta, wearing little jewellery, is not going to purchase a large Nataraja or a Kanchipuram silk. I felt really sorry for them but I have to say: there was nothing there that would tempt a middle-class window shopper. There was a lack of functionality in the displayed objects; what was there was not terribly well-made and the display was... uninviting. 

Poompuhar once had really good quality metal craft. But apart from the mythological and the religious, they also had small useful things like the little paperweights with hamsa and lion that I have bought and gifted so many times. Now the variety is less and so is the quality of the craft work.

The second exhibition I stopped at was worse. It was a pop-up of traveling small retailers. There is little that is 'handicraft' or 'handloom' about nighties, for instance. There were many tables of really dubious semi-precious jewellery (something I have bought a great deal of in such spaces). There were the obligatory Odisha pattachitra stalls. Again, I was the only customer and vendors literally chased me around the hall saying, "You walked past my stall." I felt very sorry for them but I really cannot afford endless pity purchases. So I walked briskly out and left them, waiting once again, for the customers who are unlikely to come and buy.

I admit it is also a life-stage thing. The things I like, I have already purchased for myself by this point in my life. But the life-stage part also means I can see a genuine decline in quality. And the lack of imagination and learning is mind-boggling. You make wooden pen-stands that are attractively painted on the outside. However, the barrel can hold two or three pens. The stand is so skinny it looks unstable. Most of all, the inside is un-glazed so that if a pen should leak, it cannot be cleaned. That is just one example. 

Do not read this as a denunciation of any effort to bring India's incredible treasury of craft to our rapidly changing cities. We need an aesthetic corrective, bringing back our beautiful, colourful crafts into our everyday life and work. Our tradition--in any part, any region of India--integrates form and function, beauty and utility in every moment of every day. (The best place to gain an appreciation of this is the Raja Dinkar Kelkar museum in Pune.) We need to bring that back. 

Purchased at a craft exhibition
when I was 15 or 16!

My desk--where I really live--is full of beautiful little objects that I would photograph if it were not so full and cluttered right now. I have little brass paperweights. I have mugs and pen-holders, some of which were purchased at these exhibitions. I have handloom zip pouches that hold every pen drives and chargers and head-phones. My Kindle cover is crafted with Kantha embroidery. I am proud and happy to flaunt our crafts and I cannot do it enough. But the official bodies charged with this have to do as well as the flourishing "ethnic" businesses in ensuring the quality of form and utilitarian function. 

I walked over from the Poompuhar exhibition to the neighbouring FabIndia where the crafts on display are impeccably made and functional but I have to strategise the purchase. The joy of walking in, broke, falling in love with something small and buying on impulse while squelching guilt, is elusive in stores like these. Nice to see and ironically, great for impulse control!

As I work hard to retire and free up time, I want to spend some of that time in the old way, wandering aimlessly through handicraft exhibitions, letting the beauty of our crafts replenish my soul and buying the small, useful and pretty things I can bring back with joy to my home. But officials have to find a way to bring to the craftspeople they work with a sense of what is actually useful and to encourage them to work towards finesse rather than maybe "Quickly make me so many pieces." 

Our daily lives in India are an illustration of how beauty has never been a monopoly of the rich. The wall paintings and kolams of our traditional homes. The beauty of our pottery. The vivid variations of our textiles. The gorgeous lacquer bangles that have disappeared from these exhibitions (and that I hoped to find and buy yesterday). All of us could afford them. 

Until we bring that imagination to how we manage these state-run cooperatives and corporations, perhaps we are doomed to visit dusty, desolate exhibitions with desperate, despairing sales staff.