Sniffofit

Smells are not simply about thing A and its smell B. Smells are a process, inextricably linked with both their subject and their object, so to speak. Only when red chilly finds its way to that pool of smoldering oil does its truely give out its fragrance. Not untill it can make the eyes water a little and and lead to a few sneezes is the experience complete.

Smelly gunny bags in which our daily vegetables present themselves are mouldy proof of the freshness of the merchandise. Can the bhaji sold in plastic trays at modern vegetable malls ever give that feel?Perhaps our urbanised senses have got used to another sort of freshness - big shining, clean vegetables, sanitised cold cuts.

However observation in weekly markets in small towns throws another picture. A litle mud on the vegetable just makes it closer to the land. Poultry must be executed in front of me.

Meanwhile, to return to the point I began with, smells are a coming together of many a thing. What is the item stored in? How is it presented? What are my notions of freshness, natural, reliable? what is it mixed with?

Tea powder is as if waiting to be added to hot water, mud when sprinked with water acquired a whole new dimension. mogra, jasmine, rose and marigold are intimately linked with memories of weddings, adorning hair with flowers while going to school. Rich thick and heady smells are part of rural and small town India.

And yet again that space from which all appears to be distant and alien. Is it a game of the mind to protect itself or a retreat of the soul form where it can be the observer par excellence. The hilltop where everything else is smaller, the corner seat in the restaurant from where you can absorb the place while the shadows veil your countenance, the flitting vision from the rickshaw from which the city jelously gives away a few relalities

Life in conversation....

- "had Bkfst"? (coz if not S and me will have maggi)
- do you want the all out liquid?
- hee hee ya..so cool...it was super mild! (when a micro mini earthquake spiced up a
listless day in hostel life)
- don't know about gerda lerner (who wrote on the creation of patriarchy)...darn should have attended classes..! (R in one of the several messages we exchanged about wot readings to do and which to leave out)
- my rack will be up for sale soon..lemme know if anyone keen..
- dude that was sinfully brilliant... i'm not an authority on such matters but i'm convinced that chaocolate is better than sex. (SP when i gave her a lindtt)
- he's left already should be in london by now.. (school frnds are all over the place now..hmm)
- ha ha :-D okat then some other time..just retrospecting..don't bring out the tissues yet.. (P on amby gangs and 'us four' nostalgia)
- cant believe but getting little senti about the 4 of us. could'nt have been a better bunch. (same as above)
- thought it had to do with 'boundary' (S on the forever elusive south-west asia readings)
- surveillance! :-) (P when i wasa trying to find out where she went of in the morning..)
- Neha are you planning to discard your readings and notes of second year? do u know of anybody who is ready to give? i'm in dire need (A: already worrying for next yr, while giving exams for 1st year..! )
- Bored as hell ( P - when it was reaching the limit)
- Elite class in satellite country. literally 'interpretor". (R my mobile dictionary, telling me what comprador means)
- arun agarwal rdng onlne undr title enchantment and disenchantment w concept of cmnty or smthg like that. do a google serach it one a site called science direct. (another one of those)
- oh shit! i can empathies are with you...i got one done last yr. clearly ur eating too much chocolate n growing old fast :-) remeber to get a porcelein n not metal cap fr d tooth. and show the Drji ur a duddette. (A on when i had to get a root canal)
- Can i please shoot tila!! (priceless)


Before i end up deleting these messgs... decided to archive them... D school and hostel in the last few months...

Ruminations

and yet again i postpone the moment when i will write a full fledged blog!!

suddenly someone who hardlys speaks her mind came up with a really insightful observation about me... its funny we miss out the depth people can think with if they talk too much or too less... but perhaps it should be so...
public transport is ultimate entertainment...forget Citywalk mall and PVR Gold, not the south Ex market but the South-eX bus stop is what makes my heart beat in tune with this city... The bus carries labourers, students, housemaids, miscreants, shoppers and fresh, lost immigrants... its not all beautiful, something an elite observation that distances itself from it all, as if its a 'movie' may begin to do...but its fascinating, vibrant. The man half falling on me when i travelled in first year coll...both hurt my dignity and strangely also made me realise i am a woman now... whatever that is.. ha ha..did'nt hit me otherwise...! the peanut chhilka is annoying to cleanliness loving eyes, but is stangely reminiscent of long distance travel in India...it has a good feeling...
Seeing people from small towns, or neighbouring delhi (i am guessing they are from there... excuse ignorance) relate to the escalator at the metro station is awesome... instance one from many i have seen... three kids and a couple and an old grandfather... the two small kids run to it, elder sister runs to catch them and stop them before they may ascend onto those staircase with a mind of its own. dutifully keeps the restless souls in control till elders reach... mother goes aiee and hops quickly onto it and then laughs loudly... man joins confidently... the stairs are too fast for the grandfather, who belongs to an era with a different pace, which age has slackened further. but steps in stranger man who props him up with his arm in a jiffy and then glides away with a smile... mission, part 1, accompalished... i suppose they found another helpful soul for Part 2, touchdown.
3 years back i was shit scared of escalators, encoutering one for the first time in a mall... i would have felt the same fear and the exileration each time i managed, but of course you hide it, who wants to make a fool of oneself...! ha ha... it was nice to see an open expression of feelings...though i guess back home, even they cant do it...!

grrrrr....

angry at myself.... wots the point of knowing it all if i dont DO it....! Read with concentration, u'll finish in half the time. a day started early, is in your control. You dont always have to feel full upto your diaphram. act only for urself, not to be thot cool. you can maange with 99 cups of tea.
oh when lord will the purpose i assign myself drive me enough to get after it with guns blazing! when will all these glorious romantic images of martial arts and sports achievers, actually reflect in one day led in full chanrge of myself!
BAWL...! phew..i feel better ..will go for a walk...no should study...! oh darn!

hear hear

a bark
a yell
a whistled lark
a scream
a honk
a radio selling a dream
an engine whines
a clock chimes
a generator hums
and wedding drums

the hawker cries to sell his wares
the rickshaw puller to serve for his missing honk
the bus passenger in anger at the driver
and the children to cheek the rulemakers
the college dudes for they 'just wanna be free'
as the dhaba guy yells his boys into action

i close my eyes... and lend an eager ear
the same world of everyday
offers itself anew

To be nothing to anybody

someone told me to write something on what an ideal world for young women should be like when i was fishing for ideas to write something on.....
i find that hard to do, coz i don't ever think of 'young'women' as a whole, as a community i can identify with... i may at times relate to a mna's situation better than a woman's.

So, for once let me do away with all good thought about the world, and make a selfish dream about my kind of world, starting with the assumption that i am a woman. I dont necessarily see myself 'a woman', but the world does i guess and that becomes so....
for to me i'm just a soul in this world... living the purpose or lack thereof in it...

the only times i want to be a man is when i want to travel and explore. when i wnat to walk up to the carpenter repairing stuff next door and ask him to teach me his trade, sit and observe the wod carving of the aged muslim artisan who sells his craft in dilli haat, or when i wnat to have a dip in the ganga without bothering to find a secluded spot..when i want to walk around chandni chowk and see the wholeshops, the mosques, old monuments....
or when i want to head of alone to the hills....
Funny that old women repent the lives they live... no more needed by anybody, no more roles to fulfill.... but perhaps few see that this is the age when gendered controls become minimum....
In my ideal world everyone would have a space to be nothing to anyone for sometime at least. It's here that i feel women from urban modern houses have a better time perhaps than their brothers. We can for instance 'work for pleasure' and just sort of make maony along the way... while when do young men get to do that....
my ideal world is there at this moment..when i sit and write, a little work pending, a little to be planned... a free mind.... and a desire to walk the streets by midnight....

fists in my pocket
a deep breath
i throw up my head
its another day

so much to remember to do
how annoying
but its such a lovely day

The Human...

very interesting lecture in class today...
the human and the non-human... how modern cinema explores the two realms and how they may not be so distinct as humanitarian discourse might have them be..

terminator, robocop, X men... there was a time when the american cinema saw the enemy as outside..the german, the russian, the muslim today...but its differnt now..the enemy is closer home..its at home..its even within you... the machine overtakes...

Agamben, uses the concept of musselmanner, to under stand the position of a life that if not worthy of living... the musselmanner, was a slang for the typical figure of a concentration camp that is living but is dead... shuffles around, glazed look. A captive of a camp essentially has no identity. we underestimate how things like having a name, a national identity, a gender identity gives a sense of self... imagine a man with no sense of anything...
dispensible... non-human... non-existent...on no records anywhere...

such a life, which can be killed but not sacrificed...for you sacrifice something of value. and something that the gods will accept. Such non-human entities, if you may even call them that, become sites of excessive torture, even in modern camps like guantanamo bay...

at another level... a life that can be sacrificed, but will not be killed..that can still live on...the figure of the suicide bomber..the martyr.

the machine man, is facsinating in its extreme power. power is seductive, as much as it is destructive... one way we can understand torture perhaps... the machine man is pure... untarnished by any humanity... that is why it fascinates us...

similar reductions to the non-human happen in medical experiments, the body drasticlly reduced to its parts... thoroughly objectified... and an entire vocabulary gets built around it... of abuse...

imagine this conception magnified on an entire nation...afghanistan... the red spots on your screen that have to be bombed...targets of the video game... some of the NATO guys in the places who attacked Serbia in the name of democracy, had past records of genocide...

hmm... messy business...

It is said that a common belief in traditional (though perhaps not ancient) India was that travelling beyond the seas that surround the subcontinent would make a man impure... robbed of his caste, his religion. It was also said that travelling to the char dhams would bring salvation from the cycle of births and deaths, will wash our sins. Today an Indian eyes new York accross 2 seas (why is it seven seas by the way?), and may not have visted his neighbourhood shrine.

The average countryside man in europe or Russia prior to the Rennaissance would have scoffed at a desire to go beyond his town. When a passionate marxist youth tells a bunch of jew men in Fiddler on the Roof that the 'world out there is changing', they said what does it have to do with us. And moreover were they not safe in their haven odf a jew community in roman catholic Russia? Did not the Good Book say that we are one kind of people, the chosen people and they another?

When the colonial era arose on the world did Europe set out the discover the world! To conqure, civilise, explore, educate, proselytise or in some cases to free their own souls. The churning of time and ideolgies brought the formation of America, the land where all our highest ideals were to be realised and lived. Such an ideal land that there is nothing beyond to be seen. Its borders mark the end of the modern, liberal, civilised world, bracketing it off from the rest of the vast mass of barbarians, underdeveloped, pitiable and recently terrorist elements. An average american feels no need to know where India lies on the map, while even small town indians could correct you that Washington lies on the east coast, and california on the other.

And the buddhist monk who travels all over Asia, or the muslim historian of yesteryear.

Aggassi who breakfasts in USA and travels to london from Lunch.

Our ideas of travel have much to do with our beliefs. Not all nations at all times have had a culture of travelling beyond their borders. It is a mindset. When Brit upon brit would travel to Africa and asia and write books about how 'they live out there' you are bound to have an influx, and not so before.
Even our books... lord of the rings, eragon, a travl to another universe, science fiction... a move beyond current paradigms...

These trends speak much of the ways in which we view the world and live our lives... Travl sparks off conquest and spiritual quest,