Sunday, December 18, 2011

A poem. "Stray Moment"


Of what worth is my life? 
If I have not felt you.
You, who are ever with me - 
Thinking of the moutains by the sea;
Wanting to to feel the hot beach sands,
While shivering in a farm on the hills. 

You are then with me, my best friend,

Begging for attention - 
As I ignore the faint plea for solitude
In pursuit of gaiety and fun. 

You are puffing and panting,

As I gasp for breath,
Chasing after my dreams. 

You are plucking at me - 

As I do, the strings of my half hearted violin,
to pull me out of the hazy corridors
of days gone by,
A lazy sunday afternoon. 

You take a deep breath,

Hoping I will follow suit 
While I rush to finish a million tasks;
In vain, your breath? 

Leaving you orphaned,

I stray as well.

I find you now and then - 

In my niece's laughter
And the scent of my mother's pallu.
In the satisfaction of my best effort at work
And in the fulfillment of committed practice.

I find you,

When a thunderstorm makes the world howl
On a cheery Wordsworth day - walking, walking, walking...
Appear in an exciting idea;
celebrated in the unconditional love of my companion. 

I wonder at the contradiction to normal pinings - 

As a great soul explains:
"All remember in sorrow, none in joy,
If we remember in joy, where is the sorrow?"

Here I am all upside down,

I feel you with me,
In all apparent joyousness,
complete in just being. 

But forget you,

drowned in sorrow or ire.
You sigh, and I agree,
Remembering you I am complete in joy and sorrow alike. 

As I am now - 

In you - this moment! 
Stray you are no longer,
nor am I, in this conversation. 
for you are this moment, my whole life. 
-----------------------------------

Friday, November 18, 2011

Curd!

You can take the brahmin out of the curd, but not the curd out of the brahmin!!!

Something that came to me today while having lunch. Ayurvedically and yogically speaking, I have sinned. But what joy! And I consoled myself saying, rather than eating any of the junk food ridden with chemicals, it is alright to go ahead and lick curd off my plate once in a blue while...

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Green Company!


Each action, small or big, counts. The TVS franchisee in Adyar, Ramkay TVS, celebrated Environment day today by holding an event for children.

I saw this invite yesterday when I went there to take my XL, which I had given for servicing. The best part is - the man at the counter, gave me a sweet smile, took my slip and then brought out a sapling and put it inside a big brown envelope. Even as I started wondering what is he doing with a sapling - (imagine - grease, black and grey, sounds of engine starting / sputtering, mechanics in overalls tinkering with bike parts, and place a fresh green sapling with pink buds in this scene) - he offered the envelope to me with a flourish! I did a wide-eyed, "OH! why?" on him, and he said "environment day, madam!" and I noticed this invite.


The sapling is an ixora, dwarf variety and I am ecstatic about it. Long live!

Sunday, May 1, 2011

An afternoon at Dakshinchitra

It is holidays time, and all of us are trying to figure out ways and ways to keep the kids occupied. I remember a time when as kids we kept ourselves occupied, got into a few scrapes of course (that goes without saying!), and have turned out pretty good in life. Come summer holidays and we simply had a good time, there was so much SPACE to do it in, all kinds of space. Today, children have no space (mental / emotional / physical....) to get into one teeny weeny scrape. They are mandatorily helped to occupy themselves, and everything is available to them packaged and ready-made, even fun. What happened to plain old fashioned just-FUN? Playing-street-cricket-or-marbles fun? Roaming-the-streets-of-Anna Nagar-or-Mylapore-on-a-cycle-under-the-relentless-sun fun? Just good old unorganised fun discovered, explored, conducted, experienced by children themselves? Instead, the chennai middle class (all strata of it) try and put their children in camps and workshops so that they are occupied and out of trouble's way, and of course activities that are fun and at the same time 'educational'. So there are summer camps with science, movement, storytelling, photography, tech stuff, music, arts, aerobics, calligraphy, cursive writing (!), English speaking, theatre, writing stories, origami, jewellery making, crossword puzzles, indoor and outdoor games, carpentry, basic electronics, embroidery, pot painting.... the list is endless. If I were a kid today, I would put 'educational' in my list of bad words. We educate them through the year, and not satisfied, we continue to do the same during the vacation as well, organise and monitor them and their activities down to the last detail. The plants grow and flowers bloom when no one is looking.

Although that was a rant, the present urban reality also presents itself, which is another list - of plausible reasons for unorganised, original fun being an impossibility - times have changed, roads are full of traffic and pollution, working parents, children learn all kinds of things from their peer these days (when wasn't this true?) all they want to do is play video games (which we have brought upon ourselves), these are competitive times - picking up skills and learning new things are good for him / her and will also keep them out of trouble, where is the physical space .... and it goes on. Here, I take a turn and rather than going in the direction of dissecting these reasons (since it would be quite obvious to the reader where I come from), I would rather share (promote!) some of the interesting activities / places for parents and children / families to enjoy together in Chennai, that I have been thinking about since my trip to such a place - which still let remain some space for unorganisation, freedom and orginality.

I visited Dakshinchitra, Chennai a couple of weeks back and it brought back to me all the simple joy and pleasure of my earlier, much younger visits to the place. First and foremost, the vast amount of pedestrian SPACE to simply move about - what happiness. Most of us know that it is a heritage centre / museum of arts, crafts, and architecture of South India. It is a very special kind of a museum where traditionally built houses from our villages were purchased, dismantled and relocated at the centre. The place also has many stalls with handicrafts and artefacts and also small thatched enclosures where one can try their hand at some of the art and craft. An undeniable 'educational' destination (if one wants it to be so) for a summer afternoon - one which offers aesthetic, wholesome spaces and sheer experience of culture; a veritable storehouse of traditional knowledge. I made my first clay pot, a small one, and it has been sun-drying for the last two weeks; I will now bake it in the oven.

I also got my palms covered with mehendi, which was somehow irreristible. We also saw a puppet theatre stage being prepared for a show. One can experience working at the loom, with clay, making puppets, making artefacts and products out of natural material, painting on different media, and a whole host of such activities. For those who are so inclined, there are also summer and weekend classes and workshops where children and also families together can learn some of the folk arts and crafts (both, livelihood and performance). There is something very significant about a vast pedestrians only space - feet slow down, and minds still. I saw the children there; in first glance - happy, confident, free, engaged!

Dakshinchitra got me thinking about other spaces and activities in and around the city that can be explored and which are not exclusive, elite, expensive and intentionally educational.
- The Guindy Children's Park and Snake Park
- Crocodile Bank, ECR
- In fact, the word 'park' brings to my mind - many of the parks in the city have been cleaned and 'greened' for walkers and are good spaces for an evening of walk / play / hanging out
- The Tower park, Anna Nagar (It is fun to try and race up the tower; although I am not so sure whether people are allowed to go up the tower these days)
- Vedanthangal Bird Sanctuary
- Fort St. George (there is much that can be seen and discussed about here)
- Government Museum, Egmore (Although perhaps one may argue that a museum is 'educational')
- The Marina Beach (offers innumerable past times, activities and interesting stuff, not to forget the bajjis and sugarcane juice treats by evening)
- The Eliots Beach, Besant Nagar
- Vandalur Zoo (One can tire out just walking around)
- Mahabalipuram
- Vivekananda Illam or Ice House
- The Theosophical Society (there are visitor's timings, look for the famous banyan tree and walk to the broken bridge)

If one has the mood and mind, there are the temples - A few of them that I have been to:
- Kapaleeswarar temple, Mylapore (Just walking around the streets of Mylapore would be so interesting - it is filled with a gamut of stores and activities; by evening there is a bajji vendor behind the RASI store who gives the most mouth-watering bajjis)
- Marundeeswarar Temple, Tiruvanmiyur
- Velankanni Church, Besant Nagar
- Ekambareswarar Temple, Mint Street
- St Thomas Garrison Church and St Thomas Mount

A personal opinion is that these big temples are so very free-ing for children to go to, because I have noticed that adults do not monitor kids so much inside a temple, and there is just so much physical space for them to run about and do their own thing and yet the central focus and purpose sitting right inside the sanctorum cannot be moved too far from.

A completely different kind of place and activity is Parrys (the chennai one! note the spelling). It bursts upon one with its variety of sights, sounds, shapes, and smells and colours and wares. Just walking around in the streets and exploring the different shops, places, observing the traders and people - all of it is a life experience. Some of the places to see / visit are the Armenian Church, Kothavalchavady market, mint street (dont forget the Ekambareswarar temple), Kandaswamy temple, the different bazaars (each street is a bazaar for one type of product) and it is endless. If we are in Parrys, we necessarily have to finish the trip with samosas and lassi at Agarwal Bhavan on Govindappa Naicken street (they are to die for).

The above are places that just popped up on first thought - I am sure there are more. However, it is clear that the criteria for these places are time, willingness to explore, go with the flow of kids, situations and contexts, and unorganisation to some extent. Some space for unorganisation is an unequivocal factor because it is with such freedom to conduct and organise one's own time, play, fun - such unmonitored, unmeasured, unevaluated fun that actually leads to self learning and some very important life skills (for want of a better word). However I am also not saying that children should never go to camps and summer classes, far from it; just that let us not make a fetish of "fun n learning activity". In fact, one of the best options could be to just let him / her BE, and see what comes out of that empty space - of course, set down simple checks and balances, like rules and time limits for TV and video games. Experiment and see for how long a child can say, "I am bored, or I dont know what to do, tell me what to do or let me watch TV". But, this requires patience and courage.

It is secondary (from the perspective of our summer holidays time), that during those days, year after year, even as we had tons of fun, one learnt cycling while trying to keep up with the elder children; another gained a lot of confidence after mastering the art of climbing a tree; yet another just kept collecting stones, twigs, odd material from nature just because he liked it and played with all the materials (he is a popular naturalist /ecologist of chennai today; he is also a designer); one girl just shut herself up in her room and kept dancing to popular dance numbers (she is a popular dancer and entertainment professional today); a friend just pottered around with cycles and tools and such (he works in a bank today but it is known that at home he is the plumber, mechanic, electrician all of it put together); a bunch of us explored walking and cycling on different streets and compared notes, made maps, took surveys on what people (perfect strangers that we met in the shops and on the roads) thought of the traffic and randoms information just for the 'fun' of it; a group of us put together an evening's show that included dance performances, a skit, a speech, a mimicry show and advertisements, for the adults; I volunteered at an orphanage, worked at selling a newspaper door to door, researched and wrote content for a website, took tuitions for the younger children, and got involved with other such random activity; a girl refused to do anything but read fiction (English) one summer for no particular reason and found the following year that her vocabulary had just leaped, some from the group of children in my apartment got together and helped the mothers and grandmothers with pickling and pappad-making (since summer is the time when the entire year's stock is made in many Indian households) ......this can go on endlessly.

But looking back, I realise that we taught each other so many things, all of us in our teens and younger (starting age about 6 or 7), we all mingled with so many different groups of children through these myriad activities. Of course, there is a flip side to this as well, as for all things in this world - for instance, there was a guy who got into looking at porn magazines, there were a boy and girl who fancied themselves in love with each other. Dont kill me, but none of us are in any pitiable condition or have gone 'astray' because of any of this. The guy had gotten out of his habit of porn by the next summer holidays, and the boy and girl forgot that they fancied each other by the end of the holidays. And the other children wouldn't keep quiet with this sort of a thing. They either ganged up with or against, sometimes bully someone out of whatever they are doing or snitch on them (go to the parents, although this is unpardonable) - the options are many. But we also learnt to make decisions, quick ones as well as thought out and analysed ones; we learnt to manage time; we fought and made up and then made rules and resolutions during the rehearsals for the evening show for the elders; we learnt to work alone as well as with teams and with each other; we learnt to make things interesting for ourselves; we discovered things of interest; we became adept at investigating events, people; we all learnt resourcefulness; we learnt to plan, and also have backup and contingency plans; we learnt to handle money, draw up budgets and work with accounts (sigh! unfortunately I am not among the ones who learnt this), my friend started maintaining a journal and all she did was write about her day, emotions and feelings and so on in it at the cost of being ridiculed by most of the boys (she later did English literature and Journalism and has worked as a content writer and journalist for popular newspapers and continues to do so) ... this list is endless as well - however the important fact is that all of this was accomplished without adult supervision and intervention (read: interference) except for some rules and checks that would regulate food and rest timings, and sometimes even grounding if too much rule-breaking happened.

I reiterate: none of the above were our objectives. We were just out to enjoy our holidays. And we didnt have any of it pre-planned, designed and packaged for us. We just went out there, and HAD FUN!

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Guru Vs Teacher

In continuation with the earlier post "Celebrating Guruhood", I had a conversation with a friend about using the word 'guru' casually and my friend's contention was that we do not call all teachers, Gurus. Which is true. That is exactly the point in my life - my greatest blessing has been that most of my teachers have been Gurus to and for me.

I used the words Guru and teacher knowing full well what I was doing. There is really no translation in English for the word 'Guru', however the nearest is teacher, and if more teachers were like Gurus, we would get somewhere. Even taking the etymological guru - to be one who dispels darkness with his light of wisdom or even as one who goes beyond qualities and form, and even taking it to be spiritual ignorance that the Guru dispels, that is exactly what I am saying - that my teachers have always thrown light on one spiritual aspect or another, and so in that sense they are all Gurus for me.