Last week I had the opportunity to put together a package for my daughter, who is a freshman at college this year – ‘care pack’ she called it. She wanted Red label loose tea, a filter, some books and DVDs. The books and DVDs were to be of my choice. She wanted to make chai the way we make it at home, and no suggestions for easier, less messy solutions were acceptable. When it came to the books and the DVDs, I had a challenge, since I no longer know all the books she has or has not read. After much struggle I decided to buy her books that I would have wanted to read, and compromised on that front when it came to the movies. I slipped in something she would like between a couple of movies that I had found interesting.  I slipped in some chai toast and a box of jalebi – it would get there around Deepavali anyway. That could be the least I could do to remind her of where her roots lay in the not so distant past.

This week, on the 12th day of the lunar cycle that ends with the night of Deepavali, my mother turned 75. It is the only day she remembers as her birthday, for there never has been a birth certificate, and we have come up with a date on the solar calendar for official documents. She was probably born at home in her village in Konkan. She was deprived of several things in life, formal education being one. Yet, with indomitable resolve and spirit, she has navigated life wonderfully, and continues to do so with remarkable zest, even as her knees and teeth are letting her down somewhat.

I could not help remarking to myself on the change in span that had occurred over three generations, and not just in terms of the distance which now separated them. Last week someone brought the following blog posting on globalization to my notice. Swaminathan Aiyar is an economist/columnist of repute and what he writes ( see link below), resonated well with my own experience, even though perhaps I would not agree with all else that he writes on economic policy.

http://tinyurl.com/ylh768s

Like him, I feel like a citizen of the world, am comfortable eating off a banana leaf sitting shirtless on the floor in my village in India, feel a strong connection with the old city of Bhopal, the Church of Bom Jesus in Goa, City Market in Bangalore (my favorite church in the world) and all the millions of other places secular and non-secular in India and around the world, that have lent me their roads, roofs, smells to mark the points in time that have brought me through an absolutely fascinating journey to where I am now. There is hardly a place in the over 100 cities around the world which I have had an opportunity to visit, that I do not have a friend or positive memory of people I have encountered.

Yet, sometimes, in the course of daily life, I forget. I wonder if it has added up to anything, as one has been programmed to assess. It takes a day like this in the year to sit back and rewind this panorama. It makes sense alright. Perhaps if nothing else, I was to serve only as a bridge between my mother and my daughter.

But the story is far from over. I must have inherited some of my mother’s zest. It feels as if I have just begun. Already there is so much good energy in my life to propel me for a long time to come. There are auspicious occasions in the near future. There are many more panoramas to paint and they are all poised on the horizon.

There were several things that have happened during this time, which would have spurred me into writing – to pick one example – The Nobel peace Prize, or the fact that my daughter started college, Elinor Ostrom and her Nobel prize in Economics, my travels and trips, my first visit to the famous Powell’s bookstore in Portland, the books I read, Paris the movie, and so on. The list of events in my daily life, which cause reflection, or need processing are so many, that there is never really a dearth of topics to write on.

Hopefully, this post will get me started back, help me get into the rhythm again. Right now, I am in a slightly, if one could call it so, a frivolous mood. It is not very usual for me to get excited about gadgets. But, given the fact that social relationships, personal and professional have increasingly become important, and the fact that I have also realized the far reaching power and implications of the new social technologies, I realized that I needed a platform, that allowed me to maintain contact frequently. Now, this does not mean, an addictive need to be constantly hooked, rather, a need to accomodate the mobility that goes with my professional lifestyle.

I knew that when I was ready, the device would be the Apple iPhone. never before has an electronics company so completely represented and aligned with my aesthetic and engineering ideals as has Apple. I am delighted with my new phone, now that I have had it for over 24 hours, and already feel the presence of the entire ecosystem that has emerged around this device. I have found amazing applications for free – as vivid an example of crowdsourcing as one can find.

What amazes me is the real utility and value behind the technology – it is not just a brand, but something that constantly invites you to interact and participate, and makes every interaction a rewarding meaningful experience.

Well, if I sing any more of its paens, I might evoke other kinds of passions or accusations. There is a slight possibility of people questioning a regressive tendency, and early sign of some sort. So, I am going to give that excitement a break. My fingers are starting to warm up again to the keyboard. I feel like saying to myself – “Welcome Back!”

The reason I thought about Subaru now though is because, ever since I had this car conversation with my daughter recently, and I had said to her then, that the Subaru was not a Houstonian’s car, it seems like the world is trying yto prove me wrong for having made such a presumptious statement. Sure enough, I now see Subarus more frequently on the roads around here. Perhaps Houstonians are changing, or it might just be that I am experiencing the psychological phenomenon, where you tend to see the things that you are predisposed to.

I am currently predisposed to thinking about synchronicity in my life. It is not just at this moment in time, but in general, I have had a tendency to weave things from different strands of thoughts and interests that my mind might be occupied with. One of the best compliments I had received from a colleague several years ago, was that he found it fascinating that I had so many different interests. It could just be a totally distracted mind, or an inability to focus – a dilettante!

Perhaps the only way to justify my indulgences to myself, is to weave them together into a unifying fabric, a complex of meaning. Without any deliberate attempt to do so, I happen to pursue diverse currents – I must be the person several people are describing who we have all become – diverse, multi-faceted, hard to contain in any specific label. It is not me though, that is doing the pushing and exploring – I think it is my soul that is in a perennial quest to find itself, that drags me on a string behind it. What it says yes to and the things it denies, are I think the external manifestations – the geographies of my soul.

I was talking to a friend earlier this afternoon. The general topic of discussion was ‘design’ and due to its very nature of being a synthesis of strands, we rambled into aesthetics, and purpose, and narrative, and bridging seemingly imcompatible domains and so on. During the course of the conversation, an interesting episode from own experience surfaced.

Several years ago, we (an amateur theater group) were rehearsing Wojchek – a play by Georg Buechner. I had directed before, but this one was bigger than all the previous ones – it was an entry in a theater festival. In my own way, I could not take the safe path – I had to infuse the treatment with ideas that were often difficult for me to communicate.

I had then long been a fan of Miklos Jansco – the Hungarian film director. ‘Hungarian Rhapsody’, ‘Elektra my love’ and so on, were big draws in film society circles, not just for their unrestrained exposure to female nudity, but also for their artistic value. I for one was entranced by the ideas of simultaneity, the smooth continuous takes, the use of symbols to intensify meaning without necessarily resorting to convenience and so on. If some day I make a film you might see traces of Miklos for sure.

These images were very fresh in my mind as I started imagining Wojchek. It was of course hard to communicate since the others had not seen any of the movies I was referring to. I collapsed several acts in the play, in the interest of depicting simultaneity – the constant presence of the whole context, I stripped a murder scene of all its violence, and transformed it into a lovely abstract pantomime, I used alienation when the murdered woman walks away and we used more dance than was specified anywhere in the script.

Several years before that, one of the several workshops I had an opportunity to participate in was with a British woman. I remember distinctly her asking what it was we liked about theater. People said things such as, the excitement of the opening night, the glamour and other statements in that vein. I said I liked the process – of taking a dead script, which you had no image of, and seeing it being transformed, through real people and real chemistry. It drew a rather tepid response, even from her, and I remember being the odd man out again.

The act of putting up Wojchek was an amazing lesson for me in the evolutionary and rather uncontrollable nature of creative acts.

When we started on the sets, we had two of the most creative artists I have known helping us (they were people’s artists and revolutionaries to add). We were all vounteers any way. Some day I will write about the ‘floating islands’ that were one of the most fascinating phenomenon I had the gift of experiencing.

The initial conception of the set was literal – but as we progressed, every ‘not this’, ‘not this’ led us eventually to a set which was a minimalist suggestion of spaces and boundaries – essentially left the entire stage open to be used freely throughout the play.

We won several awards in the festival, but one was for best actress – a close and dear friend of mine, who was lost to acting when she did not pursue it ever again in her life. What she displayed on the day of the show was mindblowing, however, only I had seen a performance even better than that one.

We were a theater group with few resources. We would beg schools and other institutions to lend us space so we could rehearse. Often you would find us rehearsing under street lamps to the amusement of passers by. This time we were rehearsing under an open shed in some training college. It was getting very late and we were rehearsing a soliloquy.

There were just the two of us. Street traffic had long died, and there was an eerie silence. It must have been the fifth or sixth time we were doing the scene. I did not have to provide any more direction, just feedback after every attempt. I was sitting on the half-wall, slouched, tired, when all of a sudden I was struck by the scene unfolding before me. It was as real and intense as if I was watching the tragedy of this woman struggling between love and fidelity in Germany unfold in front of my eyes. It would never happen again, and any attempt to recreate it from memory would be futile.

That is also what I had meant by ‘process’ – anything can happen at any time during the creative process, not necessarily on the final day. I had been given the private gift of one of the best performances I had seen, and that was the reward for all those months and late nights and all the hassles of putting up plays.

This is not what I had in mind though when I started this post. The thought that triggered this post had to do with sharing ideas or visions between people who did not share the same language.

My theoretical knowledge of music then was pathetic or let us say limited (It is only marginally better now). I knew we needed music for the play but could not choose or specify. Among our extended community which sprouted whenever we were working on a play was a group of musicians – rather accomplished and recognized band. They could dissect Bird’s chords, and compare Karnatic music with Jazz, and play amazing rock. I think they once had a contract to play in Israel. Any way, I asked them for help.

They said they would watch us rehearse and come up with some suggestions. They did, and one day several weeks later, invited us home, because they felt they had found the right music for the opening scene and in general for the play.

They had a set of albums stacked up. We listened to the first couple and I did not know how to respond. I thought I might just be too ignorant. They did not seem to react any way. Then they played one – deliberately kept for last, and I jumped – it was perfect – that was it! They jumped and shouted – it was a victorious – ‘I told you so!’ shout. It was Stravinsky’s Firebird. Before that moment, I had not heard of Stravinsky. The abstract ethereal music corresponded so well with the insanity that was about to come to W.

I was absolutely flabbergasted, how could they have found in musical terms what I had wanted to communicate through people on stage so accurately? I could never figure how that could have happened, but from then on, I did learn to trust the creative process.

When the minds and souls are in tune, deeply immersed, each can act and be in their own worlds, and they will still make perfect sense together – that must be what it is to unite souls – that must be what it is to know a soul mate – that must be what it is to together be more than what you can be alone.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the soul is greater than the hum of its parts - Hofstadter

Indeed!

http://tinyurl.com/m8h9sa

(Unsupervised children twirl firecrackers on a string – Utne reader)

I have not read the article yet – I am just celebrating the synchrony between my thoughts and the stumbling across that led me to this piece. The image in the article was enough to spark memories. Even though this one is from Macau – it transports me to my childhood.

There was an unstated hierarchy of courage, a progression of sorts that one made among peers when it came to handling firecrackers. There were these sparkling sticks, I do not remember what we called them (ful-zadi), copper wires about eight inches long, with the incendiary stuff coated on them, leaving about 2 inches for you to hold them in your fingers with. There were rather tepid and benign ones – you held the tip to a flame – at some point it would start sputtering brightly – you learned to hold it away from you – the sparks flew and at the core of the burning tip was a glow, which if you kept rotating your arms in circles, made orange rings in the memories of your eyes, even after the sparkler was exhausted.

The sparkles burned out quickly… were mostly harmless, and landed like tiny gray ash snowflakes…. but then there were ones which had a crusty material in the mix … made fiery bright projectiles, and shot around at random. Some would land on bare arms before they had completely burned out, and it took growing-up to bear that momentary sting as a badge of courage. You also learned through terrible accidents not to wear the nylon fashions of those days or to touch the red hot copper wire after it had spent itself.

You progressed from there to rockets and ‘bombs’, you put those things in cans with pebbles, you indulged in pranks, like tying strings of crackers to the tails of innocent animals – which in retropect were clearly crossing limits – way beyond. Yet, I think in general we were responsible enough to know where to draw lines – perhaps the ‘rangoli’ – (graphic designs made with colored powder every morning at the doorstep to welcome Laxmi – the goddess of wealth and prosperity), the lights to banish darkness, the food and festivities of Deepavali, softened the urge to destroy. I still think a modified safer version of my experience would be any day more joyful in its chaos than the canned one I am learning to like.

This morning I got a response to a post I had made in a professional discussion forum. I had the spunk, so to say, to disagree with a well-published author on web 2.0 and related phenomena. The discussion was around whether all things, (imagine!), were becoming free. Glibness of this sort rankles me, not very differently from what pronouncements such as the ‘earth is flat’ tend to do. Perhaps we have been prepared for this kind of thinking, by the idea that perhaps all that we consumed on TV was free.

The media canning industry was insidiously extracting a price in terms of our surrendered values, but we were blissfully enjoying the high of what we thought were other people’s miseries and joys. Every form of canning is a technology, and every technology a bearer of ideas, canned for diffusion and adoption, and ideas the foundations of our choices… we have to be watchful of the canning.

I had once argued with a partner of mine, that I could not imagine paying a cable company to bring the miseries of others and their corruption into our homes in the forms of soaps. We left it at that, but sure enough the memes started sprouting in the forms of new vocabularies – ‘been there done that’, guiltless feelings of desire, ‘life is short’, ‘one life to live’…. and so on.

Some canaries on cannery row were getting used to the easy feed, others were sounding alarms of toxicity in the air. Any amount of churning.. my Krishna, could not release nectar from this overwhelming froth.  Standing on the head of the serpent demon, one had to but dance and play the flute.

My first trip away from India was to Switzerland in ’84. The picture postcard perfection of the landscape tried its best to extend my state of initial intoxication, but in my apartment on the 12th floor in Brisgi, other realities started being shoved in my face at close quarters.

We shared a kitchen among 6 people. Each of us had a room. In the common area was a TV too. Mr. Widmer, my neighbor was in his late 70′s, a Moroccan gentleman and a couple of us from India made the group during my three month stay. I wanted to know them all – The Moroccan cooked some delicious smelling stuff, but he did not speak English and his German was rather rudimentary.

I would smile at Mr. Widmer, but he did not seem too keen to converse. His health was clearly not at its best and he could step out of his small room, only to put together a quick meal. He never had any visitors – not even on weekends.  I wondered what would happen if one day he needed help while in there and nobody knew. I felt deeply sorry for him, but did not at that time think of it as an endemic pattern – if there was one I could not discern it yet.

Over the next three months however, little things started to deconstruct the perfect image of this picture perfect world in my mind. I realized how the entire system was designed to serve the average human without the need for human intervention. It was an extreme example in my mind of the institutionalization of life. This daily perfection we were so in awe of, catered well to those who fell within the ‘normal band’ so to say.

However, it was those who fell outside the statistical limits that caught my attention. If you were slower or weaker, you were ab- or para- normal, then there was an appropriate institution which your care could be delegated too.. there had to be one. I was learning to stay within the system… to step onto the bus quickly enough before the automatic doors closed… quick and agile enough to be on the inside.

As is perhaps normal, I compared this to my own experience… the living together with grand-parents, the weaker sibling, the deranged husband, the grieving widow, blind aunt… all of which made the rich and far-from-perfect fabric of our lives… what would it be… if these people … these mis-fits…were all sanitized out of the picture? I understood then what a friend who had visited earlier had labeled as ‘anti-septic’ and later experienced myself as a ‘zoned’ world – the aversion for disgust.

Fellini’s ‘I Vitteloni’ (sp?), once reminded me superficially of Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row”. They seemed like stories of bums, or people without work, but on further reflection, Steinbeck’s world was perhaps different. It was a story of those who did not have a place in the canneries in some way. It was a kind of defiance (my imagination). I identify more with those people or sometimes more with the character Styles in Athol Fugard’s “Sizwe Bansi is Dead”, like a canary in a mine shaft, like a worm inside the can, gnawing and wearing my teeth out on the packaging.

Summertime and the livin’ is easy…

the gardens in our neighborhood in Bhopal, used to compete on fecundity… jasmine, gardenia, hibiscus, magnolia, of course the roses … and aboli, parijat and others… baskets of jasmine and gardenia brought indoors in the evenings would smother any malodorous suspensions of the day… the first few handfuls went to the gods of course…

I wonder why we lit incense sticks… when there was so much natural fragrance in the air… perhaps the gods needed more intensity to pervade their stony demeanors…

my mother braided the leftovers… some just with jasmine… others interspersed with aboli, their colors and delicacy complementing the overpowering aroma of the white ones… if you were a woman who lived in the neighborhood… and walked past our house… you would most likely leave with one of my mother’s braids in your hair… “may you always smile… may you always be lucky”… for why would you put flowers in your hair otherwise… one species was conniving in the game of desire with another…

gardenias, jasmine, hibiscus, magnolia… they carry my sense of home with them… whereever I am… I found them here in Texas too… the magnolias are larger but not as fragrant… the others too… less intense, less abundant… but as if they knew what I wanted… they had me succumb… not sure if it was their desire or mine that got the upper hand… with those associations of home came others… people… places…

among the intricate often arbitrary conventions of hindu social life… a bride named after a flower must be renamed at her wedding… (never really understood why a rose on a bush is not a rose on an altar?)… with so many Indian women named after flowers… I imagine the identity crisis among women this custom might be responsible for… but perhaps it is just a way to facilitate the recasting of post-marital identity… that is why one must be careful with naming… perhaps that is why we give gods and people multiple names…. so they may find different facets of themselves in each of them…in a country where the 330 million gods have hundreds of names each… two names seem hardly a big deal any way..

my mother got a new one too… which funnily enough still meant flower… synonyms… my sister on the other hand would get a completely new one… she would still remain a flower though…

fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high…hush little baby and don’t you cry…

the fish were indeed jumping one summer on a rare family visit to my mother’s ancestral home in the village… the monsoons came early in that part of the country… Konkan on the coast … often a month before they would reach Bhopal…

during  one of those freak phenomena I have never exactly found an explanation for… fish rained from the sky… flailed around and gasped in their last moments in the thirsty parched paddy fields… I caught one one morning… and would apparently not let it go long after it had given up slithering… cats meowed around me pleading… but I displayed early resolve perhaps…

my uncles then in their late teens… frolicked in the rains… jumped and swam in the well in the yard.. my sister turned blue from fright… with dead fish in hand I distinctly remember the panic as the entire household worked to bring her color back… admonitions flew around… a huge sigh of relief… offerings to the gods…

that summer otherwise has left very little in memory other than a couple of such stark images… in another one… we had to negotiate a huge flooded stream in a bullock-cart with our luggage as we were making our way to the bus station… we would not return for years….

back in Bhopal… we were still ‘homesteading’… few homes.. mostly migrant technicians and engineers from outside the region… rudimentary facilities… a dispensary but no hospital… no schools in the township…

We got a bed… a cot… it was an imposing piece in the otherwise scantily furnished house… a little too tall for a 2-year old…

she must have fallen playing… Dr. Ahmed said her collarbone had fractured… … my father would take no chances at the city Hamidia hospital…that night he left with a little bundle in his arms to hospital… 24 hours on a train to Bombay… never again do I remember such tenderness and care from him for his daughter… he did buy her Sharkoferrol and Ferradol and other vitamin supplements regularly to keep her constant colds away… who knows!

.. there’s nothing gonna harm you..

I do not know when I made the transition to being my sister’s keeper… from having abandoned her at school one afternoon (she did not know which bus to take home), because her teacher had called her naughty… to passing through the phase of constant fighting… there somehow arrived a moment… when she became half my breath… a connection hard to describe… in an ambulance… her body swollen in reaction to some medicine… penicillin perhaps…I… the atheist even then… must have prayed as I held her all the way… over several such episodes… our precious flower would threaten to wilt but kept coming back from the edge… I almost believed that it would always be so…

One of these mornings… you gonna rise up singing… spread your wings…

two years ago this day… JS and I decided to walk from the Marriott in Brooklyn to the river to watch the fireworks… I could see myself letting the trauma of the same day in ’96… beginning to transform…

my experience with fireworks is more intimate… in India you used to get to be the ones who set them off… dangerous of course… but very much a part of enjoying their essence… the thrill…that part of my relationship was one of a participant… there was no collective display… no aesthetics… just the typical chaos and excitement of intimate celebration… coming to the US, that connection changed….I now was to be a spectator… fireworks were now a spectacle… you dressed up and got a ringside seat… there was grandeur and aesthetics… awesome scale… and technical virtuosity…

I think I could have got used to that idea like so many other changes I would make over the years…( the gradual apprehension I acquired for example, for frolicking with children in public… at home… I was used to the unquestioned physical intimacy… the celebration of tenderness and play…) the three years of dutifully watching the display to cultivate that sense… would however abruptly come to an end….

The telephone rang endlessly in Bombay… the birthday wishes remained stuck and suspended on this side of the Atlantic…. three sleepless nights…. then the dreaded word… the collapse… the flower whose name was now different… would not return from this fiery encounter…

I do not quote from literature well… I only have a memory for the essence of words…. only a few fragments remain stuck… Beckett’s lines “astride of a grave… a lonely birth… the light flickers…. etc…. then it is dark again”… often come to mind…

are all firework displays the same?… do we all get jaded… is it just the passivity of watching something at a distance… is it the monotonous self-similarity of it all… the constant search for minor innovations… an extra color… a surprise flourish…What is their essence I wonder?

around Nice in France… I was exposed to the famed French fragrance industry… I think it was in Eze that I got to see some details of the making of these perfumes… the extracting of the oils from flowers… a process mastered over centuries perhaps… technical… clinical…it was perhaps the job of the fashion industry to wrap and infuse the product of that excellence with romance… to reveal the botany of desire..

Indians attribute the invention of ‘attar’ to Empress Nur Jehan… it does not matter whether or not it is a historically accurate account… but it is quintessentially romantic… the Mughal Dynasty…the image of the private baths… made fragrant with rose petals… the delicate immersion of her beauty and the intelligence of an empress who would inspire the Taj… her noticing the oils floating on the surface of the water…. and knowing that she needed to find a way to capture it all… the botany of desire was at its games again…

With some other flowers, it is perhaps enough that they were in the pool when we waded… evanescent as their temporary fragrance might have been… their botany of desire… finds a way to etch and linger longer than what can be captured in a bottle…

the fourth of July is always a time of mixed feelings for me… when the country rests to celebrate… it is summertime… barbecues overpower backyard smells… families nurture childhood… things quieten down around me… in the silence… I am able to distinctly recall the unquestioning, selfless gaze…  the sense of being one with another person… the essence of having been in a pool with a very personal flower…

according to tradition… my sister left this world… smiling and lucky…

today… my mother will cook a special meal… all the things she liked… there will be cakes and chicken… and a ‘smiling and lucky’ woman from my mother’s  apartment will partake in the feast on behalf of my sister… memories and souls will be resurrected…

Once again then, My dearest P…Happy Birthday!  and Thank you for the two beautiful flowers you left behind…

he had a soft spot for me… but while I liked and respected him and associated with him a lot… I felt he was missing something… I was a more pragmatic idealist… I did not want the tormented life of absolute perfection…

one of the things that used to bother me was how he would often invoke models from engineering to explain human behavior…. later in my own development I learned more about systems… and finally about human social systems… and the boundaries of the kinds of models we used…

there is frequent discussion these days in literature about how we can get more insight into human systems from what we know about insect populations, bird swarms and ecosystems…

in one of the large complex control systems I had the responsibility for designing… we had electronic cards with blinking lights that indicated failure or error… we had to periodically force these lights to blink in synchrony… 2 Hertz… so that watching a whole panel of blinking cards would not drive the operator’s to unknowingly drift into insanity….

I learned later how even in artificial systems… things tend to fall in and out of step… ever notice the blinking car lights when you are waiting for a traffic signal?… watch how they come together… for a moment blink as one… then drift apart again… and of course… fireflies do that…. clouds of them come together to breathe momentarily with one breath… and then off they are again… each burning to its own beat…

I resist the transferring of such metaphors and models without discrimination… I try to find the boundaries of applicability these days… yet… every now and then, I cannot help myself noticing the near universality of phenomena in certain aspects of our lives…  the engineer in me is easily enticed into such terrains…

on my way back from Nussbaumen… (yesterday’s post)… the ride back to Geneva was long… it was late and dark and there was not much to watch outside the windows… I was not carrying anything to read… left with little but my thoughts… the happiness of my friends from school… an inkling of my own life which at that time stood very near a precipice… but I would not see it coming or its depth till we got back home… and how long it would take later to inch out… there was little else left to do then but watch people…

two young college students boarded somewhere along the way and were headed to Lausanne if I remember right… they were German-speaking… and their school was in Lausanne… they were animatedly discussing some concept from electrical engineering… I cannot exactly recall what it was… but most likely something from communications theory… (now that is one area where I still cannot get over the fascination of how mathematics – Fourier Transforms so elegantly explains what happens with modulation for example… oh well)… I had been out of touch with formal engineering for a while… but suddenly I saw it all come back…

I started a conversation… my German was not what it used to be… starting tentatively we got into an exciting conversation… before the train got to Lausanne… we were sketching equations and graphs on the thin patina of dust on the window panes… it must have been the least thing they expected from this stranger… at Lausanne we said goodbyes… like so many other encounters… this would remain somewhere in memory for we would certainly never meet again…

yes, in certain ways… the dance of the fireflies does cast a light on our own lives… every now and then our individual rhythms find synch… for a while there is resonance… the light burns brighter… then one firefly is distracted… it diverts some of its energy away from the glowing… perhaps a little wind demanded extra effort at restoring balance… or there was an enticing morsel that was irresistible…and the glowing falls out of synchrony… the dyad returns to two monads…

the cloud drifts… other synchronies will happen again… sometimes dyads will oscillate in resonance… at other times there will be the spontaneous joy of swarms… with the fireflies… and the birds… and the ants… and the bees… and earthquakes… what we do not share is the acceptance of periodic dissonance and the implicit faith in the perpetual return of collapse and emergent harmony… to know the timeless essence of  ’this’ .. or ‘that’… if you prefer

With me visiting, he decided to take a chance. We were going to the Alps, I forget which specific mountain, but it was not very far from Geneva. I remember his obsession with identifying ‘dont de midi’, a mountain with peaks that looked like teeth, with the middle tooth missing. I used to be amused by his wanting to identify that mountain every time we passed, and attributed it to his other ongoing struggles with the French language.

Out of his apartment for several kilometers on the highway the going was pretty good, even though he seemed nervous and tentative. When I am with others, I tend take my mind off purpose and direction, and let my destiny completely in their hands. I must have drifted off into some reverie or the other. I was very excited with the possibility of meeting some of my college friends, a couple, in Nussbaumen the next day.

My friend exited the highway, and I assumed we must be near our destination. We were in a small village, and after negotiating some of the narrow streets found ourselves on a rather steep street, where he parked the car. It was then he asked me to drive. Confused but willing, I moved over into the driver’s seat. That is when it occurred to me, that this was a stick shift. For several years now, I had been driving automatics, and even though it is not exactly macho to admit so, I did not really miss driving stick shifts.

One of the things I had most trouble with, was getting the car into first gear on an incline going upwards. I tried to recall the sequence of actions, but they were not natural anymore. The struggle made it very apparent that I was acting like a novice. Frustrated and somewhat embarrased, I looked up and realized we were parked right in front of a police station. The test of my abilities had just been kicked up several notches.

I finally succeeded in getting the car moving and shifted into second gear. I had not driven in Switzerland before and did not know where I was going, but soon we were back on the highway again. By the time we got to the alps, I did not really get much practice shifting gears, so when we started getting into the mountains, I had to relearn the constant shifting up and down, as we caressed the hair pin bends with traffic behind us frustrated and passing us every so often. I had four lives to protect, plus those of whoever else might be so unfortunate as to cross our paths. I was playing in my mind scenarios of explaining to the french-speaking authorities the validity of my american driving license. When we made it to the top, the beauty of the scene was starker, much more etched into my consciousness, for we could have easily never been there.

On the way back, my friend decided that I should drive all the way back. Descending is somewhat easier, yet the challenge of mastering the shift remains. Back on the highway, it was dark. Almost near the apartment, I think I made a serious error of judgment, but again, I was to live another day.

If there had been any possibility for my hair restoration efforts to work, they were soundly put to rest that day. The next day I took the train to Baden by myself. I had a long time to contemplate on the day before and why in a country where the railways are as divine as nature, would one want to go through the torture of driving?

analyzing information from the past…. history… is all useful to some extent… in a recent post I talked about Kundera and not learning from the past and the danger of repeating mistakes… but the past often does not provide enough clues as to where you are going… or where you could possibly go… the beauty of the future to come is that it is so open-ended and full of possibilities…

oh the mention of driving did bring up an amusing memory… the first car I ever owned was a Volkswagen beetle… black…I bought it used from a somewhat shady person… but the papers of the car erased any doubts I might have had about the sales guy… the car’s previous owners were illustrious… I was buying a car which was registered in the name of Arundhati Nag or perhaps her husband Shankar Nag… I do not remember who now… but both were very well known actors in the Kannada film and theater world… people whose work I had great respect for… the car had been manufactured in Germany… unfortunately during the Nazi years… it used to be a convertible… but the Nags, I think, had it converted to a hard top…

when I bought the car, I did not know how to drive… can you believe that now… any way… I took lessons… but still did not have the confidence to drive it on a daily basis… every time I took it out on a weekend… its battery used to be drained… this was an absolutely regular feature… we would not discover till much later that a bare wire under the carpet was discharging the battery…

one weekend… one of my friends… who was then either studying direction at the Film Institute of India or had just finished… was visiting and staying with us… we decided to go out to town in the evening… the traffic would be heavy but i felt confident with my friend by my side. My wife and mother were also with us.

I had the battery freshly charged… Everything went smoothly till we got to the really crowded parts… on a busy uphill stretch… the car stalled and would not start again… my friend pushed… uphill…. then we found a stretch which was a steep downhill… it would not start… there we were now at the bottom of a very steep street and nowhere to go… I cannot remember now how we got it started again… we decided to return home … of course the evening was a mess… behind the wheel… I had the seemingly impossible task of bringing it back home … through all the stop-and-go mess of Bangalore traffic… the hilly terrain… the shifting of gears… all without letting it stall… without letting it miss a beat… It had to be a smooth performance…

I did it… and I remember now the intense concentration of that effort… and the constant looking in the rear-view mirror… without letting panick get into the driver’s seat.

The rear-view mirrors in real-life though… I believe they should only be uncovered for reflective practice… sometimes they bring back good memories… often they are cluttered with regrets and mistakes… frozen accidents… paths one should not have taken and so on…

keep looking there… and one cannot see what might just be opening up on the horizon…

Both the movies seemed rather depressing… I chose “The lower depths”… it was made in 1936, won an award for the best movie at some festival that year… based on a Maxim Gorky story the outline of which on the DVD envelope sounded rather depressing… yet… it must be some form of sad-masochism… I decided to watch…

Within the first couple of frames I knew I was watching something amazing… perhaps just because it was 73 years old… and my expectations were rather low… the industry or art form was certainly still in its infancy then… the images were beautiful… wonderfully composed frames with interesting angles… the acting was generally above average… except perhaps in the case of a few characters… and there were probably a few technical shortcomings from today’s pespective…

Renoir does a marvelous job creating a feel for the Russian story in a French setting… (there was a small introduction by him on the DVD under ‘extras’)… that seemed to be his main focus… Well… I have seen other films of his… and there is one more waiting at home (‘The human beast’ I thnk it is called) …

I love the way he treats his characters… there almost seem to be no minor characters… I love ideas like that… I remember once when directing a play… I had wanted to incorporate such ideas into the way I structured the play… non-glorification of violence for example without in any way reducing the intensity of its impact… or the way you position characters so that even minor ones get equal treatment… that was a digression…

Watching movies seriously needs ‘gumption’…I remember the word from ‘Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’ which is so apt.. a level of energy… a state of mind… alertness… when those are lacking all that seems to get my attention is the narrative… which is true when I watch a film for the first time any way…

the setting of the story conveys a depression… even though this was not truly set during a depression one can see the parallels given the state we are in… there is massive unemployment… poverty… most of the action in the movie happens with the poorer characters around their flop-house… when we do see the rich the scenes are mostly centered around a single character.. a Baron… a middle-aged genial gambler… who is on a downward spiral heading towards bankruptcy…

he befriends a thief while his home is being robbed… waiting for the bailiff to claim what he has left he does not really care… the friendship transforms him as he learns to start taking pleasures in the simple life… and befriends the poor… the thief too is transformed by a woman’s love… a poor and oppressed woman herself…

oh well… that sounds superficial…  there is much more complexity and depth that I do not have the gumption to describe… What was amusing .. if one may use that word… was the seeming universality of the message across eras… the formality and constraints of the wealthy life… the joys of simplicity… the transformational power of love… the humanity of the poor… the fascinating diversity of humanity in general… its emotions, idiosyncrasies and weaknesses… it becomes possible to relate…

I had mixed feelings when I finished… it would indeed be nice to lie in grass… it would indeed be wonderful to be transformed by love… but then the chimera disappears… I wake up… step out of the frame… and take the reins of my metamorphosis in my own hands…

I remembered people had wondered then about a teenage daughter spending so much time with her father… well we did get along fine…. if that was even a question… every morning we rode the A train from Brooklyn as I dropped her off… later in the evening we would take the ride back…. often taking spur-of-the-moment whimsical detours… we got to do some wonderful things… walk the backstreets of brooklyn in the evenings… eat at funny places… browse bookstores…  and of course the movies and other touristy stuff…. but I am digressing…

I have had some connection with theater… actually quite significant given the impact it has had on several aspects of my life… I still practice everything I learned during those intense days in Bangalore in my way of being and thought… but have done very little formally since I came to the US… just one of those little regrets…

It was very rewarding to see my daughter take increasing interest in theater as she grew older… she did well in school plays… developed tremendous confidence and presence on stage… attended some rather disappointing workshops in Houston… and developed enough discrimination of her own to know that, while they were fun… they did not provide the kind of depth that transcended basic entertainment… so when she asked me to suggest something for summer… it worked out great…

The workshop was not as much about Shakespeare as it was about body and voice… movement… things I was very familiar with… needless to say I was curious about what she was learning…. one of the concepts she was introduced to there was ‘Rasa Boxes”… something I had not heard of before…

In traditional Indian literature the emotional landscape is categorised into 9 rasas… emotional architecture… love, separation, anger, fear, surprise, etc…. I forget the rest… but it was interesting to see that concept being brought into a Shakepearean acting workshop…

Several years ago I was tentatively exploring what it meant to be a spiritual practitioner… I knew I would never be a theist… but I was intrigued by the notion of a spiritual practice that did not necessarily connect with formal structures such as religion… those days I was also practicing yoga regularly… some of the yoga practitioners naturally tend to gravitate to spirituality so it was easy to see why some of my friends were too…

One… tried to introduce me to several ideas which I was not very receptive to at that time… perhaps it cost me at a personal level… but one of the things she shared with me touched a chord… it was Carolyn Myss’ – ‘Energy Anatomy’… suddenly it clicked … made sense to my architectural and systems-oriented mind… the more ways I developed of looking at myself… the more avenues it opened up to finding interventions into my state of being…

back to rasas then… I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in India during a time when the popular music explored a wide range of emotions… with depth in its poetry too… these songs have all become a part of a deep treasure chest that I often and sometimes too readily draw upon… what I have increasingly realized is how I can invoke them to transform an emotional state… which eventually affects an aspect of my anatomy and state of being…

I have always thought the “laughter club” idea as ludicrous… well perhaps laughter clubs are meant to be ludicrous… but they seemed too artificial… very superficial… yet, when I invoke songs of joy to change my mental state… and the actual act of singing creates emotions that have direct and almost instant access to the state of my mind… it occurs to me that it is in fact the same idea as what the laughter clubs are based on … except… I am not on a beach…and this is no club.

I do not know what the idea of Rasa Boxes in theater really implies… but I love dipping into my hoard of music rasa boxes.