A Green Slumdog and a Ring

A few years back, some friends had recommended Vikas Swarup’s Q&A to be added to my reading list. Vikas had been their colleague but besides their personal acquaintance with the author, my friends had found the book a very interesting read. I remember reviewing the book then as overly predictable although the narrative had a very pleasant lilt and warmth in its motions. A few weeks ago, a friend was raving about a movie she had recently seen. As she went through the plot, it struck me as being rather familiar. On further connecting the dots, I found out that Q&A was now on serious film production –though by another title. Slumdog Millionaire! I came out of the theater quite satisfied that the screenplay proved my earlier review of the book quite wrong. The movie itself is well written and shot. Set largely in Bombay through three phases in the life of the protagonist, the camera was honest in capturing the depraved yet resilient and colorful spirit of wresting oneself from the alleys and backwaters of an Indian metropolis. The casting could have been a tad tighter though. Rather than spill all, a plug for the movie would be a lot more appreciable. So, if you were waiting for that one movie worth your investment, Slumdog Millionaire could be it.

(Click on pix for a fuller view)

Given that one has internalized much of the normative ways of being and parameters of reference, December tends to inflect our senses of not only ourselves but also that of the world around us in ways that remain dormant for much of the rest of the year. Giving takes on a whole new sense of urgency as we plan out our list of stuff to send out from our resources. Beyond the confines of our selves and those within its ambit, we are acutely aware of those beyond who are less privileged than us. A heightened sense of urgency to intervene or “make a difference” for unnamable faces takes on priority levels that upset the balances we plan with. Decorations and cooking bring out our creative best. These photos of a Christmas tableau in our locality exemplify just that dash of ingenuity inflected by sensitivity to world conditions. Hope rings poignantly this year. With a radically new president for the US, and a change in the leadership in Mizoram –a rehash of sorts for some –there is a measure of hope for alternate governance in the coming days. Amidst all these flashes of self consciousness, I happened to mull over the waste we produce as a byproduct of our festivities. The disposable cups, plates, and spoons, leave alone the rather sinful leftovers we eyewash with quixotic senses of abundance and nonchalance, and the toll our foods imply –they all impact us, though not immediately. Beyond our human-centered considerations in planning for the season, I am dreaming of a green Christmas!



Planning for my nuptials has been a little hairier than I bargained for, especially when done remotely by phone or email. There are more black-holes than I could ever throw light on. Minute details become headliners. For instance, my decision to plan the venue at my partner’s place rather than mine provided much fodder for the rumor-mill. The many angles this decision blew up into really tweaked my learning curve. With humility, I have learned to gracefully take their umbrage as sincere familial concern for me. So if you will be in Lunglei around the ides of January, let me know. As a gracious reader who has painfully ploughed through this posting, I can, in the least, invite you.

So what?

With communications technology breaking new grounds at a frenetic pace, mobility and portability seem to underline what makes or breaks. Of late, my inbox shows a number of emails which, when opened, have additional taglines such as, "Sent from my IPhone," and "Sent from Blackberry." We've been sending emails and messages all this while and suddenly we need to notate the technology that facilitated the communication. I guess these tags are generated by the service providers and not by the end users. Anyhoo, the tags themselves seem to feed on our human need for self-constitution, with corporatized technology being an all too willing facilitator. That one is not too averse to the tech-enabled image building only seems to underscore the reciprocated complicity. "Sent from my IPhone!" So what?

On a more positive note, autumn-winter transitions remind of beauty around us that often go unnoticed.


Winter lines never fail to transport me back to the days of approaching winters in the Himalayan foothills. With the year's work done and going home just a few weeks away, visual registers of those longing gazes into the evening's horizon remain clearly etched. As I scan the horizons at a place far removed from then, these images re-emerge to let me wander through terrain that seem to transcend time and space, to where the past and present merge in a burst of colour.

Scraps from the bin

Occasionally, I end up running through mental images that have been lodged in the recesses of my mind. These images have been lodged there for a while, and more often than not, for the simple reason that they were embarrassing moments. Interiorizing them then only let the flushed-face-inducing memories fester, waiting for that moment to surface as surreal re-enactments so that even in the most private of moments, I still cringe down to my marrow.

◙ While the events of an athletic day were in progress, I found myself setting the bar at a high jump pit to vault over it. Back in the day I had done reasonably well in pole vault. Eight years later then, I was trying to relive those glory days. Only this time, it was at a high jump pit—that too a sand pit! I remember there was some significant someone I wanted to impress and could think of nothing better than a lousy vault to do that. My run up was passable. My body arced surprisingly well as I cleared the bar. Then, my hands just froze on to pole, more like a pole dancer than a vaulter. I came crashing down with the horizontal bar sandwiched by the pole still firmly in my hands. A butt landing on sand could not be harder than when compacted by poles and bars collapsing on to a man’s jewels! And she was not even around to see it were I to have gracefully executed the vault. Dang it!

◙ Some younger folk had arranged an evening of music to raise funds. I had excused myself from any participation with the vaguest of excuses, “I’ll be too busy.” I eventually showed up at the event. Well intentioned though they were, their music was floundering with every other line. “Kids,” I thought to myself. I went backstage and told them in a pep-talk manner that we would try something cool. Very filmi indeed! My supposedly cool idea was to rap-out a very common song. I would be on drums and rapping. The others would follow my lead on whatever instrument they were playing. On stage, I got the experiment going and rapped through the first stanza. It was pathetic. And then I forgot the lines to the second verse and adlibbed my way by repeating the first stanza. Even as we ploughed through the motions, every next second being more painful than the previous, it already dawned on me that I had made quite an ass of myself!

◙ A friend felt compelled to introduce his sermon with a joke. Not the natural comic, he had to cook up a scene to fit his material: a boy had his eyes on a girl but was never sure she felt the same way for him. In class, he scribbled on a piece of paper and passed it to the girl. She opened and saw a cryptic formula: 1+4+3= 3 or 2. Instinctively, the girl ticked the 3. As she was threw it back to the boy, the teacher caught eye of the ball of paper on its trajectory. Pulling up the boy, the teacher asked him to explain what was scribbled on the paper. The boy explained the formula as “I+love+you = yes or no.” The girl had, unawares, reciprocated. My friend then put his introductory piece in perspective. “You can never conceal love if your love is real.” He then went on to wax sermonic on love by excising material in 1 Corinthians 13. Come on!

The cringe in this last one is more vicarious. There are many more of such moments that occasionally re-emerge to remind me that life allows one to sidestep the lines of propriety and make occasional asses of ourselves. Personally, I will have become a little wiser while still nursing my humpty dumpties!

Thus spake the raven…

"...the music of the night"

What is it that music addresses so that we are drawn to it? Consider the variety and genres of music that are out there and it only thickens the speculative layers that one needs to wade through in order to conjure up an answer with even the remotest of persuasiveness. There seems to be something more visceral within us and in our perceptions/constructions of our selves that, somehow, music provides appropriate bridges. Within a wider symbolic world, we perceive ourselves through a detour into an other, and refine that perception in terms of desire for the object that is possessed by the other. This desire for an absent object creates longing, taste, and radical discontent. Maybe, music provides a reference for that which our selves lack, and also the medium by which we quest for a finer redefinition of our selves.

Sometime back, a friend and I went to watch Symphony X in concert. This band is a technically dextrous unit that paces its movements through multiple time-signatures; a treat for the prog-rock connoisseur. Personally, I thought Sym-X’s act was a disappointment. They raced through their set and the guitars drowned the rest of the band. The guitarist and singer hogged the entire limelight. The guitarist had his bottle of bourbon by his side and as the act progressed, he kept racing through the bourbon-induced intro-s so frenetically that, by the time we walked out, it was just noise!

A highlight for me that evening was not the headliner but the relatively unknown opening act. Not very familiar with the European genre of metal (gothic, black, Scandinavian, et al.), it was a learning experience to sit through Epica’s set. Back home, one hears of Nightwish and others often by default, but Epica caught my attention rather markedly. Part of it had to do with the lead singer. Rather well built and tightly packed in a corset top, images of her hair swaying in unison with the chunky riffs of their songs remain visibly etched in my mind. Was it a subliminal clamouring for a white other or was it a Freudian undertow? The songs were syncopated in ways quite unlike standard rock arrangements. Minor modes and alternate scales made the compositions seem to lead me through a detour into a world quite different from the three-chord rock riffs, which I realized had become a default self-position. Additionally, the lyrics were intended to cast surgical strikes on to politics and its underside. Although I never did quite catch the lyrics, I gathered this strain from a rather “aainch” intro to a song: “This song is about extremism; because extremism is not good, whether it is left or right!” “Aainch” in the sense that I thought it was trying to say too much by saying too little; almost pretentiously profound. Or were my own political sensibilities kicking in? Come to think of it, the occasional growls by one of the male guitarists were rather “aainch.” A lot of the younger people will identify with these growls, and label me an oldie for my views on it. And yet, the growls seemed to re-inscribe what Descartes had set as the modern agenda. I exist because I think, even though my thoughts come out in growls. The neglected but rational and unitary self extricates itself from societal repressions and silences to assert its existence. Breaking set meters of lyrical articulations, the growls came across as a politically charged device or gesture. Nonetheless, a discursively embedded gesture such as a growl—that even the entire Epica-package is a product of language, a system of signs—belies, contrary to the Cartesian chutzpah, the potential for self articulation it is perceived to have.

Although I adamantly refuse to growl, the trace of the night lingered. I later found out that the Epica singer who has so captured my imagination was only a fill-in. The original singer was ill and could not continue the tour. I youtubed around and came up with this clip. It was a bonus of sorts because it has both singers on it; the original singer and the fill-in singer. The fill-in singer is the blonde back-up singer (00:17) and I read that she has been long associated with the band.


Epica is just one instance that, for me, outlined the self’s desire for an objective other. I would not risk dissecting musical tastes anymore as some aesthetics in life just lose their soul if we were to blanket them with the finality of a theoretical reference. Yup, we do categorize them for easy reference. Just step into any music store and guffaw at locating your music in a rather inappropriate category. And yet, music persists beyond such flat categorizations. So does the desire.