'Hot' Cricket

During a recent visit to a 'continental' restaurant in the North Indian city of Amritsar, I was amazed to discover a novel way of offering toothpicks - by poking them into green chillies. Until I was informed by my uncle that this is how they served chillies. This was certainly food for thought, or hot food for acidic thought - have five years of living in Australia made me too 'western' in my perception of the world and am I, therefore, more likely to want toothpicks than chillies? Maybe it is as simple as the fact that despite having grown up in the land of spices, my gastronomic ability to appreciate anything 'hot' has always been limited.

I had a similar reaction to the heat wave of the 'racism' controversy in cricket that not only swept India and Australia, but also radiated to other parts of the world as witnessed on CNN during my two-day sojourn in Singapore. However, even though it was the peak of winter in northern India at the time, I found myself in the middle of the most heated reaction to the Harbhajan Singh-Andrew Symonds row in this part of the country. The umpteen television channels played and replayed the umpiring decisions of the Sydney Test, hunted down Singh's relatives for comment, and conducted opinion polls in a bid to invoke/represent public anger. And as I packed my bags and sat on the morning train to New Delhi from where I was to board my outward flight to Australia, I was unusually sweaty. Then there came iced coffee and former Australian captain Steve Waugh's column in an Indian newspaper putting the fiasco down to a matter of 'cultural difference'. That explained many fiascos to me - both in my personal life and in the big bad world. It was a magic phrase. But I still dreaded that I was flying to Sydney and not directly to Adelaide. Perhaps I was only worrying about how Australians would react towards me.

Sydney was calm. Adelaide was calmer still. I came to the hasty conclusion that cricket-mad and newly-moneyed, Indians had as usual made a mountain of a molehill. My friendly next-door neighbour, a 'mainstream' Australian and cricket buff, encouraged me to purchase a ticket to the Adelaide Test. He also added that given Symonds' made nothing of being abused while in India, there should not have been a repeat of the episode here. I concurred. And then it was suggested that Singh never used the word 'monkey', but instead employed the Punjabi insult 'maa ki'. Cultural difference indeed, I thought. The Indians withdrew a complaint against Brad Hogg. Peace at last? I was nonetheless beginning to feel the Adelaide summer. Sipping water at my desk, I glossed over most of the readers' comments accompanying the story on the Adelaidenow website. India won the Perth Test. Redemption for the wronged? My father told me on the phone that Indians were getting very excited about the possibility of winning in Adelaide and drawing the series. The test was a draw. Adam Gilchrist's retirement took away some of the bite from the still-pending 'race' decision. But the test series was over, and India was still here. I was relieved.

Yesterday, I bumped into the ever-dignified Sachin Tendulkar while strolling along Rundle Mall in Adelaide city. Was it a sign I should have paid more heed to my 'Indianness' while forming an opinion on Australian soil?

Yesterday, Harbhajan Singh was also cleared of race charges. But as I booted my laptop this morning and read the story in the The Australian, it struck me that the matter was bigger than cricket and politics. 'Cricket caves in to India's demands', it said. Possibly true, I thought. And then I opened The Times of India, which read - 'Australian media cry foul over Bhajji decision'. For the first time in weeks, I was saddened and not angered by the disparate readings of the situation. There was no urge for water, just a heartfelt desire to ask people at the top and those down below to let go - not just for the 'spirit of the game', but in the interests of that goodwill which is not enshrined in any national, international or cricketing constitutions. I have spent a very personally and professionally rewarding period of my life in Australia - and I cherish the independence, the friends and the surroundings it has given me. At the same time, my identity is incomplete without factoring in my Indian upbringing. Am I torn? Is the current discord breaking my heart? Probably. But I hope my healing and that of my countries is speedy and scar-free.

A Smoky Memory

Where do we go now?
Is this going somewhere?

But we live miles apart.
So we will go wherever alone.

Unless the world shrinks.
And geography collapses
Into the void of time.

Then we will go together
To a smoky memory
That lies before and after.

Circular Thoughts

I'm tired of possibility and in dire want of the real thing. But the absence of possibility is also a dormant possibility of possibility. And its presence in the thick of things always signals bigger possibilities. Perhaps this 'bigness' and 'thickness' is what I'm after. For small pleasures in my everyday life are only creating room for greater ones. And these small joys are so fickle. They leave my heart craving for more.

My fortune for the day says: "The heart is wiser than the intellect".

Crowded Corners

Before embarking on my annual overseas end-of-the-year trip, I've been trying to clean up the clutter of the year gone by. From the dust on my bookshelf to the trash in my email to the inconsequential texts on my mobile to the stale applications on my Facebook page, it has been quite a journey of accumulation and good riddance. Sifting through some of these tangible and intangible remnants made me alternately nostalgic about certain moments and hopeful regarding times to come. Moreover, as I near half a decade of staying in Australia, I realise that I have 'stuff' in this country - people and things, places and memories. I have become an adult here. I have learned to give and receive. I have self-expressed, self-cooked, self-sufficed. I can walk to Coles with my eyes closed and sense my bus stop without once looking away from the book in my lap. My environment is now embodied in me. My space is becoming my place. My gaze at Adelaide from the descending airplane will no longer bring forth a tide of dis/mis-placed emotion. I hope I can find Familiarity in Canada during my two-week sojourn there. And then slide easily into the domesticity of my parental home in India. Perhaps, when I get back, I will not feel crowded, or empty. And another year or choosing and discarding this and that will begin.

Offering

This is all I have to give to the
World.
Writing
That is elicited with the labour of
Experience.
Elucidating
The agony behind each word of
Thought.
Tired
Of accumulating this fat on my
Soul.
Serving
No purpose during floods and
Droughts.
Diseasing
The mind with the obesity of
Self-pity.
Subtracting
The burden with poetry, prose and
Genrelessness.
Generating
Heat and light using paper as
Fuel.
Fan
The flames of my only offering.

Aloof Heroines and Moi

The hauntingly beautiful Catherine Deneuve in French director Luis Bunuel's film, Belle De Jour, is also elusive and ethereal. Just like the narrator in Asian-Australian writer Alice Pung's memoir, Unpolished Gem, I feel the need to explain my own attachment and detachment to the different cultures that have shaped and continue to shape my overt and covert selves. Needless to say, this calls for a constant definition and re-definition of rules pertaining to acceptable personal and social behaviour. I am more than aware of activities that would be regarded as 'normal' in one context, and bordering on morally repugnant in another. Do I then, non-chalantly allow two paradoxical personas to reside within me and 'perform' as the situation calls? Would this be hypocritical or simply strategic? Perhaps I could even find a literary/cinematic parallel in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. However, the existence of characters like Severine/Belle De Jour, and 'real' women like Alice/Agheare assures me that my dilemma is not as gothic and far-gone as the Jekyll/Hyde tale. Being a student/practitioner of critical theory, I am often tempted to adopt the much-celebrated postcolonial term, 'hybridity' to put a positive spin on my existential status. But most self or other-proclaimed 'hybrids' would know that they are not hybrid at all times, that one or the other dimension of their fluid identities pre-dominates at any given moment. Is it then, appropriate to consciously/un-consciously show a monochrome and more palatable version of myself to an acquaintance, while reserving my full spectrum for those closer and better positioned to understand me? Or am I precluding (and excluding) potentially interesting people from my kalaedoscopic life (while also assuming their life to be so dull that they would be incapable of comprehending any difference)? Then there is also the trouble of people being 'interested' in me only because of my difference, and not being able to digest the possibility of any 'sameness'. I have written, photographed, filmed; deliberated and calculated; debated and discussed; yet I have no solution(s). If I rebel against one system, I will still be conforming to another. Let there be strings then, but let me control the distance.

Existential Epiphanies

It’s that time of the week/month/year when I am grappling again with
decisions and their precision And
expectations that travel in a wave forming
Crests and troughs
From the others to my many selves.
I’m reflecting, retro-analysing and respecting what I want from life again with
The desire to reinvigorate a free will and
The will to be free lining
all the clouds that I conjure up
in the imaginary reality of my past future.
In the hybridity of my existence that obfuscates meaning again even as it
Lives itself out day after day And
gives me glistening realizations that turn rustic
Over the course of words
formed and read, spoken and listened to.

'Curry Night'

I went to see the John Travolta-starring Hairspray recently, and was both inwardly and outwardly relieved to find the film was more than just a musical. It might be set in the 1960’s, but its references to ‘Negro Day’ on mainstream American television resonate with the multicultural-multistruggles faced by contemporary Australia and other western societies. There are examples aplenty…
After Big Brother’07 adopted the marginal by devoting a weekly task to a Bollywood theme, it is now the turn of Channel Seven’s Dancing with the Stars to pay homage to the Indians with a night of Bollywood-style moves. Is this another instance of patronizing the minorities? Or is it simply a case of western culture tiring of itself and lightly caressing the promise embodied in the exotic, not dissimilar to the fashion world embracing ethnic chic a few years ago through the vibrancy of Indian peasant skirts, printed kaftans and chunky silver jewellery? The current Prime Minister, John Howard, is not far behind in dropping the Indian name. During the ‘Great Debate’ with Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd last week, he unexpectedly compared China and the US’s not being signatory to the Kyoto Protocol to a World Cup Cricket tournament without India and Australia. I wish I could assume that appeasing new migrants, a significant proportion of whom are now coming from India, was not on his agenda.
But the mainstream is not the only stream attempting to ‘include’ the previously excluded in its magnanimous and newfound liberal self. When I flick through Rip it Up, Adelaide’s local gig guide to find out which bands will be playing at the Exeter Hotel, my favourite artsy haunt, I am both bohemian-pleased and migrant-cynical to see Wednesday advertised as ‘Curry Night’. Perhaps I/we should be glad that attempts are being made to integrate us (presuming there is a unitary ‘us’). Perhaps I/we will have more friends now that we are a wise economic investment, if not a desirable cultural precedent. Perhaps I/we ought to negotiate the terms of this ‘integration’ – so that way we can have our curry and eat it too!

Intimacy (Aut. Hanif Kureishi)

This book of fiction (although apparently based on British-Pakistani Kureishi's own marital life), is the stream-of-consciousness of a middle-aged English male writer on the eve of his "abandoning" of his competent spouse and two young boys. It has often been described as a much-needed "man's novel" in today's age of feminine/feminist abundance. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) my status as a self-proclaimed feminist, I enjoyed this honest rendering of what goes on inside a man's head, even if he may be a man more attuned to the creative world of self-knowledge than most "average" men. Why did I like a book filled with so much retrospection, regret and rumination? Or was it the disjointed narrative with its unexpected trips down suburban-London-lanes and its seamless, almost palpable depiction of ongoing love-lust that appealed to me? Yes, the narrator-writer's state of mind was/is manifested in my psyche as my fingers trace(d) his words. I don't sympathise with him; I don't know if he is brave or gutless; I'm not sure if one can be free through escape. But the idea that one cannot be loyal to others by being disloyal to oneself has stayed with/in me. Or is this the realm of self-indulgent artists?

Monsoon Wedding (Dir. Mira Nair)

I couldn't stop myself from watching this film yet another time when it was screened on SBS on Sunday night, despite the fact that I "possess" it on DVD. Why? It is one thing to watch a crossover film that one relates to at one's will, and quite another to see it broadcast on a national television station in a country to which both oneself and the film are relatively foreign. Agreed, SBS stands for Special Broadcasting Service and is Australia's dedicated token of multicultural programming, but this does not sufficiently subtract from the entertainment value accorded to the Indian diasporic cultural product through its "displaced", yet somehow appropriate screening on a g-local channel. Simply put, I was thrilled to see an "Indian" movie being shown in Australia.

I felt validated. The years of explanations on Bollywood and arranged marriages notwithstanding.