Creative Lull

Secure in the routine, in the everydayness of it and the mundane domesticity it brings forth, she has forgotten how to create. She browses through catalogues and her sense of art is becoming ominously kitschy. When she picks up the camera, it is the social and familial she wants to capture, not the personal and political. Does she need to travel again? Or just find a place inside where she can get lost?

Beyond Extremism

Today, The Age has a story titled ‘Extremists drive out India’s rising tennis star’. This reminds me of what was happening with Mehta in Varanasi several years ago, and has often been the fate that has befallen westernised/privileged/elite Indians like Rushdie and others. Perhaps Mirza’s story is complicated by the fact that she is a ‘Muslim woman’. But should it be? Why has she chosen not to play in her own country? Surely, that would be every sportsperson’s dream.

Would it be a leap to suggest that screening/shooting in India would be Mehta’s dream (and perhaps mine too)? Then why the fear(s)? While it is all too easy to brand India as a land of religious extremism, it is harder to remember that it is the same country that has produced people like Mehta and Mirza. Theoretically speaking, the post-colonial reality of contemporary India lies somewhere between the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘western’ models, and perhaps is complex enough to encompass these apparent anomalies. With such seemingly contradictory realities co-existing, it would be naïve to brand the nation as either a land or rising fundamentalism, or a rising economic superpower. Perhaps the heterogeneity of the country is a call for intellectuals to re-think post-colonial theory in a way that it considers power relations that operate within a nation, between natives and diasporic citizens, between the diaspora and host societies, as well as taking into account changing global dynamics where the dominance of the erstwhile powerful nations is being threatened by the new cultural and economic might of China, India and other ‘emerging’ societies. With all these radical inclusions, should post-colonial theory even be called that? Maybe all it needs is a transnational dimension (while remaining specific to contexts). Can transnational post-colonial theory be exemplified by a Deepa Mehta film?

Old Heart, New Beat

Some things were given. Others were more given.

Maybe she had the same heart. It was a more-than-given. But she wanted to change its rhythm. Make it beat to a new desire, a new year, a new dream. She will be a girl. Adjectives will be welcome. And there will be no hiding from tears. Because they ring true...

'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.