Namesake, Kolkota and hot roshogollas

I had been fascinated with Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Namesake’ for a while now and the fact that it was set in kolkota fascinated me even more. In what can only be termed as a strike of poetic justice, I was stuck in kolkota without any outbound tickets for 3 days with just one sathsang on my TODO roster. And that too, I was ‘stuck’ in a room which was pilled from the roof to the floor by the books belonging to the host collected over a period of 15+ years. I hadn’t got a chance to read a book for the last 6 months which is a very long time for me. I had also somehow managed to restrain myself from buying a paperback on those endless sojourns to the railway stations. As it turned out, I allowed myself to get lost for one more time into the papery world of words and phrases.
I thought ‘Namesake’ was extremely genuine, heartbreaking and thoroughly haunting. The novel starts with a young Bengali couple: Ashima and Ashoke moving to New England from Kolkota and starting a new life. The main focus however quickly turns out to be the psychological travails of their son Gogol. Those who have lived the fascinating life of inhabiting two worlds at the same time will relate to this movie. As I did.
Gogol Ganguli emerges as the centerpiece of the novel and its protagonist. Though in characterizing him, Jhumpa threads a potentially hackneyed theme, she paints a character so true and so genuine that I could vouch for the fact that I had known many Gogol’s myself. Ashima reckons that when she listens to her children with her eyes closed, sometimes she feels that she has given birth to strangers. Gogol grows to be an all-american youngster but is dragged east-bound by his parents who inhabit a different world altogether. His struggle is a stunning remainder that one’s cultural and other identities though a huge part of the experience that is life is nevertheless unfailing picked up from the outside. And that no matter how big an emotion these confusions and these yearning provokes, these identities are like chalk drawings on a blackboard which will be eventually wiped off the board leaving only a slight discoloration on the blackboard.
Perhaps what touches me the most is the heartbreaking predicament of Ashima as she pines for the brazen and perhaps what could be considered in the west as an almost uncouth closeness with her family. Being brought up in a world where there is no dearth of human contact, she ends up in the frozen North eastern corner of the US with a husband busy with his academics and with her children trying to organically confound the conundrum that is their life. Her loneliness and her parental yearning haunts every page of the book. I also suspect that there is a part of me which aches for my own mother as much as my heart aches for Ashima as I was reading the book.
These days, as I am endlessly traversing the lengths and breadths of the country, has been quite a revelation. One thing that amazes me is even after all the things that have transpired between me and my parents and even though my days are filled with tireless exhaustion unapologetically doing what I do, there is a corner within me which aches as I see my family writhe and wither in unnecessary pain, anguish, anger, heartache and humiliation. I am amazed that still I am hopeful, after all that they had done, that one day they will see Isha yoga for what it is independent of what it has done to their son. Is this my conscious responsibility or a manifestation of my own need for intimacy, I don’t know.
One of the more poignant moments of the novel is when Ashima decides to go back to Kolkota after the death of her husband. As they are packing and cleaning out their suburban house, she feels strangely lost. After decades of living in the US, she has the sadness of leaving something that is a part of one’s life. Also amazingly, she feels a little alien to her hometown Kolkota where she did all her growing up.
Overall Namesake succeeds as an authentic portrayal of a tiny Bengali-expatriate microcosm in the US. Their nostalgia, their thrills, their fascination and their heartbreak fills endearingly the pages of the book.
P.S: Just for the record, I had clocked 8500 kms in the last 2 months and this post was blogged from Chennai Central just before i catch my next train.

For the Love of Wilderness

On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Raghuram KR wrote:

Hey Andhonee,

Just felt like sending you a mail today... Its been raining here crazily for last few 2-3 weeks now.. Have not been hiking during the rains this time.. but when you were here, i remember the enthu we had to go even in the rains :)

Thats when i thought i will just send you a mail.. Happy Deepavali to you :)

And tomorrow i am just going out on a hike probably alone to a far off place [mostly Ingalls Lake] inspite of the rain :) I will send you some pics when i come back....

Enjoy and take care.,,

-Raghu

An Open response to Raghu

Dei Raghu,

How are you da machi? I remember going to Ingall’s lake myself. I thought you also came for that hike along with pala. I posed for some of the most ‘mokkai aana’ pictures there. That time around it was frickin cold up there and the path was quite treacherous. Let me know how the hike was this time. I did see your pictures. They were quite similar to how I remember them.

About the enthusiasm with which we would go to the mountains even in the rainy days, there are a lot of things unsaid which I thought I would share with you. (you being one of our own gang of mountain men). I know you don't care about big talk and big experiences but i thought i would share anyways!

x---------------------------------x

Hiking started very naturally for me. The first time I went to the US, it was in the middle of the hiking season. The sun was out for all the 4 weekends I was there and I think I probably made it to the hills on all the weekends. I don’t know whether I consciously decided to go hiking but I do remember relishing those experiences when I got back to India. So the next time I went to the US for a longer trip, somewhere I knew I would be paying my visits to the towering sentinels of the Pacific North West. Looking back it has been an essential part of my experience in the US. Almost as essential as Isha. I have a feeling maybe they were related…I don’t know.

I have been to so many hikes those two years. Even if the weather was playing spoilsport, I would be the one nudging my roomies to come. I remember doing some of the hikes in pouring rain. Sometimes, we would decide to go on a day-hike as late as 2 PM in the afternoon.

Looking back, all these hikes clearly fell into a pattern. In the first stage is an almost irrepressible need or desire to head for the hills. Not because you wanted to conquer the mountains but because somewhere in my experience I felt hiking to be a very intense experience. And this intensity was something that I was consciously seeking. Sometimes, I realized it was almost masochistic to put yourself to this meaningless ordeal of climbing up a mountain and climbing it down the same way. I distinctly remember some of these hikes were physically overwhelming. In some weird way, I used to enjoy being defeated by the mountain and the gravity. Every time, I come to a point where I reach the end of my physical capabilities, I taunt myself saying just this one next step and that’s it. And it has always been that one next step that takes you till the summit.

Secondly, in some ways, being in the woods puts things in perspective. The forest never acknowledges your presence. It does not care for what you think. It does not care about that problem that you are brooding about. Its ways and the ways of physics are very raw and unforgiving. I found that subjecting myself to such rawness straightens me. Whatever mental nonsense that I seem to be carrying seems to vanish by the time I reach the top. Because of this, over a period of time, it was an avenue to forget myself. Forget my life, my struggles, my cravings, my limitations, my struggle to grow etc. Being in the mountains, somehow these doesn’t seem to matter and when I come back from the mountains, that little space is created between me and what I deal with. That little space was liberating. Somewhere in the seemingly endless hues of green, I lose myself. If for only a moment, what a leap that loss is!

Finally there is one aspect of hiking which even if I think about gives me goose bumps. Initially when I headed for the hills, it was usually to watch and enjoy nature’s splendor. On an average Saturday morning, just to think about that lake or the pass or that valley was enough for me to spring out of my bed. There have been many occasions where I found myself getting up relatively earlier on weekends than on weekdays. Initially I savored the scenery. But over a period of time as the intensity between the beholder and the beloved deepened, it was more of a pain than anything else. There have been times when I have been on some of the trails, I was just so overwhelmed. Overwhelmed because on one level I was truly delighted and exhilarated to see the creation but on another level as much as I long for it, the distance between it and I was very distinct. After moving to the ashram, looking back at my experiences, I feel somewhere I had bowed down. What I bowed down to was immaterial but what matters was somehow I bowed down. Looking at the snow sprinkled Mt.Stuart across the Ingall’s lake or the endless meadows at Mt.Rainier, my being bent. I distinctly remember climbing the Carne mountain during late fall last year. The air was crisp and cool and the valley was drenched in fall colors. The hike was long and arduous and at the peak there was a 360 degree vista of craggy ridges and valleys and salt-and-pepper summits towering over the clouds. I had a tough time bottling my overwhelm to myself. This overpowering feeling boggled me initially. I had always thought that ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever’. Why then, does beauty evoke such pain? But if I look at it now, it does make a lot of sense. Over a period of time, as the intensity of the rapture increases, it only leaves the subject longing for oneness with the object. And where the oneness isn’t there, pain is.

I have always been a veritable nature lover. When I first landed in seattle, I had thought this was my dream city to live. In whatever little ways that I could imagine, Seattle seemed to fit my bill. Perpetually raining, a long brooding winter, an hour drive away from alpine paradises, endless greenery, occasional snows etc. During my last days in Seattle, there have been moments when there was a part of me arguing against my move to the ashram. I had sometimes told myself that even if I cannot enjoy my work at Microsoft, still I can bear it by looking forward to hitting the hills on the weekends. But over a period of time, the hiking experience itself was a remainder of my isolated existence. And those remainders definitely contributed to the helplessness and the vulnerability within me which eventually made me take the step that I took.

Even now, an occasional thing of beauty sweeps me off my feet and I seem to remember why I am in the ashram.

P.S: Just realized that I didn’t record my experiences of the Dhyanayatra in 2007. My memory (and unfortunately only that) tells me that it was a similar experience in some ways.

P.S2: All the photos are courtesy wta.org and are places where we have been to. Top to bottom are Ingall's lake, Squak mountains and Bandera mountain.

The Lost Cause

Anto is a lost cause
This is what i seem to be telling my parents...
And more often than that, i find myself saying this to me as well.
.......
P.G. Wodehouse rocks. Got initiated into it while i was convalescing from a bout of viral fever in the ashram.

The Hunter and the hunted

It's been almost 2.5 months since i have moved to the ashram. And it has been all kinds of things. I have been doing a lot of random things lately. Like for instance the day before yesterday i was assigned the job of ushering the people from the village for whom the ashram is thrown open every Sunday. I watched in bemused wonderment as they all sat for a session on Project Green Hands. It was a pretty simple session where about a few hundred ppl sat under the big tree right next to the triangular block. But what amazed me was how the presenter conveyed the sense of urgency with such ease and humility. At one instance, he asked about what are all the problems they were facing in the villages. People said lack of rains, soil erosion etc etc. Then he asked them who is creating all this problems? They all magnanimously agreed that it was them in fact who is responsible. Just when you thought the presenter will applaud them for their sincerity, he said (shall i add in true Isha Style) "Aren't you ashamed?". At the end of the session, we distributed tree saplings to everyone who had come so that they can plant them at thier villages. Initially i was mighty perturbed that my uber-cool tamil will make it difficult for me to do this work but then once i got my hands dirty, there was no stopping me!
To be utterly frank, the move to the ashram has been quite difficulty as expected.
But when i fall dead on my bed in the night, i don't have an iota of doubt about rather doing something else. Blissful or tortured, that conviction is there always and that's what makes me get up the next day in the morning.
Couple of the photo-worthy moments every day:
1) Lying down in Shavasana after doing 25 surya namaskars just before Guru Pooja.
2) After the practices, taking the plunge into the icy Theertakund invoking the hunter to hunt me down.
3) Sitting at the temple after all the practices for that blissfull 25 minutes.
4) Serving food to all the ashramites at the Biksa Hall during the brunch. (And watching the Swami's and the Maa's eating the food)
5) Censored for the uninitiated!
Finally) Nodding "Wassup?" to Dharani, Vijay and a bemused Swami Trika at the water cooler just before we fall dead on the bed. :D

P.S: When someone asks about how things were in the US/seattle, i usually say we do this and we do that as if i am still there. Just now Ananda Ala has culuminated in Hyderabad and i just feel i am all over the place!

P.S1: A big shout-out to all in Seattle! I love you.

The valley of the shadow of Death

After the anticipated (and maybe some unanticipated) fireworks, I have moved at the Isha yoga center. All i wish to share about the last few weeks is that it had made me cry for help. Made me go on my knees and beg for redemption. I had not prayed for anything since college. So this was a new thing for me. Strangely the psalmist of the Psalm 23 shares my predicament.
A Psalm of David.
The LORD is my shepherd,I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside quiet waters.
He restores my soul;
He guides me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,I fear no evil,
for You are with me;Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You have anointed my head with oil;My cup overflows.
Surely goodness and lovingkindness will follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
Also these last few weeks, it made me realize the following:
1) Life is taken for granted. I am afraid of death...Oh yes very much so.
2) Physical security is taken for granted unless it is threatened.
3) Sense and Intelligence is taken for granted. I was in one of the 'Christian' retreat in one of the leading Catholic retreat center in the world and during one of the session, I could not help tears in my eyes as i helplessly beheld innocent young men and women being perverted irresponsibly by brash morality and stunningly stupid simplitudes. After going through this nonsense, my resolve to go full-time only increased. This nonsensical S*H*I*T is bloody good manure.

I just realized that the song which accompanies Matt Harding's 2008 video is an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore's "Stream of Life":

Stream of Life 

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day

runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. 

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth

in numberless blades of grass

and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. 

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth

and of death, in ebb and in flow. 

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.

And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment. 

Read the rest of Gitanjali here: http://www.schoolofwisdom.com/gitanjali.html

For the Love of the Retro

For the last few days, I am listening to some great rock music from the early 80’s. The one which got me hooked was “Tunnel of love” by the Dire straits. I first heard their music in the film “An officer and a gentleman”. The outro of this song was used so wonderfully in a scene where two former lovers meet when one of them is going after another person after they break up. This scene particularly interested me so much that I decided to watch it along with the director’s comments. Taylor Hackford mentions that it is one of his proudest scenes ever. Wikipedia describes the outro of “Tunnel of love” as one of the most heartbreaking guitar pieces. I agree whole-heartedly.

It is one of those musical moments which makes your heart ache and makes your being crave for something more than a cursory slice of life. An intense forlorn mood is designedly created by the plaintive guitar that is fierce yet subtle. This is not just this piece, there are a lot of instances where a piece of music has stinged my being to the core. When I look at this, in a way I can say this feeling of desolation is also one of longing. Not longing for anything in particular, Just longing. A frantic passion without a specific object. In fact I have noticed this quality within myself whenever I come in contact with something of an artistic quality, anything of enduring beauty. Some touching phrases of Tagore’s Geetanjali. A Painting by an Impressionist master. A heart-warming movie. All these works definitely evoke such feelings within me. What interests me is somehow the art endears itself to me even when the context of the work is so alien to me. Like in some of the movies that I have relished, I am truly not able to empathize with neither the story nor the characters. But still the empathy is there with the creator of the work. At this point I feel that my ability to express things is kind of stretched if not decapitated.

Any ways I feel like listing down my recent ‘crushes’. I feel the word crush kind of suits the scenario as indeed true art crushes me. It makes you feel helpless and vulnerable. Maybe sad and melancholic. But inevitably beautiful and intense.

1) An Indian violinist arranges a classical piece “Mokshamu” for a western style quartet. I really don’t understand the technicalities of the work but it does not matter. The music speaks to me as clearly as my mother’s voice.

2) A contemporary version of “Samaja Varagamana” featured in the album of the film “Morning Raga”. In the film, the song is picturized using an instrumental version (violin) of the song in the background. Man, that was awesome! After listening to this, even the classical version rocks!

3) Woman Hanging Laundry: Or any painting by Camille Pissarro if accompanied by a commentary!

4) Some random phrases from what I consider as a masterpiece among Tagore’s novels: Gora: "...They were not aware, as they talked on, when the moon descended behind the roofs, and its place was taken by a faint hint of light in the east, like the smile on the face of a sleeping child...."