So, I started another blog. This one, long pending and long niggling, is about the books I read and the films I watch. Perhaps it might also be about the music I listen to. Like the current blog, the new one too has a strange, not-quite-explainable name. But then, where's the fun of anything without some quirk.

thepinklimoreads.blogspot.in

Some months ago, I was having a discussion (more a debate) about the choice of cars in India, when compared to the US. The conversation was with someone who has been living in the US for close to 15 years now.
"India should allow more foreign cars to be sold in the country; consumers get more choice--like they do in the US."--he said. "And competition is always good."
"Yes, I have heard this before."--I thought. "Do you know which is the largest selling brand of cars in the US?" I asked.
"Um, no."
"Toyotas and Hondas."
"Hm."
"You do know what the Japanese carmakers did to the American car industry?"
"Hm. Yes. Sort of."

This conversation has been coming back to me when I see so many other things around me. Just this afternoon I had a conversation about how shopping websites have made life easier. Then there are those conversations about how Uber and Ola having made life easier. Not to speak of Whatsapp making life easier. Going by all these "innovations" that are "making life easier", all our lives should be a cake-walk by now, isn't it? We should be traipsing through it. But are we?

Convenience cannot be the only defining reason for doing anything. Especially if you consider yourself to be among those who are better read and more aware of how simple behaviour patterns can have huge collective effects.

Yes, shopping online is easier. But what happens to the hundreds of thousands of people employed in shops and the entire logistics industry that keeps shops running? And the online discounts that most shoppers run after will soon dry up. They have to. No business survives on discounts alone.
Uber and Ola flout the laws of every country they function in, find legal loopholes to enter new markets, and charge far higher than the regular fare (surge pricing) when they know you need a taxi during crunch times. And while I have waited for a BEST bus, boarded it and gone home, my colleague has been left standing on the pavement, waiting for Uber to tell her if any cab is coming her way. Hailing a taxi the old-fashioned way is not cool any longer. Staring at your phone app unendingly is.
And Whatsapp... Barring my mother, everyone I know has it and is confounded why I don't, specially when "it is free". (They are clearly not looking at their phone bills if they think Whatsapp is free, but that's another matter.) In the past couple of years, I have lost touch with almost all the friends I had because it is not convenient any longer to even email, let alone pick up the phone and call. Oh, and phone calls cost money. The horror of it!
And then, of course, there is the whole issue of what information apps mine from mobile phones, but, hell, who cares, right? Apps are convenient, and cool.

Are we even aware of what we are becoming and the lives we are leading if we are willing to sacrifice all else at the altar of convenience? I doubt. I wonder what we do with all the time and energy that we surely must be saving by all these convenient inventions.

There was a time, not too many years ago, when I had thought that there was nothing much else to fight for in the world. I mean, when I looked around myself—around the cocoon that I then inhabited—a lot of things were alright. Not perfect, perhaps, but alright. And that there were few things—women’s rights apart—that warranted a battle. I would even mope in private about how I was born at the wrong time in history when all the biggest issues have already been dealt with and there was nothing much left for my generation to do; like I had been denied the opportunity to put some wrong right and change the world; well, denied a good fight, at the least.

I did say I inhabited a cocoon, didn’t I?

And now, when I look around the world I inhabit, I don’t even know where to begin the fight… or perhaps, I have been at it for so long already, I don’t see it as a fight anymore. It is just a way being.
Perhaps, at least some of the battles you pick—you have to pick them, because there are simply so many—are the ones you make a part of your lives. You don’t announce them, you don’t march for them, you don’t plaster posters for them, or (sigh) write Facebook rants about them, but you fight them every day, every waking hour. And sometimes these battles are fought in the confines of your own solitary mind.
There are days, and nights, when you question every thing you are doing, question the need for these unending hostilities, the futility of all the effort and pain and heartache. Wouldn’t it be easier to simply give in? Give up? Raise a white rag and say, ‘You win’?

But how do you then live with yourself for the rest of your life?

This, probably, is going to be one those rambling, going-nowhere posts.

Nine years ago, when I had first stepped into the Parkinson's Library at the University of Leeds--Leeds, where this blog was born, nine years ago--I had, for the first time in my life, realized the immensity of the written works of human beings. I had never before seen a library that big, with so many books in one place. I was truly awed by the human ability to write, the human mind's ability to create squiggles on paper which not just mean something specific but have the ability to create images as good as real in the mind of the reader. Have you thought of it that way? We make marks on a paper with some coloured sticks; someone else looks at those marks and knows exactly what I am thinking; that someone else can also mentally conjure an image that is very close to the image that I have in mind. All through squiggles on a blank surface. I still feel rather overwhelmed when I think of it this way. In subsequent years, I have seen, and read in, Oxford's Bodleian Library. It is some 800 years old. We have been squiggling for so many, many years!

And then I hear something like Dmitri Shostakovich's Waltz No. 2. How is it even possible for anyone to create sound like that? I don't know. And yet, the human mind is perfectly capable of such creation. This is not sound made by our natural voices, which can sing and hum, and which we have heard in us, around us. This is sound made from an assortment of metal, string, animal skin, wood, and wind. How does a human mind even imagine this sound before going about creating it?

At times like these, when I think of what the human mind can make, I am truly spellbound.

But then there are humans slaughtering each other, in ways that even animals don't. Humans slaughter everything else as well... every single thing we see around us. We hate everything so much, isn't it? We hate other animals (we kill and torture them for fun, we eat them for pleasure, we take away their homes and poison their food), we systematically destroy everything we touch (the air we breathe, the food and water we consume, the ground on which we walk), we are greedy and selfish beyond all explanations. And this behavior--this behavior which we all, in some way or the other, are so bloody proud of--springs from the same mind that writes those books and makes that music.

Maybe that is justice in itself: That something that has the power to create such beauty, shall also be so inherently, rottenly ugly; that we shall have the power to make the most magnificent of things, and yet choose to use it to do so much more harm than good (and come up with justifications too).

A couple of days ago, I was talking on the phone in the parking area of my office when I spotted white flecks on the trunk of a tree a few steps away. Immediately curious, I walked towards the tree, between two parked cars, and realized, to my delight, that what I could see only as specks from the short distance, were actually small mushrooms growing all along the trunk. They were like small pearly white sea shells, sticking perpendicularly out of the bark. I followed the line of mushrooms up the trunk and saw that they went upwards quite a bit. (In looking up, I also saw three massive jackfruits on a tree next door.) Back to the tree in front of me, I saw that there was a second variety of fungus—also pearly white, but more like a thick carpet to look at and touch—growing on another branch.

And then, when I looked down, towards the base of the trunks, I saw tiny mushrooms--very delicate, translucent stalks, and small delicate caps with dark stripes—growing there. I was soon on my haunches, peering at them, growing increasingly fascinated, oblivious to other people walking around in the parking lot, casting me strange looks. I even went around a bit to peer at the trunks of the other trees—there are many of them—to see if there were mushrooms growing there.

This past summer, I have found more madhobilata creepers in Bombay than I ever imagined. I have become so good at it that I would first detect its intoxicating fragrance, and then look frantically around to spot the plant. I always found them… in the busiest of crossroads, in sleepy bylanes, in the narrow, congested road through a slum… they are hardy that way. The first one I spotted was near my office—I had actually seen it about three years ago while walking to the station. It grows in the neighbouring building—the one with the jackfruits—and spills over the boundary railing. Every season when it is in bloom, I have stopped and smelled its heady fragrance every time I have walked past. Passers-by have stared at me. And then, one evening, I saw a woman who gave me that what-on-earth-is-she-doing look and then stopped to smell the flowers herself. I smiled.

Now that it is raining, I often stand at my widow watching the pigeons. On the roof of the neighbouring building, where water collects in small pools on top of the plastic sheets covering the terrace, the pigeons put up some of the most entertaining displays of their love for water. They spread their wings in different ways, in different directions, letting the rain seep in between the dense feathers; they squat like roosting hens in the pools and refuse to budge when some other bird wants a share of it; they dunk their heads in the pools while furiously splashing their wings in it. They always make me smile. Like they have for so many years.

There are many people I know who would never—ever in their lifetimes—notice things like these. They can barely tell the difference between a cow and a buffalo, or a hibiscus and a lily, or one bird from another; they will not be able to say if there are stray dogs on their street (unless they hate them and want them killed), or if there is a tree in their building compound. And, if you really have some kind of intellectual debate about it, you could argue that this is really no big deal; that these are, after all, such ordinary and mundane things around us; there are always so many more important things to think about and do in our important lives. You would, perhaps, be right.

But, fact is, if you don’t have the capacity to see this world around us—this world where mushrooms and jackfruits grow on trees in the midst of corporate buildings and where pigeons play in the water and fragrant flowers cascade down creepers along smoke-choked roads—you are missing out on something truly incredible.

Something that makes us, humans, as much a part of the world as the mushrooms and pigeons; a world most of us never really acknowledge, let alone appreciate.

I had written this four-and-a-half years ago, probably in a fit of exasperation. A lot of things have happened since, most of which makes me believe more in what I wrote.

***

This is something that is still really dawning on me: A realization that parents usually have very little idea about what their children are really about.

I mean, think of it. The mother of a 35-year-old man lets out an exasperated (even exaggerated) sigh and says, “But why doesn’t he like the clothes I buy for him?” You would think that in those 35 years she would have, kind of, figured out why. She hasn't. Clearly. And I fail to understand how.
But buying clothes is something relatively harmless, sometimes even amusing. There is serious stuff to worry about.

So, her – some 30-year-old’s – parents got separated when she was about eight or nine and she lived with her mother. I knew this and never asked. But there were her other friends who would – initially harmlessly and unabashedly and then with winks and elbow nudges – ask where her father was and she would make up some excuse. Perhaps something like him being out of town on work. He remained out of town on work for more than a decade or so.

Would it not have been easier for her to say her parents did not stay together any more? No. Not for an eight-year-old perhaps, especially if her mother never quite told her what to tell her friends if they asked. Did her mother never realize that her daughter’s friends would increasingly get curious? Or did she think children don’t get curious about each others families? I am not quite sure and I will perhaps never know what her mother thought, if anything, about it. All I can see are the effects.

And then there's another friend. Another childhood and teenage spent shutting out utter mayhem in the family. Another life being spent trying to not repeat the parents' blunders. And the parents? Utterly bewildered by these reactions. It seems that parents live their lives under the delusion that their children don't understand anything. That just because they usually keep to themselves--and the more the discord in the family, the more the children keep to themselves--they are oblivious to what is being wreaked around them.

Most people seem to have children and go through the motions of raising them – feed them, clothe them, send them to school (make sure they wear monkey caps as soon as it is November if they are Bengali) – without quite figuring out the effect (the damage, rather, in many cases) of their actions, or the lack of them.

From our parents we inherit their fears, prejudices, likes, dislikes, family feuds and, the worst of them all, their failures. And then we spend the rest of our lives proving we will not make their worst fears come true. That’s seriously such a waste of a life: To spend it disproving a non-existent theory.

Earlier, I would laugh at how the Americans were weird in blaming the strangest of things on childhood trauma. We’d laugh and say, yeah right, if a guy picks up a gun and shoots children in a school (and that still seems to be happening in the US), it must be because he was denied an ice cream when he was four. Now, I don’t laugh any more.

Things I was told as a child – apparently innocuous stuff – are etched in my mind. I remember the scene in which the line was delivered, the setting, the audience and most of all, what I felt. In some cases, I still feel what I felt then. They still sting as much as they stung then. But no, all these are not unpleasant memories. Some are truly joyous. They still make me want to sing, as they had done then. But yes, I remember. And I am sure I am not alone in this remembering.

What surprises me further is that parents themselves remember what their parents had told them as children. Some of these are bitter memories too. And they, too, feel the same sting they did decades ago. Why would parents with nasty memories of their own want their children to have similar memories when they grow up? Is it one of those traits in humans by which we want to inflict – knowingly or otherwise – the pain we have endured themselves? Or is it that everyone is so caught up in being a parent, that they forget what they themselves were like when they were children?

I can’t help but wonder if parents think at all about what they are giving their children – monkey caps apart.

I had never really thought about this aspect of our lives, our nature, before. And then I found myself talking with people about what their childhoods were like. I have always been quite happy with mine and almost everything about it. That does not mean everything was great and everyone was happy. Far from it, but nonetheless. I heard friends I thought I knew say things I didn’t know, or even thought possible, about their childhoods; things their parents had said or not said, done or not done, realized or not realized. If, somewhere in our thirties, we wince at the thought of a casual, unthinking comment made more than two decades ago, then it is not something to laugh away.

And now, the flipside: The parents.

They can be quite a traumatized and confused lot themselves, but, more often than not, they are too proud, adamant, scared and old to admit any of it. They had their own cranky parents, and crankier in-laws, to deal with; they usually became parents at an age at which we knew little beyond the college campus; access to anything they wanted – information, jobs, boyfriends, girlfriends, counseling, friendly advice – was far more difficult than for most of us; and society at large was still far, far more stuck-up.

How often have we seen our parents frightened, shit scared? I recall one solitary instance. But does that mean they were never scared? Of course they were. Of so many things, I am sure. But how come we grew up thinking that our parents are these invincible beings who can never do wrong, and have the correct answer to every problem that life chucks at them? Now that we are adults, we will (hopefully) understand if we are told what their fears are, their doubts and uncertainties are. As children, too, we would have understood. Children are not dumb. They are just small. Not stupid.

Parents and children don’t usually see each other as human beings. We just see each other in the roles that we are born into or have thrust upon us. And we spend our lives rarely being able to live beyond these roles.

Rather unfortunate.

All children are asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" (It is a different matter altogether that after a certain age most children are told what they should become, rather than asked what they want to become.) I was asked this question in Class 3. We were to draw 'What I want to become when I grow up'. I drew myself in front of a table with a cat on it. I wanted to become a vet.
I don't quite know or remember what the others in my class drew. But from what I remember of unending chatter with my friends, we wanted to become things like doctors, and lawyers, and engineers, and pilots, and policemen, and army men, and teachers, and singers, and dancers, and painters, and geologists and historians. And, in many ways, by our parents and teachers, we were encouraged to be what we wanted to be. We were sent to various kinds of classes to learn so many different things. We learnt how to sing and dance, how to write and recite, how to learn and imagine, how to build and create.
Most of us now, of course, do things entirely different from what we had then imagined. One of the biggest reasons, of course, was the phenomenon called 'computers'. It changed every bloody thing, didn't it? But did it, really? I, for one, still want to open an animal clinic someday, even if I did not study to be a vet.
And then, of course, was the phenomenon of being an 'MBA'. When in college, I had once considered studying for CAT at an institute near my college. I went there and made enquiries about class timings, and realised that it would be a toss-up between joining CAT classes and theatre rehearsals; I would have to pick one. I chose the latter. I will still choose the latter.
It had taken me a while to understand that people who study engineering usually end up being salespeople. They don't go door-to-door of course, but that's what they effectively do. So, say, I study how to build bridges, and then spend the rest of my life convincing people that a soap will make them fair. Or, I study how to build grand machines, and then do a clerk's work in a bank. All this, of course, is entirely justified simply by the money I get paid for it. Who cares what I could have done with what I learnt! And who cares what I wanted to be.
By now, I know people with young children. I wonder whether they ask their kids what they want to be when they grow up. Do the kids still say that they want to be professors and lawyers, or painters and dancers? Or do they say, "I want to sell Axe deo when I grow up?"
There was a time when the best of human minds were engaged in building better things, improving the quality of lives, understanding the deeper meaning of how things worked, pushing the limits of human creations and imaginations. Now, they sit in neon-lit cubicles and contemplate their next pay cheque and vacation.

If, some years ago, I was to imagine my weekend afternoons being overtaken by serious bouts of cooking, I would find it difficult. But, strangely enough, that is how many of my weekends are now spent. And as I see, spluttering in the kodai, colours and textures from my childhood, fragrances and aromas that clang bells of familiarity from an increasingly distant past, I know why I am doing this.

As long as I lived in Calcutta, this is what I could make on the gas: Omelets, poached eggs, coffee. I absolutely hated cooking. I hated the hellish heat of the kitchen and all that it held, the steam and spluttering oil that would shoot off in all directions, and the mildly chaotic manner in which people inside seemed to function. I could never fathom what possible pleasure anyone—my mother being one such sample—could derive out of toiling for hours in that severely hot and dangerous place (with all its sharp blades and scalding surfaces).

When I first tried to cook in Pune—the other girls I shared the flat with found it too much work to maintain a functioning kitchen and ordered dabbas instead—I didn’t know how to make rice in the pressure cooker. Did you put water in the cooker, or inside the bowl with the washed rice, or in both?

The first time I lived on my own—still stubbornly continuing with my attempts at cooking and not copping out—I gave myself some sort of food poisoning after eating a large amount of lau that was still uncooked. Well, I had come home from work at my usual time, which was around 1 in the night, and then I got down to cooking lau (lauki, white gourd, whatever). The vegetable looked like one that gets cooked fast enough. So, in a kodai that was as thin as a spoon, I put in the chopped lau, spices and water. And then I waited for it to get soft. It refused to comply. I kept pouring in water, which evaporated in a blink, leaving the lau hard. I don’t remember how long this pantomime went on, but at some point I was starving, and terribly tired and sleepy. So I decided to eat whatever it was in the kodai. It was a bad decision.

I have come a long way since then. And it makes me smile.

Yesterday, a Saturday, I thawed the tilapia in my freezer. I had to ask Ma for the recipe (like I still do for so many things). The last time I—we, as a family—had eaten tilapia was when I was less than 10. We had stopped eating it because it was sold live, and I would insist on trying to keep the fish alive in buckets of water. It all led to much tears and heartache. However, in keeping with the contradictory spirit of all animal-loving non-vegetarians, I had absolutely loved the taste of tilapia and its tomato gravy.

Yesterday, when I finished cooking, and tasted the red-orange, coriander-sprinkled gravy in the kodai, I was once again a small girl, sitting at a large mahogany dining table, my head barely higher than its edge, picking at a fish that I loved without quite knowing it. It was a taste that had wafted in some unknown corner of my memory for more than twenty years.

I taught myself how to cook out of a stubborn belief that I should not be dependent on anyone else for this most basic requirement in my life. I have detested the idea of eating crap food from neighbourhood eateries every day, or being at the mercy of some dabba-delivery aunty somewhere. Food—decent food—has always been too much of a fundamental need to do that.

But after the initial years of frustration, seriously hard work and injury (sliced fingers and burnt hands), I have now reached a stage when I actually like it. (Here, I must add that I have a cook who comes in now and then to keep my fridge stocked, so that I don’t have to come home every night and prepare dinner. And I have taught her to cook stuff I like, cook it my way.)

Now, cooking means conjuring a bit of my childhood from which I am moving increasingly far, and to which I can never, of course, return. Food is perhaps the only element of our childhood we can hold on to even as adults. Every other element—toys, books, films, friends, even music perhaps—lose their magical quality. But all it takes is the right combination of vegetables and meat and spices and condiments, and I am once again running around on the terrace, in my shorts and pigtails, looking for snails under rotting pieces of wood, and pulling gently at the cat’s tail to see if she wakes up and spits at me.

I am not big on social media. For that matter, I am not big on social. But that’s not news to those who know me.

I intermittently scroll my Facebook page, and the last time I logged on to Twitter was about six years ago, but there’s enough in the air to know what is happening in that version of the world. Social media, however, has helped me know some people better; people who, of course, feel more confident (and definitely more compelled) to communicate through it.
This revelation—about what certain people are—had happened at individual levels before: you know, some classmate whom I had once thought to be rather take-on-the-world turned out to be the worst line-toer of them all, and such like. But larger, mass-level revelations take place in the immediate hours after some big-bang event: Attacks and assaults on people, ridiculous and offensive comments by public figures, political churn…

The last such event in my diary was the attack on the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The next time I logged on to Facebook (after the attack) I saw innumerable people posting ‘Je Suis Charlie’ in various forms—pictures of people with placards proclaiming Je Suis Charlie, status messages saying the same, etc. I don’t know French, apart from perhaps Je ne sais pas and s’il vous plais. So, I did not know what Je suis Charlie meant. I gathered it was a message of solidarity or consolation.

But, when I did learn what it meant, I was rather stunned. Did these people, all posting Je suis Charlie, even know what Charlie Hebdo stood for? Had they ever seen their cartoons? Did they agree with what Charlie Hebdo portrayed? Knowing what I do about these people, I have grave doubts; it was simply a term that originated in France, that caught on like a wild-fire trend there, and that some people in India wanted to be seen as agreeing with.

I had seen Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons before as well (after the uproar over the Prophet cartoon a few years ago). And I had found them disgusting; if that is what they pass off as satire, then they clearly do not know what satire means. No, that does not mean I think their cartoonists should be killed (if I don’t like them, I just don’t read them. Quite simple); but I am definitely not Charlie Hebdo.

And then, thankfully (but predictably), after the initial adrenaline-fuelled support for the French newspaper waned, there appeared more articles that presented alternative opinions, not blind submissions. Among them were cartoons that highlighted how lampooning Jews is hailed as anti-Semitism, but lampooning Muslims is labeled satire. [As an aside, I wonder what reactions on social media would have been like when MF Husain had painted his versions of Hindu goddesses. My mother, at that time, had said, ‘Let him try and paint similar versions of the Prophet and we’ll see how people of his own religion react.’] With Charlie Hebdo, it was heartening to see that there are people—and this is the positive revelation of social media—who think before they speak, think before they write, and do not feel compelled to join any mindless, senseless mob of opinion simply because that’s what they need to do to appear progressive, liberal, and cool. Yes, such people have always been there, and always will be. Just that they seem to be the quiet, patient, thinking minority in the digital world.

These insights into the nature of those I know, no matter how closely or tenuously, would perhaps have eluded me had it not been for social media. So, yes, in a way, I am thankful for it. It is just that in the real world, I find fewer and fewer people who have the knowledge or the spine to stand up to a rigorous argument without becoming as shrill and senseless as their online opinions.

***

PS: Here are two quotes on the issue of the much-touted “freedom of speech” from the one who has been reviled, exiled, exalted and celebrated for exercising that very freedom--Salman Rushdie.
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
“One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.”