prabāt

It seemed like just yesterday. A new baby was born. Cuddling itself under the wraps of her mother. Leaving behind the miseries of another woeful stretch and taking forward all the gains of goodness, she was born. Born with a lot of promises, a lot of unfulfilled desires, to seek the sought after, to give the ungiven, to share the unshared, to hope the unhoped, to make herself better with a hope of joy, to unleash an infectious aura of laughter.

As providence would have it, her path became not all that breezy. She trampled over every hurdle, bruised and battered in the sea of changes, her eyes bloated and dried, her heart beaten and sunken, mercilessly pulled either ways by the vagaries of the world, death and destruction being her daily cuppa. Short specks of brightness and smile amid all the miseries were but an interim relief. The goodness of the smiles is etched in her, but the sadness of miseries is what soaks her. She has lived through the trauma and died through her life, carrying the little smiles between her lips that nourish her heart.

Today, she gets a reincarnation. A new baby is born again. And as she peeps her head out of her mother's womb, her benevolent eyes sees in the distant horizon the solitary panacea to all her past miseries. Hope. And she prays the hope endures with her all through her new life, as she gears herself to jump into the new ordeal.

May the Lord, carry her through her challenges and guard her through all the treacherous paths she would traverse. May the world loft her to cheer. May her company solace the languishing tears. May the goodness bestow her with an indomitable grit. May she come out with a fulfilling smile.

Bless you my dear!

I was having breakfast and they gave me something called oopuma. Whatever it was, I liked it… I accidentally put my hand in that and I heard its actually ok to use your hand in some parts of the country.
- Bill Gates on South Indian food, in conversation with Shiela Gulati
No bags. No food items. No cameras. No mobile phones. All in the name of the “for security reasons. Your cooperation is highly appreciated” thingy. Well, thanks for your appreciation!

Walking past 6 stages of verifying the bar-coded identification, 4 stages of photo identity verification, 4 stages of frisking, two of those with metal-detectors and with a half-human feel in the absence of my mobile phone, I was helped to the delegate luncheon and finally found myself seated as far as the 10th row from the dais and beginning to play the waiting game, waiting for the VIP of the day who has spent over 30 billion dollars in aid of the poor worldwide, who runs a foundation managed mostly by his wife, who frequents the lesser privileged nations of the world doing his bit to its people, who is better known as the chairman of Microsoft and even better known as the richest person in the world. William H. Gates aka Bill Gates.

The hall darkened, lit dimly only on the stage, and accompanied by a heavy music blaring the ears an all-smiling Bill walked in, even as the 4000+ electrifying audience rose to its feet thundering a harmonized applause audibly merging with the heavy music in the background. “This is the liveliest developer audience I’ve ever seen”, and so saying the chairman-of-Microsoft personality in him came to fore. He would spend the next 40 minutes talking the strides technology has made personally for him and for Microsoft per se, unveiling bits of his vision of what technology roadmaps would read in the near future. There were mentions, among others, of research initiatives of my-company, including the one I belong to – a moment for a goose bump!

That was followed by a demonstration of the technologies that were launched during the event. And Bill was soon back again on stage, this time flanked by the glamorous Shiela Gulati, Director of Microsoft India. The next half hour would be a tête-à-tête between the two, staying quite apparently away from technology and business. “I would have been inventing medicines if, for some reason, I was not allowed to code”, and on a question about cricket, Bill said “I was glad to know the Indian cricket team uses Microsoft Media PC to train their players” and a deafening round of applause acknowledged him.

As he waved his hands to the applauding audience, the rock band Parikrama began playing some heavy metal ear wringing stuff to the gaping audience and their evening snacks, both of which were disappearing fast. Well then, Bill would be on his flight back home at this time. Thanks for being here, Bill. Hope to see you soon again!

As for me, after receiving the delegate collateral inclusive of software and a hip-pouch (call it job perks) I swiftly returned back home until I found a safe haven holding my mobile phone in my hand for the first time in 8 hours.

Some stories are appreciated for their suspense and thrill. Some for their surprising climaxes. And some for their emotional feel. Shalimar the clown doesn’t fall into any of these. The distinctness about Salman Rushdie’s latest novel is that, it’s a story narrated by the intricate tussles between the emotions carried in the heart and the hallucinating thoughts in the minds of its characters, set in the backdrop of a torn paradise called Kashmir.

Max Ophuls. A war ravaged hero, the American ambassador to the country, who looks to the outside to satisfy his sexual appetite being rather indifferent to his wife’s inability to do so, and the father of his daughter with Boonyi. Boonyi. A teenage dancer who loves and marries Shalimar the clown, only to be clutched between the pincers of infatuation and juvenile dreams of glorious futures. Shalimar the clown. Possessed by his demonic love for Boonyi, betrayed by her and driven to extremist limits of terror with the sole agenda of exorcising the demon.

What is most opulent, is Rushdie’s expressions of thoughts and his descriptions of the path those thoughts tread on their way to making life’s choices. What had to happen should be allowed to happen or it could never be overcome. And thus Boonyi makes her choice to make love to Shalimar. She was recklessly pouring out Pachigam’s supply of good luck while bad luck accumulated like water behind a dam and one day the floodgates would open…and everyone would drown. And thus appear the first strands of terror in the hitherto tolerant Kashmir.

However Rushdie’s narrative of the terrorism part has a few disconnected links. The abrupt appearance of the fanatical mystic Bulbul Shah leading to the slow incubation of terrorism in the land, Shalimar donning the hat of a terrorist ultimately to keep the promise he made to his father and father-in-law that he would not take his revenge on Boonyi until the fathers have died, the extra-long narration of the holocaust times to bring the context of Max’s marriage with his wife, the military General Kachhwaha making frequent insignificant appearances. Perhaps Rushdie aims to draw us into the typical emotions of an unmarried military man caught between his need for a woman in his life and his escapades of war and hence realize the terrors of war, but they all fall short of doing just that.

But what Rushdie does manage to do, is take us deep into the roller-coaster travails of pain beneath a betrayed heart of Shalimar and a love despite betrayal of Boonyi. When death beckoned Boonyi, in her husband’s form, Rushdie paints the picture of a woman who prepares herself for the ultimate honor of being rendered dead by the person she still loves, and has always loved. She knew he was coming, could feel his proximity. She wanted him to know she loved him. He came on foot, holding a knife… Now, she commanded him. Now.

In Shalimar the clown, the story moves not with the conversations between the characters, but with their contemplations of emotions and relationships. It’s more of monologues and retrospections that hold the roost in binding the branches of the story together. The novel is not flawless, but nevertheless, a compelling trinity of love, betrayal and revenge.

“Comprehension is not a requisite for cooperation, and hence for action.” But I couldn’t stop wondering how the mind manages to form exquisite references to what it needs to absorb even amidst rumbles of obscure images zigzagging within themselves.

I started the picture on the right as a couple of tiny circles drawn to make a technical point, and ended up to what it is now. Though minutes after the discussion I was all lost about what the figure meant, we actually were perceiving it with complete sense until then.

Quite often I attribute the cause for any resultant attitudes to perceptions. The mind as involuntary as it gets reads what it wants to read. How often have you skipped noticing two successive ‘and’s appearing in a line or safely overlooked a wrong spelling while reading through a book. Our thoughts are ruled more by these unconscious perceptions than that of its poor cousin – the conscious mind.

But the mind when in its fluent flow is one fantasizing instrument. I wonder how fast and energetic I could think at certain times, that at certain other times the same mind goes so muggy and rusty that I go out for a cuppa coffee to figure out what url I was about to type when I opened the IE window. In the best of times, the minds seems to discover a meaning in obscurity, adventure in complexity, lesson in ordeal, purpose in pressure, but at other times its just another painfully sluggish passing of another extra-habitual act in yet another day of the calendar.

Well, as they say, its all in the mind. Whatever you hold swaying in your mind, knowingly or otherwise, will tend to roar up right in front of your eyes at some point in time. When you continue to believe what you have always believed, you will continue to act as you have always acted. But more often than not, changing the belief system and hence the mind is just as easy as scaling atop the Alps in the middle of a snowstorm with a sealed backpack of heavy snow-clearing equipments.

And if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter!

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
- Paradise Lost, John Milton