Shoe-Laces

My technique was flawed. Shoe Laces. My shoe laces. They used to get untied all the time. Right from childhood. I had to find spots where I could tie them. On a lamppost. Or a fire hose. Sometimes standing on one foot. Sometimes people would try to warn me. That they are open and that I could fall. But I could almost never be able to tie them immediately. Coz I would be in the elevator. Or walking on flat surfaces. Or waiting to get to my table to tie them.

So I googled. Came to a site that explained how to tie them well. I read. I reread. I got bored, I didn't try to understand. Or couldn't understand. So I gave up.

And so they continued to get untied. On the road. In the Snow. Subway stations. Sometimes the left shoelace would untie. And I would tie it. And then after a while, the right lace would untie. And I would tie it.

Once I was walking with someone. She pointed out that my laces were open. I tied them putting my shoed foot on a dirty bar. I told her that they always open up. She mentioned with disinterest that I should tie another knot.

So I started tying another knot. A knot over my original knot. Now my laces don't open. They stay right there fixed, morning to evening. I don't need to bend down at awkward spots. I don't need to stand on one foot. No one tells me your laces are open. My left foot and right foot do not remain unbalanced now. My technique was flawed and now I have improved it.

I miss tying my laces 10 times a day.

Very short Movie Reviews

(1) Rock On
About a young rock band and how its members take different directions in life before getting together for one final concert. Easy for the mind and heart and worth watching when one wants to get encouraged.
(2) Kung Fu Panda
Animation with a moral behind it: Looks don't matter much, a fat panda saves a village from evil chaps. Worth watching if you have small kids.
(3) Changeling
True story about a single widow whose only child is kidnapped and then police apathy results in a wrong child being returned to her. Extremely gripping movie with a lot of heavy and raw emotion. Worth watching if you want to remove your thoughts from everything else for more than 2 hours.

(4) Slum Dog Millionaires

A celebration of the life of residents living in the slums of Mumbai. Very interesting story, well directed, realistic to a large degree and presents Mumbai in a neat way. Worth watching if you are a middle class Indian chap or someone well off.

Books and Other things

I have realized that I liked Michael Crichton more than Salman Rushdie. I have not been able to summon the courage to read Naipaul. Yes, I liked Harry Potter a whole lot and I didn't and don't have a clue about what was happening in "The life of Pi".

Rushdie depressed me or I read Rushdie when I used to be depressed. Depressed not in the light two hour sense, but in the complete absolute sense. Perhaps even in the clinical sense. I still remember getting up at mid noon having missed all my morning classes with the scorching sun raging through the window and the sheets on me sweating with my sweat and the foul of the mouth ,uncleaned by a toothpaste, staying the whole day with me. I would curb my bladder's demand to urinate, because I wouldn't want to face people and the breeze and then I would turn into the bed, lay on my stomach and stare at the floor. There used to lie Rushdie, with all his 100 midnight's children and I would turn page after page. Something would pierce slowly and piecemeal into my head and the numbness of my head would add more elements into it to increase its intensity. Time would crawl and I would turn the alarm clock and shut the window to ignore time. The numbness would increase, forcing me to droop my eyes. I would rub my crotch, against the bed and its sweaty crumpled sheets, and the crotch would respond in a few moments and I would go to sleep and attain peace for sometime. The panic would return when I would wake up again in an hour or two. I would turn the clock towards me and turn it back again and I would return to Rushdie. So this was how I read Rushdie and Martel. I don't know how those novels ended or what they were saying. An unsatisfied feeling, the same as I had after putting some Bs and Cs.

Not to say that only simple thrillers can be enjoyable. I liked the lawyer book, narrated by the little girl and I don't remember its name. I didn't understand the catcher in the rye. I read Seth's long book for the sake of completing it. I loved Harry Potter, top to bottom. I liked " The hakawati" and the last mughal.

Question is: Can I ever like a literary masterpiece which has won some literary prize or is all the hoopla surrounding them just for the literary refined who get degrees in English literature or History.

Book suggestions are welcome.

A Biographical Morning

It was an irritating disturbance. His hands moved without any aim, trying to make sense of what was happening. The shrill seemed to increase and increase and forced his consciousness out of its comfort zone and he woke up confused. He turned off the alarm ringing on the cell phone. He gave himself time to re sleep before the worry of getting late forced him to get out. Enveloped in a sweat shirt and shuddering in his shorts he reached for the basin. There it was, the mirror, staring at him. The night had randomized his long hair and caused them to stack one over another. One more wrinkle added he thought. He had resolved to get his stomach clean today. The cold toilet seat made him tremble for a moment before his body made it warm. His drowsiness helped  his thoughts wander. He pictured the girl he had seen on the bus stand the previous day. She had stood outside the parlor, stretching herself and breathing the last waffles of the warm October air. He had eyed her and she looked vaguely interested before the bus came. Nothing was coming out. He had already wasted 5 minutes. He grudgingly got up, put his shorts on and put the brush in this mouth. The flavour of the toothpaste helped him think of the girl in the red coat, who sometimes took the bus a stop after his stop. She didn't seem beautiful at first, she had an asymmetric face, and he had seen her return back in the bus with a guy once. But for some reason she looked better after 2 more rides in the same bus. He gargled his mouth with water and started feeling fresh. During the extremely difficult task of adjusting the shower water temperature, in order to take a warm shower he thought about the girl who used to smile at him, a girl with long lustrous ebony hair, before he saw her with a guy, and stopped noticing her smiles. After drying himself with a towel and getting dressed he started walking towards the bus stop. 

It was a new day and he was looking forward to it.

For the sake of keeping this blog alive

Link

For those who haven't already seen, The Last Lecture on achieving Childhood Dreams by Randy Pausch

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Book recommendation

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam translated by Edward Fitzgerald

Sip upon the Rubaiyat slowly and over a long period of time and let its beauty soak into every small corner of your senses.

Short Review:

You can find numerous reviews of this collection of poems all over the internet and here is my take. For background purposes a Rubaiyat means, a quartet ( a 4 line poem) where the first, second and last line rhyme. The poems were written in the 10th century by Omar Khayyam in Persia and were translated into English by Fitzgerald in the 1800s. The translation is extremely beautiful, preserves the rhyming scheme of the Rubaiyats and is a feat in itself.

The poems mull upon the transcendental nature of this world and the mortality of every being. They emphasize the importance of enjoying every bit of time we have in this one life. The theme of the poems is derived from Sufi Mysticism which to some degree is similar to Hindu philosophy. But the words are cast so very beautifully and the ideas presented are so rustic that these poems are a treat to read. Make these poems your companion on a beautiful sunset or a fragrant lonely evening and I assure you, you won't be disappointed. A few Rubaiyats to end this post:

*******************************
Here with a Loaf of Bread
beneath the Bough
A Flask of Wine, a Book of
Verse---And Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness
And Wilderness is Paradise
enow
[Bough= Big tree branch, enow= enough]
********************************

********************************
Ah make the most of what
we yet may spend,
Before we too into the
Dust descend
Dust into Dust, and under
Dust, to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans
Singer, and ---sans End.
*********************************

*********************************
For in and out, above,
about, below,
Tis nothing but a Magic
Shadow-show
Play'd in a Box whose
Candle is the Sun
Round which we Phantom
Figures come and go
*********************************

Whats the big deal about Joker!

This has to do with "The Dark Knight". I along with another friend attempted to watch this movie on the very day it was released. Needless to say because of the extremely favorable reviews and the death of the actor who played the role of Joker, it was extremely difficult to get a ticket. We reached the theater at 6 PM but found out the tickets had all sold out. Then we faced the difficult decision to either watch some other movie or to try some other theater. I convinced my friend to do the later, and after reaching this new theater, we found it full too. After idling in a park for about an hour we returned to the theater we started from. It was already 8:30 -9:00 PM by then and in a moment of madness we bought tickets for a show which would begin at 12:30 AM. Idled away 3 more hours with great difficulty and by the time we were in our seats, I was exhausted, dehydrated, irritated and half dead. . And after all this we had to endure at least 30 minutes of long, boring and useless trailers. By the time the movie began I had myself been transformed to a cynical Joker.

I found nothing great or darkly philosophical about the movie as reviewers had described it. The story was very very ordinary and didn't have the tiniest of the twists. Of course Batman chose to save " The Good Mayor" over his ex girl friend. But then, didn't he do it so that his dead ex would approve what he did. I didn't find Joker to be unusual, nor his performance to be powerful. Things were easy for him because he was under a mask, so he didn't have to change expressions on his face. The only modulation in expression came through the variation in the tone of his speech, which I concede was good. But the credit for that should go to the dialogue/script writer as well. Joker's character was built around the proposition that this world is full of people who are empty, that he stands out of them all and that Batman is one more empty guy who is just trying to showcase himself as non empty.

There is nothing novel about this proposition and most of us believe that very few people in this world are intelligent. So we are all Jokers and we can all at least act how Joker acted. The actress was beautiful, the stunts were fancy and Batman had an accent which was difficult to comprehend. But that was about it. I always fail to understand why deeper meanings and philosophical motives are ascribed to science fiction tales or comic book stories like this. Sure, they are inspired from the ups and downs of real time stories, but doesn't that make real stories more well...true and real. I am rambling already and should perhaps shut down before I try to debunk this whole business of deconstruction and interpretation of tales. Matrix(I) was an exception though.

To Neo I cheer, not to the most ordinary of jokers!

Ghalib 101

I recently finished reading this book on Ghalib's life by Gulzar, titled very straight forwardly as:

Mirza Ghalib, A Biographical scenario.

I remember scurrying through this book at some stall on MG road in Bangalore 3 years back, when I was at IISc for the summer. Three years of nothingness!!. Or may be a whole life of nothingness!!. But let me not digress. So 3 years back, I remember scrawling quickly on a piece of paper ( in the small telephone diary, I have) a sher ( 2 rhyming lines also called a couplet) from the last page of the book. I still find it beautiful and here it is:

ना था कुछ तो खुदा था, होता ना कुछ तो खुदा होता
डुबोया मुझको होने ने, ना होता मैं तो क्या होता!

Deserves a wah-wah, doesn't it! At that time the book seemed costly to me (~400 Rs). I am still not economically well off, but the book seemed affordable to me now and so I got it . After this long prelude let me talk about the book a bit.

Well as a treatise on life, the book treats Ghalib with reverence, which biographies should ideally not. I would call this book an extended epitaph rather than a complete biography. It is interspersed with his shers and ghazals ( longer poems) in accordance with the phase of his life which it is describing. The shers and ghazals are in chaste Urdu (transliterated in English) and can be hard to understand for a person familiar with contemporary Indian Hindi. The translation of the verses is really bad ( its not Gulzar's own translation, Gulzar's original version is in Hindi/Urdu) but the verses which Gulzar chose to present are interesting. Some of them are Ghalib's more famous ones like:

हमको मालूम है जन्नत की हकीकत लेकिन
दिल के खुश रखने को घालिब ये ख्याल अच्छा है

and this:

उनके देखे से जो आ जाती है मुहँ पर रौनक
वो समझते हैं बीमार का हाल अच्छा है

Despite the "hard" Urdu and the bad translation there are moments and verses which make one smile and elicit a wah wah. Like this one where a courtesan (कोठे वाली ) is rummaging about her unrequited love for Ghalib:

इश्क मुझको नही, वहशत ही सही!
मेरी वहशत, तेरी शोहरत ही सही

हम भी दुश्मन तो नही हैं अपने,
गैर को तुझसे मुहब्बत ही सही

हम कोई तर्क ऐ वफ़ा नही करते हैं
ना सही इश्क, मुसीबत ही सही

[वहशत = madness, तर्क ऐ वफ़ा = giving up my love]

And then there are the sad ones. The emotions of loss, sadness and irony are the ones which create great poets. Don't they? This one after the death of another one of his little sons,

जाते हुए कहते हो, क़यामत के दिन मिलेंगे
क्या खूब! क़यामत का है गोया कोई दिन और

[क़यामत = Doomsday, गोया = as if]

And another brilliant gem:

जला है जिस्म जहाँ, दिल भी जल गया होगा
कुरेदते हो जो अब राख, जुस्तजू क्या है

[कुरेदना = digging, जुस्तजू = intention, purpose]

A sketchy story and ghazals compliment each other all the way in the book. An only Ghazal or poem collection would perhaps be boring. I am sure there are more accurate and complete translations of Ghalib's poetry and more real biographies. But my first tryst with Ghalib was through this book and I enjoyed it despite all the shortcomings.
I will keep looking for more Ghalib and will end this post with a couplet which Ghalib has gifted to posterity looking for suitable words to conclude any kind of tribute to his writing.

हुई मुद्दत की घालिब मर गया, पर याद आता है
वो हर एक बात पर कहना, की यूँ होता तो क्या होता!!

[मुद्दत = ages]