THE INDIAN INDEPENDENCE

It’s been fifty eight year since we got our independence. Right now I am extremely busy with all the packing that I need to finish, ensuring that I am not leaving anything behind, and all that tiny last minute shopping that revolves around your head, screaming “Do it. Do it. Do it”. Nike... I’m sorry, Power shoes (let’s not get globalised today and remain rooted in India), would be thrilled by my advertisement of its catch phrase.

Anyway, the reason I mentioned my packing is that I have no time to either eulogise our country for all it has achieved or deride it for what it has not. Instead, decided to post a poem about India which I wrote 8 years ago when I was 13.Very immature but not bad for a 13year old.

THE BLOSSOMING TREE

All you people I ask you to see
Is it right to live in disunity
in a wonderful country like this
which tries providing nothing but bliss

Our forefathers have nurtured it from a seed
To a tree whom every one of us need
It's a lovely country we live in
To let it die now would be a sin

The flowers of this tree were always lovely
blossoming in all colours whatever they may be
With dew shimmering on it early in the morn
When no face lived who at this would scorn

The fruits of this tree were wonderful to eat
They were neither too bitter nor too sweet
Just enough to satisfy ones soul
'cause love it gave but never stole

The lilting melodies of the leaves were clear
And every ear in the world would turn to hear
Enthralled in a new light life would shine
And to hear it again every heart would pine

But now these leaves are drooping down
And the harshness of the water has made the flowers drown
Clouds filled with tears still do cry
Not of happiness but for those who die

In the 50th year of Indian independence
Let us make a vow of peace and keep it from hence
For the fruits have rot but seeds can be seen
Which when sown will reap an India;
blossoming; the tree it had been.......

By
Deepti Ravi
August'97

GIBBERISH FROM THE HALF DEAD

Have you ever tried to control yourself from sleeping? I don’t mean the heroic utterings of “ I shall keep awake all night!” but those moments be it night or day when your eyes start feeling heavy, a languor creeps over you and your lids begin to shut. And just as they do, you jerk awake and open them again. It’s more a losing battle, actually. You versus your eyelids. They succeed more often that you do. But then I guess you do know. Anyone who has had an education would vouch for having experienced this.

Take me for example. The reason I write this blog right now, is because I suffer from the self same malady. So please excuse any excess of mediocrity. Do not rush to your nearest police station or make frantic calls to my dad in an attempt to inform them/him that I have been abducted and all my passwords have been stolen. Shall I tell you a secret? It’s something that I should not be saying on the internet because hackers might take note of it and cause irrevocable harm to me. Don’t ask me “What irrevocable?”. I don’t know. I just used the word because it sounded real good there. Anyway, I was talking about controlling sleep the way I desperately am right now. It’s a good thing that I type very fast. The one satisfaction I derive from it is that were the IT boom to become a bomb I would at least have a back up career . The other I can type what I am typing with my eyes closed. Isn’t that nice?

Controlling sleep. When I was in the 10th std, I had a fantastic chemistry teacher. She was extremely knowledgeable and explained concepts exceedingly well. Still, that didn’t prevent my eyes from closing. The sad thing about your eyes closing is that opening them again is an arduous and seemingly Herculean task. On the other hand, were you to give into the temptation and close your eyes, your desire for sleep would either vanish or just as you would give up and succumb to the ‘Draught of Soporia’, you would be caught by your professor for sleeping. At least I was. Not once. Many times. I used to sometimes sleep during sleepovers when the conversation would start become interesting. I would be responding to whatever my friends would be saying ( sometimes utter irrelevant crap) when suddenly I would drop off. My friends would find it exhausting. But then the ability to control sleep requires either genius or some trick in the book. If it is a trick in the book, don’t loan it to me. Gift it.

The worst part about feeling sleepy is that you end up writing gibberish in your answer papers.I had a civil exam to write.. And I wrote the lyrics of Hindi songs in my answer sheet. I know people have been known to have written their life story in their answer sheets. But that they do when they don’t know the answer at all. This I did when I knew the answer but my mind was quite detached from my fingers. Anyway, need to sign out so as to write some better stuff next for which I have a ‘requiem for sleep’. If it weren’t for the delete button I don’t know where this article would have gone. Forgive me for this piece of trash.

THE CRACK ON MY WALL

There is a crack on my wall. It’s not a small crack and it’s not the only one. But this particular crack seldom fails to get on my nerves. I had it painted once. But it would not be deterred. Within a couple of months the paint on it flaked and it appeared again. What makes it even more irksome is that it has some gibberish scrawled across it. I did not scribble on that wall. It was my nephew. A boy, I think, who fancies himself to be Pablo Picasso creating ‘Guernica’. It was four years ago, when in a burst of inspiration he decided to decorate (or was that desecrate?) the wall. I was sorely tempted to box his ears. Unfortunately, the fact that my cousin sister, his mother was also staying with us then made me desist. I was not too keen to have my ears boxed, which is what would have happened if I had succumbed to temptation.

I deviate. I was talking about the crack on the wall, not about the scribbling on it. Remember the earthquake that hit Chennai some years ago? No one died. No buildings fell. Actually, nothing happened. It was more the novelty, of being an earthquake in Chennai that made it hit the news. Well, that day I was lying on my bed reading a novel when suddenly my bed started to shake. For a second I thought I was hallucinating. Then I sat up and stared at the walls. Realized that the walls were trembling too! My reflex action is not too reflexive. It behaves more like an afterthought. After a few seconds of contemplating whether or not to crawl under the bed, I remembered that my grandmother was in the house too. So I went to her room and there she was, sitting on the bed, her fists clenched together, white as a sheet. When she saw me, she immediately asked “Is it just me? Or do you feel it too?” She was petrified that this was the sign of impending death. My grandmother was 92 back then. So I can’t really blame her for thinking so. I said “No Patti, It’s an earthquake”. She said “Oh, ok. Fine. “. I could see the colour seeping back into her face.

Once the tremors stopped and I decided it was quite safe I went to my balcony. I live in the second floor. I could see almost every person from my apartments standing on the road. I could hear them discussing the earthquake each one interjecting the other. Exclamations of horror, secretly tinged with excitement. I watched them for a few seconds wondering what they found so fascinating about the earthquake that they had to; en masse gather to discuss it for so long (It was more than an hour that they stood there for). Later I would rue my stupidity. Aren’t everyone supposed to get out of high rise buildings the microsecond they feel an earthquake?

Anyway, I deviate. The reason I mentioned (Didn’t it seem longer than mentioning?) the earthquake was that I believe that it was this earthquake that caused the crack to form on the wall. The crack I so detest.

THE SUDOKU CRAZE!!

2 weeks back, as usual in the morning my dad woke up and rushed to the balcony with his steaming hot coffee in one hand and the morning newspaper clutched in the other.I,just as any other day,had to wait till he finished. In the evening, when having dinner I remarked to him about the bombing in Egypt killing 80 odd people.With a striken look on his face, he leapt from the table,exclaiming "Is it?" and rushed to pick the paper and read the headlines.I was like "Dad,you monopolised the paper for so long this morning.How in the world did you miss the headlines?". For which he said with a very sheepish look on his face "I am getting so addicted to Sudoko that i forgot to read the paper.Directly skipped to the last page to solve it..".All for the love of Sudoku!

PARSLEY IS GHARSLEY ! ( Part Two)

Read Part One ..Candy is Dandy first...

Didn’t have the heart to cut Ogden Nash short. Decided to keep you rolling on the floor with laughter, by adding on some extracts from his most hilarious poems and limericks.

This one which is one of his best is can you believe it , about standing without purpose on the road?

One of the hardest explanations to be found

Is an explanation for just standing around.

Anyone just standing around looks pretty sinister,

Even a minister;
………………………………..
Well, should any official ask you why you are just standing around,

Do you wish you could simply sink into the ground?

My dear sir, do not embarrassed, do not reach for your gun or your knife,

Remember the password, which, uttered in a tone of quiet despair,

is the explanation of anyone's standing around anywhere
at any hour for any length of time: "I'm waiting for my wife."

A few of his limericks about animals.

The cow is of bovine ilk;

One end is moo, the other is milk

The ant has made himself illustrious

Through constant industry industrious.
So what?
Would you be calm and placid,
If you were full of formic acid?

Ogden Nash also gets credit to having written the shortest poem ever.

Purity is obscurity.

On parents. This is a high five to all kids.

Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore,
And that's what parents were created for.

But my favourite of all is his poem on visiting the dentist. This is what initiated my fascination towards Ogden Nash. I remember having it as a text back when I was in school.

This Is Going To Hurt Just A Little Bit

One thing I like less than most things is sitting in a dentist chair withmy mouth wide open.
And that I will never have to do it again is a hope that I am againsthope hopen.
Because some tortures are physical and some are mental,
But the one that is both is dental.

It is hard to be self-possessed
With your jaw digging into your chest.
So hard to retain your calm
When your fingernails are making serious alterations in your life line or love line or some other important line in your palm;
So hard to give your usual effect of cheery benignity
When you know your position is one of the two or three in lifemost lacking in dignity.

And your mouth is like a section of road that is being worked on.
And it is all cluttered up with stone crushers and concrete mixers and drills and steam rollers and there isn't a nerve in your head thatyou aren't being irked on.
Oh, some people are unfortunate enough to be strung up by thumbs.
And others have things done to their gums,
And your teeth are supposed to be being polished,
But you have reason to believe they are being demolished.

And the circumstance that adds most to your terror
Is that it's all done with a mirror,
Because the dentist may be a bear, or as the Romans used to say, onlythey were referring to a feminine bear when they said it, an ursa,
But all the same how can you be sure when he takes his crowbar in onehand and mirror in the other he won't get mixed up, the way youdo when you try to tie a bow tie with the aid of a mirror, and forgetthat left is right and vice versa?

And then at last he says That will be all; but it isn't because he thencoats your mouth from cellar to roof
With something that I suspect is generally used to put a shine on a horse's hoof.
And you totter to your feet and think. Well it's all over now and afterall it was only this once.
And he says come back in three monce.

And this, O Fate, is I think the most vicious circle that thou ever sentest,
That Man has to go continually to the dentist to keep his teeth in good condition when the chief reason he wants his teeth in good condition is so that he won't have to go to the dentist.

Classy, aint it?

CANDY IS DANDY,BUT LIQUOR IS QUICKER! (Part One)

The British always believed they had the monopoly to humor. This belief lasted right until Ogden Nash appeared as a tiny blip that grew into a massive blot on the literary radar. An American writer and poet( with a city Nashville already named after an ancestor of his) ,who first started his career as a journalist, Ogden Nash took the world by storm with his writings which were at first read hilarious-second,insightful about the vagaries of daily life.
Take for example this,

The Lord in His wisdom made the fly,
And then forgot to tell us why.

Celebrating Leos. Nash was born on August 19, 1902.



One day radio director Tom Carlson found to his dismay that his dog had destroyed an autographed copy of one of Ogden Nash's books. Although the book was out of print, Carlson managed to find another, which he duly sent to Nash with an explanation - and a request for another autograph.
The book was soon returned, with an inscription from the author: "To Tom Carlson or his dog, depending on whose taste it best suits."

Ogden Nash never got to graduate from college. His first published work was a pretty good poem titled ‘Spring comes to Murray Hill’ which was published in the ‘New Yorker’.

Nash, not just wrote amazing poetry, but also wrote books for children. Famous among these are ‘Cricket of Caradon’ (his first) and ‘Custard the Dragon’. Children loved his books because it addresses them as equal to adults. Quite an appeal isn’t that? I can remember when I was young; I used to find it extremely irritating when adults would take that sing song tone and utter quite nonsensical nothings when speaking to me. Did you find that as irritating as I did?

Enough about his life story. Let me get onto why I find Ogden Nash so fascinating. Apart from the humor in his writings, what is really quite remarkable is the way he managed to make a parody out of the most mundane things in life. From Christmas, to wealth, to husbands and wives, to animals, visits to the doctor, children standing on his feet, he succeeded in deriving amusement out of the simplest instances in life. And if you scraped below the surfaces of humor, you would find that his writings had hidden depths. A unique perception to all things mundane.

Any poet would admit that getting those words to rhyme is one of the most difficult tasks unless one is quite practiced at it. The most enviable trait in Nash is that he never broke his head over getting his words to rhyme! He simply created new words or altered the spelling, pronunciation,- the everything of existing words to make them fit his sentences.
And I think he must be one of the only poets who not just got away with it, but was also appreciated for it! A classic example of this would be a poem which he wrote about ‘rhyming his poetry’.

English is a language than which none is sublimer,
But it presents certain difficulties for the rhymer.
There are no rhymes for orange or silver
Unless liberties you pilfer.
I was once slapped by a young lady named Miss Goringe,
And the only reason I was looking at her that way,she represented a rhyme for orange.
I suggest that some painter do a tormented mural
On the perversity of the English plural

Isn’t that atrocious, yet at the same time marvelous?

I FIND YOU BORING -PART TWO

Read part one before attempting this...


What would you do
if you were looked in the eye
and told “Girl! I find you boring!”
with a hurt and desperate cry
would you rush into the room
bang the door on the way
and sob hearty fits 99
or would you stand up and say
in a rather sneering way
in a voice loud and clear
“I only wish you’d told me this before
you see, the feelings are mutual, my dear!”

Deepti

I FIND YOU BORING - PART ONE

Sometimes in life you end up meeting people whom you long to have a conversation with. Long to smile at, laugh with and share ideas and beliefs. So first you start with those ‘looks’ along corridors, canteens or bus-stops. Once you know for sure that the other person knows you exist, you proceed to tentative smiles, quickly look aside turning to the person next to you as if absorbed into some deep conversation that you are apparently carrying out with them. Yet, mostly abstracted, you pay scant attention to the conversation and through the corner of your eye watch the person as they pass by. After this routine gets established you accompany the smile with a ‘hi’. That would be the point where you know you could start to call the person an acquaintance and probably a friend.

Slowly as weeks drift by, you start to exchange pleasantries and then phone numbers. On reaching this juncture, you feel a dart of pleasure go through you. You say to yourself, at last we can be friends. (This Para comes with the statutory warning that until here you come from a rather cloistered environment where ready smiles and speeches in the absence of introduction would in all likelihood brand you a flirt even though all you desired was friendship! If you directly reached the final stage please skip to the second Para treating the first as quite invisible.)

After such a promising beginning, where the seeds of friendship were well planted and nurtured by you, you would expect the friendship to blossom into something –special. But have you noticed that not all friendships which start exceedingly well proceed with all the smoothness you expect of it. I do not refer to rough rides. Friendship without argument would be like eating nothing but sweets for your meal. Beyond a point it makes you want to puke. I refer to 'conversation'. The connection between minds. The sharing of ideals, beliefs or probably even the most mundane occurrences in your daily life ( irrespective of whether you agree or disagree). They portray the signs of a good friendship, if not superlative.

Yet there are a few friendships in which you struggle for conversation. You desperately hunt in the deepest crevices of your mind, hoping to find things to say, cover those blanks that enter in the conversation. Deep inside you wonder, ‘Am I boring the other person? Does she/he think I am tedious?’. Stop. The overused cliché states ‘It takes two hands to clap’. Reality states that it takes two people to make an interesting conversation. Start thinking. Does not the fact that you struggle for words to fill the occasion suggest that the other person is filling it no better? Does not the fact that you find the conversation unsatisfying imply that neither is the other person succeeding in keeping YOU riveted? So ask yourself when you face this.

Am I really boring or is the other person boring me?

WHEN FRIENDS LEAVE....

Last night, a very close friend of mine- Anu, left to do her M.S in the U.S. A frequently occurring phenomenon, nothing unusual about it, I know. Yet I can’t help but feel a little bit lost. No more when I am bored can I just pick up the phone, dial her number and talk endlessly, just meaningful nothings. Gone are the sleep-overs, theatre visits, restaurants, gang get tog ethers, private conversations, laughter and tears. It’s all going to be purely virtual. She and I have known each other for sixteen years. We studied in the same school right from Ist standard and continued our entwined lives in the same college.

What makes her leaving more painful is that those twelve years together in school, did nothing to make us close. Yeah, we were friends. I do not deny it. But, were yesterday a reflection of four years ago, when she was leaving for her boarding and we said our last byes, I could easily have said,” Bye! Have a good time the next few years”, turned away and walked off unaffected. Instead, as she left, when we said our last byes my heart could not but will her as she walked away to turn around and wave again hoping for one last bye and a wave. And when she did, hope again for another last bye right until she disappeared from all our sights.

I shall miss her. Miss all the things we did together. But what truly makes me feel low is a fear. A fear of whether things will really be the same when she comes back. In those last few moments when we all exchanged those last statements of ‘promise you will mail regularly, don’t dare forget, scan all photos you take there” all that kept running in my mind was “What if she slowly forgets to mail back? What if the new friends she makes might not be too nice? What if distance in miles leads to a distance in our minds? What if she changes and will no more be that amazing mixture of wise beyond her years, yet charmingly innocent?” .A thousand ‘Ifs’ that were running through my head, a thousand ‘Ifs’ unanswered. Only time can answer these questions. And time is a cruel mate who makes you wait and at the end of it all wont necessarily give you the answers you would want from it.

In the end, during those final hugs and farewells unable to contain myself, I burst out and told her, “Just one thing I want from you. Please don’t ever change. Come back the same person”. And when we all walked off, everyone of us were silent and had no words to say. Yet, we knew exactly what the other was thinking about. ’Anu’.

FLAWED.. ?

You would think that at the end of two thousand years after Christ was born, leaving alone all those thousands of years that we lived through before, we would all have become enlightened souls. My soul which would remain long after I have departed from this mortal existence of mine would have learnt several lessons from the mistakes I have made and strive to be a better 'being' (notice I do not mention human. The likelihood of being born human cannot be too high if you were to apply the rules of probability to the total number of species existing in the world which is supposed to be at the least 5 million so 1/(5*10^6) is a number so unfathomable that I could be quite justified in assuming ‘I will not be human’).

If you were to take into account the number of years that have elapsed since I probably first made my appearance( me and the 6 billion odd humans alone) on the face of earth, I should have by now have become ‘ne plus ultra’, for the lack of any word that could fit the occasion better. The dictionary defines it to be ‘the state of being without any flaw or defect’. Yet, somehow, no amount of soul searching allows me to accept myself as being perfect, if not infinitesimally close to it. To be honest I would sooner concede to the blatant fact that I am in all likelihood as flawed as the preposterous theory which suggested the world as being flat. I lose my temper, I tend to be impatient, I can be quite prejudiced, I lack consistency… the list can go on and on.

But what made me what I so distinctly am today? If my soul in its eternal quest for knowledge had learnt a great deal in the thousands of years preceding my current existence, then why do I not show a superiority of thinking( superior to what??), greater perception and understanding, kindness and a million other traits that personify an ‘Ideal Being’? Why are you no closer to being an ‘Ideal Being’? In the unlikely eventuality that you don’t believe that you possess any imperfections I think it is time you look up the meaning of ‘narcissism’.

The society I have lived in, the people who surround me, the education I have received and so many other factors have played a deciding role in what I am today.
Innate nature? Do you notice that I neglected to mention it? Probably because I don’t accept that you exist when you are born. A child is just a desert, parched, ready to accept and greedily swallow anything offered to it in the way of knowledge. This naturally means that the adult you end up being is the end result of societal influences on you. The goodness and the flaws in you are the result of the way your intelligence was directed to interpret every incident that has occurred since the day you were born. If that were the case, would I not also be justified in absolving myself from all responsibility that dictates to me the unending list of all my imperfections, since all blame lies on society that misguided me? The society that did not teach me right, when the wrong around me could have been used as illustrations for what could have been made right? Could every single defect that exists in me be attributed to society that did not strive to set the world right? Do you agree that it rightly leads me to the conclusion that society in its entirety is flawed? If a teacher who taught you, taught you wrong, then definitely what you learn will not be right. Similarly, if the society in its entirety is indeed flawed and who you are, is the by product of societal influences, who can your soul learn right from? What enrichment of knowledge does the soul gain? How can it achieve enlightenment and thereby liberate itself? Is it no wonder that evolution has dictated us to have existed for thousand and thousands of years?

Does our liberation therefore lie solely in our destruction?