some lines from Swift's 'Cadenus and Vanessa'

That women were not worth the wooing,
And that, unless the sex would mend,
The race of lovers soon must end)—
She was at Lord knows what expense
To form a nymph of wit and sense,
A model for her sex design'd,
Who never could one lover find.
She saw her favour was misplaced;
The fellows had a wretched taste;
She needs must tell them to their face,
They were a stupid, senseless race:
And, were she to begin again,
She'd study to reform the men;
Or add some grains of folly more
To women, than they had before,
To put them on an equal foot;
And this, or nothing else, would do't.
This might their mutual fancy strike;
Since every being loves its like.

light years away

and one day you shall leave them all behind. you will have become alien to them all and they to you. and you keep growing, in and out of people. to the point, where there's noone you connect with. is that when you start growing inward? and its not necessarily bad, its stagnation that's bad.

and adaptation and reconstructive memory are both my boons and curses. i can objectively remember what was, and know for sure that its no more.

genes?

research has shown that identical twins separated at birth and brought up away from each other still remain shockingly similar in their personality, choices, and response to situations. so its hereditary that seems to mould them more than their environment.

but what about siblings sharing parents and their environment? no pair of siblings ever resemble each other, whether its their preferences of activities, their choice and habit of food (i.e. once they are on their own and get to choose), their emotional composition, or anything else. what's going on here? why does every human couple produce such a variety of babies? where do the genes evaporate then? in fact, you can expect any pair of siblings to be as different from each other as is possible to be, growing up together.

if you've heard about the Bengali film writer and director Q and are trying to get hold of his movie 'Gandu', I have better advice for you. fget Gandu (which is probably his wet nightmare on screen) and try getting hold of another film by him 'Love in India'. its not really a movie, and yet its more than a documentary. its more like his thesis, his personal soul searching for the meaning of love and sexuality in India; today, yesterday, and aeons ago. he travels far and wide within the country to find the logic, the meaning, the philosophy to sex. and compare it with how Indians today (mis)understand, ignore, and hide, sex.

watching it made me feel sorry for the country. it is difficult to describe all that he has successfully conveyed through the film. its simply very honest. and although he gets opinionated at times, and you may not agree with all his opinions, you cannot ignore the reality in them, and that they apply to many, sorry most, Indians today.

i don't believe in marriage, just like the filmmaker does not. and yet i'm glad i married for love. if marriage is such a disillusion, then i have the guts to marry for love, and challenge my love with marriage. does that sound strange? strange to me are his friend's words in the film - that sex is for before marriage, which itself is just a compromise, a duty, and after marriage sex comes in through extramarital affairs. that that is why Krishna & Rukmini are not a celebrated couple, but Krishna and Radha are the epitome of love and sex.

its sad that we look for excuses in our mythology for our warped ideas, while we leave the beauty and the honesty in those stories, unpracticed in our lives.

today for the first time, after watching his film, i honestly acknowledged to myself that getting out of the country, coming so far away has liberated me in a way. i understand myself better, i know myself better and i acknowledge what i know much more easily. i can now judge Indian misconceptions about sexuality without feeling like a victim trapped in them.

its astounding that most Indians haven't ever seen their parents kiss. that most feel really awkward talking about sex, even marital sex. and abhor the idea of oral sex. its sad that India teaches her women to be ashamed of their sexuality, to keep it well covered, as if it were a weakness she was born with. a weakness that is better protected if the world doesn't know about it.

there's just one thing the film misses out. it digs the legend of Radha-Krishna's illicit love beautifully, but does not even talk about Shiv-Parvati, about the only married (to each other) lovers in Indian mythology who define sexual relations, whose union has been made immortal in the lingam. long ago, someone told me this, that when you bless a married couple, you don't bless them to be like Ram-Sita, you'd rather bless them to be like Shiv-Parvati. and to think of the legend about why the lingam is worshipped - it was actually a curse on Shiv to be remembered by his genitals, by the annoyed sage Bhrigu who was kept waiting while Shiv-Parvati were busy making love.

only an epidemic of honesty can eradicate sexual hypocrisy from India.

a man is defined by the words he quotes in his major inquiries in life and science. and by his family and the love or hatred or memory or kinship that he feels for them. and by his childhood and what he shared with his siblings. and how he preserves some of that as he grows up and moderates the others, erasing or retaining in memory all the while. by his friends, not just those who played and bled with him, but also those he could die for. those he could be silent with.

a man is defined by the woman he loves and she by him. and each is defined by the music they hear...

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." - Henry David Thoreau

its not strange to find meaning in the company of strangers. sometimes even when family does not suffice. but beautiful strangers are rare in the world. beautiful people are rare in the world. and most have buried or strangled their beauty in the folds of their private lives. those eyes are dead. those smiles are fake. they will never be true enough to obliterate the need for words, for time, for acquaintanceship.

corridors of sun-flies

its rare that we notice strange patterns in the behavior of little inconsequential winged insects. some days ago i heard this TED talk about how this random normal bird-lover living in Maldives noticed year after year the sudden swarm of dragonflies flying at a particular time of the year. and by questioning that he discovered the globetrotter dragonflies that fly back and forth the Arabian Sea with the monsoon winds.

as one thing leads to another, since then i've been noticing these really tiny flying things that i now like to call sun-flies. i notice these insects everyday in the hours of the sun swarming around in large gangs flying almost like electrons in a given cloud of space. they don't ever fly out of the limits of these cloud-like spaces despite a continuous flurry of wings and movement within. its amazing to watch one of these clouds, dynamic within and static in its spatial relationship with the outside. and each of these clouds surprisingly, is located exactly at the same spot at exactly the level of my face, every single day. not just that, each of these clouds is always basking in the sun and is in the middle of a pedestrian cemented path. such that i am always walking into these. and if that's not amazing enough, each of these swarms always covers half the air-width of the footpath, almost consciously leaving space for a human head to pass neighborly-by without scissoring the cloud. and yet if i am not mindful of them, my head walks straight into the cloud. and this, when the entire width of the path is equally sunny.

anyone else seen them??

being a woman feels special. in a self-treasured way. in a soft, cradled, pampered way. and i see that reflected in women from all over the world. its extra delicate in the east though. what does it mean to be a woman? its like having a universe of naive, vulnerable, innocent beauty within oneself. something that can be destroyed with the least intent. something that can be inspired with the least intent. the potential for the most gentle, the most valiant, the most loving of all human expressions. or the most vicious, the most dangerous, the most cruel...

I claim to have found the cause of the decline of America. the youth, the typical undergrads!!! if adult America is made up of this material then its no wonder that nothing is moving right. and if I am right, then the decline has only just begun because all these obnoxious 20-somethings have still to grow up into adults and worsen the prophetic trajectory...

and you can't really blame them. most of the youth of America are full of some snobbish superiority. of being American, of having their parents splurge money, of having more than they ever felt the need for. of never being answerable to anyone. of never failing. of never knowing that they were wrong. that they are wrong, in how they view the world below themselves. in how they refuse to budge their asses.

there's something else. Americans have this misconception that competition in this country is the toughest in the world, and they extend that to college competition among undergrads. how it makes me pitifully shake my head because these immature kids cannot even comprehend what tough competition means. for them to have been born in this country implies they are the best. and they want to be rewarded for it every now and then without them bothering to shed a drop of sweat. "sweat? that's dirty, that's for the underdeveloped world. we are the born-with-silver-spoons-in our mouths. S&P has no right to downgrade us! we are golden kids because we are Americans. and so far that's all we are. American spoilt-brats whose parents have money. who cares for when they don't. there's always credit. we are the champions. even if all we do is recognize this fact and eat & watch TV and grow tires of flab. as for college, professors are paid to give us 'A's. deadlines, what are those? deadlines are supposed to adjust after us. failure, that's impossible. grades are supposed to curve keeping us at the top. we all deserve 'A's. don't you get it?".

don't you get it? I pity their parents, for when they were like them, and for now.

i like Fall much better than Spring, especially here, where dying leaves far overshadow flowers in their variety and color. the Fall sky asserts its blue-ness so strongly, the air turns to a reminder of winter, and the sun drips honey onto your skin and is all sweetness and yummy-ness.

Spring in Dallas has a weak character. in the beginning its like a shadow of the gone winter. and then even before it has realized its newness, it bursts in a heated self-implosion into the all consuming summer.

Fall on the other hand melts slowly, deliciously into the barrenness and snow of the next season...

one's world is made up of words... and wordless talk

of first impressions...

if one were to record one's first impressions of every person one met and then read it a couple of years later for those people one still is regularly in touch with, it would really be some fun.

i just came across a record of my first impression of a person written 19 months ago in an email to someone, and ... it just reads so funny now ... reading old emails is always fun but this is different.

"chutku. __ seems like a nice guy. met him now. im supposed to be his ta for both courses actually. but he says i should worry about game and envronment he will take care of. only random students may come to me for that too. but basically he needs me to attend game classes keep 3 hrs in the week office hours for that and grade assignments which he will make and give me answers to. the exams he will grade. and the class is small supposedly 18 odd students. and he is sweet. he was stammering just a lil in the beginning before he got comfortable."

and its not easy going on a vacation. especially, if you live alone. preparing to go on a vacation is an art and a strenuous one.

1. think of where you can leave those other leafy inhabitants of your apartment where they can see someone daily watering them even if they are deprived of sunshine cos noone is going to move them around like you do.

2. finish all that pending work cos when you come back there will be much more pending on you before you begin a new semester. all those half read books and papers are going to haunt me this week till I take flight after which they will qualify for that status of "work not done" which stops to arouse guilt by passing into the realm of the past tense. and this does not even include the work that I am being paid for cos that I cannot afford to award wnd status to.

3. clean out your apartment - the kitchen, the bathroom and the entire apartment. so that you are not greeted by pests, dead or alive when you get back home after the holiday.

4. stock yourself with the right amount of food such that the perishable lasts (or is trashed) exactly these few days of hard work, and that there is something to feed on when you're back (cos the bread-milk uncle shop isn't within earshot in this country, actually there is no bread-milk uncle shop here. sigh).

5. and if that's not enough buy a suitcase and plan out exactly how much will fit in so you can buy an exact sized gift for your host.

6. and last but not the least, to prepare yourself for the vacation. stop looking like what you are (a grad student in rags who doesn't care about her looks, until acne sprouts up all over her face) and wax and groom yourself so you feel good while the vacation lasts at least.

7. bear the 42deg heat while you do all this hoping it doesn't kill you before the vacation. and bear that haircut and smile about it.

"An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded flight, the earth mutated - nearly - into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted."

now, isn't that beautiful? for all the Rushdie critics out there (especially those who haven't read much Rushdie) from 'The Satanic Verses'. he sure knows how to tell a story, a winding long magical one, keeping you involved and intertwined in it.

suddenly have a strange urge to go on this cursing spree. and that makes me realize that I haven't told a person to "f*#% off" in ages. what's wrong with me. is this what the US makes of people?!

man, woman, eat, drink

there is some (one) logic behind the desi arranged-marriage concept.

years ago i told a friend my theory that two people had to have common languages and culture in order to feel an intimate togetherness. in order to relate with common memories, in order to commonly feel and understand on the same scale. such that each knows the other understands (almost) just as well as oneself and that the other knows this and so on... (at least most of the stuff communicated most of the time). something like the common knowledge assumption of game theory. its important for a relaxed and take-understanding-for-granted strategy required in a relationship that outlives chemical and sexual introductions.

and although the greater the commonality of experience in both lives, the richer the present and future sharing will be, commonality is (obviously) not a sufficient condition for compatibility. chemistry and sex are just as necessary.

probably that's why desis have a greater range of compatibility with the world than say the chopsticks people (for lack of a better non-racist term). its either the comfort with the English language (or whatever) that makes us more aware of, and connected with the world, arming us with a larger bag of common goodies. unlike the chopsticks armed who have lived in their closed world and if you are from beyond that, you are alien to them (although they are way more western than us in their clothing).

no wonder a political psychologist I met some months ago was of the opinion that because of the adverse sex ratio in China and the influx of Chinese students in the US, Chinese men students come here looking for Chinese women.

starry eyed

and I am still fighting. and so far I have won. but I will keep fighting... everyone and everything that demands from me a submission and a defeatist acceptance of an un-romantic world. of the giving up of my freedom, of my fairy tales, and of my ideas of perfection, of non-compromise.

I'll do the black swan too, but only when its perfect. and till the everlasting "happily ever after", life will always find me armed against the in-between

aargh! i am so exasperated with my countrymen (and women). watching even 5 mins of Indian news gets my blood to a boiling point these days.

I used to have a theory when I was a teenager. that there's some beauty in every human being. not on the surface, but beauty deep within.

then I came in contact with many more people, many more of those who manage to hide from themselves that beauty. and I forgot about my theory...

but it's true. I sometimes see glimpses of it in the eyes of people when they mirror a smile I give them. that's the best way to view the beauty. to smile at them. but you should know what a real smile is, to begin with...

nothing beats sprawling alone on a grassy slope under the shade of a tree in the Texan summer with a book open like an umbrella, resting on your face and shading your closed eyes from the world to give you that extra privacy.

it's the kind of de-stressing every teacher needs once in a while.