After a long while I went to the beach with my two siblings, sister-in-law and three nephews last week. As usual, my strong brother Manish carried me on his shoulder in the silvery sands and put me in the wheelchair at a safe distance. Then they all went to play in the greyish-blue seawater. And, I tried to click a few photographs with a red digital camera hanging from my neck. Here are a few examples:
Last week coconut palm climber (in this part of the world there are professionals traditionally qualified persons to climb and pluck the coconut. They visit every home having the palm(s) and do the job for a price) had come to our place. Ma requested him to cut a part of jack-fruit tree threatening the tiled roof of the house. It was a holiday for me and as always she took me out to see him work. I got a bit adventurous and tried to click a few pictures sitting on my wheelchair.
Sometimes we are provided moments to laugh as a safety valve to deal with the pressure cooker called life. One such instance came last week; we (me and dad) were returning from a movie around midnight in Robert chettan's cab (dad has a list of cabbies whom he knows from his working days and he calls them in random order whenever we need to go out, and most of them know me since my short-pants days).
Coming back to the story; the police waved us to stop as we were getting down the ThoppumpadyBOT Bridge and told us to park on the side. Police checking is a routine thing in the night but, that day I'd an intuition that something was amiss; maybe he has seen us overtaking (prohibited) a twenty feet container trailer on the bridge. The constable came towards us and asked where we were coming from. Robert said cinema and even mentioned film's name. The policeman peeped inside the car, saw me, saw dad and the wheelchair in the back (in Indica the wheelchair has to be put in passenger seat behind as it doesn't fit in the boot). 'Ok, blow into this”, was his next command putting the Breath Analyser in front of his mouth. It made a funny sound somewhat like the siren of an ambulance and red and green light blinked on it. My first thought was that the machine was activated for the test, but realised that some was wrong when the cabbie laughed nervously.
“Are you drunk?”
“No Sir. I told you I'd gone to a movie with them. I'm with them since 7:30 PM”.
“This thing wouldn't buzz if you weren't drunk”.
“I swear on my kids, I don't drink”.
The policeman went to his senior and said what was happening. He came back and sniffed the driver then signalled us to leave as he stopped the next car. Even his senior smiled and waved us good bye.
One good thing about the whole episode was that the policeman never became rude and had the smile intact on his face all the while.
“This is ridiculous Bhai, I haven't touched the stuff since '92”, Robert Chettan told dad.
“Have you had anything strong flavoured for lunch or dinner?” dad asked.
“No! Just simple rice and curry. And, yes the candy you gave me in the interval”.
“Don't tell me that it has alcohol, it is Paresh's favourite”, dad joked. “Anyway, you have got a nice incident to tell your wife about”.
I'd have teased and joked with him even more. But, he looked distraught about the whole thing. So, I kept quiet and told him to pray a little harder before going to bed as God had put him through a little test tonight.
PS: Robert Chettan is a performer of Chavittu Nadakam, a traditional dance-drama performed in church yards during festivals. This art form is on the verge of extinction because the new generation is reluctant to take it up and the public in general isn't interested in it. Now, only capsule version is performed once or twice annually for the foreign tourists.
For the last few days news of domestic violence is clamouring of space along with humongous scams, illegal detention of a minor rape victim, sky rocketing prices of essentials commodities and numerous other worthy things in the media just because it happened in a foreign land and involves one of our high ranking Diplomats.
Normally domestic violence is just a topic of gossip among the neighbours; what I could make out was that she didn't allow him to sleep with her as he was stinkingly drunk or she didn't serve food for his ailing mother or the curry she made was not of his liking and accept fallen in the toilet as an excuse with a wry smile when we see a mutilated face. Even immediate family would wash off their hands saying it is a matter between the couple and we don't like to interfere in their private life.
How I wish there was a 911 kind of service to help not only women but kids too against such violence.
And, the law will remain useless if not impotent unless there is a change in attitude.
Sometime back there was high visibility campaign named Bell Bajao with TV commercials prompting people to non-intrusively halt acts of such violence just by ringing the doorbell. Wonder why they have stopped appearing.
It is amazing how a few hours can change your thought process. I'd planned to type this post last night (it was churning in my head for a long while now) with the title I would have been mason or carpenter discussing the blurb of a slim book Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke that goes like:
Go within and scale the depth of your being from which your life springs forth. At its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must write. Accept it, however it sounds to you, without analysing. Perhaps it will become apparent to you that you are indeed called to be a writer. Then accept that fate; bear its burden, and its grandeur, without asking for the reward, which might possibly come from without.
I had planned to write how I would been a mason or a carpenter (who works as diligently as a painter or a writer towards his craft without giving much thought to the world around him) instead of struggling to be a writer, a choice I always think is compelled by my physical limitations. But, a short visit to the hospital yesterday (29th Dec'10) and completing the book in single sitting this evening (30th Dec'10) changed the form of this post.
This book is not merely an advice or encouragement to a young poet from a senior fellow as the title suggests. But, it dwells on the mysteries of life like any good book should; from creativity to love to sex to God, it covers many topics but, its main focus is on solitude, aloneness or loneliness of a creative soul; apathy of the world towards a creative soul to be precise (that is what I could gather). In the modern world I doubt that such experience would be limited to creative people alone, even a corporate honcho, a lawyer or a medical professional would be experiencing such apathy.
Even though I found this whole book to be a big quotable quote. Still there are a couple of nuggets worth sharing:
Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded. Even more inexpressible are works of art; mysterious entities they are, whose lives, compared to our fleeting ones, endure.
For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation.
A few days back I made a long face in front of an online friend using emoticon saying that I wasn't getting a sentence as good as I wished. She reassuringly said: “you'll get it, just keep trying.” Next she typed something like “you don't practice, if you practice daily it'd be lot easier for you.” She meant writing (or should I say typing), I know every writing manual or 'How to write' book says: “put away a few words daily – Practice.”
But, I never paid heed to it. Being lazy to type, my excuse being, writing is just an extension of thinking. So, as long as I can think I can write. And, thoughts are rumbling in my head throughout the day or to be precise until this laptop comes in front of me, then more important things sprout up seeking my attention, checking emails is the foremost. Then looking for friends online and telling Hi to few of them. The list goes on like this, and the actual writing rarely happens, sacrificing the thoughts that glowed during the day in the subconscious as being mundane or pedestrian not deserving the effort to be typed out and shared by the night.
Here is a glimpse of the Master Writer Marquez's take on practice in the beginning of his book Strange Pilgrims.
When I began Chronicles of Death Foretold, in 1979, I confirmed the fact that in pauses between books I tended to lose the habit of writing and it was becoming more and more difficult for me to begin again. That is why between October 1980 and March 1984, I set myself the task of writing a weekly opinion column for newspapers in several countries, a s a kind of discipline for keeping my arm in shape. Then it occurred to me that my struggle with the material in the notebook was still a problem of literary genres and they should really be newspaper pieces, not stories. Except after publishing five columns based on the notebook, I changed my mind again: They would be better as films. That was how five movies and a television serial were made.
My friend BG sharing similar thoughts on his blog here.
Letters trickle to form words. Words queue up and make sentences. Sentences creep along to become paragraphs. Creating something new or reliving old memories. Do they make sense? Very hard to guess. They project my mood or change it while at work... making me nauseous or exhilarated by the end.
The naked soul being vulnerable for the world to see.
These are the few pictures taken collectively by my folks of the garden. They have been my limbs for life. Now they try to be my vision by clicking away with this camera every morning.
