Open Window # 6

Open windows are to be used to look out of. Looking in by any other than yourself is a risky thing to allow.

You can be observer, witness, onlooker, student, critic, timepasser, spectator, sightseer, bystander... silent, non-committal, uninvolved, removed, unseen...

And the same applies when another looks in your window. There lies the crunch.

My cellphone camera, regardless of its nearly obsolete technological ability is a handy tool for peeping out of windows. In fact, it becomes a window inside a window.

Just another facade, another skin that layers and protects me from others looking in.

The rain is fascinating even though roads become a mess.



























Headloads increase as the countdown to Puja splurging surges.












Where do you want to go today?











A little birdy told me so...



... to be continued...

The Madhav Chari Trio... and several reasons to be cross

The Madhav Chari Trio performed last night at Someplace Else at The Park in Calcutta.

At the outset, I must say the good things before I vent my anger. The Trio played wonderfully well. Hard Bop, with generous doses of Latin elements in a repertoire of covers always goes down well with an audience. Madhav, who gave up a future in mathematics in the USA to learn and play jazz, is a pianist who has studied the masters with enthusiasm, and this showed. Oscar Peterson is obviously a major influence. Madhav's arrangements ably showcased the incredibly talented Karl Peters on bass and Adrian D'souza on drums. For 90 minutes, without the benefit of a perfect sound system, they held the attention of a Saturday night pub audience, most of whom are starved for good jazz played live. If you were not there, and have never heard him before, you missed something.

Now that I've got done with the raves, it's time for the rant.

First of all, SPE sucks for sound. Either they should spend a few more crores to install a proper sound system and repair the acoustics of that place, or they should rebuild SPE from scratch with the performance of live music uppermost in their mind. And 750 ml of beer for Rs 175? 60 bucks for a cola? That's highway robbery! Or is it capitalism at its finest?

Now we come to MC who deigned to grace the occasion as the international standard jazz pianist India has on offer. I mean, we are ever so grateful to the man for returning to the country of his origin and giving us a taste of his talents. Understandably, by being so gracious he must also be forgiven for being a bumptious dyspeptic. In a thin, reedy voice which he, to our extreme pleasure, did not employ for song, Madhav informed the audience in his opening announcement that we should all quieten down as this was not a rock concert, and he was going to play some serious stuff. That's like offering street food at a five star banquet and asking us to eat it with silver cutlery.

Hey dickhead! If this were a rock concert, would you be playing? And if you wanted concert hall ambience, why the hell did you agree to play in a pub? I do not like musicians treating listeners as if we were slimy things under a rock. And if your music is danceable, like the original composers intended it to be, then we will make some noise. Quite a bit of it, actually. In fact, from what I understand, jazz musicians fed off the raucous energy of their audience and their creativity thrived because of it. Madhav, if you wanted that sort of hush, you should have been playing Beethoven and Bach in a white tie at Carnegie Hall or somewhere appropriately elitist for you. Don't give us that crap, when you have the lighted signs of the whisky sponsors glowing behind you as a constant reminder of who gave us the opportunity to listen to your performance.

Karl and Adrian, equally talented musicians of India, never gave off that attitude. They have played far and wide in this country and they know what audiences are like. The standing Karl's ever-smiling face was always a pleasure to watch, and his occasional grimaces as his fingers did amazing things to the fretboard and five strings, guided my enjoyment of the music. I could see neither Adrian or Madhav, except for distorted reflections on the stained-glass ceiling, but Adrian kept the momentum intact as my tapping feet and swaying body confirmed.

I'd be happy to listen to Madhav Chari time and again and even pay good money for the shows, but hey arsehole, get off your high horse and come back to earth! Music is not your sole preserve, and needs to be shared. If you don't agree, go back to Busherica, or lock yourself up in your loo and wank off on the ivories.

Open window of a moving vehicle

The open window of the vehicle I travel in is probably more interesting than the static viewpoint of the open window from my room. The images I receive keep changing, sometimes becoming a blur, sometimes lingering in my mind's eye even after a few kilometres stretch behind. The changes are rapid and often when stuck at a traffic signal, there's so much to see at any given time with the 180º vision I get, that I have to shut my eyes to avoid information overload.

Natural filters in place, I can then focus on certain images that become fixtures of the locations, seeing them every time I travel that route. People I see often are the destitute. Am I indulging in armchair sympathy? With wheels beneath carrying me comfortably to earn the luxury of permitting myself this indulgence? Years of working in the world of journalism has taught me such indulgences can, with affectation, be wished away as occupational hazards. Which then transform into responsible, sensitive journalism. I am not calling myself a journalist or what I write news-worthy. I am only arming myself with a defense mechanism that helps to suppress my confusion when confronted with these very real sights. And yet I wish to write of them.

The Durgapur Bridge (did you know it's official name is Henry Louis Vivian DeRozio Setu?) (or DeRogio, as spelt on the commemorative plaque?!), that spans the railway and connects New Alipur and Chetla, provides lodging for three such destitute. There are two men who have been there for at least a year of my noticing. Both occupy space on the pavements diagonally opposite each other at either end of the bridge; are bearded, unkempt, coated in soot and dirt, but otherwise look healthy, even sustainably fed. They are both usually supine, their backs to the railings staring at the passing traffic. When it rains they have cast-off plastic sheets to protect them, and alongside, they keep their possessions in overfilled plastic shopping bags which also serve as pillows.

The man at the New Alipur end is younger, has alert eyes and a half-smile that does not have the signs of a rictus nor one belonging to the mentally handicapped. To me he seems observant and in the process of making space deep in his mind to store his findings. The older man at the Chetla end is quite obviously mentally unstable. I see him often enough eating food out of plastic bags, and sometimes standing at the edge of the footpath talking to the skies. Of late, their community has grown with the addition of a young woman. She has apparently displaced the younger man's perch, causing him to shift to the opposite side. She has no possessions, is mentally unsound from the looks of her, and is dressed in a black T-shirt and what seems to be a black and long, wraparound skirt. She takes no interest in the traffic and I see her wandering the New Alipur roundabout area, looking bemused at what she sees. People give her food as well and she eats it on the go. She appears to be a free spirit, unlike the lethargic men.

There are more such souls along the ways of my commutation. But the sights I see at either end of my journey are those that linger. And so that brings me to the Beleghata/Salt Lake crossroads on the Eastern Metropolitan Bye-Pass. This location has not the “character” which, let's say the New Alipur roundabout vibrates with, but it does have the presence of two other destitute men, characters in my mind's movie nevertheless.

Waiting for public transport at this crossing, I see a man in his late fifties, garbed in stained and soiled robes, similar cloth tied in a high turban beneath which flow wispy, graying locks of hair, framing a bearded face. He is bright-eyed, carries a long and slim bamboo pole as a staff, and a bulging plastic sack over his shoulder. He exudes the air of a dispossessed raja in his regal bearing. I watched him cross over the zebra lines to my side. He walked along the pavement and came to stand close by, apparently in wait, like all of us for transport. A young couple held their noses and moved away. He watched the oncoming traffic intently and then began to cross back over to the side he'd come from when he felt it safe to do so, pausing cautiously on the grass covered median separating the lanes of traffic. Having got to the other side, he once again watched the traffic zooming past, till he thought it safe enough to cross over back to my side. He was now a little distance away from me and he kept at this, making two more crossings till I finally got my bus.

The other man is roughly the same age, with a lean scrawny appearance, clothed in dirty shorts and a singlet. He moves very fast among the cars, but not more than twenty or thirty feet in every direction, muttering to himself as he slaps the sides of the vehicles rushing past. I must give credit to the drivers of the speeding vehicles who always manage to avoid banging into him as he smacks their metal sides. I wonder how bruised his hands must be.

Who are these citizens of nowhere? Who are they, who have forsaken, or been forsook? No easy, convenient answers are available to me. All I can do is to record my own observations.

Such an evening

It's been a long time, getting such an evening to my own. Not the kind after a tired, often wasted day. Then it's, get the hell away from where you are, however you can, specially when it's raining; back to one's own, not merely the familiar, but where one can lay claim on the integral. A part of me.

No, today, this evening, with a mind pleasantly splattered, after imparting enunciation, correcting pronunciation, tut-tutting (sympa-tutting?) appropriately to avoid getting run over by someone's elephantine neurosis, an airconditioned bus transports me to the opposite end of where I have been all day.

It has been awhile since I saw a typically Calcutta tropical sunset. The colours in a monsoon sky match the hues and shades of my mental being. Nothing seems to be what it is. The sunset retrieves dusty memories, a little rubbed over by the sandpaper of time. Nostalgia is a hurtful thing. Not always welcome when it appears without permission.

There's magic in the moment when open fields, fish farms glide past in the darkening east, as the psychedelic sunset paints a surrealistic backdrop to under-construction high-rises in the west. I like the windows on these new buses. Almost panoramic in their utility. Perhaps a bit tinted, a sort of dark violet which may also be distorting the colours of the sunset. Never mind.

A splattered mind needs but a suggestion to colour its world.

In those days of yore when the marijuana stoned you much more, when the colours excited you into verse, when music was tangible, when friendships were naive, when every evening had a differently brilliant sunset, when the future held no promise and was only a distant extension of the here and now, in those days one could not foresee that nostalgia would become a dull ache. Something to be wished away. Medicated, narcotised. Treasured memories were black and white snapshots. Not digitized pixels.

I have no hankering to return to the past, to relive it. Memories and nostalgia occupy too many gigs in my head. I don't need them. History should be just a well written story book. All that's relevant is the now. The present.

Even the future must wait till I get there.

Open Window (not yet closed!)

a soft madness gets under the hair on my scalp. i itch. i scratch. harder. when there's some relief, the madness burrows through and invades my mind. its a soft sound my nails make on my scalp compared to the madness of the sound outside my open window. that is a conglomeration, even a conflagration of sounds, a compendium too.

how does one relate in words sounds that one can only feel? the sounds of traffic at a really busy crossroads with a bazar, railway station, a bus stand, packed residences cheek by jowl, and commercial establishments encircling it? could i perhaps, in some way cover the city with a reflecting dome that will bounce the sound back to us? send the smoke and pollution back to us? and the smells?

the dull roar of diesel engines straining to power their overburdened chassis... the whining of stressed gearshifts... manic horn blowers in the octaves from cacophony to richter-scale-wrecking craziness... the sharp popping of 2-stroke auto rickshaw engines... arguments that the drivers of these pests have with their disgruntled passengers... the enthusiastic chanting of 'bolo hari, hari bol' by "shawshan bondhu" as they carry a corpse to the ever-burning pyres of keoratala for its transit to the cycle of rebirth... hysterically barking dogs maddened at the intrusion of an unfamiliar smell... the frenetic whingeing of police sirens, frantic ambulances... the sounds of life unable to hesitate, painstakingly moving on.

and the smells that drift in through the window. unburnt motor fuels, freshly rained-on earth some miles away, the noisome garbage truck labouring past, covered by plastic, under which wisps and fragments of everybody's leavings reject recycling, littering the street. fish frying, smoke wafting up from a cigarette being puffed below. a whiff of synthetic sandalwood from the incense lit in a creeping taxi. the smell of decay and devoutness. the odour of contemptuous familiarity giving way to the scent of the unknown.

************

and i'm trying to listen to my music over all this. music played loud enough to disturb the inmates in my home. something they can object to since they cannot do the same outside the windows. headphones become necessary but irritating. the sounds outside not only filter in, they actually override the music quite easily.

"look what they've done to my song, ma.../ it's the only thing i could do half right / and it's turning out all wrong, ma / look what they've done to my song. / Look what they've done to my brain, ma.../ well, they've picked it out like a chicken bone / till i think i'm half insane, ma / look what they've done to my song. / wish i could find a good book to live in.../ well, if i could find a really good book / i'd never have to come out and look at / what they've done to my song." melanie from the 70s sounds so appropriate.

as does jim capaldi doing 'eve', billy preston telling me 'that's the way god planned it' and that '(he) wrote a simple song'. leon russell wandering as a 'stranger in a strange land', and then him and joe cocker 'cry(ing) me a river'. until the blistering guitars of zappa, roy buchanan, duane allman, alvin lee and to round it off, jimi, douse the noise completely. i can now sleep.

if only the sodium-vapour street lamp wasn't so intrusive between the fluttering drapes...

The Asian Age

I unabashedly, unashamedly provide a link to an article in The Asian Age of 4th July 2006, in which a childhood friend of mine, David McMahon - journalist, author ("Vegemite Vindaloo"), more importantly 'Parish Boy' and my cohort on many jungle trips of centuries ago, has written a rather moving article about my sister! The article is called "The Tale of Kolkata's Samaritan". Clink on the link below to read it. And if you would like to know the kind of stuff that Dave blogs, go here.

(Sorry the link won't work as it was available only for the day of publication/posting. Added to which is the inconvenience of being able to view it only on IE. So if you're Firefox or alternative inclined like me, give it a miss. The Asian Age)

So here's the original piece copy/pasted for your reading pleasure:

The Asian Age (July/4/2006 12:30:39 AM)

The tale of Kolkatas Samaritan

Ive known Dr Ishika Ghose since I was six and she was about five. Fortunately, she never kept to her threat of removing my appendix without anaesthetic.

Being the sort of person that she is, her goal is something that has never been achieved before. She has already begun to raise funds to ensure that Kolkata, that heartlifting city where she and I were born, gets a world-class childrens hospital.

As she points out, there are childrens hospitals in the city but the services offered are "incomplete and fragmented." There are two crucial aspects to the hospital she envisages comprehensive services, at an affordable price.

A crore, she says, "would do very nicely to start with." It would fund a ward, one step in the journey to founding a hospital.

As a young doctor, she spent time in England, a phase that dictated her lifes direction. "One of the most comfortable aspects," she says, "of working in the much-maligned National Health Service, was never having to worry about who was paying the bills. I remember a senior nurse in a childrens ward giving me an entire box full of intravenous cannulas and telling me to get an IV line into a child with difficult veins."

Funding just wasnt an issue. "When things went wrong as they sometimes did, horribly wrong, you didnt spend sleepless nights worrying about how the family would cope with the mounting bills. You could spend that time worrying about the child and reading as much as you could about its problems."

But that experience was just the start of her journey. Dr Ghose is back in Kolkata, working at not one hospital, but two. One of those hospitals is the Rabindranath Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences in Kolkata.

"A couple of years ago," she says, "this hospital got a very generous grant of seven crores from the Armenian Church Trust Fund and started the general (non-cardiac services) unit. This includes general surgery, orthopaedics, neurosurgery, urology and trauma."

But as Dr Ghose points out, there is just one stumbling block. "There are no paediatric services, apart from paediatric cardiology and cardiothoracic surgery." In her own words, she "barged in" there about a year ago and started general paediatric surgery.

So why do they need more money? There is a prolonged silence and I begin to fear for my own appendix. But Dr Ghose reaches not for her scalpel, rather for her inescapable logic. "There are no dedicated paediatric services in this hospital, insofar as we neither have a paediatric ward, nor paediatric intensive care, nor paediatric nurses. Children, including babies, are cared for in adult units. As all of us who are doctors know, children do better on wards and units specially geared to their needs.

"Childrens services have already been assigned the floor space in the new building. But until we can raise the money for equipping it, thats all it remains empty, useless floor space. The money we raise will be used for equipment and to train nursing staff and junior doctors."

She explains that the hospital caters primarily to the middle class. "Parents of a large percentage of children who need surgery, pay only for their medicines and consumables. Thats all their families can afford. They dont pay for their stay or the operating theatre or doctors fees. I know because 50 per cent or more of my patient load is made up of these families. They cannot all go to the government hospitals, mainly because of the bed crisis. There are not enough beds and never will be."

There was another epiphany for Dr Ghose. Despite her years of study and experience, nothing had prepared her to answer the most crucial question asked so frequently of her by parents. The question? "How much will this cost?"

"Worst of all," she says, "the most challenging patients were the poorest. So I started waiving my fees, cajoling my anaesthetist to waive her fees and pleading with the director to reduce hospital charges. As you can imagine, I was no ones favourite paediatric surgeon. But we were operating on children and the vast majority of them were getting better."

Even Ria and Pulak got better after free surgery. Ria was two years old, with only one normal eye and a distorted mouth. Pulak was 13 and lived in a village with his widowed mother. He had been horribly burned when he fell on an oil lamp. His chin, bottom lip and neck were fused to his chest, but photographs taken after the first round of surgery show him smiling.

Their tales bring tears to Dr Ghoses eyes. "You cannot talk to me," she says, "about profit and loss within a hospital and show me a balance sheet and say paediatrics and paediatric surgery are really not making us any money. Are the only parameters to measure progress in India the stock-market index, IT companies, Bollywood films or Indian designers?

"At the end of the day all we have is our children and our grandchildren ? none of my own, but all mine and all yours anyway."

For details on how to donate, email Dr Ishika Ghose at ishikaghose@gmail.com

Let's really open up open source

I am neither a nerd or a geek. Nor am I technologically qualified to talk or even do anything very significant when the topic of computers comes up. However, I am very keen on the applications I can use on my computer to make its use pleasurable, easy and productive. I have no real understanding of Microsoft's almost manic clutch on computing, but I am willing to bow to superior knowledge on this issue.

What I am happy about is the Open Source movement. It certainly reflects the potential that the Internet was first conceived with. A community of developers working together and in harmony, to ensure that the use of the Internet remains free and available to the widest possible range of users, apart from making it a convenient medium for progressive communication.

And so I have software on my computer which replaces the Windows shell graphics-from-boredom. It is far too expensive to purchase a copy of MS Office, and the pirated copies pose too much of a risk, so I have downloaded OpenOffice which has never failed to bring me superb, and more than comparable facilities and pleasant surprises every time I use it, which is every day. I prefer Mozilla's Firefox browser and their Seamonkey mail client. I wish I could make sense of Linux to be able to use that instead of Windows, or at least had friends who do use it and would show me what's what.

But I do have an axe to grind about open source developers and those who make their work available for free.

For one, they assume that anyone who downloads and intends to use their work, is a person who knows whatever there is to know about programming. They have a condescending tone in their Readme.txt files which pisses me off, apart from confusing me no end. For example, take the Clipart facility of OO. They don't include it in the program so you need to download it as a separate application. That done, you are suddenly informed by the resident ghost of Bill Gates on your comp that it cannot open the SVG files which make up the clipart. So, you google and come up with the interesting but trivial information that it is Scalable Vector Graphics. Great, but still serving no purpose. Then you are confused by lots of other information, one of which tells you that a programming language called Python is used for SVG. So you dutifully download this as well, only to discover that the buggers who worked it all out haven't really given much thought to people like me who don't know what the hell they're talking of, one; and second, what the hell to do with it, other than to take a crash course in C, C+ or C++ or whatever babel they are spouting these days.

It's at times like this that I miss the user-friendliness of MS. Simply click on a few buttons like "yes", "no", "finished", after committing your heart and soul to the Gatesian EULA and impatiently indemnifying that millionaire and his company without actually reading the bloody thing, and you're done. It all works fine and satisfactorily till the virus hits you unexpectedly, your computer crashes, you regret buying it from a vendor who invariably delays his service till you are a frustrated, nervous wreck, and then you never learn from your mistakes but install another pirated copy of an MS program to allow history to repeat itself.


Therefore, hence, and so forth, I have tried to install open source programs / applications and I have so far not been affected by viruses, and hope to keep it that way.


There is one request that I would like to make to open source developers. Don't talk AT people like me. Be kind. Just in case you didn't know, we support your endeavours, and we do want an open, sharing community in this global village of ours. So do stuff that need not make it essential for ignoramuses like me to be able to program. Give us a couple of buttons to click and we're happy, we don't actually want much.

Let's really open up open source.

Alcoholics Synonymous

Alcoholics are abusers of the drink of course. They are also users. They use people for purely selfish reasons; for any personal advantage and gain without so much as a token thank you. They are egoistic; manipulative; arrogant; dishonest; opinionated right up to the brim, overflowing even; have no compunctions about doing what they do; know that what they do is right, and never need more than a bit of glib justification to establish their case.

I have friends who are alcoholics. I know people who may not be friends but are alcoholics. I know alcoholics who have been through detoxification and rehabilitation often, are apparently clean, sober, going through the Program, yet retain the qualities I've mentioned above. Of course there are exceptions, but I do not include them in this rant of mine.

One alcoholic, a friend since childhood, lost his mother recently. In fact the reason he had been in a rehab for three months till the day his mother died, was because of the inhuman treatment he had meted out to her. The reason he had to part company with his wife and two sons was because of the consequences of his alcoholism. The reason he is unemployable is alcohol. The reason his mother died was due to the effects of his abuse which caused a deterioration in her already frail, medical condition. Today I consider him a previous friend. A person as easily detested as you could be indifferent to.

I know that AA requires moral and emotional support for a recovering alcoholic/addict from his family and friends because they say it is a family disease. An incurable disease that affects all those closely connected with the abuser even if they themselves do not share his choice or consumption of intoxicant. Alcoholics know that. And because they have this crucial piece of knowldege, they knowingly take advantage of it. They then expect the world and its uncle to support them in all the ways they themselves are too lazy or reluctant to do, which is everything. If they could get you to wipe their bum after they take a dump, they would. Everyday. Every time.

Alcoholics are insecure, but show off as if the world turns because the sun shines out of their arse. This is evident from their I-centred talk. It's always "I did this", "I did that", "I said it first", and notably, "But I didn't do it!". This ex-friend, at a prayer meeting for his late mother, when asked to say a few words, only talked about how he returned to this city to be with her after his father passed away, implying an unselfish sacrifice. He talked of what he did for her, he talked of being the devoted son he never was. Not once did he even mention the contribution she may have made to his existence other than calling her his mother. I know for a fact that even in private, he has expressed no remorse or regret, or even shed a crocodile tear.

The first two days out of rehab, he really seemed to be on the rocky road to full recovery. We were impressed, both with his progress and the good that the rehab had done for him. Yet, once his mother had been consigned to earth to complete her cycle of dust to dust, and he became increasingly aware of his inheritance (not a fortune, but no pittance either), he regressed to his former self. His alcoholic self. His true, real self. He reverted to being immodest, insufferable, inexcusable in the shortest possible time. His excuse for not returning to the rehab as he had promised when he was released for his mother's funeral, was this: "They've taught me to face reality, to handle the outside world, and if I don't start doing that now, when will I?" That's glib. Impressively so. In normal circumstances, he would have been there another three months at least. His counsellor told me that, adding that while he was improving, more time was necessary for a complete recovery. This ex-friend told me how he doesn't like his counsellor for many reasons, not least being that person's inability to be intellectual. I believe his counsellor just saw through him and was in the process of making him reveal his true self, when the mother's death interrupted matters.

This guy used the rehab as a good excuse to stay out of prison which neighbours and well-wishers of his mother wanted him to be in. He had a clean-up as it were, at a long, rigorous, but healthy vacation, and now with no further responsibilities, with easy access to a fair bit of cash, and the pretentious, misplaced sympathy of certain people who don't actually know him, he is going to become a rich alcoholic. For a while of course. Till the money is all drunk up, till his cirrhotic liver and his preferred lifestyle send him to an early grave. I can only hope it will be a timely one.


One other alcoholic I know has never been in rehab or through detox. He fortunately has no family to abuse and spread his disease to. He too shares the same qualities as the one above, but in varying degrees. He is obssessed with proving he is India's foremost competitive bridge player, is perhaps the only stock market trader in the country who did not make money in the fleeting boom period recently, and denies his alcoholism vehemently.

A third one, or as he likes to call himself "a recovering addict and alcoholic", currently benefiting from the Program to only stay clean, is similarly warped in the head. Offering to place him in an income-earning opportunity, I also gave him a friendly warning that the employer already knew of his previous addiction problems and it was a good chance for him to prove his capabilities despite the reputation that preceded him. He so surprised me with his almost crazed, hysterical reaction to this warning of mine, that I have resolved never to help him again. All he does is attend AA/NA meetings every evening, and surfs the Net all day looking for women who will pity him enough to marry him, if not, just lay him. Meanwhile, his older brother accommodates him, takes care of his expenses, doing more than he should, and getting used once again in the bargain he has made with his sibling to stay clean.

It perhaps is not possible for organisations who work with addicts to both rid the abuser of his dependancy as well as clean up his way of thinking. I believe the three persons I've mentioned above were already messed in their minds and their true personality types merely accentuated by the abuse of the intoxicants. They sorely need serious psychiatric help but who's going to help them get it? Not me!

And just as a by the way: "The Globe, issue 2, 2005, is a special issue, "Launch of Indian Alcohol Policy Alliance." A few statistics: 62.5 million users of alcohol in India; per capita consumption up 106.7% over 15-year period; sale of alcohol growing at 8% a year; 270,000 people die each year due to use and abuse of alcohol..."

What is it with us Bongs?

Travel east to west down south Calcutta's main artery. The one that links the round traffic island from Ruby Hospital to Alipore. Once you cross Bijon Setu, the flyover spanning the train tracks of Ballygunj Station and enter the chaos of the Gariahat area, you will see a rather remarkable sight: jewellery shops in quick, crowded succession.

Being a bit of a nitpicker (do they also term that anal?, I decided to count how many such shops there were over two days of travelling that road. On the left, between the flyover and the Gariahat crossing, there are 42. On the right, 36. From Gariahat to the Rash Behari Avenue and SP Mukherjee crossing, there are 28 jewellery shops on the left. I haven't actually bothered to count the number on the right. From the last named crossing to Chetla bazar, there are another 11 on the left, and about 18 on the right. That's when you almost reach Alipore. They don't need jewellery shops in Alipore. The denizens of this upscale area wear and possess enough to be classified as mobile jewellery displays themselves. In Alipore they mainly have outlets that sell all sorts of edibles. And banks. With locker facilities.

Now why there should be 135 jewellery shops on a 3-4 kilometre stretch of road is anybody's guess. And they say that Calcutta's citizens are poor. That, as a thumb rule, the "market" in Calcutta is depressed, down, accounting for about 20% or less of all-India sales figures for consumer goods. Yet Mr Biyani of Pantaloons, probably India's most successful, home-grown and fastest growing retail chain, has gone on record to state that he considers Calcutta to be the retail capital of India. What? Aren't we the poor cousins?

I decided that if I must torture myself, I might as well do it to the max. An initial guesstimate tells me that there are about that many pharmacies, medical laboratories, clinics and similar medically related outlets along the same stretch of road. Their density levels per square feet are perhaps not as glutinous as the jewellery shops but they exist. And at this point, I also need to make a note that all these shops seem to be doing well from outside appearances.

The third phase of my informal survey shows that there are thrice the numbers quoted above of eating establishments of all sizes, shapes and quality on that very same length of road.

So what is it with us Bongs? Eat as if there's no tomorrow, buy jewellery to flash at those who have none, (and those who have too much to prove that we too have it), and then go to to the medical establishments for our cure-alls and panacea to overcome or suppress the sensations and symptoms that arise from over-indulgence and overextended credit lines? That is as good an explanation as any! If you have a better one, I'd love to hear it.

Open Window 3

Thick, black cables stretch heavily across the span between two of the street lamps which flank my window. They are TV and broadband internet cables and at least two of them connect to my house. In the mornings avian life squats there, waking me. Raucous and intelligent crows, ever on the lookout for a morsel; chattering sparrows, hyperactive and temporal. In Bangla we call them shalik, I guess the English word for them is mynah, but I'm not sure. These brown, black and white birds with red beaks had a little ditty associated with their sighting when I was a kid: “one for sorrow, two for joy, three for letter, four for toy, five for diamond, six for gold, seven for...”. I can't remember the rest of it! They are a noisy lot as well, but kind of musical compared to the previous two. And of course there are the pigeons which roost in crevices, atop ACs and other wall furniture of my building and the one adjacent to it. Their muted warbling and gurgling is comforting. A pair which nest on top of an air conditioner shaded by a ledge in the adjoining building have just had a pair of chicks and they are extremely protective of their offspring.

The traffic island as a roundabout for vehicles, can confuse an unaware pedestrian. I find many of them randomly trying to cross diagonally to or from the island to get to the other side. What results is a scary wait for minutes on end as drivers race by, unmindful of these jaywalkers. The trick is to walk the circumference of the junction, to cross a single street at a time and get to the other side. Longer yes, but safer and less strenuous. I've often wanted to shout this suggestion out, especially to senior citizens and those carrying children in their arms, but they may get distracted and perhaps cause an unfortunate accident.

Vagrants and the mentally unstable or unsound abound at this junction. This morning I saw three of them. A grey bearded waif of a man sat on a curb, ignoring the traffic that rushed inches past his toes. Her head completely shaven, dressed in someone's discarded blue printed kaftan, a mentally unsound woman roamed for an hour or so under my window, giving unasked for directions to auto rickshaws which halt here to disgorge passengers. The third, an almost naked man, black with dirt and grime, lay supine on the narrow pavement which encircles the island, walking away only when it rained.

The addicts skulk in a corner of the junction that has overgrown bushes and stunted Ashoka trees. They are all rag pickers and from my vantage point, I get glimpses of them 'chasing the dragon'. Sometimes they get chased away by the shopkeepers nearby, and sometimes they get picked up at night by policemen acting on complaints of petty theft. They steal almost anything to support their brown sugar habit, and we have small metal grills over drains and concrete manhole covers missing from our driveway every now and then.

There's a man who carries clay matkas twice a week and wisely follows the circumference of the junction to get to the other side. One day, the largish clay pots clustered in a wide cane basket resting on a wooden board with castors, is wheeled along by him. On the other day, in a different sort of cane basket, he carries clay hundis or what might be called 'piggy banks' on his head. Both times he heads in the same direction and I wonder who his customers are who need such large quantities of clay pots every week.

This open window lets me look out on to a world that is as distanced from me as it is an integral part of my life. Sights, sounds, smells abound. I may not be able to touch, but they touch me... ...in places I can't reach?

Open Window 2

The view from my window being top-looking-down, I often have the pleasure of some down-blouse sightings. Many passengers disembark from auto rickshaws with their backsides first. When they are shapely and definitely female, the view is enchanting. I have a few favourites among the regular, daily passers-by and I keenly watch out for them, sorely disappointed when they sometimes don't show up at their expected hours.

I heard about a guy who set up a camera at a window of his office, recording that point-of-view of the activity on the street below him for 12 years. I'm told he calls it a work in progress. I once had a video camera with me for a week, and never having had access before to such a piece of equipment for so long a time, I filmed life from my window at all times of the day and night. It was fascinating to see what I'd filmed when I played back the tape. After about three days, I began to notice a recurring feature in the film – people carting loads, carrying burdens. Animals too, though not as many and as frequently. The other interesting feature that showed up was of people using public and private transport, the interaction of humans and machinery. Candid camera if you please.

At this point in time, at 11:54 tonight, three yellow vehicles of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, outfitted as tankers with swivel arms and pipes, are making enough of a racket to wake the dead as they clean the drains of this junction my window opens out on to. Yellow taxis are parked strategically around this 6-point crossing, and the sodium vapour street lamps give Vivekananda a dirty yellow tinge. There are about 12 lamps at this road junction and at night the view is remarkably jaundiced.

I'm listening to Donovan, once, and unfairly known as the Dylan of Britain. Wonder where he is today? Two of the songs in the compilation I have are aptly suitable to this piece I'm writing. The following are lyrics from Season of the Witch, “When I look out my window, so many sights to see / And when I look in my window, so many different people to be / That is strange, so strange...”. The other is Mellow Yellow, “I'm just mad about Saffron, And she's just mad about me / They call me Mellow Yellow...”. Both colours figure in this open window topic of mine but probably not the way Mr Leitch imagined it.

(Ah! Google and Wikipedia have informed me in 14 seconds that Donovan, though afflicted by a tendency to keep disappearing off the musical map every so often, released an album in 2004 called Beat Café. What I didn't know was that he apparently was a great friend of The Beatles and collaborated on songs with them. Well, well... don't you just love trivia?)

One of the streets which meet at this junction is directly in my line of sight across the traffic island. It leads south into the super built-up density of Behala, but more importantly, it acts as a passage for the wonderful southern breezes which Calcutta is blessed with most of the year. A scientifically informed person told me it's known as the Venturi effect. Let's not get into an overdose of trivia though... Suffice it to say, during the monsoon, the breeze is cool and damp and even if I could afford an air conditioner, I wouldn't need one with this breeze blowing through my open window.

Open Window 1

I may have a problem. I get claustrophobic if all the windows are closed in the room I'm in. Regardless of the weather, at least one window should be partially open. In heavy rain as well. A few raindrops never hurt anyone...

The window of my room looks out on to the busiest part of the locality I live in. It is a junction where six roads meet around an eye-shaped traffic island that has recently been renovated. The island has a statue of Swami Vivekananda painted in a glossy shade of virulent saffron. SV in stone faces west-north. He has his back to two much smaller statues painted in glossy milk-white which too have their backs to him and they face south-east. I wonder if it's some Vaastu influenced positioning. Strange... These two figurines in their typically seated position on the gate-posts of this little island are those of Shri Ramakrishna and Ma Sharada Devi, SV's real life gurus. SV's statue is in the middle where the pupil of the eye should be and is enclosed by carefully tended foliage of different shades of green. Somehow the designer of this installation has managed to fit in the colours of the national flag into the whole scheme of things. When dusk arrives, a man comes and switches on lights which shine on spraying fountains that ring the railings enclosing the island and its occupants. Every morning, another man balances on the locked iron gate and religiously garlands the statues of Ramakrishna and Sharada, after removing the dried garlands from the day before. The island and garden are ornamental, and the public cannot enter or use it. It serves no purpose other than to minimally regulate the heavy, unruly, constant traffic flowing noisily around it and under the view from my first floor open window.

A friend once commented, after visiting for the first time, that if we could somehow mute the noise of traffic, the sight could be akin to an acid trip without taking recourse to LSD. I had to agree. The noise is deafening. The roar of buses, horn-happy drivers, revving engines, broken exhaust pipe mufflers, loud voices of passers-by and irate drivers are a fugue in cacophony.

The world passes by under my window. People... Animals... Things... Somewhere between 2 and 4 am there is a distinct respite in the traffic noise and the streets are eerily empty of human life. Stray dogs rule then, and once a week a man herds goats down the road, presumably to be slaughtered. The patter of their hooves on the tarmac sounds ghostly when I'm in bed in the dark. The sodium vapour street lamp casts a glow through my open window that etches pictures from my imagination into the ambience.

One night, awakened by the strained growling of a diesel engine under tremendous stress that was rattling the glass panes and causing seismic vibrations to course through the walls of my building, I looked out to see a lorry carrying three huge, thick logs of wood trundling off. As the noise began to fade into an echo, leaving behind a hollow silence, I turned to return to bed when jingling bells suddenly punctuated that emptiness. The moment was surreal. In my sleepy state, as if in the grip of some psychotropic substance, I watched a small wooden cart drawn by an emaciated pony, carrying milk canisters, canter around the corner and up another street. The bells were strung along the harness, and their sound was an amazing contrast to the lorry's that had just gone by.

In retrospect, that scene was a film noir camera moment from a B-grade movie with nothing available to record it but my mind. I imagine the long, terrified scream of a woman in the silence left behind by the horse's bells. Cut to shadowy presence in darkened window looking down on street from where scream originated.

Imagine a Google-less World!

Google is quite amazing. Really! Okay, even if I do state the obvious... Well to move on, I had loads of time to kill and a good broadband connection, so after idly updating the Google taskbar on Firefox (there's an update out for this also for those who want to know), I googled an old girlfriend's name, someone I still carry a torch for. And guess what? To state the obvious in boring repetition, I found a reference to her on the 7th page.

Now I expected her reference to be in the category she specialised in as a professional, but no, her name came up in an associate site of bharatmatrimony.com. Surprise, surprise! It was an endorsement from her husband, and he spoke about how they connected through BM, a fairly detailed account of him and HER meeting, and how they married eventually.

Amazing, huh? They call this the Age of Information Explosion. They say there's an overload of information, often overkill. But we can never have enough, can we?

Can you imagine a world without Google? I shudder horrifically!

His Bobness!

Tomorrow Bob Dylan will attain an age of 65 years. O yes! Milestone and all that, for a man who is something of a milestone himself. I first heard him when I was probably ten years old. What I mean is consciously heard him. My young blood in those days wanted The Stones and The Beatles, The Swinging Blue Jeans (“Hippy, Hippy, Shake!” – anyone remember that one?), little knowing what the slightly boring voiced singer of the wind blown anthem meant to those guys! And then one day in my life, Bob Dylan hit me a musical blow I’ve never really recovered from.

That’s almost the same thing that happened to Lou Majaw of Shillong. For the last ten years or more he has been instrumental in planning and organising a BD birthday tribute in the Meghalaya capital. It has also extended itself to a performance by Lou and the Ace of Spades in Calcutta’s Someplace Else. Not exactly an ideal venue (is there any?) but it does till a better one comes up.

Let me also tell you that other than Lou, musicians I respect as much as I do Dylan make up the Ace of Spades. There is of course Nondon on drums, Hiltu-da – Lew Hilt on bass. And the inimitable AJ – Arjun Sen on lead guitar. I also have a slight edge. I know them all at a very personal level and spend a lot of time with them when this show, and similar shows happen. With AJ and Lew living in Delhi, these are great times to get together. So we hung out before the show, rapping and exchanging notes, listening to music, partaking of The Park’s generosity, and waiting for 10 pm when it would be time to go down to SPE.

Nondon arrived punctually as he always does, and some laughs and repartee later, guitars on shoulders, remembering to take their room entry swipe card, we lifted downstairs. SPE was crowded, but it’s such a small space that 10 people can make it look like a full house. Majaw changed the opening song onstage five minutes after they’d decided what it would be upstairs, but that was all right. They’re experienced musicians who can handle any given situation, and I really mean any.

But I will not tell you which songs they sang. If you’re a Dylan freak or fan, they will all be familiar, and if you’re not, then maybe you should have been there. What I will tell you is that they were mostly like what Dylan himself is, a constant reinvention of the known, often drifting off into unexplored places and then finding their way back home. The purists were not happy, but then BD was never a purist either.

Later, post-performance, the band was not happy with the evening. They felt a big hole had been left behind. They are some of the most intensely self-critical guys I’ve seen. It’s what makes them great musicians too. I felt that the energy which comes back from an audience was lacking too. SPE’s greatest failing is this. It is too much of a scene where alcohol intake supersedes the music one comes to listen to. It’s an altogether head banging, feet tapping session rather than a serious listening effort so the band can’t feed off audience response and give back in kind.

Nevertheless a good time was generally had by all (I love this cliché!). Reasons? For some, much money was spent on booze, so they were compelled to. For others, listening to great musicians, who themselves have grown up listening to His Bobness, is in itself a treat to be savoured. And for many of the younger generation, who have not had the opportunity to be intensely exposed to BD and others of his ilk my generation heard, they got their chance at extremely good second-hand lessons.

His Bobness has inspired personal and creative reinvention as much as he did to himself and his art. That’s why the world will always pay tribute to Bob Dylan.

Gour Khyapa!

We hoped that the full moon of Buddha would charge the atmospherics and enrich our evening. We hoped that the heavy “pre-monsoon” showers which inundated the day would not continue in the evening.

Man proposes, god disposes is a convenient adage to use even for the die-hard non-believer.

Buddha Purnima gave us a fleeting glimpse of her rare beauty before she was smudged from our sight by the rain clouds. As soon as that happened, it began to rain, the one thing we desperately hoped would not.

But Gour Khyapa had spoken to the skies, and it did stop after a brief downpour. The rains may have wet the floor, but it did nothing to dampen the spirits of music lovers congregated on the rooftop of one of south Calcutta’s best known landmarks. There were barely twenty people when it was time to start, and there were a hundred when Gour was in full voice.

An enchanted evening was had by all is putting it mildly, even diplomatically. Gour perhaps, is not in full form these days due to his ill-health. Yet he sang, he danced, he made witticisms, and passed often politically incorrect comments; and those who have seen him perform when he was at his peak were reminded of those days of yore. Whatever it was, Gour can still entrance like few performers can.

When I’m at great music shows, I cannot but recall Stevie Wonder’s lyrics from his song ‘Sir Duke’: “Music is a world within itself / It’s a language we all understand”. Gour sang in Bangla, but what did that matter to a large part of last evening’s audience who didn’t know the Bengali language, yet sat there mesmerised? They were captivated by the language of music and that was enough.

Requests poured in from listeners who had heard him perform twenty years ago and would never forget his songs. There were others who sat at his feet and sang every word along with him. A friend, a very able blues harp player who had never heard Gour before, was moved enough to take his harmonica out at one point and jam with the mad Baul. I swear there was a crackle in the air and it had nothing to do with the lightning that scarred the overcast skies!

For those who may not know (and I include my own ignorance), Baul geet is significantly influenced by Hindusthani classical raags and raaginis. However, because of their free ranging spirit and their open minds, Bauls merge one or more raags to create a tune and feel of their own, and add a distinctive flavour that is not possible if one sticks to the classical tradition. Gour is one of those very few learned Bauls who knows the raags or raaginis his songs are based on, and later, after the show, he discussed this aspect at some length with a classically trained musician who had been one of his enchanted audience.

I find it necessary to describe the setting for the show. It perfectly suited the ideas we have about what we would like to do in our interactive project with folk and ethnic musicians.

The stage was the open rooftop of a popular market building flanked by a constantly buzzing flyover that spans the crossroads of the busiest locality of south Calcutta - Gariahat. Our neighbour was the police thana. In addition to us, the silent spectators of the show were a multitude of beautifully nurtured potted plants, the angular steel structures of giant billboards, a cellular phone tower, the slatted façade of a huge AC cooling tower, and the squat ugly boxes of smaller air conditioners. Random sacks of cement and stacks of new bricks were unintentional art installations which enhanced the sculpted setting. It was as urban an ambience as you could get.

The audience was urbane, most comfortable when speaking English. The performer was a man from rural Bengal, who in the first few moments gauged his listeners, peeped into our souls with his vast experience, his understanding from the philosophy he lives, and then sang for us because we wanted to listen.

When Gour Khyapa sings even the gods pause to listen.

****

Once it stopped raining at 8 we had no rain till midnight, and then we had to regretfully pack up amongst protests, requests, and promises for future shows.
___________________________

The first two photos are by Santayan. My sincere thanks to him.

Bauls

The pronunciation does not rhyme with Gauls, and so should not lead to adolescent humour as it did when I told someone about this community of wandering minstrels from Bengal, and he had difficulty pronouncing it. It is Ba-ools, more or less.

The Bauls are more than wandering minstrels. They are philosophers, mystics, observers and commentators, rebels; and by their own admission, mad. However, this lunacy is not the kind that warrants psychiatric or psychological attention. It is the madness of the man seeking his “inner being” through his love of god. Again, this god is of no particular denomination, and Bauls can be from Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist religious communities and any beliefs in between. Defining their belief system is itself a major task.

The Bauls’ music is simple and evocative. But it also has hidden meaning in straightforward, sometimes off-the-cuff, lyrics. They pluck out examples from normal, human daily living to sing of the oneness that must be achieved in mind, body and spirit so that we can all live a life of divine sustenance. The Bauls tradition is oral and so the language of their songs change with the times they are in, making them of great and instant appeal to the common man and intellectual alike.

There’s plenty more about Bauls, but I will end this post with just one more fact.

Today, May 9, is Rabindra Jayanti, Rabindranath Tagore’s birth anniversary. Tagore, as a poet-musician-philosopher, derived immense inspiration from Baul music and it greatly influenced many of his compositions and thinking. In fact, people with musical sensibilities and interests should not forget that Tagore was probably one of the first “world” musicians. While his learning was in the Indian classical tradition, he broke away from its rigidity and incorporated Baul, Bhatiyali, Murshidi and other Bengali folk and ethnic music influences, as well as used his understanding of Western classical and other music from Britain to add those distinctive flavours in his music, which thankfully, was not the mass-produced “fusion” of today.

In Bangla, the term “baul mon” (literally, the baul’s mind) depicts the state of mind when everything that is material and of this world is left behind to seek that certain spiritual realm, forever out of our grasp.

Look out for my future post on The Bauls of Bengal

For all those rock music fans: Garth Hudson of The Band recorded Purna Das Baul in the late 60s and an album was released called Bauls at The Big Pink. Anyone got it?


Painting by Jamini Roy

Look out for my future posts on the Bauls and use the link
Bull's Run on this page if you'd like to see a private performance of the Baul, Gour Khyapa on Buddha Purnima, 13th May 2006.

Age

I have commenced living the 49th year of my life.

What is that supposed to signify? Forty plus years of ignorance and bliss? More than forty years of swimming around in a shallow pond? Over forty years of never knowing the difference? Forty nine years of experience gained and lessons learned?

Age has the notion of becoming a millstone around one’s neck. Certain behaviour, certain wisdom, certain expectations make demands on one merely because one has reached a chronological point in time in one’s otherwise insignificant life. Suddenly, what you are most expected to share are memories.

As you age it becomes a barrier to re-employment. Age significantly reduces one’s physical capabilities. Age diminishes possibilities of getting financial aid and income opportunities. Age debars one from insurance, and reassurance. Age gets you back-handed compliments. It earns you wary respect, often condescending.

So who needs to age? As The Man said, who said almost everything that my generation had to say, wanted to say, never thought of saying, I want to be "Forever Young"! Or, just be ageless...?

Eyes

Eyes are fascinating features of we humans. I see more of a person through their eyes than from their conversation.

Young eyes see better
They know who I am
They watch very carefully
And don’t give a damn.

Older eyes know better
Though myopic in sight,
Years of watching everything
Have let them see the light.

Ancient eyes in cataract
Don’t want to see anymore,
And in their mind’s eye
They’d rather, remember days of yore.

My eyes watch in silence
In my head the voices speak,
I watch the watcher watching
And drown in the depths of sleep.

Magic

Another of my attempts at verse!

Deep in the heartland,
In the forest that entraps the night
Under its leafy shade,
In the hollows beneath rocks,
In streams where the water sounds,
And my fingers in it can feel the wet,
I look for magic.

On a stage stuffed with gimmickry,
Lit bright, as nimble fingers prestidigitate,
Simulate wizardry,
In the wide open eyes
Of child and adult in me,
As my breathing pauses –
I look for magic.

In the silent sanctuary of a church,
Behind the oil lamps in a temple,
In the moonwashed smoky night of a flaming pyre,
Beneath the high eaves of ancient caves carved in love,
I seek the truth,
I burst my skin,
I look for magic.

In the house, on the street,
And on the grinding tram beneath my feet,
In the hushed halls of education,
In the warp and weft of celebration,
I look for magic
In the wrong places.
The magic is in me.