Bad Hair Day

Why do bad things always happen to me? This was the only thought on my mind today as I sat in front of a mirror at my hair dresser’s. Let me recap.

I’d been thinking of getting a haircut for a while. Just a haircut, no big deal. So off I went today, to the same ‘beauty parlour’ I’ve been going to since I was an atom. It’s a homey little place, run by a frail middle aged woman who watches Malayalam soaps as she watches over as her assistants beautify her customers. It was a busy day; the assistant girls were running around, picking up this and that. One was bend over a young girl, dutifully scraping off her bushman eyebrows with a tricky little arrangement consisting of a long thread held tight between her teeth. The technician twists this thread with her hands and runs it over her customer’s eyebrows, pulling out each eyebrow hair. The sight reminded me of the time when I allowed myself to be tortured thus once. Ouch! The things women have to do make themselves appealing to hairy men. Do men even care about eyebrows? Has anyone asked?

The beauty parlour matron looked up from a facial she was supervising and asked me what I wanted to do. Haircut… a U or a step ? “Hmm.. I don’t know” , I stammered. I tried my best to explain the vague idea that I had fantasized over with carefully chosen words and wild hand movements. “Get a U cut’ she said. “No I want a little flare here and some layer here and I ..” I started off again. The assistant who was waiting to pluck my feathers looked anxiously at me and then her mistress. Sensing the desperation, I gave up.“oh never mind, just cut it off ”

The haircutting section was familiar territory to me. I looked to see if the calendar with twelve Chinese faces demonstrating hairstyles unattainable by normal people was still in place. Yup, there it was, right where I can stare at it while I got my miserable mane cut off. The hair dresser sat me down on the chair and covered me up with a yellow protective fabric with a cool Velcro strap to hold it in place around my neck. She then proceeded to spray and shake up my head. I relaxed and started flipping the magazine in front of me. I feel so important!

Then the battle started.

Ever noticed how after an unpleasant experience, our mind forgets it very fast or dims the memory a little? Then you will find yourself spot on the same situation again and the recollection will hit you on your face with a saucepan. Well that’s what happened as the hairdressing started. The woman pulled my poor hair, pushed my head down and poked me on the scalp with a stupid clip as she tried to hold my hair in place! I had gone through all this before and suddenly realized why I hadn’t got a hair cut in the last six months.

The mild torture was interrupted as she called in another assistant to hold my hair up as she cut around it. There we were, these two women holding up my hair as I watched at the mirror half amused and half anxious. As this circus was going on, a messenger arrived. Someone had called for one of the hair dressers (the main one of course) looking down on me; her mother was sick and she was wanted at home. The scissors shook in the woman’s hands. “Oh damn! My hair..”

“Who called? Why didn’t you tell me earlier?, I heard the phone ringing ten minutes ago…” the affected woman yelled at the girl who brought the message. I looked about the room, petrified. “er… maybe someone else could finish this ..” I suggested feebly. “I can’t go now, I have to finish this, its hair; I can’t leave it midway” the hairdresser declared, without paying me any attention. The woman has no intention of leaving to see her ailing mother; probably on her death bed, waiting for one last look at her daughter. I was screwed. Why? Why me? The lady kept cutting my hair at an unnatural pace. I looked at the mirror anxiously as she aired her grievances in an agitated voice to all around. Snip snip snip. I will be lucky to get out of here with my head in one piece.

Of all the people in the world, this had to happen to me. The old bat had to fall sick while her daughter was cutting my hair; my hair which hadn’t been cut for six months. The snipping continued, interrupted at intervals by more phone calls. Finally with another flourish it was almost done. “Is this fine? Do you want me to cut a little more off the back?’ the ‘aggrieved’ daughter asked cheerfully. “Ah, no it’s just the way I wanted” I said without a glance and jumped out of the chair. Phew!

Anything can happen.

I opened my eyes for a split second and sank my head back into the pillow to escape the weary morning’s coming. The day was impatient to begin its routine.I turned around to sneak my head beneath the pillow, then pulled the blanket over myself and waited for sleep. The day ahead crowded into my head in a procession of images. Breakfast, bus, books, buildings; another enactment of yesterday and the day before and the one before that. My eyes were already awake beneath their lids.

I turned around in desperation and opened my eyes, still covered by the blanket. The sheet was white over my eyes. That’s weird; my blanket was cream with giant brick colored monstrous flowers. I sat up in confusion. The sheet was indeed white. I pulled it off of me. the white dress I had worn to bed last night, which looks like an elongated T-shirt, as though it was stitched for Tree beard, was splashed with big brick colored flowers all over. I tried to rub it off, but before I could understand what was happening, the strange light in the room forced me to look up at the ceiling. The fan fluttered with its usual “taduk taduk” motion. It lay suspended by an endless cord which stretched into the bright blue morning sky. My ceiling was gone. I looked around. The walls were intact and everything was in place, though in a confused mass of colours. I had curtain flowered walls, wall colored curtains and a shocking door with a myriad colored doormat pattern painted over it. I jumped off the bed, and still staring at the sky overhead, ran out of the room. The ceiling of the rest of the house was as I had left them lat night. I ran back into my room. A crow flew past lazily. I shoved my feet into my slippers, which had the floor tiles pasted on to the sole by the way, and ran out into the front yard and looked at the roof of the house. From outside everything looked normal, the roof was intact where my room was supposed to be. No holes. I ran back into my room to find the sky still there inside, seemingly stretching forever above me. Mom was in the room, stacking the clothes from yesterday’s laundry into my cupboard. Was she blind? “Go get ready” she said as she picked up what looked like an ‘inside out’ book from the floor and put it on my table on her way out. What was happening?.........................

Karma

Growing up, I was fortunate enough to not be burdened with the concept of sin; things were right and wrong of course, but lying to your brother about the number of chocolates you took out of the fridge didn’t necessarily mean that you will have to spend eternity in vats of boiling oil being deep fried with a pitchfork sticking to the back. After being introduced to Indian mythology at a relatively young age, I began to speculate on how my daily wanderings would convert into what I would become in my ‘next life’. I had read about kings and heavenly creatures being reborn as ordinary guys, lowly animals or other unsavory creatures. So if I kept up my hobby of climbing over the compound wall long enough, maybe I would end up a hairy green monkey. Fantastic! Slowly though, I inevitably came to believe in the tit for tat, instantaneous justice of ‘karma’ as they call it.

The best thing about karma was of course that it made sense. Like any basic law in the universe, it balanced all things we did. Do good things and good things happen to you, do bad things and you lose your phone at the department store or fall on your face while getting out of the bus. Simple, straight forward and easy to follow.

Karma was working out perfectly for me. It didn’t keep me out of evil ways but it did give an incentive to good deeds And all bad things, all the terrible acts I did were done with full knowledge that it was all coming back one of these days. All was fine for a while, then bam! It was payback time. And a new dilemma emerged. Now, I have hurt people, I have made terrible errors of judgment. So when the same things happen to me, I know where it’s coming from. But the problem is, does knowing that take away my right to try and dodge the misfortunes approaching me? Believing in karma, do I fight it? Or do I take karma lying down, allowing it to balance out all my evils? Hmmm.

Think again.

Right when you think you know all there’s to know about the people around you, they’ll throw up he biggest of surprises. Being young and snobbish I happen to think the older freedom struggler generation and the latest technology could never really go together. Until this happened.

Recently my dad’s mom, my grandmother, turned seventy something, I’m not sure which exactly, but its on the wrong side of 75 (I know, I should know these things, but that’s not the point..) so my dad, always enthusiastic about buying gifts, decided to get her ..a mobile phone! Everyone in the family pooh poohed the idea of course, especially me and my brother who had a hard time comprehending why a guy who took five years of going back and forth before buying us phones could come up with such an idea !

A phone, that too for our paternal grandmother who dropped off from school in the 3^rd standard and whose life revolves around her beloved cows, her spinach farm and an obsession with temples of all kind. The fact that a similar experiment with my very educated, very cool, retired headmistress maternal grandmother had failed miserably wasn’t very encouraging either.

But dad was adamant, so off we went to the mobile phone store, and bought a very basic easy to use phone for my grandma whose closest encounter with technology is probably the TV and the electronic voting machine. Then we dutifully filled the speed dial with contacts of all my grandma’s our off springs. In the evening dad went off to present the phone to her and to give her instructions on using it. He came back happy with grandma’s response and we all felt pretty optimistic that at least we’ll be able to call her on her very own phone rather than depend on the ‘land line’. Soon we all forgot about it.

Then one morning a week later, my mobile phone started vibrating me off my bed at bloody 6 in the morning. I flipped it open and it’s a call from grandma ! She was calling to ask whether I and my brother would be coming to the ancestral temple at kumbhalanghi for a ritual. I said something and passed the phone to my dad. From then on there was no looking back. Apparently my nearly eighty, almost illiterate grandma was taking the phone everywhere she went. We got calls from her as she temple hopped all the way to palani and guruvayoor and god knows where else. Dad was ecstatic at the success of his 'mission bring mama to 21st century'.

All was well for a while, the family rejoiced at their 'forward' thinking.But recently the phone has become an eyesore for my uncle and aunt with whom my granny lives at the old house. Now, my grandma’s a very stubborn little lady-a tough nut-so now, whenever a little tiff happens between her and my uncle, my dad’s mobile would ring off the hook. An endless stream of complaints would burst forth. Then dad would spent time pacifying her. Same goes with my aunts as well, one little thing – temple festivals, an abundant harvest of chikkoos or yams to give away, another fight with my uncle – and grandma’ll hit the speed dial! I started feeling a whole lot of respect for the lady. She had lived all her life taking care of a tough husband and four children and an endless stream of pet cows. Yet she had defied all our expectations and embraced the new technology like a pro. The only people miffed are my uncle and aunt. They’re apparently tired of granny calling all the people we know and complaining about this and that at home!... (She even called the temple priest up on his mobile phone and complained that my uncle never took her anywhere! ) so now my uncle always thinks twice before saying anything insensitive to my grandma which could potentially throw her into a phone rage… go grandma!... a woman liberated :)

smoke

I’ve heard that when we face death, our whole life would pass before us in a flash. One flash. A single moment when all the moments that touched us flicker one last time in our eyes.

Made me wonder what I will see if I was to face death today. Life seems so long and endless sometimes but the moments I’ve lived, truly lived, are so few and far between. Almost twenty years of life and what have I felt? Large stretches of my life are like air trapped in an empty bottle in the attic. No ripples, no fragrance, no rising dust. Then one of those moments happen when time that had stood still until then suddenly becomes real. But soon the sudden tide settles and the waters become still until another one hits.

If death were to stare at me in the face right at this moment what would I remember? What would flash? Maybe the sudden joy when mom and not the maid came to school to pick me up after school just once in kindergarten. The numbness when in my head as my dad lifted a four year old me, covered in blood from a gash on the forehead, and ran as he waved to halt a bus to take me to the emergency room. Running wildly through the light and shade of the old acacia trees in the old school court yard with the best of friends. The sudden shock when a trail of red down my legs took away a childhood and left me with secrets to keep and things to hide. Moments of warmth, sitting on the rails of the school bus stop, samosas in hand, talking about anything and everything. Whistles. Blushes. Waking up to the song of birds outside and walking out into the morning to discover a world changed by the night’s downpour. Other moments when you die a little, when the bed room door slams and the room fills with hate and the pink pillows become wet. Some moments stand out , those of hope, of peace. The flash of smile on grandma’s face as I walk unexpected through her smoked kitchen door, that feeling of having come home. A walk on the beach, a lonely sunset. Moments that make one dream.

Twenty years leaves one with a handful of moments. As though life existed only for a few short seconds, as though the rest was smoke. There’s no reason to crib about the loss of time then. No reason to pound at the watch as you wait for a friend on the park bench. Life happens it its own sweet time. A year lost in idleness? What does it matter? Was there one moment in it to cherish? Then you’re compensated.

Life’s co-everything ;) gone off the track a lil....

Girls only colleges are wild. I know, coz I’m in one. As someone who has spent more than three years of the my life’s prime in a unisex world after livin it up for 12 years good old co-ed , its time now to retrospect, to stare back at what a girls only life has done to me.

When I first joined a girls-only institution for the first time for my 12 th grade, I told myself that I would hate it. And I did. For a while. A whole bunch of girls, all rule abiding and prim and proper and shiny. I hated it. I swore I would run away and join a co ed for college. But life, as always , went on with its own plans and I found my self, standing in front of those same gates as I entered college life. No guys, no nothing!

I’ve always prayed for a sister. I think I didn’t make it sufficiently clear to god. He gave me whole lot of them, made of coffee brown hoods and hearts of stone and gravel(there are good ones, but they’re too busy saving the poor to have time to herd a bunch of unruly teens). Any ways, the thing about a girls-only college is that any thing goes here. And I mean anything. Our teachers can tell us the most outrageously stupid things and we’ll do it just like that. We don’t revolt. We don’t hold flags or shout slogans, and when there’s a student strike all over the state, we go to class like school kids. How many times have we prayed for some students revolutionaries (read boys… men , I mean) to come disrupt our classes and liberate us. How we’ve rejoiced when student politicians came to college on strike days and forcibly stopped classes!...oh how we adored them, even though we acted like we didn’t care.

Like most people who grew up in kerala and in a co ed school, I wasn’t physically expressive when it came to loving my friends. I never hugged or went ‘mwaah…’ or jumped up and down when I saw my friends. My way of showing love or affection was to show nothing at all. But when you come to a girls’college, prepare to be loved. The really hard way. These people will hug you every second of the day and kiss you on both cheeks whenever you meet them. Hell, we hug our teachers because we don’t know any other way to show them that we love them. We hug our ayah ‘aunties’. If you’re down one day we’ll squeeze you till you chuckle. I realized I had truly lost touch with the ‘real’ world when I found myself hugging away crazy at my stiff typical malayalee cousins and even my brother and dad and mom, whom I haven’t touched since I was a child! That’s love, girls’ only style. We get carried away with it sometimes and end up shocking our ‘normal’ friends who go to co eds, with our outrageously ‘forward’behavior’…

To be continued…

gods own,,,,,

Once upon a time in kerala, backpacking, white skinned, tourists were a rare sight. We malayalees used to peer at them with wide eyes from wayside teashops, children used to wave wildly at the ‘madhamma’ and ‘sayippu’ who rode past in motorbikes.

But it took only a few years for everything to change. India soon became ‘incredible’ and our very own kerala became ‘God’s own country’ (god help those who coined the term). Tourists and travelers now land on our shores by the tons. Bus loads of air conditioned tourists and hippy backpackers and bikers zoom past us everyday as they hop from resort to resort. Tourism has become one of the most hyped up industries in the country and thanks to vigorous ad campaigns; the ‘tourist’ is no longer a rarity. In the desperate bid of a developing nation to up its economic ‘progress’, tourism has gained tremendous importance and in many instances the down sides of the industry are conveniently neglected.

Take a look at kerala for instance. Every village in kerala worth its weight in coconut palms has now declared itself a tourist destination. Village dames arm themselves with ‘kayi kotti kali’ , tourism committees round up cricket playing boys to teach them traditional crafts and give them ‘stipends’ to keep them from running away; All in a bid to fit into the stereotyped image of a ‘typical’ village without any thought given to the carrying capacity ,infrasrtructure, waste management or resource availability..

Most tourists who come to kerala are people who travel with tour companies and visit a handful of places in the little time they have. The destinations frequented by such travelers have become special zones where every thing that’s anything is tailored to suit the needs of tourists; every shop sells over priced handicrafts, fake antiques and kashmiri shawls, every things packaged to suit the attention spans and interests of the traveler. From dumbed down versions of the kathakali to fake ayurvedic massages, every thing is standardized so that the local population’s identity and culture becomes a commodity to be packaged and sold. The influx of outsiders in search of lucrative tourism revenue and the sudden changes in living costs and lifestyle push out much of the local population.

As the number of visitors increase beyond the carrying capacity of an area, the local population slowly loses access to its own resources and end up as second class citizens. Already in most of the best selling tourist destinations, land prices have become so high due to large-scale buying by big companies that none of the local population could dream of buying a cent more of the land in which they grew up. Even in places which don’t really have much to offer to a tourist, mere rumours of ‘tourism development’ have pushed up land prices. Along with this, other resources like water are also depleted due to pollution and large scale exploitation.

Leave aside the pollution and resource depletion and skyrocketing land prices caused by uncontrolled tourism, what is most shocking is the fact that we Indians, the native population are slowly becoming unwelcome at the most hyped up tourist destinations and resorts. Instances are many when local population is turned away with various excuses from eateries and wayside cafes which target easy to please foreign travelers who would pay outrageous sums to sit in the sun and sample anything spicy and ’Indian’. In large resorts and hotels, the staff complains that Indians ‘dirty the place’. One would expect that the four or five figure sum that ‘Indians’ shell out along with the foreigners would ensure equal hospitality too, but then again , we Indians have always been stingy with tips compared to foreigners. All of these along with the unconscious belief in the superiority of white skin embedded deep within the minds of most of us result in a raw deal for domestic travelers and the locals .Unsuspecting Indians can be seen screaming ‘wasn’t what I paid money?’ after being shocked by second class hospitality. What are we coming to when the local population’s rights are compromised for the sake of dollar bills? This form of ‘apartheid’ is slowly growing in our country as the gap between deep pocketed foreigners and ordinary local population widens. Whose country is this? God’s or the tourist’s?

Well may be we do deserve this. We, who have taken away the native lands and livelihoods of the indigenous tribal populations, are now being pushed to the sidelines by others like us. This is God’s country after all.