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.

ammamma

I went to my grandmother’s place to spend my break from college, its onam over here. The festival of all malayalees……….

My grandmother lives with my uncle and his wife at a small town called cherthala. She’s a retired school teacher.she’s also the most efficient, fun person I can remember. Even though she’s retired and nearly 80 she calls the shots at her house. She does all the house work alone with a little assistance from her daughter in law for whom she has utmost contempt(no offense). My poor aunt is no match for the fiery personality of my grandma. That does not mean she’s mean to her. She just ……..how do i put it, tolerates very patiently the irritation that she suffers due to the unworldliness of my aunt.

Any way, I hopped on a bus this Monday and went off to visit my ammamma. She’s one cool grandmother and the many summers of my child hood that I spent with her are the most delightful experiences I ever had. I never knew my grandfather, who passed away due to a heart attack when my mom was in college. my ammamma brought up my mom and her three young siblings all on her own. She maintained the family property, married off all her children including the youngest, her only boy in true Indian fashion…then she shed her strict rule over her children and made her home a heaven for her grand kids. she can put any teenager to shame with her bustling energy and the discipline and vigour with which she approaches any task in front of her…..one busy bee she is, a clever one too…she has all the right tricks up her sleeve, from handling her troublesome domestic help to showing us kids how to have a goodtime………

I reached there Monday afternoon and scrambled up the back porch in the rain. expecting her to be cooking up roast fish by her antiquated little kitchen with its stone stove with wood burning in it. I called out to her and saw her emerge from her room down the hall from the kitchen and dining area. She had a book in her hand and her reading glasses on. Her face lit up and her familiar voice called ‘aa…..ethiyo?..’ she laughed. She had been waiting even though I hadn’t called to tell I her I’d come that day. I felt like I had come home at last. The murky life back with my parents shed off and my mind restored for a second….she talked in her witty style, cracking me up with her humour.she had been reading in her room, trying to beat the rain which was playing spoilsport with her onam plans. "I was sewing earnestly all of last evening, I even missed a good movie that your uncle brought home…I sat in my room and sewed up everything there was to sew in this house"…she said with a smile… " then I woke up this morn and I can’t even sit up….this is what I get for my sincere pains!" she said in her familiar banter and I started laughing again…its going to be a good onam.

I called up my two cousins who were in town. They said they’ll get there that evening. By then my grandma had got a big fire going in her kitchen. she was out of gas due ‘wicked pilferers’ in her gas company , but ever the soldier, she was cooking everything on her traditional wood fed stove and a little contraption called ‘the mannanna aduppu’the extinct kerosene stove…… the strong smells and flavours of her spices mixed with the comforting warm smell of smoke wafted out of the blackened chimney. …

I changed into the salwar kameez which I had bought especially for her sake. You see, my grand mother prefers to see me dressed like a young woman than like a brat in shorts which is my style back home. So eventhough I came wearing a jeans I needed to blend into the country side in order not to offend. Nobody messes with ammamma’s rules!……..

Soon enough the dining table was set and I sat down to lunch with my aunt and uncle. As always my plate contained enough food for three and on top of it ammamma served her delicious curries. Fried fish, cooked fish in coconut, tangy white mango curry with coconut gravy…the works……

my grandmother never sits down to lunch with the rest of us.she runs around the table serving food. she makes sure everyone’s done, she then cleans her kitchen, takes a shower and then eats at a kitchen side in peace.thats her style.rarely, she sits down with all the women folk during gettogethes where all the ladies waitill their husbands and kids to clear out so they can gossip and eat in a peaceful pace.but today I ate with my uncle who runs a hardware and building material store on the street where my grandma’s house stands and of course my dull aunt. I felt suffocated. My uncle, a tall goodlooking man with all my grandma’s fine features in a much darker shade, tried to make small talk, but it burnt out soon and I fled to the safety of the kitchen…..

he evening saw the coming of my cousins, a brother sister duo born to my mom’s younger sister ‘vava’…that means ‘baby’ in English… ammamma’s face brightened up further and she busied herself making sure we were well fed… new delicacies and onam dishes emerged. We followed her around , fascinated by her quickness, and eager to help. We skinned onions, ground dried spices and cut raw plantains to make chips….all done squatting on the kitchen verandah on ammamma’s low wooden stools only two or three inches high. In the mornings we went around picking flowers with her and made up designs with them on the courtyard. Every now and then she’d disappear and then emerge with more flowers in her hand and new design suggestion….

bus ride....

I live an adventure everyday. And I don’t mean it in the romantic, ‘my life’s great!’ kinda way at all. The thought occurred to me while commuting to my home from college in a bus with people bursting out through its doors and windows. Hanging from the rails at the door, almost fainting due to the congestion and suffocation inside ; Holding on to dear life while the driver showed off the precision of his brakes (ouch! That really hurt) and his skills at overtaking speeding buses which , unlike our bus, didn’t have the entire population of Kochi inside them.

you think you know who you are but you will be surprised at how many more times selfish, snobbish and cheaper you are until you’ve traveled in one of the ‘private’ buses in the rush hours. Boy, won’t that be revelation! There I was , this evening, waiting for the bus to come take me home. Feeling good about myself. Confident, socially conscious, principled young woman that I am. And then came the bus. It stops reluctantly a mile away from the bus stop. I forget my sophisticated airs and run to the ramshackle vehicle. Many older, hardened ‘chechis’ push and shove to get in first. I wait patiently with an unsteady look on my face. There’s no seat in there! Where are you people rushing to?!. "Get in there fast", the bus conductor growled and I jumped in. the bus was sufficiently crowded. I found a comfortable place to lean on through my hour long commute. the bus reached the next bus stop. A group, well, a mob of students waited at the stop for the same bus just the way I had waited a while before. How my heart fell as the we stopped to let them in. my social conscience and basic humanity evaporated at the thought of being squeezed in further by all those annoying people. I checked myself. They’re people too. They need to get home just like you do. Crap!

My body feels pricked by strangers' touch, their smells, the sweat. The girl in front of me has long frizzy hair. It keeps getting into my face. I fight hard to keep it out of my mouth. I make clear signs of displeasure. She looks at me. What’s she supposed to do? The bus is crowded beyond all imagination. The old ladies keep complaining. Why don’t theses people shut up?

I hungrily eye the group who’s to get off at the next stop. My legs will give away any second now. I keep trying to prevent myself from falling into the lap of the old lady at the adjacent seat. People are getting out now. I politely move to let them go. How I wish I had had the guts to rush for their seats. Its all gone now. How did these people manage to grab those empty seats so fast?.....the rest of the people seem to expand to take up the vacant spaces. I can’t find my feet. My hair’s a mess. I smell like an old currency note.

The bus conductor kept shouting for his money. Old, hardened ladies shouted for him to shut his mouth up as they tried to fish out notes from their bags. The exertion had left me drained. I tried to keep myself conscious by reading the hoardings outside and talking to myself in my head about the others who crowded beside me. A lady coughs. A small child started to non stop. Right when I thought it was getting easier. ‘would you shut that thing up?’ I shout into my head. I’m never having children.

I passed my measly change to the conductor. He eyes me suspiciously. ‘student concession’ . he accusingly thrusts the ticket into my hands. ‘you should be paying me for traveling in your mad truck I tell him in my head. Humph…!

Can’t you drive this thing any faster?........ are we there yet?...