To Travel or Not To Travel

04Oct09

Four large suitcases, two carry-ons, two laptops and a near-empty house. There were just these minimal things left with us and we were all set to travel. It was three days before we were scheduled to board an Emirates flight to India. The travel preparations were done; couch, TV, TV stand, dining table, chairs, water filter and a lot of other stuff had either been returned – exploiting the 90-day return policy – or sold on the ever-dependent craigslist; and disconnection requests for cable, phone and the utilities had been placed.

That fine Friday afternoon, as I walked into what I thought was just another official meeting, I was told I might have to stay back in San Antonio for some more time, and the final word on that would be by Monday.

So there we were. Me and the wife. Surrounded by four large suitcases, two carry-ons, two laptops and a near-empty house. We asked our community leasing office to hold on to our notice for a few more days because, “We might just have to stay back and my office would let me know soon, thank you for your help today”.

A bounty of mixed feelings ran through us – we would miss the smell of the Texas air, the fragrance of what had been our home for the past six months, the nightly walk down the calm streets of our community, the pool side chairs we unwind ourselves on – or we may stay on and miss none of it for some more time. If missing was sad, not knowing if you would miss or not is awkward. Were we to board flight to India or make our weekly grocery visit to HEB?

A coffee would help, we thought, only to realize we ran out of sugar. We drove to HEB to buy the smallest available pack that would last us just a little while, trying to make optimized use of our limited resources. The hours ticked by, as we waited for the day to move over to the next. And then to the next. We walked over to the patio and kept gazing at the Sunday sun setting over the horizon oh-so-slowly until the large ball of fire sunk deep beyond the visible edge taking the trail of orange clouds along with it. Before we realized, it was dinner time. A limited resources dinner.

For the first time, we eagerly awaited the dawn of the Monday. This Monday was going to brush away the blues, or so we hoped.

Luckily, the proverbial Monday morning was anything but blue. It was official – we were staying back. By evening we had our list of things to do – cancel disconnection requests, buy a TV, TV stand, dining table, chairs, water filter and the lot of other stuff, make our weekly grocery trip to HEB, hang the paintings on the wall, unpack the clothing into the closet, and unpack everything else that needs unpacking.

It was suddenly like we just moved in and have to start setting up the house. After six months of living in this city, in this house, it all seemed just like the day we first moved in – four large suitcases, two carry-ons, two laptops and a near-empty house.

Filed under: Life and Living, Travel   |  1 Comment
Tags: San Antonio

Attending Symphony Concert – Gil Shaham and Carmina Burana

24Sep09

September 19. My Birthday eve. A black limousine in all its shining luxury halted just ahead of us. Two people who would aptly fit to be called “lady and gentleman” alighted from the car and walked through the heavy entrance doors.

As we entered the lobby of the Majestic Theater in Downtown San Antonio, we were greeted by tuxedo and formal-gown clad members who welcomed us with complimentary champagne. The lobby was dimly lit with a low indistinctive noise all around. The traffic was increasing in the narrow East Houston Street and so was the crowd on what was a sold out day of performance.

I never learnt any form of music, but did learn to love all kinds of it. And a long-awaited first visit to a symphony concert was just the moment I knew I was going to cherish for a long time.

Minutes later, we settled down at our seats at the mezzanine level, looking around in awe at the magnificent theater. The ceiling was dark blue spotted with tiny lights giving an open-sky feel. The noise wasn’t ceasing anytime soon with people flocking in trying to make their way through the dim lights. A few musicians began taking their places, some working on the passages they needed to polish before the performance with no regard to what other musicians were practicing. It was fun listening to those random notes from violins, cellos, tambourines and trumpets mingled in no specific order.

As the conductor walked swiftly into his position, there was a sudden silence almost giving an eerie feel. Without much ado, the performance started with the American National Anthem. As we were about to retire to our seats, the conductor walked back with Gil Shaham – the Illinois-born Israeli violinist who won a Grammy Award in 1999 for Best Chamber Music Performance. The next 45 minutes was a treat to the soul as Gil Shaham unleashed an Allegro.

The best part was only about to start. If you’ve ever listened to an erstwhile Old Spice ad, or more recently, the introductory music in Michael Jackson’s History DVD collection, you would know what, arguably, is the most famous piece of music ever composed. Carmina Burana is a manuscript of 254 poems and dramatic texts in Latin from the 11th or 12th century. Between 1935 and 1936, Carl Orff composed the cantata Carmina Burana based on 24 of the poems found in the original Carmina Burana manuscript.

The drum rolled and the choir began singing the best known piece of the composition – the opening section, O Fortuna. I could feel the nerves tingle, like what only music could do to you – as if I had just fallen head over heels in love all over again. (Music is one of the things V wouldn’t mind me falling in love with). Although the Latin words were hard to follow, the translation ran on the screen suspended on top of the stage that made it possible to make an English-sense to the performance.

Carmina Burana was performed for about 70 minutes. The standing ovation that followed was an experience of a lifetime, as we joined the audience in a nonstop applause lasting almost five full minutes.

That brought it just a few minutes to midnight, and it was a privilege having celebrated the most unique birthday party – with Gil Shaham and Carmina Burana!

Filed under: Arts and Music, Life and Living   |  1 Comment
Tags: Carmina Burana, Gil Shaham, San Antonio, Symphony

Memories of 9/11

15Sep09

“Imagine how different the skyline would’ve been with the twin towers?” V said walking across the top deck aboard a ferry to the Statue of Liberty. The New York City skyline towered majestically across the horizons, albeit the missing jewel in its crown.

9/11. How household those numbers have become. Across countries, cultures, languages and History books, henceforth, the number 9/11 can only mean one thing. I was sitting in my little Madurai University hostel room on 9/11/2001. It was late Tuesday evening and I had just returned back from the classes and switched on the TV with a few cookies to give me company. CNN was Breaking the News. There was smoke bellowing out of one of the towers and the rest of the disaster was just about to unfold.

Soon a crowd joined around me, open mouthed, unable to believe they were actually watching live pictures streaming 10,000 miles across the globe and not Hollywood graphics. When the North tower fell as if it were submerging into the ground below – the TV showed a journalist with his camera on, running frantically into Liberty Street trying to escape the raining debris. “Oh My God!”, we chorused incoherently.

The Empty Space where the towers once stood. As seen from the Liberty Street.

We walked across the WTC Memorial Site and past the Liberty Street, as I shared my memories of 9/11/2001 with V. We stood watching the empty space that was once a hub of action, that now felt like a dent on the planet. Life around seemed business-as-usual. Scores of tourists walking in and out of the Millennium Hilton, some taking pictures of the empty space. Probably it’s the only instance where the empty space is as much a place to see as the towers itself were once.

Over the years some people ask why is 9/11 so important, when innocent people all over the world succumb to bombs all the time. To me, 9/11 is not just ‘another’ terror attack – simply because of the place and the way the whole thing happened. Struck on a busy weekday morning at the headquarters of world economy, that injected an unfathomable if-WTC-can-go-down-anything-can fear on the safety of any place anywhere in the world, the day rewrote what terrorism is capable of.

Today there are researches, theories and conspiracy theories on how in the world what happened could ever have happened. The post-mortem would continue well into the future, and chances are, we may never get to find the real answers. But 9/11 would stay on in the hearts of everyone of our time, as a mark of how brittle the world and our lives could be.

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Tags: 9/11, New York, WTC

Lost…

22Mar09

Seems to me that I’ve developed a habit of losing stuff and, as if a strange pun of destiny, get back what I lost. And that seems to be the pattern – at different times it was my mobile, jacket, a duffel bag, all finding their way back after being lost.

I set out to write a story
That spoke of a loser
And how he lost.

What is losing, after all
But the temporary misgivings
Of a trampled mind
Where thoughts trickle
Through
Sepia tinted pages
Of a depleted memory

What is losing, after all
But a mere
“Change of owner”
Like they say of Energy
Or the soul
That could only move
From one owner to another

I set out
Searching
For those phantom words
To tell his story
But the words elude me
Much like my fortune
As I keep looking
For my lost words.

What is losing, after all?
Words that just passed
Like the rainless clouds?
Or did the loser just find
A new owner
For the words he lost?

Filed under: Life and Living, Poetry, Thoughts   |  2 Comments
Tags: memoir, Poetry

A Journey That Continues

13Mar09

He was a nice looking gentleman wearing an oversize coat and thick mufflers around his neck, who acceded to taking a picture of me and V standing on the edge of Dolphin’s Nose. “So where are you from?” he asked me handing over the camera to V. “I… Er… I’m from…”, I fumbled. V did better. She smiled, as she secured the camera into its case.

It was an incredible moment in our lives. A moment when we realized, we didn’t have an answer to the most rudimentary question of existence – “Where are you from?” Well, let me see. We have moved three cities in two countries in four months, have our belongings lying in five cities across the two countries and have no idea where we would be four weeks from this minute.

Things weren’t supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be happy days ahead. Family, elders and all that, you know? A fairy tale of the prince and princess living happily ever after. It sure was a fairy tale of sorts, until the day we called bitter-gourd bitter. Ever wondered calling bitter-gourd bitter could bring you trouble for the rest of your life?

Many months after that ignominious moment of getting reprimanded for stating the obvious, troubles continued. “Elementary my dear Watson.”, a well wisher suggested, “Everyone has troubles. Just deal with it.” Deal with it, huh? At what price? A few hundred dollars of happiness would do? Heard they started selling that thing in Wal-mart these days. So I could’ve helped myself, you know, with a few capsules whenever there was trouble.

We are dealing with it alright. But not like the Goody two shoes that we used to be. Although no one knows it that way. Life is simple. People are not. They are high on illusion or hung over on reality. So much so that any attempts at talking them out of their ridiculous assumptions or psychic outbursts only falls into deaf years. We became weary of our condemned routine and decided to find our own way.

We are on the move, although no one knows the real reasons of what we are doing or where we are moving. “Family” thinks we are happy. The indicators are there – we travel, we do the vacations, we shop, we laugh, what else one needs to know if someone is actually happy? For them, we are the good kids who do a lot of traveling on business. To ourselves, we are lost rowing in a sea without a compass and the shore is nowhere in sight.

May be we could still have waited for more time, until the day when the deaf ears would open up. May be, if we could’ve drugged ourselves with a few capsules of Solvomycin from Wal-mart, everything would’ve been solved and life would’ve been back to being a fairy tale. Life is a honey moon. Except that the honey doesn’t taste good at some times, and the moon is hidden by clouds at other times.

“Deal with it, kid”, an elder told me. “It’s the same with everyone”, a veteran confided. “You can’t run away from troubles. You’ll have to come back to it someday”, told a peer. I agree with everyone. Except that they are not me, and they haven’t seen what I’ve seen. But how do you tell the world you don’t bother about it anymore? I guess you just don’t. And that’s what we’ve done. Kept quiet, and moved. “Cheeky, but you did the right thing”, a friend smiled when he heard our story, “Life finds a way”.

We’ve set out to do what we think is our pursuit of happiness. We are moving places, driving in near-zero visibility. We don’t know where our next turn is, or how long until we stop again. We don’t know if we’ll run out of gas, or reach our hitherto unknown destination soon enough. We don’t know if we are alone, or there are other cars beside us. But we do know that we’ll keep driving.

Filed under: Life and Living, Travel   |  4 Comments
Tags: memoir

A Letter to My Father

02Nov08

Dear Father,

How I wish to start with a “How are you doing?”. Everybody who leads a normal life does so. But mine ceased to be normal on this very day, 16 years ago. The day when a pang of insecurity struck me like I were stripped naked in the middle of the road on a winter night.

That day they brought you home cold, after you spent a whole day in ice. I reached out to you with my little fingers and felt your unshaven cheek. It felt chill – a chill that ran down my spine and has stayed there ever since. Life was about to change forever.

Four days before, it was Diwali. You were already struggling to hold on to your life, while I sat home beside the window – from where you used to show me ta-ta as I walked out to school every morning – watching fireworks. Fireworks are a mark of joy. But it was my first Diwali without you near me and I didn’t seem like hearing any of the cracking noise they made – it was as if my Diwali was muted. I hoped you’ll be back with me for the next Diwali, and I’ll make up for this time and it’ll be happy times all over again.

You loved me in every way a child could be loved. When you save sweets from your colleague’s birthday party, bring it carefully wrapped within your black Safari briefcase and I run across the living room to tug your legs the moment you return from work, or even while giving me a piece of your mind for not doing my Math homework properly. You know, there was this day when I noted down my Math questions to discuss with you, only to quickly realize you’ll never be back home anymore.

I feel I should’ve told you someday that you were very kind to me, and that I loved you more than anything else in this world. I’m sure you would’ve loved to hear those words from your little kid. But I was barely 12 years old. Hardly old enough to even define my feelings in proper words. I thought when I grow up into my teens, I’ll sit face-to-face and talk with you like the way Men do. I’ll be a man of the house, and we’ll talk family, finance and other such big stuff that grown-ups do. Little did I realize, that those days were never meant to be.

People started feeling sorry for me. “Oh, I’m so sorry”,”it’s so unfortunate”, they would say, whenever I happen to tell them my dad was no more. It felt soothing initially, but now I’ve grown weary of it. Years of repeating my story and listening to how sad they felt for me, has made me thick-skinned to sympathies. Yes, I’m unfortunate, and thank you for being sorry.

On that day when they brought you home cold, a part of me stopped growing up. That part of me continues to be the little 12 year old kid. It longs for your hug, runs across the living room to tug your legs the moment you return from work and dreams of growing up with you. It still lives with you in the same old apartment. And it’ll someday tell you how much I miss you. Miss you, Dad.

Filed under: Life and Living   |  5 Comments
Tags: memoir

Wherefore Art Thou?

01Nov08

“And so saying he chopped off his head with a giant axe and then they lived happily ever after.”

That’s some kind of crap that flows out of your system when you run blank on your biggest passion. Four posts in 14 months, isn’t something to be proud of. And giving myself 101 reasons (excuses) why not to write every time I think about opening Word, all the while searching for that one ass-kicking reason as to why I should actually sit up, open Word and start typing a few pieces of my mind, wasn’t helpful either.

So, after many months of crunching under why-do-such-things-happen-to-me-in-life stuff that I’ve got so used to and moving 12,000 miles away from where my last post came from and giving a million unkept promises to V on how I wouldn’t sleep for the day without writing my next post, I happen to sit up in this hour of evening, looking out of my window at the parking lot, flanked by the autumn colors glowing in the evening sun, switching my eyes between the autumn orange, and the giant Evergreen trees that dot the entire state of Washington, wondering if I’ve at last found my ass-kicking reason to actually write something.

Well, I still don’t know. But I did read temporal’s poessay and his question – “Is there an affliction known as writer’s block? Or is it an overblown condition to camouflage fear, lethargy or lack of discipline?” I know it’s not a Writer’s block. Writers with a block open Word and not know what to type, but they don’t give 101 reasons (excuses) why not to even open Word.

“Just write down a thought – the first thought you have and put it on the page. Slowly, more words will follow and the haze would lift“, says temporal in his poessay. Ah well, that sounds neat. What’s my first thought? There seem to be many first thoughts, the nice ones – there’s V, there’s these interesting things I did and interesting things I should do and interesting things I should have done long back but didn’t, and the ones I don’t want to think about, though they engulf like god-knows-what. There must be something in this world I could write about, if only I could make a word for the thought.

“So friend, despair not…look around and write that first word. Good luck!“, temporal completes his poessay. I don’t despair. I look around. I look at the fading sunlight, the autumn colors diminishing into the grayscale, parking lot filling up as people end their weekday and flock back into their homes, a few work emails waiting to be read, a can of beans baking in the oven. So where do I look for that first word? Have I really found my ass-kicking reason to write something? Well, I still don’t know.

Filed under: All in a Day's Work, Life and Living   |  2 Comments
Tags: writing

Deccan Chronicle And The Naked Art of Selling News

08Jun08

In the age where our most inner and intimate matters have been commoditized by corporations, it’s no surprise that sex is being used as a tool to sell products. Many critics of popular culture use the adage “sex sells” to justify the means. Well, though there may be some truth in it, it’s disgusting if a product that comes with an element of the proverbial “social responsibility” resorts to a juvenile representation of its target market for the sake the one thing all business needs – sell more.

If the advertising guys at Deccan Chronicle think this is what young minds are – one heck of perverts ogling at hoardings of naked woman embossed in newspaper prints all over her body, metaphorically meaning to read the newspaper giving particular attention to detail, or whatever crap that was meant to mean – then there has just been a little mistake. Just that we youngsters have a little more sense than to get swayed by pictures of naked women to buy a newspaper.

What’s more intimidating is that their ad doesn’t even talk about the quality of news – the least you would expect of a newspaper – and whenever they remotely do, it’s again a skin-deep expose. Chennai Metblogs carried a post on similar lines with more pictures. Probably the in-house talent pool of Deccan Chronicle Marketing ran out of concrete ideas to increase youngsters’ readership and resorted to the only supposedly sure-to-work strategy – sex appeal.

An independent survey conducted by research firm MediaAnalyzer states that,

While almost half of men (48 percent) said they like sexual ads, few women did (8 percent). Most men (63 percent) said sexual ads have a high stopping power for them; fewer women thought so (28 percent).

If only 8 percent of women give a damn to such an ad, then was it all about increasing Male leadership? Am I hallucinating or does it really sound awkward? If you still think this would make Deccan Chronicle the-ultimate-choice-of-the-young-minds then take a bite at this MediaAnalyzer finding,

Men tend to focus on an ad’s sexual imagery (breasts, legs, skin, etc.), which draws their attention away from other elements of the ad (logo, product shot, headline). This may be why men’s brand recall was worse for the sexual ads than for the nonsexual ones.

So there goes the sex sells theory. Trying to fit an ad suited enough to market a lingerie brand into marketing a newspaper looks as awful as it sounds. They would do a lot of good to themselves, if the nice folks at Deccan Chronicle could stuff their ad-women with some clothes and talk more about how good their news reporting is, so we know exactly what they sell. We youngsters like to see naked truth in newspapers, not naked women.

Filed under: Thoughts   |  7 Comments

Short Story: Say Cheese

29Mar08

Airports are busy places, more busy than you would like them to be. He took a chair on one of those numerous blue cushioned seats that dot the entire vicinity of the airport, taking particular care that the adjacent seat was vacant. The large LCD screen right above his head was showing the day’s breaking news in a near-mute volume. What a job reading news must be, he thought; first, it’s the smily-face-moment of the birth of a big movie star’s son, and the next is a sad-face-moment of a massacre. It was funny to watch the lips move and the head sway to instant emotions and yet hear no sound.
 
The LCD screen got interrupted to display the rescheduled time of his already delayed flight. Long time to go, he said to himself. He turned around and looked at the coffee shop at the far end of the waiting area. Men with red caps bearing the shop’s logo were smiling as they took orders. This thing about making your customer’s day and all that good stuff; they smile, make coffee, and they smile. He tried to look into the shop but as it would be, it was crowded. Airports are busy places, you see; more so, when your flight is delayed.
 
He was back to watching the LCD screen. Television ads were being shown – Golden Spa is the best place to vacation; No tea tastes better than Tata tea; and Canon showed their cameras. Say Cheeese, the ad said, giving emphasis on the extra ‘e’. He knew what that meant, the thing about the Say Cheese.
 
It was a few months back, in that little coffee shop six blocks from his house. He was waiting on a 2-seater table and had asked the red capped smiling guy to come back later to take orders. And there was the banal paper napkin with squiggly stories written all over, the tip of the pen sauntering over it, careful enough not to rip pieces away. He continued scratching the paper napkin drawing figures only the pen could decipher.
 
He jerked his head as she pulled the chair on the other side of the table. “Am I late?”, she asked letting out a wide smile as she slowly placed her handbag on the corner of the table and took her seat. He quickly dragged the paper napkin into his palm, closed the lid of his pen and smiled back at her. “Hi”, he said with an involuntary blurt. “Am I late?”, she repeated, still holding on to that wide smile. “So this is how an animated Say-Cheeese smile looks like”, he heard say to himself. “No, I just came minutes back”, he said trying in vain to match her smile. He beckoned the red hat guy to place their order. That was their first meeting.
 
Whoever heads the department of cosmic intervention in the sky, sends you messages. Messages that are vague, out of the blue – sometimes like the scribbles on a paper napkin – and yet in that moment hold the key to a flurry of events, unlocking such things from memory that you carefully stowed away, never to be reopened. That smile – the Say Cheese one – was just one of them.
 
“Am I late?”, she asked. Suddenly he jerked back from his train of thoughts and looked around dazed until he realized where he was. The LCD screen was back to showing the day’s breaking news, the airport was abuzz with all the blue cushioned seats filled. His eyes fell on her as she took the seat adjacent to his, carrying two cups of coffee she got from the red capped seller.
 
He took a cup in one hand and placed his other hand around her seat. She moved back slightly, her head resting on his arm. Comfort in a little corner of a busy world. He smiled taking a sip of the steaming coffee. She smiled back. An animated say-cheese smile.

Filed under: Fiction   |  5 Comments

This Day, That Year…

18Nov07

The year was 2002. The day was November 18. And I had just woken up into a warm Monday morning cooled by the humming Air Conditioners within the confines of my room at Hotel Poonja International in Mangalore. I lay motionless in the bed listening to my watch ticking the seconds off counting down to the biggest moment of my then life – the first day of work. Hours later, I would start nervously, clad in my new shirt, new trouser, new tie, new shoes and new socks, almost spill a drop of sambhar on my trouser, and take the elevator down to catch the bus to work. To Work! How awfully strange it sounded on that day to say I was going to ‘Work’!

It felt so much like a newborn baby, with nary an idea what to expect out of a career – except that, it should be ‘great’. The nervous pride of beginning a career in a dream company overshadowed the nostalgic memories that were being created in those very minutes. It was still like good ol’ college days, and the first few weeks of training meant I would continue to pour over notes and write exams and wait for results. The 90-member class room – where I always sat in the last row – seemed just another extension of the college-day classes.

And when one such session was in progress we were told not to call the instructors ‘sir’ like we were so used to calling the college professors, but to call them by name; it was the corporate culture, after all. “Welcome to the corporate world”, one of the instructors had told us with an ironic smirk on his face. Life was never going to be the same again.

Well, it never was. Five years later, today, there is just the sepia tinted pictures of those days etched in memory. I do continue to work for the same company where my career was born on this day and brought up this far; where I grew from an anxious kid into the stuff that adulthood is made of. Today, I know why it’s hard to write software, why they call customer the king, and why they taught stress management in college. I know age and energy are inversely proportional, and, needs and responsibilities increase with income. And I also know that choosing the seat next to the emergency exit gives you the maximum leg room in flights.

So five years, it has been. Enough time for a newborn to go to school. And that’s how long it has been since my professional life was born. A stutter here and a stumble there, but it has kept moving nevertheless.

Filed under: All in a Day's Work, Life and Living, Thoughts   |  8 Comments