Interesting lives

Every now and then one encounters a person who's had an interesting life and more often than not, that translates to a difficult life. Yesterday I met such a person.

Lets call this lady Sethe. She was a woman in her late sixties, a large African American woman. She grew up in the south, in cotton fields. Finished high school and came to Illinois for college. She got married and had 7 children. The kids grew up, got married. Hard times hit late.

One of her daughters developed an ailment that slowly killed her. Her daughter's son had tried really hard to take care of his mother, and had convinced himself that if he did a sincere job of looking after her, she would get better. He'd sleep at the foot of her bed , and if at any time the mother felt pain or needed something, the boy would run and get it for her. When she finally did die, the boy went into shock, and never came out of it. Its been five years. Counseling and the passage of time have not seemed to have done their trick. After the mothers' death, Sethe took custody of all her grandchildren - seven children. The following year her husband died, and the year following that, she was diagnosed with cancer.

She said that she was sitting in the doctors office when she was told she had cancer. She said she was scared, very scared. More scared because she knew she had to be strong, there was too much depending on her LIVING. She said she walked out of the doctor's office feeling weak... and decided to sit for some time. as soon as she sat down she saw a very young boy around four years old, coming out of an open heart surgery... and she saw his mother crying, and she thought - this kid is so young and he is already seeing a darker shade of life, I'm sixty how could i possibly feel sorry for myself. She said she felt no fear after that. Slowly but sure she recovered.

So Sethe is a survivor in many ways. By survivor I don't mean just someone who came through alive. I mean a person who's spirit has survived. Sethe was one of the most energetic, funny and loving people I have met in a long time.

I began by talking about interesting lives. No, I don't believe that interesting lives have to be tinted with tragedy, some interesting lives are full of surprising and unpredictable upswings. The interesting-ness lies in the spontaneity and surprise in the trajectory... and the voice of the storyteller.

On Lingering

So while i begin most posts after a long time on a declaration of ending a 'chapter', this won't be one of them. This chapter doesn't seem to want to get over so easy.  I feel like the author of a book in which the characters have become so strong that i can't keep to the story i had planned... the fictional characters themselves are suddenly planning the trajectory of the plot... and that i myself will be surprised when i write that last chapter.

So right now is about lingering. Its about a lot of looking back, a lot if reflecting.  I'm in a place i didn't expect to be in after my 'time was done'. I also  such a have foggy picture of whats ahead that the only way to navigate is by looking behind me.  The good thing is that there IS so much behind, so much that i can pick up the loose ends of and start a whole new tapestry.  

The last few months were fun. And here i mean fun in the best meaning of the word.  It was SO much play with thoughts and fights with time.  Mock fights - the fun kind.  So i DID manage to take my work on understanding humor to a new level.  something so far from my comfort zone.  I read my paper again today after 2 weeks of not thinking about it, and was thrilled to see that it still seemed to have the possibility of a touch of magic... and strangely and most importantly it was so not complete. So much still to come. Just like the format of humor.  Humor is fun cause its format is in its incompleteness. Ones mind has to work to complete the riddle.  Different minds tie the ends in different ways, some don't and don't laugh... but the important piece is that interestingly jokes like abstract art hold no meaning if you don't make sense of it in your own context.

Here's to the next few months being the 'set up' for something that will truly make me smile at the point of resolution. 

Like humor.

Snails...

Its time that i took my own idea of "Snails at Heart" seriously.

This has been an exceptionally slow semester so far. A lot of idle time, a lot of sleeping, a lot of 'yak-shaving', movie watching, wiki-surfing. I feel sinful, but I'm hopeful that this will BE the goofing off quota for the year and I'll get a crazy job that know the tricks of keeping me on my toes.

Writing is difficult business. I chose to write a paper this semester and even though a few good ideas have struck me, its all still in note form.  Some people find it hard to write things in a concise manner... i find it hard to elaborate... i keep wondering if I'm entering into the realm of redundancy.  Ideas seem wonderful in my head, but when i write them down, it feels exactly the same as when one wakes up thinking one had an AMAZING dream, and the more you try to remember it, the more you forget it, or worse - CAN remember, but can't figure out how it made me SO happy...

OK, coming back to snails at heart - my original idea with this was to create a space where it was OK to 'slow down'.

and not feel sinful.

 

health

I am wondering if I’m turning into a cry baby.

One of my courses has me studying and reading an online blog - a new method of user research in which participants maintain an online daily journal and share their life, their views. This particular study was on understanding notions surrounding health and food choice.

While this may sound very dry, and I must confess I felt pretty weighed down after being handed 500 pages of research data to read, but this stuff has me crying every few pages.

People can be so candid and honest in faceless environments... perhaps in the past year I’ve had so few "real conversations" (as in I don't remember the last time I had a lump in my throat after a conversation with a friend). Suddenly this influx of truth and unadulterated emotion and confession has me choked!

People were so forthright and honest with all the details of their life - the crazy little problems that bugged them everyday, dilemmas surrounding BIG challenges in their lives, very sad moments, moments to remember... stories about having to care for their little child who is suddenly very ill, caring a family member with a mental disability, the death of a close friend, cancer, pregnancy, eating when upset, eating to celebrate... etc.

The lives of these people seemed 'closer to the ground'.  And I definitely do not mean this in a bad way. I mean I realized that since I have not had to deeply care for another person/creature and take care of anybody on a daily basis, my daily/life goals are mostly oblique.  Nothing seems too scary or too urgent. Time is always on my side, and I rarely feel that I actually have something to loose. Motives and reasons for my daily actions are luke-warm.

And so I cried.

Not out of sadness but a strange relief.

We really aren’t as selfish as we are taught to believe we are... we actually perhaps function much better when we need to take care of someone (anyone, even a pet)

And then I cried again, because I missed Shadow.

Which brings me back to the beginning...

washing the mud off my stripes

When I was 12 I sat in front of the mirror and slowly painted my whole face brown. I wanted to see what I would have looked like if I wasn't a 'zebra' as my mother called us. After finishing, my heart sank cause everything looked wrong. My eyes, my lips, my hair… nothing went with the brown.

And many times I just lied brown. I told people that my mother was an INDIAN from Trinidad, and that I was in fact completely Indian. I learnt the rules – that I could never correct people's English, but everybody could correct my hindi. I learnt that people who 'hated' fair skin, were good people, and people who hated dark skin were bad.

But its been some time now …

I now introduce myself as part Trinidadian. I talk about my grandmother who was from Canada. My accents not changed a notch… and I want to go back to India, after seeing a bit more of this side of the world.

Cause i do owe 'this side of the world'. This one year here HAS changed something very deeply. this was the first time when i introduced myself as Indian, i didn't have to explain my color, or make excuses for it, i WAS what i said i was. It even struck me that if i said i was American, if ANYBODY said they were American, it would be accepted without a blink of an eyelid, without the need for any explanation of color of skin. there might be undercurrents that i don't see, but there is a difference, - prejudice is not a subject of pride. and once i didn't have to fight to be seen as an indian, another door opened in my mind... my real roots. I didn't feel the need to lie anymore. No more excuses, no more fudged history.

Caste: CAR

The Caste System of India has been replaced by the Car System in New Delhi.

Stay with me, this makes sense.

At the top are the Cars:

This is a powerful class, and believe that all resources are meant for them or should be given to them as Dakshina.

2^nd tier are the Motorized Two Wheelers:

This is the warrior class. They charge bold and brave past most obstacles. They take chances, and often are prey to it. However, as they aspire to the Car class, they too tend to believe that resources are MEANT for cars.

3^rd tier are the buses

This is the trader class, the vast majority of people. They suffer many hardships but are resigned to their fate. They believe that the only way they can escape from the cycle of daily acrobatics of jumping off moving buses, transversing through moving traffic after being dropped in the middle of the road; is by moving up the chain… they aspire to buy a bike some day.

4^th are the bicyclists:

This is the service class. They have no power, no right to space. They occupy the leftover space on the road. Each turn/change of lane is a life threatening event, and in the actual event of death, it is presumed that it WAS in fact the bicyclists fault, for BEING on the road that is meant for cars to begin with!

Recently a new system was introduced in Delhi’s roads: the Rapid Bus Transit.

A system introduced because everybody undoubtedly ASPIRES to rise to the Car Class, and our roads can not hold that many cars, if we build more and more roads so that all cars could be in the various levels of road, the air would not be worth breathing.

The reaction of the car owners to the BRT was very similar if not IDENTICAL to the upper caste reaction to the ‘reservation system' introduced also not very long ago. While it IS the rise in the number of CARS, not buses causing the increased traffic congestion, car owners find it impossible to accept that they need to sit in a traffic jam consisting of cars, while buses move relatively freely. This reaction is almost amusing seeing that even if the BRT was NEVER introduced, these cars would be sitting in a traffic jam of similar duration in a matter on years ANYWAY owing to the rise of car ownership. So if the BRT has pre-empted the traffic conditions 2 years hence while still providing a way to get from place to place, one would expect a welcoming reaction…. But car owners would rather NOBODY get to their destination if they can’t.

So, back to my earlier comparison, the Upper caste/ Upper class seem to believe that all resources are primarily THIERS for the taking and everybody else must be grateful to receive the leftovers. Any attempt to equalize distribution goes against the very nature of the caste system ingrained as FAIR!

other Readings:

http://thecityfix.com/media-and-car-owners-take-on-brt-in-delhi/

http://www.india-seminar.com/2007/579/579_geetam_tiwari.htm

18 to 63

I heard this from an old woman as she was leaving Chicago.

Girl you gotta make things happen
or things will just keep happenin to you….

She said:
You come here young at 18, and
Blink, you’re 63
All those things you collected
You just give them out for free

I couldn’t sleep when I got here
The sirens drove me nuts
Do people really manage with
No Ifs and buts?

But then I slept so soundly
That I woke up just right now
45 years are over
And I still can’t figure how

Girl you gotta make things happen
or things will just keep happenin to you….

Well, I had just moved to Chicago,
and I wanted her rocking chair,
the sirens weren’t my problem ,
but my apartment was pretty bare…

Ma'am

There are moments in your life you know you will remember forever
There are books you put down knowing you’ve changed
There are people that you meet, people you know that MAKE you. You would not be the same you if you hadn’t met them.

Today is a sad day. My school history teacher passed away. And I am so far away from anybody who will understand how sad this is.

Its strange. There is comfort is knowing that that somebody is there SOMEWHERE in this world, even if you never meet them again. And to know they are gone is comfort removed from a strange place…
A close friend who wrote to me telling me about this is about to go to Japan for 5 years to do a PHD in Japanese, another close friend who I wrote about this to is doing her PHD in history, all my closest friends are from my school are out there somewhere still studying… I am here, so far away from the world I know and love, to study. And I KNOW that Chitra Ma’am probably changed the course of all our lives.

NO ideas, no discussion, no thoughts, no quirks, no reflections, no contemplation, no questions, no answers, no anything.

Very very blank.

turtles all the way down...

This morning i woke up early feeling very hungry. I sleepily wandered into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of milk, mixed in sugar and coffee, sat and stirred it until it was nice and frothy.

i was hungry but very very sleepy... so i decided to put my glass of cold coffee next to my night lamp, and lie down, intending to sip it every now and then...

Soon i fell asleep.

I my dream i was still hungry, and still in my bed, i reached over to the night lamp and was surprised to see that my glass was not there! i got up and looked all around my apartment... then the dream took over. there are spaces that i visit often in my dreams. I have never really seen them, but from dream to dream i seem to revisit them. Its almost like a Yoshifumi Kondō film. There are long sequences in my dreams of the path i take to reach the place... secret shortcuts, little hiding places, clearings, alleys...

I visited ALL those places looking for the glass of cold coffee.

Finally i gave up... in my dream i thought that maybe, i just dreamt that i made cold coffee, and actually i never made it...

i was just thinking of making another glass for myself when i woke up... and saw the cold coffee right next to the night lamp...

I had to laugh!

But thats got me pretty worried about whether i am really AWAKE this time!

(if the title does not make sense, then read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down )

confession

This thought hit me last night.

I am intrigued by my growing need for blogging every now and then… its like a form of confessional behavior that I never imagined I would subscribe to.

Why I call it confessional is cause of the way I treat this space... no big secrets being let out, - no. By confessional I mean that I treat this space as a mood and meaning tracker. Unlike a personal diary this space gives me the feeling of something ‘bigger’, and a feeling of a degree of anonymity. Probably most of the people that read this blog are people that do know me, but every once in a while there comes the unknown reader.

This got me thinking about this whole need for ‘confession’ and something ‘bigger’… it sounded too much like the way people feel about god. Its probably an outrageous parallel… I know.

But I sat and thought about this for a while. Confession is a crazy strand of communication. Its with ‘nobody’, and with no expectation for a reply. I don’t blog to create an open source solution finding attempt at my life’s problems… many of my blogs end with questions, but I don’t expect answers.

So what is it about externalizing thoughts that is an end in itself?

My cow

I actually thought i could build the whole cow out of cans... but a dozen cans down the line i realized that the 'face' made me happy enough!
Now she gives me company next to my seat.

Candid? :)

About Trees and Weight-gain

i was thinking a crazy thought...

The fact of the matter is that as a 'system' humans are pretty warped.. if we eat too much , ideally our body should use what it must and throw out the rest. but no, our body uses all the extra stuff, and slowly we become fat!

And that's when trees come in.

The other day i was eating and looking out the window at a sunny day. the trees along the raod looked beautiful in the sunlight.
And it hit me... Trees don't get fat! its not like a couple of sunny days can ruin the look of a tree... a good monsoon and and the trees become gross... NOPE that NEVER happens.
they become greener... leafier, and if ANYTHING just more beautiful...
However, starved trees DO look horrible, the leaves fall off, and they just look SAD.

hmmm... Humans ARE pretty warped.

Dreamy Debate

Perhaps it’s the month of idle time to blame
Perhaps it’s all the extra sleep
And then again, maybe it’s just how things are… I seem to obsess over the same things over and over again in almost a cyclic manner.

Dreams, humor, death, religion, time, patterns and design… definitely the strangest combination of interest areas.

This time its back to dreams. And in particular I’m obsessing over the ‘brim’. The crazy time between sleep and wake. The transition time when one is ‘half asleep’. It’s like between two worlds. A world of collective reality (awake) and the world of personal reality ( asleep).

While going to sleep its interesting how one tries to let go and just sleep… the funny feeling of KNOWING that one is drifting into sleep…

And then while waking up, the funny feeling of trying to remember a good dream, and the harder one tries, every last memory of it escapes leaving only a good feeling, but no trace of the reason…

I have often wondered using Darwin’s theory of evolution, what could be the evolutionary reason for dreams… and bad dreams? Is it just an error?... maybe not… dreams are perhaps a means of remaining in a semi-conscious state, keeping the mind alive, so that it is easier to spring to action if needed… the opposite of dreaming is the ‘dead sleep’ which is so much more difficult to snap out of…
The dead sleep. Now, away from the world of wild predators out to get us, a good sleep is meant to be a dead sleep. A complete write off of that time… and amusingly it’s always the people who don’t like ‘wasting time’ that prefer the ‘dead sleep’. Perhaps being completely in control ( after all its ALL your creation) and even so, not in control is a terrible feeling for the busy ‘doers’ of the world!

So are dreams a defense mechanism? A way to rest in way that still allows for an alert mind? If so, then the plot thickens!
So we derive that dreams are a means to attempt at a longer life.
And yet I’ve died so often in my dream, except the amazing bit is that death in a dream ENTAILS waking up. No dream allows for the experience of death… Death is ALWAYS about waking up…
And there again I’m back to religion! So does religion too take cues from dreams? Is this experience of ‘waking up’ upon death in a dream the origin of the concept of ‘afterlife’ or the concept of a ‘nirwana’ ?

SO not only have dreams given us longer lives, they have unwittingly instilled in us a concept of death as an awakening, stretching our existence into eternity!

Being 8

Quickly quickly before i forget this moment.

Its new years, and even though i have all the space i could ask for i am just not able to wrap up last year in my head.
maybe a post could do it for me...

high points?

a water fight

standing on a table and singing the birthday song

standing in Namsang tower watching the roads turn red as the night set in along with its traffic bottlenecks

taking pictures of myself holding wine after finding out that i got into ID, and then realising that i couldn't open it!

riding a bicycle on the coast of Korea

giving the Tata scholarship interview sitting next to an Alsatian dog

my best friend feeding me cake in Barrista after i put mehendi on both hands

seeing a train pass by from so so close

reading Jahajn

spending the night in JFK, surrounded by the happiest people in the world

the moment it was announced that i was about to land in Chicago

cooking an omelet in a pressure cooker on my first day in my own apartment

seeing snow...

dancing salsa in my apartment at 3 in the mornin cause me and roommate couldn't sleep

lows...

saying bye to dadaji

sitting in a car outside Big Chill with my Best friend after she didn't get something she should have got

walking on the streets on Christmas day

its been such a long year.
i was discussing years with somebody, and they explained that years seem shorter now because when we are young, a year is a bigger proportion of ones life - an age 8, one year is one eighth of ones life, at 25 one year is one twenty-fifth... so perhaps at 25, three years equate the one year when we were eight...

but this year broke that rule! this year felt like i was eight again.

closure.
goodbye2007.

and here's hoping i can keep being 8 for as long as i can.

little projects...

Yesterday i made something.
I picked up the single use coffee cups, cut them up, and made a bicycle out of them!!

Its rare for my impulses to DO something to override my inertia. I often get ideas to make things, often silly little things, but long before I can gear up to build it, my mood deflates, and thats the end of the story. But the few times that i hold on to the excitement, and just do the little things that i want to, it becomes a day to remember...

So here to all my forgotten discarded little ideas:
1. I wanted to go out during the rainy season and pick a part of a strange weed. That part of the weed behaves like Velcro, it tends to stick to cloths, and also to each other. I really wanted to collect them and then play with form.. make cubes, pyramids etc out of them... i never did... So many rainy seasons have gone by...
2. I wanted to make a Christmas tree out of old bottles... i lost patience and finally threw all the bottles away... they were taking too much space, and i wasn't convinced that i would ever finally use them.
3. I wanted to take pictures of the first night i saw snow fall...
4. I wanted to make a little shelf/rack to put next to my bed so after reading a book, there was a good place to put it.

Thats all i can remember now.
And there will be many more to come.
I just hope that i find the patience to see these little things through... it really makes my day!

If weather can effect moods...

then chicago doesn't need drugs... !

why do stars twinkle?

Somebody once told me that stars twinkle because of things like pollution and dust particles, and that if one went out into space, then stars don't twinkle anymore..

More recently someone told me that some stars are so so far away that the twinkle is actually because we are catching only one photon at a time, and the delay between the photons is what causes twinkling.

I had a very interesting class the other day. We were trying to understand perception. We noticed that people's understanding of the world around them happens in waves, and not in a straight line. We tend to compare by forming ratios. Everything is measured as relative information and not in absolutes...This got me pretty excited... we noticed that we could immediately detect the difference between NO light and a Very small amount of light, but if we already had a lot of light in the room, and somebody let in just a small bit more, nobody could tell the difference.

So this means that extremes define the scope of perception... light and dark ... weightless to heavy ... black and white to color saturation ... and the inbetweens are ratios and relatives within that.

This got me thinking about beauty/art/poetry. An old experimental idea of mine.
That beauty lies approaching extremes... pushing the limit, but perhaps not crossing it.
Playing with the limits of perception.

I probably need to think this through a bit more...

Ghar Ghar

I've been thinking about this for so long.

Suspension of disbelief excites me. what amazes me really is that it seems to be an innate need in us. Nobody actually needs to teach us about it. My earliest memories revolve around playing ghar ghar. Me and my cousins would assume roles and enact the roles for hours. We would unknowingly stretch the situations we enjoyed, and compress the time of the actions we thought didn't added to the 'story' .. like sleep. A whole night was enacted in 2 minutes. ( perhaps an elementary translation of sleep-time: the time taken to sleep + the time taken to wake up!! - the in between time was non-time!) In just 2 hours we would easily create the routine of 3 or 4 days! We would willingly take anything lying around and imagine it was something that looked similar enough...

Years and years later I'm studying design methods. And it feels like I'm relearning all THAT. we need to re-learn storytelling, re-creating scenarios, and do prototype testing using 'similar objects'.

Its a game of adult Ghar Ghar!