Dr Binayak Sen: Stunned, shocked and ashamed..

to say that i am shocked would be an understatement - one of india's finest social activists has been arrested for sedition and sentenced to life imprisonment. the charges against him have not been corroborated by any conclusive evidence.
people callously responsible for the disaster in bhopal get sentenced to three years' imprisonment. and life goes on...
just last week i was watching this programme on safdar hashmi, who was struck down only for voicing what many others felt but were scared to speak up. completely unjust but life goes on...
well.. this time, life should not just go on.... we need to do something.
what are we. as a nation? a mass of useless ineffective adults who take whatever is given to us, or thinking people who will at some time stand up to say - we have an opinion. we want ...
maybe  hunger fasts, strikes and bandhs were effective modes of protest once upon a time. now they are just tools in the hands of politicians looking for a way to attract attention.
signing a petition is hopefully an effective way of being heard, and i have done that, but will it be enough? is there something more we can do to register our concern?
what kind of a future are we giving our children if we quietly accept the writ of adults who are given the power to run our lives but have no clue as to what they are doing? do they care? don't we?

aaah guntur!

till i moved into guntur, telugu was, for me, a language which sounded beautiful when spoken, but was completely incomprehensible. stories about friends who moved into guntur and faced the 'repu randi' dialogue had us in splits. little did i know that i'd also be using the phrase 'repu randi' comfortably one day, without giggling (at least not visibly)while saying it. in spite of two years in guntur, and what i believe is a passable command over telugu, there are still a few really hilarious moments. last week's incident still has me smiling when i think of it.


i'd asked an upholsterer/tailor to come and take measurements for a new set of curtains for our living room. When the doorbell rang, i went and greeted the person at the door with a 'curtains?' and he nodded. i guided him to the windows and watched, amazed, as he took some pretty peculiar measurements along the length and breadth of each window, He noted all these measurements in the little sheet of paper which i had provided, wondering at his not having brought his own paper and pen. i told him that the curtains needed to reach down to the floor-skirting level, and he duly measured the rest of the area and made some more notes. when he looked like he was done, i asked him the total quantity required. he looked confused, but patiently added up the numbers and told me that the whole thing measured 75 sq feet! completely stumped, i told him that wouldn't help me and that i'd already ordered the material, and that he needed to give me measurements in metres. he looked more desperate by the minute - i'd already exhausted my telugu and was talking to him in hindi which he apparently understood. i finally told him to please get his boss who could sort out my requirements. the poor man left, and i walked into the house still puzzled at this tailor in guntur who gave me measurements in sq feet! 


i finally realised that the joke was on me, when he walked in with his boss who could speak english! the poor man was a carpenter, not a tailor, and he'd come to fix one of our chairs. he had left his tools at the door and when i took him to the windows, assumed we needed some work on them. too polite to yell at the 'amma garu', he had floundered on!!  even now, i can't help but smile at the person who gave me measurements for curtains in square feet! 

wonders of knitting and crochet

What is it about knitting/crochet that’s so wonderful? It’s so relaxing and mind-settling! Just the fact that suddenly something exists that was not there a second ago, and it has only come into existence because of something I did. Each stitch is pretty pointless on its own but the yarn running through all the stitches ensures that it all adds up to something concrete and very stable. And this stability is taken for granted till just one stitch is dropped! How fast the entire project can become unravel then!

This is so much like a family that meshes together. All members of a family have to be given a chance to develop, each on their own path, with occasional inter-weaving of paths. A common thread links all the family members, however different their roles are. Care has to be taken to gather every member along on the way else the family can break down before one can blink.

I’ve never started a knitting project (how grand that sounds!) without knowing who it’s for, and as the yarn goes over my fingers for the first time, I’m already thinking about the person I’m knitting for.

So many people walked through my mind while I was making a baby blanket – the little baby’s parents, who care so much about doing all the right things and being ‘perfect’ parents, her grandparents who are dear friends of ours, their pleasure in this little new entrant into the family, the little baby herself, who I hope will be ‘snug as a bug in a rug’ like my sister said. Her life – what will it be like? Surrounded by loving family, she’s had a wonderful start and will surely go through life happily, making mistakes and learning from them as we all did.

Now I’m knitting a stole for my niece and she’s constantly in my thoughts. At the threshold of a career, she has so much ahead of her to look forward to: an education, a rewarding career, an understanding life-partner, becoming a parent. All my hopes for her happy and peaceful life are knit into something as mundane as a stole! Hopefully each time she uses it, she will think of me for a moment, and so it goes on…

sankaranti in vijayawada

had a wonderful day yesterday when ravi and i decided to drive down to vijayawada on bhogi (pre-sankaranti) day to the big bazaar to check out a rice cooker for martha. we walked in to unimagined pandemonium. there were 3 nadaswaram players seated at the entrance who were in some kind of frenzy and i could just about make out the song they were playing amidst all the wailing. we walked into the crowded store and found 2 very colourfully dressed people (more on the dress in a few minutes) who, i later found out, were haridasus. we commented to each other on the traditionally dressed people who had come shopping and commenced to stack up our trolley with sauce, soups etc. suddenly there was a loud shout and we noticed that the 2 had been joined by a third person and they had started ..... well, i'll call it singing for want of any other word (cacofonix would have been bound up and stowed away for less!!). there was a lot of dialogue in the singing - or at least two of them took turns saying something to each other (could have been question/answer sessions but i could not identify a single word, and i do have some grasp of telugu by now). the third guy only yelled out something once in a while, and joined the chorus. the main singer was dressed in a bright orange turban and tunic and black pants over which a set of ghungroos had been tied. the quiet singer was dressed in ordinary drab clothes but the third one was the best - he wore a pretty transparent tunic that looked like a kathak dancer's costume., a pair of very faded blue jeans and to top it all - a santa claus cap. i seriously couldn't stop smiling! like a proper tourist, i managed to get a couple of pics of them on ravi's phone camera so the quality may not be great. the nicest touch was when i finally understood something they were singing about - they kept mentioning shopping and big bazaar so... that was easy.

the nicest thing was that no one could watch the performance with a straight face and within minutes we had strangers smiling at each other - with the eyes too, not only the mouth. it was wonderful and by the end of it, when they took the escalator to the next floor, people turned to continue their shopping with a smile on their face. i was hysterical by then because in the midst of this noise, through the window, we could see another performer outside who was dancing to his own beat and singing away, oblivious to the pandemonium inside. fortunately we could not hear him till we stepped out. here too, he was not alone. there was a nadaswaram (or something similar) player (he's apparently called gangireddulavadu) standing close by who just kept playing this one long note, coming up for breath occasionally - definitely no tune. facing him was a beautifully decorated ox (gangireddu) quietly nodding to the music.

it was all so unexpected and such a treat that this must be the first time i enjoyed a visit to the big bazaar which i normally avoid totally. i just loved the whole thing. if this is not incredible india, what is :-)

after a long while again

had not visited this blog since july 2009. considering that i plan to write regularly, and not only as a pastime, i really should be writing in this blog more often. i've realised that the problem is that i haven't decided who my target reader is - am now planning to write to someone exactly like me - surely what i have to say will be interesting to me at least :-)