Kolkata, ami ashchhi!

As Raza Jaffrey once sang so beautifully in "Bombay Dreams" - "the journey home is never too long..."




P.S. - Blog will be updated regularly. I promise.

Bits & Pieces

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HOME! and happy :)

Finally managed to wrap up another 25-30 page paper on Kashmir (Faultline Politics and Pathways to Peace) for my Identity, Rights and Conflict class. Huge sigh of relief! It turned out well, I think. I managed to bang out 10 pages at breakneck speed...and then I reached the bit delineating my so-called "pathways to peace"...and all inspiration left me. Go figure. But, finally I followed my natural instincts when doing research and found that really, it all boils down to universal values of insaaniyat (humanity) and insaaf (justice). And more inclusionary politics, an easing of Kashmir-based Indo-Pak nationalism construction, a demilitarization of J & K (in particular the Kashmir Valley) and democratic rights for the Kashmiris. So, yeah...Humanity and Justice :D

Now that that's done. Winter break starts....NOW.

Which means that I can officially start gearing up for our trip to India. Lots and lots of fun things planned - rickshaw riding, park prowling, gaane gaaye-ing (song singing), street store surveying, and all the un-planned/spontaneous madness that ensues when the Bhattacharya cousins & friends are reunited - for the 2 weeks. Spirit, confidence and faith have all taken a marvelous beating during the past semester. But it's nothing that family and India can't cure (thanks Natutu!) :D 4 more days!!
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Anyway, I did have a few more updates but I have been hogging my Mum's office computer non-stop for the last two days and I'm now starting to feel (slightly) guilty. Also, I want to listen to the new Trance Around The World episode which took...wait for it...a massive 5 hours to download. If you know me well, you'd know that it's the latter which is forcing an abrupt end to this post vs the former. Oh Trance, you have me enslaved...

MUCH more later. Have a lovely weekend, wherever you are in the world!
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Food for thought:
"The unimaginable sums of public money that are needed to keep the military occupation of Kashmir going is money that ought by right to be spent on schools and hospitals and food for an impoverished, malnutritioned population in India. What kind of government can possibly believe that it has the right to spend it on more weapons, more concertina wire and more prisons in Kashmir?"
- Arundhati Roy, "Land and Freedom" (courtesy of the Guardian UK, 22.08.2008)

Kul sana wa inti tayyeba!

19th December 2008:

a very very HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my Lebanese Love-Muffin...aka Joanna :D

(oh, IMP!)

Hope you have a wonderful 21st birthday in snowy Providence - and a year ahead that sees every little one of your characteristically minutely-detailed dreams come true. I love you so much and am eternally thankful for having you in my life - as a friend, activist, youtube-addict and so much more. Also, I owe you a (legal) Pimm's when we get back :) xxxxx

last Study Break for the day.

Finals have had me unbearably stressed. Apologies all around for not writing, calling or blogging. I am DONE on Monday though - and I shall be seeing most of you (my favourite people in the world) very very soon. Please, if you're going to be in India this December, LET ME KNOW! Even if I don't get to meet you, at least I'll be able to hear the strains of your voice and reminisce about the good and great times :)

Speaking of good times, Christmas is without a doubt my favourite time of the year. Happiness and jingle bells. Reflection and silent nights. And an excuse to have my favourite carol (Carol of the Bells) on repeat for days on end (because, everyone knows Christmas starts in mid-November and goes on till mid-January. duh.). But, ALSO...nearing Christmas day reminds me that it is about to happen. The ONE tangible present I begin every year waiting for...Armin van Buuren (oh, love) releases his annual "A State of Trance Year Mix [enter current year here]" around Christmas time. I got my hands on this year's copy on Friday (shh) and...OK, I know most of you aren't (I can't for the life of me understand why :P) Trance/Progressive buffs, so I won't bore you. But, yesterday, fighting the bitter and angry Providence wind, I ventured outdoors, iPod in ears, hope in my heart. And...it was everything I dreamed of. I might say that this is the best Year Mix since 2004/2005. I know my trademark is hyperbole...but, really, the magic of hearing the opening bars of "La Guitarra" (for CD1) and "If You Should Go (Aly & Fila Remix)" (for CD2) beginning the mix and then being a part of the journey that IS A State of Trance cannot be overstated. Really, even exam stress and life-numbing New England winters can't put a lid on my soaring spirit. People often ask me why I have music in my ears ALL the time - why I walk the streets and don't listen to the sounds of cars whooshing past, college students chattering, grotesquely loud construction monsters reshaping the very face of Providence/Brown University, etc. Why I'm not a "part" of my surroundings. Believe me, I am. Except my reality is found in the 240 layers of sound that comprise every second of uplifting/euphoric/vocal/instrumental trance. So, while I risk being run over by yellow school buses every day (3 times and counting), it's OK. Because at least I'm flying when it happens...

Congratulations to my dearest, favouritest, bestest friend in the whole wide world. You are so beautiful, it only follows that the things that you see and the way you see them will be much the same. I hope this is only the beginning of a very long career in gallery appearances :) Love you!

While trying to wrench my suitcase out of its nook in my miniscule closet in my room (try and find it, I dare you), I had to rearrange a lot my room. And, I realised how much CRAP I have. No, literally. (OK, not *literally* but you know) Ticket stubs, eight packs of gum with exactly 1 piece left in each, 3 kinds of lip balm - all of them half used, notes, posters/fly-cards of events that I had wanted to attend, 2-line letters, cards, post-its about needing to study 320 pages of Economics in 4 days (praise the LORD those days are over)...EVERYTHING. And, it's funny...because I'm really not one to live in the past much. There are those who open up shoe boxes of memories and painstakingly try and put together the days that were in chronological order. I, good reader, am not one of them. It happened...and that's that. It was wonderful...but that's it. WHY then all this stuff? 1) Lift box of crap, 2) Pull bin out, 3) Throw. Away.

[Actually, I lie...there are some things I keep in a special little diary and look at with tear-filled eyes. Boarding passes to Zambia/India, train tickets to New Haven, passes for the commuter rail to Boston, my ticket stub and autographed wristband (eep!) from Armin's Halloween concert. Times when I have left behind what I know to purposefully create days&nights which will become memories I will treasure forever...like sunshine-flavoured charms on an otherwise uniform chain of life's days]

Wow...my square brackets are so emo. Worrying.

Began packing today as a study break. SO SO excited for winter break. This semester's been a lovely one - for the most part, things have gone wonderfully right - but there has been a strange sense of discomfort. An underlying lack...of something. I can't put my finger on it, and it might be absolutely nothing...but it has not let me have the perfect semester (if there is such a thing for reflective, thinking, questioning young people). Being with family in the comfort of maachher jhol-bhaath will no doubt help put things into perspective. Another way of saying - 16TH DECEMBER, WHEN WILL YOU COME?!

I have the WORST exam tomorrow. A final for my History of the Modern Middle East Since 1918 class. You would think that this would be a piece of cake class for me. And, yes - it was one of the most interesting classes I've taken. The material was vast and really helped me contextualise whatever knowledge I had of the region (barring my knowledge of Palestine-Israel and a little bit of post-civil war Lebanon, I really didn't know enough), Professor Akarli was an incredibly professor (even though I disagree with his take on the PKK in Turkey) and one of the few leftover humanists from an era long-gone, and our readings were diverse and so full of useful information. HOWEVER, that does not mean, Professor Engin Akarli, that you should torture us with your exams - it does not mean that we should have to know what on page 156-line 28, word 9 was! We should not have to try and guess what Sadat was thinking in 1977 that one time when he thought of something that related to something else that happened in 1965. Gah! Anyway, major cramming session tonight. And then beautiful, cursive regurgitation tomorrow at 9 in the AM. Sweet.

Excuse me for the haphazardness of this post, by the way. Tried to get as much written down in 30 minutes. Style, unfortunately, had to suffer. More tomorrow after the exam, in between packing, saying goodbye to friends and being a general bum.

Tomorrow. I will think of you twice every second...instead of just once. Sadly, you don't deserve to be the one. You shouldn't. But, you are. What a waste...

The quietest time of day

04:27.

Finished the best paper I have, possibly, ever written

...and have fallen in love with Kashmir in the process.

Read Vishal Dadlani's letter.

And Barkha Dutt's piece.

It's never simple. Never.

Dreaming of dollops of sunshine on the Dal Lake and "Guzarish"

Alvida, for this short night.

Bas chal naa mere sang sang...

Music lost its meaning for a while. I would play it, for the first time in my life, just to fill the silence. Sometimes you need to be reminded of what you have loved...to know that your soul isn't scarred...and that the future can be just as beautiful.

When I first heard this, I was struck by how similar the strains are to one of my favourite songs, "Saathiya" (Saathiya, 2002). And also, how familiar the feelings - my heart momentarily experiencing the most beautiful ache, a slight shiver, time stopping for just a minute - were.

"Guzarish" - Ghajini (To be released 25/12/2008)


Week 1.
26/11: We will never forget.
Simply, we can't...

Aye mere vatan ke logon...

"So I’m booking flights to Mumbai. I’m going to go get a beer at the Leopold, stroll over to the Taj for samosas at the Sea Lounge, and watch a Bollywood movie at the Metro"

- Suketu Mehta, "What They Hate About Mumbai" NYTimes 28/11/2008
[Read his op-ed here]

Thanksgiving break is coming to an end and I feel like I've lived through a few lifetimes in the last few days. My heart and spirit have been thousands of miles away from Alpine, New Jersey and there isn't a cell in my body that is looking forward to taking a train ride back to Providence tomorrow morning. It's been hard having to sit down to write final papers, study for final exams and try and be a Brown student knowing that Bombay and the nation at large are suffering through nights of insecurity and anguish.

I have read hundreds of blogs, spoken to dozens of friends and relatives in India, trawled through every online news source and watched NDTV 24x7 (pun intended) during the past few days - hoping and praying that the words people were using to express their reactions to the events in Bombay would in some way, shape or form allow me to come to terms with my own sentiments. Anger and sadness have somewhere along the line metamorphosed into a deep-set sense of disappointment and melancholy. The victims of my wild emotions are also dynamic - religious leaders, terrorist groups, blinded youth, colonial powers, academics, insensitive peers, over-cautious older people, politicians, journalists, socialites and celebrities, friends, society, we the people...the world.
***
Crimson streets, broken-glass vision, blaring sirens, burning heritage, ruthless AK's, frightened pigeons, smiling terror. Wednesday and Thursday are a blur of tears. CNN America, usually SO careful to hide images of injured civilians in Iraq or mangled bodies of American/British soliders, had no qualms about displaying before its viewers graphic images of the blown up, bullet-ridden, fire-blackened, forever paralysed bodies of Indian men, women and children. Mumbaikers. The Taj burned late into the night and something broke inside of me.

Oh god, I was so angry. I was angry at those men who sit in their plush homes in Dubai, Karachi, Riyadh, Mumbai, London, Paris (you name it) and plot these atrocious acts. I was angry because I was living in a mad, screwed up world where bad people can band together, and truly believe that they are soldiers in "The Army of the Righteous" (Lashkar-e-Toiba). I was angry at people who, barely 48 hours the horrific acts, were posting, on facebook, conspiracy theories linking the attacks to the BJP. I was angry that, after calling me and asking if everyone was OK in my family, one of my friends would respond to my rhetorical questions, "Why Bombay? Why terror? Why AGAIN?!" with, "I mean, Muslims are treated pretty shittily in India...and plus there's the whole Kashmir thing". I was SO angry, in fact, that an Army friend's status message on facebook (“Forgiving terrorists is left to GOD, but fixing their appointment with god is OUR responsibility”) gave me some sick sense of pleasure. The knowledge that inhuman forms of torture were, no doubt, being used by the special forces on the body and spirit of the captured terrorist didn't appall me as much as it maybe should have. Admittedly, I was unbearably hateful.
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The dust settled around the, yet again, bruised and battered city of Bombay, the Tiranga-draped bodies of Hemant Karkare, Ashok Kamte, Vijay Salaskar and other lesser-known but (god knows) equally important national heroes were laid to rest by tearful masses, cellphones were turned on, window shutters opened and frightened feet ventured outdoors. Life risked going back to normal. As it always does, in this compulsively resilient city. But something had broken.
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I was watching the latest episode of "We The People" (if you haven't seen it already - here is the online version) and I was struck by a number of things. Firstly, could Barkha Dutt and her team have put together a more inept panel of speakers? People like Kunal Kohli, Ness Wadia and Simi Grewal - besides having no public policy, homeland security, international politics or conflict resolution experience/expertise whatsoever - are unbearably uninteresting and trite individuals. Why would I ever feel any sense of reassurance or take any kind of advice from a panel of these self-obsessed, wealthy, entitled celebrities? Other than M N Singh (Former police commissioner of Mumbai), none of the other panelists had any real reason to be on that show (except Ratna Pathak who just seems like a fiercely intelligent and lovely woman)! Yes, they are citizens and prominent members of the Mumbai crowd - but who cares! At a time when we need to be asking tough questions about the politics and policies of our country, who are these people?! Where were the relief workers, the members of the ATS or the police force, the activists, the academics, the Post-Trauma health workers, the journalists, the report writers, the think tank workers, on the panel? These are the people amongst us who are formulating and putting together ideas that will bring on-the-ground change to the country. These are the people who we should be engaging with and the nuance in their ideas are the ones we should be attempting to understanding. Not Simi Grewal and her narrow-minded, war-mongering politics.

And then, it hit me. Terrorism had struck. No, not for the first time nor the hardest (read as: highest death toll). But it had struck the richest. Terrorism was no more just dinner conversation about distant events in some sprawled out market in Delhi that one's Manolo Blahniks would never walk into nor was it about dead conductors on (god forbid they ever have to breathe the air in one) commuter trains in Mumbai. Terrorists, by upsetting the peace of South Bombay, have implanted that universal fear in the minds of the rich and famous in Mumbai - it could have been us.

And, suddenly, people like Ness Wadia and Mr. Oberoi are speaking using the most trite methods of verbal manipulation - populism. With stilted accents and hoity-toity tones, these multi-millionaires speak of big concepts and 'relate', in the most annoyingly fake way, to every citizen of India. But, that's the scary similarity between politicians and this crust of Mumbai society - their empty, thoughtless words and their complete lack of commitment to the communities of which they are a part. Cynic that I am, I can't help but feel that the sudden epiphany that the Indian govt. is not doing justice to its people does not come from a deep-set sense of disgust at the atrocities of political negligence - but more from a sense of elitist "we pay you guys and keep you guys in power and THIS is how you repay us?" Once a few more MP's are sacked, the Oberoi's and Taj's and their socialite friends are going to be able to find the millions to rebuild their grand hotels and ensure tighter security for their flashy public appearances and private jets. It's the rest of us that need to look deeper to rebuild our societies and find ways to create long-lasting social change.
***
Since Saturday, people have been falling over themselves to be heard over the din of angry voices. Every individual is trying to air his deep-set disappointment with the government using harsher and more eloquent words than his neighbour. From Amitabh's blog post about the ominous taking-justice-into-my-own-hands act of sleeping with a gun under his pillow to regular off-the-www-street bloggers who say "line up every politician in sight and shoot him" - India's favourite game, i.e. find a scapegoat in the government and then put as much pressure on him as possible, is being played with an unabashed sense of entitlement by every 'proud' citizen of our nation.

Please don't get me wrong - I am up there amongst the most disgusted critics of the Z-class security having, Merc driving, Bollywood gawking, Communal tension promoting, bribe swallowing, empty promises making senile idiots that are in positions of power in our country. However, what I am also a heavy-handed critic of is distancing ourselves from the process of that ultimately entrusts these leaders with our tax money - our role in choosing these men and women.

There are a million reasons to be livid with the current set of duffers in power. Why does it take 10hours to get forces to the Taj, in a city that has been plagued by terrorism and communal tension non-stop for the past 25-30 years? Thank you, Home Minister-saab for informing the whole world on TV that NSG men are leaving to take on the terrorists. Why oh why, however, did you think it necessary to give us all the classified details - number of NSG men, what time they would leave and what time they would start the operations? Thank you, Mr. Minister, the terrorists were ALSO watching you on TV. Why did the hundreds of fire fighters, who were putting their lives at risk trying to douse the flames at the Taj and evacuate hostages at the same time, enter a terrorist attack with 2 bullet-proof jackets and no bomb-detectors/detonators? Why didn't the authorities secure our harbours when they received the letter from the union of fishermen warning them of hijacked jetties, foreign smugglers and potential security threats? And these are only a handful of failures that have been brought to the fore thanks (I apologize for the seemingly insensitive use of this word) to the events of the past 4 days.

But please, let's not just jump on the shiny-and-sinfully-tempting bandwagon that is bashing our incompetent politicians and their apathy. Let's also take a good hard look at ourselves and our own personal role in the state of this democracy. How many of us take the time and make the effort to vote?! How many of us really know about candidates within our cities and states, research and engage with their political platforms? How much do we know about our constitution and our rights as citizens of a democracy? How many of us have ever considered working for the public sector or look to actively be a part of policy making/government institutions? We cannot sit around and hope for a change in leadership and better days - a community and a nation has to be worthy of it. We cannot expect a more secure nation when we roll our eyes at security personnel at airports and sigh deeply when our bags are checked at the cinema halls. How can we expect to elect leaders who represent our social opinions and world view if all our conversations on Indian politics are prefaced by the disclaimer "I hate politicians. I have no faith in the politics of our country." We ask ourselves, why aren't our politicians afraid of the people?! Because we, the people, are making a conscious decision - every day of our lives - to depoliticize and, ultimately, disempower ourselves.
***
But, like the politicians who delude us time and time again, I have said more than is necessary.
***
The past few days have changed me as a person. I wasn't in Bombay and I did not see the blood-lined streets or the gashes in the fabric of the city. And while I know you might find it trivial and pointless, I will light a candle to mourn the dead and hope for peace. But, that is NOT enough. Please, let us finally take responsibility for ourselves and our actions - let us rise to be the good citizens that our great country deserves. If not now, then when?

"Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. "
- Rabindranath Tagore