Parking and Patriarchy: a strange relationship

Almost always, my neighbor’s bike is parked in the garage in a haphazard fashion. It is because he has got the bike as part of his dowry. Because he hasn’t earned the bike, he does not respect or take care of his bike. Because he got his bike along with his wife, he thinks the same about others too! He never respects other neighbours’ or my bike. He carelessly hits and scratches others' bikes, parks carelessly so that other bikes have no space left and so on.

What’s unfortunate about this dowry-induced lack of respect for others’ property is that it is passed down the generations. Now, my neighbour’s 6 year old son has a small cycle. He parks it exactly the same way as his father. He scratches our bikes the same way as his father. The six year old will grow up and may ask for a dowry. He may get a car along with a wife (because girls’ parents lack a spine). He will park it carelessly and encroach into others’ spaces. He will scratch others’ bikes, cars and self-respect.

This is the story of one manner in which patriarchy continues to live on in this country.

Fairy Lab

Researcher at the end of the day

Too human to be a researcher?

Bookmarks

 Three bookmarks.

Bookmarks

Three custom bookmarks.

Bookmarks

Here is a custom Bookmark I made.

Pooh is a lovely creature! Always looking for a little 'hunny'!

37 and so on

I turned 37! Yay!

During the week that led to the event of my turning 37, I was sick and very weak due to fever and cough. The weather was as cruel as the brutal election results. I was crushed by Uttar Pradesh's summer heat and the burning thoughts of living in this country in the coming days and years. I felt very fragile and vulnerable. But that was when I was 36. This is the story of how I graduated to 37.


On the eve of my turning 37, everything went as usual at home. Chinnu my wife cooked. We both ate. I got the sick-concession and was resting the entire day, sleeping and idling. She had asked me what I would like for the birthday. I didn't want anything other than love. Because I already had everything, including love. The little space left is reserved for love, and yes, I would like some more love.

By evening, I had developed migraine too. Perfect birthday it's going to be, I thought. So we had our usual roti-paneer dinner, some over-dinner-conversation, and some audio-visual entertainment. Suddenly at 10.55 pm, she says, "come on, let's go get a cake." I discouraged her saying the shop closes at 11, and that I was very weak (which I really was). She didn't budge. So we went to the only shop on campus to get a cake. Our favourite cake- Dutch Truffle was there. We bought one on a credit card, and rode home happily.

So, at 11.30 am, we happily ate tiny pieces of Dutch Truffle cake in a saffron state, in an almost all-saffron country almost at midnight. By 11 55, we were in bed. She wished me, and we were about to sleep when Jijoy called to wish. He always calls. At midnight! A cool friend, he is family. So at 12.05 on my birthday, we sleep.

I woke up at 7.30 am with a numbing migraine. 'Happy Birthday to you,' said the migraine to me. 'Thanks buddy, no one has been this close to me since my childhood,' I told the migraine, and got out of the mosquito net. Round the year, this mosquito net protects us. It's a great invention. We must have saved at least a litre of our precious blood this way so far. And the mosquito-gods are surely angry at us, I am sure.

In the kitchen, the poor girl is cooking breakfast and lunch simultaneously. She has to report at her office at 9.30 am, or else she will get scolded by her superiors who arrive at 10 or 11 am. Punctuality is important you know, particularly for contract employees! So I wander about in the small house, trying to make sense of what's happening. The pounding in my head is becoming louder by the second. I decided that I should stay home. When the food was ready, she packed our lunch in separate boxes. I kept mine at home. We then got ready. We both went to office area of the campus. After dropping her at her office, I went to my biometric attendance machine and gave a finger to the department. I personally had protested against the biometric attendance system, but had to comply in the end, thanks to the system's insensitivity to individuals' privacy. I returned home to rest.

At home, I forced myself to eat breakfast. Somehow, I managed to eat an entire puttu and went to sleep. Cough woke me up by 1 pm. By this time, five people had wished me apart from my beloved Chinnu. Some people would be unhappy when the number of wishes are low, but I wouldn't be. I am happy these many remembered or got reminded. It doesn't matter whether people remember or not. What matters is that you remain happy so that you can make others happy. After my MA at EFL University, Hyderabad,  I used to get one email every year from Prof Upendran on my birthday. Those emails used to make me very happy and proud. Nowadays, I don't get those, but the thought of those emails still make me happy. Afterall, birthdays are just like other days, except that they are not other days!

So I had my lunch, which my beloved Chinnu had packed for me. Then I had about 2 ml of the cough syrup given by the Institute pharmacy, and again went to bed. I thought I would wake up by 5 pm, so that I can go and pick up Chinnu by 5.30. Unfortunately, the cough syrup knocked me down and I woke up only at 5.40, by which time she had almost reached home walking in the scorching heat! I felt guilty, pathetic and weaker.

We had tea and another little piece of cake each. We decided to make kanji. By that time, Mettin a friend called from her hostel. She had come from Kerala that morning, and had brought some delicacies with her for us. We became super glad. While we waited for her, Shyam came. We gave him a piece of cake. He asked, 'why is there a cake at home now?' He used to remember my birthday every year, so when we told her it's my birthday, he wished me and stayed longer feeling 'guilty'. He is a long-standing true friend. No amount of forgetting will distance him from us.

After he left, Mettin came with the delicacies she brought from home. We gave her a piece of cake too. She asked what's special, we told her its my birthday. She was 'surprised' and she wished me. Then we sat chatting for some time. The doorbell rings. Chinnu opens the door, and to her surprise, there stands a group of 7 friends with a cake and some candles on it! This is the biggest surprise of all! It turns out that Mettin was acting all this time that she didn't know about the birthday. Normally I would have cried. Being feverish and all, I didn't, or I couldn't. Either way, I was carried away with emotions, became super happy, but couldn't show any of it to those friends. All eight of them sat around, cut and had the cake, sang, made jokes, even made Chinnu sing, and so on. By about 11 pm, they left; so did my migraine.

Chinnu and I cleaned the house up, had bath and went to bed by 11.30 pm. It was a great birthday. Birthdays are great not because so many people wish, but because some people become limitlessly happy, and make others happy, and make them forget their sicknesses, misfortunes, unhappiness and difficulties. It would still have been a great birthday even if those 5 people hadn't wished me over phone, or those 8 people hadn't visited us with a cake, because Chinnu and I had shared our love. But it became a celebration because everyone who wished shared happiness. Such islands of happiness must connect to form continents and oceans to cover this earth. What we need is more happiness- on birthdays and other days!

So I turned 37, and so I go on...

Love. Nothing Else Matters.

Henry Miller had many wives. There was one wife named Hoki. She was Japanese. Hoki and Miller met in a Japanese bar where she used to sing. After meeting a few times, Miller asked her hand in marriage, and she said yes. She was not yet twenty, and he was over fifty!

After Miller's death, the other wives inherited all his wealth. Hoki was the forgotten Japanese divorced wife. She spent the remaining years of her life in her dark little room on top of a second rate bar on a noisy street. But she kept Miller's memories- a few of their photos, a few signed watercolours of Miller (Miller used to paint), and an autographed book. And of course, plenty of invisible memories of a good time.

When Paulo Coelho visited her once, she told him that she did not inherit the rights to his books or his property, and none of those' mattered, because the experience of being together with him outweighed any monetary compensation'. 'There was no point in squabbling over inheritance: love was enough,' Hoki said.

Yes. When there is love, nothing else matters!

[Quotes taken from Like the Flowing River by Paulo Coelho, Harper Collins Publishers, London, 2018]

The Pounding in the Head

Work these days is monotonous. The technical name is 'transcription'. It is to listen to recordings and carefully write down what people spoke in a test, paying acute attention to minute details like duration of pauses, number of 'hmms' and 'uhhs', syntactic accuracy and linguistic complexity of language, and so on. Transcribing 5 minutes of recorded speech takes approximately 90 minutes. Extremely monotonous. The larger picture is clear- a PhD thesis in the area of language assessment. But remaining focused doing the monotonous daily transcription is a tough job. Yet, I drag through this drudgery to reach the golden goal hiding somewhere in the future.

Then comes the villain- the pounding in the head. Some people call it a migraine. I call it a devil. Or a demon. Or whatever I want to call it! While the headphones reproduce different test-participants' speech about themselves, their lives, interests, studies, and other people, my eyes, ears and brain try to focus on how they express what they express. As I do so, the pounding in my head becomes louder. "My name is..." The pounding becomes harder. "I come from..." "I love playing the guitar." "I have a very small family." "My mother is a teacher." The voices from the headphone slowly become rhythmically aligned with the pounding in my head. I can neither hear anything nor understand a word of what's being spoken. Everything around me is blurred out into a hazy hum. The laboratory in which I work, and the people around me dissolve into the air, and I become the pounding in my head. At this level, I walk to the rhythm of the pounding in my head. Or maybe I dance to the rhythm of the pounding. Faster and Faster. Harder and Harder.

The 'Pounding'

Source

Then at one point, I give up living. I am pushed to a point where I no longer exist. At that point, I end. I stop existing. Blank. At the base of that whirlwind of a spiral, I ain't. For me, that is the zenith of existence and non-existence. That's the top and the bottom, fullness and emptiness. end and the beginning. That's when the 'I' cease to exist as an embodied reality. I become weightless; the body disappears. The mind disappears. I disappear. There is no 'I'. It is just the pounding. And I am the pounding.

And that is what I call self, and you call god!