I lived with her for four months. All love and no fight. She began writing her phd thesis. I began mine too. The shroud of misery that I wear sometimes slowly dissolved in the sunlight. I learned to sidestep my unhappiness. For the first time, I started listening to music in some earnestness. Music that has never entered my ears. I conceded that music, like other art, wants to tell us something. There was an expansion of time within itself. Four months elongated and gave birth to little threads of time. And then they detonated.

It is not that I was attracted to her in any sense. On the contrary, I do not like the extreme virtue combined with a certain reflexivity that renders her sexuality defunct. Perhaps, all I am is sad that she is leaving. I am a diviner of her moods and misgivings, my ears to the ground beneath her feet wherever she is. All those soon-to-be redundant skills need to be rehabilitated. I was oblivious to the upheavals around me. I have terribly neglected them. I must descend to retrieve them.

Mathrubhumi and predatory journalism

The media in Kerala is fast becoming another axis of repression of marginalised communities and of human rights activists. The latest example is really bizarre. A documentary film was screened and a play performed at Lenin Balavadi in Trivandrum on Sunday,28th November. The documentary is by Someetharan, a film maker of some renown and was on the genocide of ethnic Tamils in Srilanka. It captured in terse images of gore and lament, a war waged by the Srilankan state against its own people. The play was by a theatre group from Pondicherry; some of the group members were traditional performing artists. It examined in great detail the algebra of ethnic hatred and violence and the absurdities that it throws up for us to grapple with. Both the documentary and the play were poignant and hard hitting and I left Lenin Balavadi late that evening feeling angry and sad. As the organisers point out, Srilanka is so near, yet we know so little about what is going on there. I told my friends about those images of war-ravaged bodies and landscapes which refuse to go away from my mind.

The next day, the organisers show the Mathrubhumi report on that evening’s proceedings. The report called it a “secret meeting” to propagate the cause of Tamil nationalism in Kerala and read it together with alleged infiltration of LTTE in the Kerala coast to consolidate its remaining forces. The “secret meeting”, any way, was included in Mathrubhumi’s “today’s programmes in the city” on that day. It quotes sources in police and intelligence to substantiate this argument and links all kinds of disparate pieces of information and misinformation. A bunch of concerned citizens meeting to understand what is going on in a neighboring country become terrorists and extremists at the hands of this newspaper. It is high time that we watch the media for such instances of repression and spread of misinformation. The mainstream media not only refuses to bring out the voices of marginalized communities, but also aids state repression through misreporting, slander and vilification. Sadly, the repression in this instance is directed against theatre and film. These fratricidal tendencies among media tell us that we live in interesting times: A time when an evening gathering becomes human rights activism at personal cost and risk.

* the link to the report http://www.mathrubhumi.com

/online/malayalam/news/story/647232/2010-11-30/kerala

Who is a quack?

I met two medical practitioners last Tuesday. One possessing an MBBS in Alternative Medicine and another a plus two (a revelation which I take as testimony to my skills in fieldwork than their audacity). Both were offering their services for a mere Rs.20. They worked among Bengali, Oriya and Assamese migrants in Kochi.
The idea of quack has interesting genealogies and is entwined with the rise of modern medicine and how it annihilated and devalorised other medical practices and traditions. But P. Sainath says that such practitioners could be killers in rural India where there is little access to health care. He particularly gives this example of a pregnant woman who died after too many saline drips administered by such a practitioner.
In Kochi, the single most disease that is cured by these practitioners is body pain felt after long hours of arduous manual labour. Usually a liberal dose of pain killer cures such symptoms. These workers work in quarries, plywood factories and chemical factories. Pain all over the body and chronic fatigue.
Why do these workers choose these practitioners instead of our not so bad government hospitals? They describe their ailments to these doctors who speak their language.
At one level, it demonstrates the need for affordable health care among migrants in Kerala. At another, it questions our perceptions of health care as malayalees where we seek the most specialized, preferably expensive doctors and hospitals.
The misfortune of falling ill and having to encounter the health system in an alien land is dreaded so much that the workers of Banma, Bihar when they went to work in the Delhi metro took the village healer, called guruji, who does massaging besides ritual forms of healing, mainly to ease body pain. Guruji is a handicapped person and has a tri-cycle. He does not work at the site. He lives off the fee he gets when he does healing. He gets food for free from the common kitchen of the workers from the village.
The practioners in Kochi are not ritual healers, they practice allopathy.
The Bengali practitioner says “I came here as a toursist and saw the suffering of Bengalis and decided to help them.”The Assamese practitioner is being promoted by a local medical shop which sends up Assamese customers who visit their shop.
After talking to some workers, I felt that they do not trust malayali doctors with their bodies, much less their ailments. “They keep using the needle too much”
The good doctor, bad doctor and the quack?

Laughing Unabated

The Hindu, 13 May 2009: Ajmal’s smiling and laughing continued unabated, a
day after the court reprimanded him. On Tuesday, the court once again chided the
accused for his behaviour in court. When the butts of the rifles were being
examined, Ajmal seemed to be tickled to pieces.
However, Mr. Tahaliyani took
strong objection to his laughing when details of Ombale’s death were being
mentioned. The judge remarked that at every mention of Ombale, Ajmal tended to
laugh. Ajmal stood up and said that this was not his intention.

Why is he laughing? It might seem gross disregard for what is going on or the seriousness of the crime he committed. But I do not think so.

I think he is genuinely amused by the name Ombale and even more genuinely tickled by the butt of the rifle. It might also mean that he crossed the threshold of the mirage called hope. Must be feeling immense freedom. Otherwise what could lead to this irreverant laughter?

I also get unduly amused by certain names however prosaic and ordinary they might sound. Ombale is not prosaic by any stretch of imagination and the fact that Ombale is dead does not diminish the potential of his name to amuse! So.. Ajmal. go on and laugh because you have nothing to lose!

There is no place for place! by hakim sanai translation by Ivan Granger

There is no place for place!
How can a place
house the maker of all space,
or the vast sky enclose
the maker of heaven?

He told me:
“I am a homeless treasure.
The world was made
to give you a place to stand
and see me.”

Tell me, if the one you seek
is placeless,
why put your shoes on?
The real road
is found by polishing, polishing
the mirror of your heart.

Untitled

Your music ploughs my heart

Setting sail in my veins

Cutting right through love and hate

Making them vapour and smoke

Boredom and Loneliness

This post is dedicated to understanding the difference between boredom and loneliness.

Boredom is when you feel that you have pursued an action or an emotion or a person enough and you do not know which is the action, emotion or person to be pursued next. Both these feelings have to be there i.e an enough and a more. I know this kid who said when she was three that she feels bored. She said it in malayalam. boradikkunnu. which translates literally into boredom is beating . So her father asked: where is it beating, darling? She said that it is in her stomach. That is true boredom, I guess. Anything you feel in your stomach is your truth. The problem is that we are mostly not even capable of truly bored. It is not a stomach boredom. You could also say that boredom can never be true because it is just not discontentment: it is discontentment plus a want.

Now, what is the nature of loneliness? Loneliness is when you feel that you are not enough. You need someone other than yourself. As you know, you could feel loneliness even when you are with someone. But basically you feel that you are not enough. You want the other to fill up your self. Is there true loneliness , a stomach loneliness?

So, boredom and loneliness are different. There will be some who would say that you are lonely when you are bored with yourself. I would beg to disagree. There is a "not enough" part in loneliness. You are not enough. And you need someone. Boredom is when you have had enough of something and you need more of something else. As you can see, this is not too subtle or anything.

So, how was your day? Were you bored or lonely today or are you a fool who thinks that you are living to make other people happy?