Category Archives: india
Taking a Breather from Maximum City
What’s happening to Mumbai?
Leave it to Pritish Nandy to elaborate in his inimitable way. His post on this topic, published in the Times of India, is very well written and says it all. It’s called (in it’s tongue-in-cheeky tone) Why I love Mumbai.
Just in case there’s not enough of an incentive for you to read it, I have included an excerpt here:
“….
Muslims have got Satanic Verses banned. Hindus have banned Husain. So no gallery dares to show the art of the city’s greatest son. You can’t show sculptures with genitals, not even Michaelangelo’s David, though you can see any number of genitals on the streets where people openly pee. You can’t watch The Dirty Picture on 9 pm TV. That’s outlawed though it won Vidya the National Award and every kid has loved it. You are lucky Donald Duck ain’t banned because comics and cartoons in text books are banned. My Savita Bhabhi is too. So are, sneakily, many websites.
…..”
Read more here. Now you will, right? [And how do you like all that genuine purple prose? 🙂 ]
This write-up by him was followed by another article of the same ilk (by Nandy again) a day later – Don’t you dare sing, dance, eat out, watch films. Welcome to Mumbai in 2012. Obviously he has strong feelings about the new era of moral policing that is emerging here. As he should.
I mean, this kind of stuff happens only in cities like…Bangalore, right? My intuition tells me that the people of Maximum City will not stand for it and sooner or later, it will be nipped in the bud.
Combine this with the despairing populace of India who are wondering how and why India Shining got so tarnished, so quickly.
With a government that is called paralyzed yet is able to introduce funky finance “reforms” (retroactive taxes, anyone?) while taking the country back to the low days of the early 1990s, with inflation that doesn’t seem to have a cap in sight, with foreign investors intent on fleeing, and the light at the end of the economy’s tunnel nowhere in sight…why, America looks downright luminous! 🙂
All of this combined with the city’s inherent humidity that gathers even more steam (literally!) in anticipation of the grand entry of Monsoon-2012 and I decided – what a wonderful time to break away, even if it’s just for a couple of weeks!
To break away and escape from madness by heading home – to my modest-sized, quiet, pristine, lovely city in the southern United States. It’s where a bright and sunny Summer, as well as friends and family await me with open arms (I hope!). And it’s where I certainly won’t get busted by the moral police if I decide to go out for a late night drink. (Chill already, Mumbai!). Far from it.
What a welcome change it will be to go from the mega-city that never sleeps (or used to not) to one that is quiet and peaceful, if somewhat sleepy at times. The yin and the yang. 🙂
So, home sweet home, here I come!
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P.S. As I was reviewing the post, I noticed that I have three of these 🙂 (this makes 4) embedded in my writing. That’s unusual for me…must be something about my mood as I head home, eh? 🙂 (and that’s 5)
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P.S. #2. As I make my way out of Mumbai, it appears….ah yes, I hear it. The monsoon of Mumbai has arrived.
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Photo Credits:
Mumbai Skyline at Night: By Cididity Hat (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Smalltown USA : By User:Anivron derivative work: Spyder_Monkey [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Mindfully Saying Thanks (sometimes you just have to)
The inclination to write this post crept up on me as I was doing my daily two-second (hah!) FB check this morning.
Something I saw there stood out so starkly…it appeared to be showing me the yin and yang of life itself.
As many FB users do, I subscribe to a few people and communities that interest me. Today, my FB wall had a juxtaposition of two themes that were such contrasts that it made me stop in my tracks and think.
Here is what I’m talking about. [It’s a screen snip so the links won’t work on the picture].
I don’t mean to wax philosophical so…but do you see what I see?
On the one hand, you have Mariam Tia. Courageous, tragic, bold, inspiring and as Mr.Kristof says “World leaders could use some of her backbone“. Do read her story and that of so many other Sudanese people caught in a merciless situation that they have to call “life”.
On the other hand, adjacent to her story, we have ….fashion designer Satya Paul – showcasing his beautiful, expensive creations that women love to drool over. [Satya Paul is the name of an eponymous Indian design house which creates and sells some fabulous high-end clothing, mostly for women].
It’s just that (through no fault of theirs!), sitting right next to Mariam’s story, posts on Satya Paul (and I?) seem so flighty, superficial, soft and silly. And yet, these thoughts would never have crossed my mind if I had not just spied those divergent images together, one right after another.
Both topics are of interest to me. Besides, Satya Paul is a substantial presence in the design world. How come then that just because I happened to see these images adjacent to each other, I feel so….well, icky? It’s also what got me thinking like this.
[Needless to say, if nothing else, I would like you to read Mariam’s story. Mariam, who named her baby daughter “Fakao” which means “bombs are dropping“…which was what was happening all around her when she was pregnant].
As I read her story, I thought to myself, Mariam and I live such different lives – yet here I am getting inconvenienced and unhappy with the most trivial of matters, despite basically living a good life where I have the time and means to lust after Satya Paul’s designs, using catch phrases like “life is beautiful“ so lightly, as banalities almost – without even thinking before spouting them.
How often do you and I truly acknowledge and value what we are so fortunate to have?
As I finished reading about Mariam, I simply came to a complete stop. Then, what I did very deliberately and mindfully was this:
I. Appreciated. My. Life.
And not just the happy stuff either but all of it – all that is inseparable, unchangeable and woven together.
I paid homage. To my friends and family, to my relationships and connections, to those who passed through my life and to those who entered and stayed. To my joys and sorrows, my successes and failures, my pleasures and regrets, my hopes and fears. In other words, to the yin and yang of a life that I am so fortunate to have.
And as I did this, I realized something else. Racing through life, giving more attention than they deserve to irritations, regrets, fears or troubles, I simply don’t give my holistic existence a solid pat on its back often enough. (How about you?)
Not to get too preachy, but whoever you are, as you are reading this, can I ask you to do something (and do it more than just once, please…maybe even once a day)?
Don’t just say it, but BELIEVE this: that your life is very beautiful indeed.
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The Yin and Yang of Life Anywhere 