let’s talk of serious things

And indeed we will. I’m sitting about at the office, wasting time till I can leave (which will be in about ten minutes) and a friend sent me this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jan/11/learning-english-india-dalits-rahman. Building a temple to English! Could anything be more appropriate? At least in my own personal experience, I have built a monument to English and England in the interests I pursue, and the knowledge that I pride myself on having. Who else would be so absurdly pleased by the prospect of reading reams of prose on the Conquest of 1066, the Wars of the Roses, the feudal politics of the Anglo-Saxons and the gauzy, glittering extravaganza that was the Regency?

I’m used to being the go-to person when a question on English history arises (which is rare enough, as you might expect). But I know all of this, I read all of these books even as I neglect to delve deeper into the history of my own country. In fact, it’s been a long time since I properly thought of India as peculiarly “mine”. I think of being Tamilian even less; I am not fluent in the language, I cannot read or write in Tamil and my knowledge of Tamil history, culture and tradition is woefully minimal. I have, in effect, put my faith in the metaphorical goddess English as much as the Dalits in that article who have built a temple to her.

Non-belonging. That’s what it is. I was never aware of being not-Brahmin till I had Brahmin friends, and it was then that I realised how entrenched the caste system still is. Unconscious though our prejudices may be, they still exist, and we still continue to perpetrate them, even if they may be slightly skewed owing to the addition of variables like money, power and education. Either way, not-belonging seems to me to be the safest way to prevent oneself from being either partisan or apologetic about the identities that one did not actively choose.

And indeed, both nationality and ethnicity seem so arbitrary, as you grow up. I don’t feel more “Indian” than I do anything else, so why should I identify myself as such? But then again, the thorny question of how we define Indianness (or Tamilianness) comes up, and the possibility of an answer grows ever more remote. Non-belonging removes the necessity of subscribing to (or being thought to subscribe to) any of those things that make up either of the above identities. Non-belonging gives you agency, the ability to choose what you want to be, what you think and what you believe in.

Speaking in terms of the centre/margin conversation that this article plunged my friend and myself into, if the margin refuses to recognise the centre, and chooses not to be marginalized, it can no longer be called the margin. And if non-belonging gives you the power to choose, then why not choose not to belong?

a groovy kind of love

[Groovy Kind of Love - Phil Collins]

I think of my parents in terms of their music.

I took afternoon naps to Genesis, I had proper sit-down dinners to Dire Straits, and every anniversary, they’d sit my brother and me down and tell us how they met (the story was embellished a little bit more every year) to the tune of Air Supply. Throw in a dash of Jethro Tull, in the evenings over a drink; a bit of A.R Rahman, in his early days, as we drove around in a big black monster of a car, and random spurts of REO Speedwagon, Queen, Toto, Michael Jackson, The Eagles, Eric Clapton, Foreigner and Sting. Oh and how could I forget? Pink Floyd. ‘We don’t need no education’, ironically enough, was one of the songs of my childhood. Ironic, because after almost 17 years of education, I’m applying to study for three more.

I’ve been confronted with lots of family stereotypes in 21 years. There’s the inevitable Indian soap opera family: a few warring daughters-in-law, an aged, wise grandmother (or alternatively, an aged, manipulative shrew), a couple of rebellious teenagers, cheating husbands, jealous wives, stern head-of-the-household men, and there you have it! Their stories are the same: arranged marriages, brooding over lost inheritances, revenge, abuse, fear, resentment… you get the drift. It’s all about accommodating (or coercing) the individual identity into the group, because of course, the group’s survival depends on all of its members behaving like the well-oiled cogs of a machine.

And, much to my naive astonishment, the Indian soap opera family has its roots in reality. I’ve had lots of friends who’ve had to give up their own dreams and marry the man their parents chose for them, living lives they didn’t have much say in choosing. They had to forego love, set aside ambition, and slide into the comfortable, well-oiled grooves their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles gently but firmly guided them into. And in my own way, I’ve been mildly jealous of them. Because I have no grooves to be slid into, I have no set path in front of me.

Because, of course, my parents aren’t stereotypical. For one, they were, even to my untrained eyes, quite in love with each other for a long time. They had opinions, they read books, they went to concerts and they drank themselves silly. They were friends before they were lovers, lovers before they were parents. They didn’t expect my brother and me to follow the system, nor did they smother us, foisting their own thwarted ambition onto us.

I think the best gift they gave us was letting us make our own choices, forcing us to make our own mistakes and find our own ways to fix them. They didn’t tell us what to believe, or whom to trust. They didn’t say we could only watch one hour of TV a day, or tell us we couldn’t have sugar in our milk. They didn’t try to force talent on us by shoving us into a million and one classes, but they encouraged us to pursue what we liked. I remember switching incessantly from bharathnatyam, singing, playing the piano, table tennis, painting, craft and the Girl Guides while my mother uncomplainingly let me join and un-join things as and when I liked.

Above all, I’m grateful they let me live my own life, in books. I don’t know how, or when, I began to read (sure, there are pictures of me at 11 months with my head bowed, poring over a newspaper). But my entire childhood was just that – I read. Voraciously, unceasingly, unstoppably. I read all the books I was given, and those I just found lying about. Fiction, mythology, science, history, archaeology, chemistry, astronomy and million other things I only half-understood. The only active step my parents took at this point was to keep me far away from comic books and I’m actually grateful to them for that.

When I had to find a system that would take me on my terms, and give me the choice to study what I loved, my parents found me the IB. When I realised my career path was one that required a ton of monetary investment, with very little hope of outstanding returns, they supported me.

And when I hear of people whose problems stem from their parents’ inability to see that identity shapes itself, taking from its environment; that it cannot be forced into a respectable, acceptable shape – well, I’m immensely grateful to my parents for being the way they were, the way they are.

Maybe it was the music. Maybe it was the love. Maybe it was a bit of both and something else besides. But when you’ve got such great parents, the only quarrel you could have with the universe is that you have a ton of debt on your side.

you’re a carousel, you’re a wishing well

I feel unaccountably happy every time I listen to this song (‘Everything’ by Michael Buble).

Friday afternoon. Tomorrow’s a busy day, what with one job interview and one general ‘how to make money online’ meeting. Hopefully, from the following week, I will be engaged in more than one scheme through which I will finance my laptop. At twenty years of age, I’ve begun to feel more and more guilty at having to spend my parents’ money on things that have nothing to do with them.

And here’s an abstraction:

Now and then, between those frisson-laded phases of madness and obsession and fixation upon one object, one person outside of oneself for all the most intense sensations of happiness and sadness, you fall into a languorous exploration of things that have nothing (and yet, everything) to do with your immediate emotions. The kind of sanguine contentment that you feel, in this period, feels more relatively valuable to your life than any previously longed for and experienced intensity.

Spending long, lazy days filled with reading and conversation, lunches and dinners with friends who are long past superficial concerns of politesse, conversations to nowhere on the phone and advertisement-worthy evenings with family all the while knowing that your path in life (for the next year, at least) is secure: in the midst of so much, could you feel anything but happy and content, as if nothing could be lacking?

comfortably numb?

I’ve read 6 books in the last two weeks.

1. i’ll take you there – Joyce Carol Oates
2. The Enchantress of Florence – Salman Rushdie
3. On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan
4. Vanity Fair – W.M Thackeray
5. Q & A – Vikas Swarup
6. The House of Blue Mangoes – David Davidar

I’ve watched 9 movies:

1. Changeling
2 Slumdog Millionaire
3. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
4. Feels Like Heaven
5. Kate and Leopold
6. Partition
7. License to Wed
8. Australia
9. Twilight

I’ve written in my diary, gone to play rehearsals, eaten out, gone to Speed and Zara’s, made unfulfilled plans to go shopping and dreamt strange dreams.

I’ve felt contented, unhappy, lazy, sleepy, bored, miserable, afraid, hollow, depressed, thoughtful, apathetic, outraged, indignant, vindicated, bitchy, self-indulgent, jealous and thankful.

I don’t know what this is called. I don’t know if I like how this year’s going so far. I don’t know if I’m as intelligent as I once thought I was, or as unique, focused, well-adjusted or ambitious.

The word I’m looking for, I think, is upheaval. So far, 2009 has been all about violent, unstoppable change. Mostly of the destructive kind that changes you forever.

And as always, I’m reacting to change I can’t control by being as static as I possibly can.

you’re free to leave me, but just don’t deceive me

Indian Writing – II tomorrow. I have no notes for the nine poems we have on the paper, and all my responses to the one novel we have are hopelessly “subjective”.

There are so many things I want to write about, but not too much or too little. How to maintain the perfect balance between revealing too little and too much? Because of course, being as shamelessly exhibitionist as I am, I can’t quite keep from revealing some of it. I have no defence, but the honest hope that in throwing it all outside of myself, I will not have to feel it anymore. And oddly enough, it’s not an effort made in vain.

i) This goes out to a bunch of people whom I care a lot about and who all seem to have the same problem:

Your only problem lies in your inability to see yourself for the beautiful person that you are. You constantly strive to be someone else, to please everyone around you when really, you’re only making yourself unhappier in the process. We have one life and you owe it to yourself to live it the way you want to. No one else matters as much as you do. Forget about all those things you perceive as failures, look at yourself in the mirror and see all those things that make you better and trust yourself, above anyone else.

ii) Is it normal to think you can’t ever trust anyone again? It’s so easy to slip into this self-conscious cynicism, this bitter view of things. I’m terrified, it’s true. Once you’ve felt hollow, once you’ve made yourself sick with regret and hurt, once you’ve had everything you ever believed in thrown in your face, is it wrong to never want to be that vulnerable again?

iii) All your life is based on trust. You trust your abilities to get you through education and employment, you trust your intuition to keep you safe, you trust the people around you to be everything you want them to be, you trust life itself to be for you what it’s meant to be but so often isn’t. Questions, questions, questions of sincerity, of honesty, of integrity blow about in the wind. I don’t pretend to know the truth anymore.