Anew

While I still love Charlie Brown and love being his Little Red Haired Girl, somewhere I feel like I am more than just that so I've created a new blog. Like me, it's going through a transitional period and requires a lot of work in terms of aesthetics and finishing. However, the soul and writing are present so you can see my new posts at: silatoria.blogspot.com

I shall work on it slowly and let it grow into a new entity. It's been a fun few years here but now the little red haired girl is growing up a bit and she needs more space.

Much love!

Warnings of un-warmth

You know it's really cold when you:
1. warm your hands over your keyboard
2. stalk people with lit cigarettes for some smokey warmth
3. question the dangers of global warming

On Oxford and other bovines...

Oxford has finally unleashed its true avataar today – grey, wet and cold! After two weeks of clear skies and sunlight that shone on flowers and through stained-glass; today we were assaulted by an incessant drizzle and a disturbing sea of grey. I should have read the signs. Over the last few days, people have been wearing more jackets and scarves and mufflers and raincoats and carrying umbrellas. I scoffed at those people. I refused to wear layered clothing. I contracted a cold. Prior to this becolden state, though, quite a lot was happening in my life and this is a small sampling:

I have no idea where to start but I think my room is a good place. It’s a tiny, quaint room in crooked building with a winding wooden staircase and I absolutely love it! My window faces the road and I can hear everything from the heels of shoes and random chatter to the post-pub singing and breaking of bottles! My college is the smallest one in the University and right opposite my department. Everyone is extremely helpful and the dining hall caters to everyone, including people who have eating disorders like vegetarianism. The library has beautiful stained-glass windows and wooden interiors where you can drink coffee and catch up on your reading. When it gets too cold, there is a blanket at the back of your chair to wrap yourself in!

The architecture of this town played with my senses for a while. While the buildings are compact, the work on the buildings (windows/ statues/lamps/etc.) is rather large and for some reason this completely confused me! I wasn’t aware of this but constantly miscalculated distances and the relative sizes of birds and vehicles next to buildings!

During Fresher’s Week there are hundreds of orientation and induction programmes. All the students ran around like headless chickens between departmental and college activities. The Freshers Fair took place in the examination hall and it was packed with stalls for everything from Scottish dancing and underwater hockey to societies that were interested in medieval weapons! I went mad. I became a compulsive signer and signed on for all kinds of activities. I don’t even remember most of it. Everything is a haze of colour, people and signatures! I loved the room with the religious groups. It started with a Sikh group (manned by a boy who had cut his hair!) and went on to Hindu, Christian and so on, until it ended with an atheist society. The agnostics probably didn’t know whether they believed in starting a society.

On the last night of Freshers Week, my college organised a pub-crawl. We had to go to a number of pubs and answer a set of questions. It seemed to be more of a pub race and I couldn’t understand why it was called a crawl; barring the fact that they expected us to get absolutely sloshed and come back on all fours. When I saw people being tied together at the ankle, I realised that as a four or five-legged race to the pubs we would all be crawling. My group had four people and we almost gave up before we left the college. Our porter gave us a motivational speech and rhythm of ‘one, two, one, two’ to chant. Duly motivated by his enthusiasm we marched on. It was a difficult task and we had to avoid people, vehicles and dustbins. We chanted ‘one, two, one, two’, then moved to ‘un, dos, un, dos’ and finally ‘ek, do, ek, do’. One Indian was completely puzzled by four people, who were tied together, trooping down the road and shouting numbers in Hindi and he screamed back ‘teen, char, panch’! We soon gave up and walked as free soles down the streets of Oxford. We motivated those who were still tied together and silently supporting the other creatures who had given up like us. In one club we were assaulted by a strange mix of music: The Beatles, Rihanna, The Spice Girls and Boyzone. The DJ didn’t even try to keep the tempo up. I ached for a trashy punju song that I could actually dance to. After that noisy, funny and animated night we walked back quietly to college. On the way, we passed the Radcliffe Camera. There was something majestic and awe-inspiring about seeing the moon shine through the dark clouds that moved swiftly behind such an imposing building. In that lighting, Oxford looked a lot like south Mumbai and it felt strangely familiar yet different. This mixture of familiarity with a strong portion of the bizarre is a perfect way to sum up my experiences at Oxford. It’s a place where I feel like I’ve been for years and yet at times feel like it’s absolutely strange and new. At any rate, it should be a good adventure.

Building: Brilliant blunders

Imagine your hall being flooded with rainwater. Granted, that was easy to imagine and you did not have to tax your brain too much. Now, imagine the same when your house is approximately twenty meters in the air and almost a kilometer away from the river, and this flooding occurs while the entire city is going through a drought.

A miracle? Or perhaps a sign from a higher power telling me that while others may suffer, She knows that I am a virtuous woman and I will be spared? Alas, it was neither. This morning’s flooding was merely a direct result of a few brilliant architects and civil engineers. Yes, these aforementioned Brilliants made a series of decisions, such as the drainage pipe of my balcony must be located near the door that separates my balcony from the hall. Thus, the balcony now slopes towards my hall. They also decided that aesthetics took precedence over functionality. They believed that the edifice of the building would be marred by an ungainly pipe running down the wall. Thus it was embedded in the wall of the building and the wall was left stark naked for all to admire.

Neither of these decisions are problematic in themselves, however sometimes when a drainage pipe is heavily clogged it must be unblocked by breaking the pipe and removing whatever waste has logged itself inside. This has happened to the one in our balcony, except to break the pipe we will need to break portions of our balcony and the walls of the subsequent five floors through which this pipe runs. So, when it poured yesterday night, the rainwater could not gush down the clogged pipe and stagnated in the very balcony that slopes towards the hall, and ultimately seeped into the hall. And thus my hall, that is approximately twenty metres in the air and almost a kilometer away from the river, was flooded with rainwater while my city was going through a drought.

Mad munchkins

For over a month, my narrow little lane had been hijacked by the neighbourhood children as a battle ground for cricket, badminton, cycling, running, hiding, screaming and laughing. This made activities like driving, walking and standing extremely hazardous. You never know when a little munchkin will crash into you or worse when a cricket ball will do the same. The local watchmen, car owners, vegetable vendors, pedestrians and dogs, pray collectively everytime they hear the screaming that heralds a sixer. Gods are invoked, chanting is resorted to and there has been considerable adult bonding over the fear of broken merchandise.

The children however, choose to be oblivious to the fear that they have caused. The mini-munchkins have a disorganized running and screaming routine while the older children have organised their running and screaming into the framework of games. By evening, they bring out packs of cards, shuffle them up and take over the staircases and entrances of buildings. Mellowed down after a day in the sun, they stare at their cards intently and try desperately to win at Uno and ekka-pa-char.

About two weeks ago, the aforementioned newly religious parents formed a union and loudly vocalised their fears for their cars and lives, to the munchkins. The solution to stop these potentially dangerous games was a total ban on playing on the road. The adults who believed that this would result in some peace were rudely shocked. The children just redefined the rules and space required. For example, the cricketers play happily within our society by declaring anything more than a foot from the bowler/batsman a boundary and anything two feet away a “SIXXXXERRR”. So the noise, animated individuals with their hazardous flying objects continue to dash around unabated.

Unabated, that is, until last week when schools restarted and cursed my lane to a lonely existence with stationary vehicles and adults.

Syncing, to swim.

Ghalum gu ta ka ta di… Yesterday I felt like I was in a funk. I was lethargic yet restless, asocial and generally very bored. I didn’t want to go out, I didn’t want to meet people, I toyed with the idea of going for a walk to the hill and sitting quietly by myself near the quarry but I eventually vetoed that idea as well. Gin-a-tom… ta- tai- tayum tat- ta-… But this strange feeling had to be dealt with, I wouldn’t sleep for another 6 hours and I didn’t want to spend that time floating around like a grumbling ghost. I saw Eyeless in Gaza lying on my desk. I had wanted to reread it but right now I really didn’t want to delve into the life of Anthony Beavis so that idea was chucked. Kita taki taam... dhet tam… kita taki tai…tat tai… I wasn’t even feeling hungry so my mind could not be pacified with food! And then it struck me that there was only one thing I wanted to do – dance.

Kita tam dhet tam tai tat tai… After tying my duppatta and closing my door I warmed up. I started with a few shlokas and surprisingly all that grouchiness disappeared! On a lark, I decided to do the first item we were taught – the allarepu. It is a short little dance, which just makes you keep moving. It’s been years since I did my first allarepu and I couldn’t remember it completely. Tam dhet tam tai tat tai… I danced in fits and starts, I’d get a whole part and then suddenly the next part would be alien to me. I played the beats continuously in my head. I invented steps where I couldn’t remember them, ad libbed and generally messed around. The body knew that the steps were wrong and strange but through this process, the brain would suddenly remember the correct step! It would seem so simple and obvious when you remembered it! Those eureka moments are incredible, it’s like suddenly remembering an old face or someone you knew in your childhood and loved. You feel so happy and warm.

Tam dhet tam tai tat tai… Yesterday was like using a map in my head with certain landmarks visible but the connecting right and left turns missing and as I kept dancing I’d suddenly remember a right turn here and a left turn there until slowly the whole map became visible and I knew how to get from start to finish perfectly. And suddenly the world seems at peace. Kita taki taam.

Armchair activism and other redundant pieces of furniture

I read that Earth Hour is going to change the whole Global Warming scenario. All I have to do is switch off my lights for one hour for one day in the year. This act will inspire the World Leaders at Copenhagen to choose policies that will fight the gaseous terrorists of global warming. Then I can sit smugly in the dark, commending myself on my sensitivity to international ecological issues.

Bah, humbug.

How is this really going to make a difference? The representatives at Copenhagen have already been chosen to work on issues to reduce global warming, why do we need to further inspire them? But that’s a subsidiary issue. What I really want to know is whether the decisions made there will actually work as they are supposed to. People who want to work around the agreement will find loopholes and grey areas to misuse the words written and signed on. Or worse, they will create legal spaces that could work against the very goal of the agreement. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, was supposed to work towards reducing carbon emissions. Or as they put it, “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. Thus, every country now has a certain amount that it can pollute. A new found right to pollute. If a country is not polluting to the full extent that it is authorised, carbon trading allows the country to sell its rights to an over-polluting country. Whatever else the treaty may have done, it has also justified polluting and created legal spaces within which it now becomes economically viable to pollute.

Is that what they set out to do? What is the value of such treaties that are distorted or not enforced effectively? They degenerate into hollow words printed on nice stationary.

To know why these things happen we don’t have to look beyond ourselves. We don’t take an active role in creating, criticising and enforcing rules. Somewhere an understanding that creating rules is the work of the government and following, criticising and making sure that these rules are enforced efficiently is offloaded on civil society organisations. All we citizens need to do is switch our lights off for Earth Hour. But why do we need to make this difference between civil society organisations and civil society as a whole? We, as concerned citizens, have to take part in the processes that create and enforce rules. Apart from all of this, why do we need external bodies to decide how much work we can and should do? Can we not be self-propelled individuals?

There is some value to laws and policies, there is even value to motivational gimmicks like Earth Hour but these are of additional value. They are incomplete in themselves. We can’t divorce ourselves from issues and expect things to work out. We have to go beyond these comfortable spaces of activism and actually take part in the issues we believe in.