Award for me?

Alankrita, thank you for giving me my first award ever, are you sure you intended it for me? I am honored that this is a frequent blogsphere detour for you. :)



The Brilliant Weblog Award’s a prize given to sites and blogs that are smart and brilliant both in their content and their design. The purpose of the prize is to promote as many blogs as possible in the blogsphere. Here are the rules to follow:

1. When you receive the prize you must write a post showing it, together with the name of who has given it to you, and link back to them.
2. Choose a minimum of 7 blogs (or even more) that you find brilliant in content or design.
3. Show their names and links and leave them a comment informing them that they have been awarded with the ‘Brilliant Weblog’ award.
4. Show a picture of those who awarded you and those you give the prize (optional) to.
5. I am thrilled to adorn these favorite stops along my blog world rambles with this award:

• David Israel - a true artist...in every medium

• Anitha - her eloquence always takes my breath away

• Shankari - there's fire and fun and lots of power in her pen

• Anjali Purohit - I am floored by her awesome art.

• Choultry and Ludwig - I have Shankari to thank for bringing this blog to my attention and it certainly deserves an award.

• Ashish Gorde - For the elegance, eloquence, excellence and reason that makes every post worth pondering.

• Jyotsna - When she writes her words resonate with me, I wish she would write more often.

Thank you all for making the web so very addictive.

Pragya

Monsters under the bed

We had a discussion last night about how in a couple of weeks, after her 7th birthday, she would really need to start sleeping in her own room. She has made several failed attempts but somehow the monsters under the bed have been relentless in their pursuit of little girls and she sleeps with us, legs flung across my belly.

I leave home before she wakes up. On most days I don’t see her again till 8 at night and I can’t put myself in her position, even though my memories go as far back as the time when I was three years old. I remember things with great clarity and haven’t forgotten how it is to be a child, not yet. But I don’t know what it’s like to not have one’s mom around all the time.

On certain occasions, I remember how a band of pressure used to build up right across the bridge of the nose and then spread to the eyelids before the deluge of tears started. I remember how easy it was to cry, for awhile…for a few years… and then how much of an effort it took to learn how not to cry…in later years, despite the unbearable pressure on the bridge of the nose and the eyelids.

Last night I insisted that she should start thinking about sleeping in her own room after September 17th. She told me she would try but introduced a contingency whereby if she got scared she would still have the option to come back to our room. I held my ground, saying that coming back to our room wasn’t an option because she is a big girl now and because she knows there are no monsters and no nameless scary things in her room. I saw her staring straight ahead for sometime and then I knew at once that she was feeling that familiar pressure…sure enough tears were just a fraction of an instant away.

I am realizing now that I can’t bear to see her cry, there is no force as powerful as her tears, as far as I’m concerned. I am always ready to give her the world, if she so desires, but her tears would always make me give it to her sooner.

I know it isn’t because of some misplaced sense of guilt I feel about not being around too much and I know she can learn about this power she has over me; kids are good at developing formulas of the nature: tears = rewards, but I react this way because I am convinced about her inherent gentleness. I see qualities in her that I never possessed.

In many ways, I see myself in her; I see a younger me. There are some very familiar signs…only… she is not me…she is so much better, someone with a heart of gold as her teacher insists. There is so much innocence, such gentleness, such fierce intelligence and creativity in those twinkling eyes that it breaks my heart if I ever see tears brimming over those eyelids.

So, I relented, of course. I told her she could come back and sleep with us if her room got too scary for her. I wiped her tears away and asked her to smile.

She gave me a bright smile but said, “I don’t know what it is about tears, mommy. They just don’t stop once they start coming. I am not sad now, I’m happy…but tears are funny. Sometimes they just don’t stop.”

I told her I knew exactly what she meant.

Mirrors

If we think about mirrors, occasionally, we aren't alone. Mirrors often find a metaphorical place in literature, in philosophy, lyrics. Mirrors are always good for introducing an element of surreality into everything.

In a recent post I said this about mirrors:

We're always searching for an un-laterally inverted mirror image of ourselves, someone who
thinks, feels, acts the same as us. The idea being that such a person will
really understand us. But mirror images are trapped behind glass, you see them,
but do they see you? They cease to exist as soon as you walk away from the
mirror, don't they?

I am amazed now that an answer to the question I invented emerged rather eerily and fictitiously in Haruki Murakami's novel - After Dark. In this book where Murakami, as always, expertly isolates the threads of surreality woven through our subconscious, mirror images trapped behind glass do appear to see you and do NOT cease to exist as soon as you walk away from the mirror. They linger after you've left, watching, scanning the empty room with their eyes.

Just one of those strange coincidences where a month or so after I append a rhetorical question to a ruminative piece of writing, I pick up a book of fiction where a writer has already invented an imaginative answer to my question. Almost as eerily strange as the novel itself.

Just finished reading another book which dealt in doubles and parallel universes. The book was called The Man Who Turned into Himself - a stunning 1994 debut novel from David Ambrose. Mirrors are a part of this story as well, a story that fictionalizes certain aspects of theoretical physics. We deal with many worlds and parallel universes here in a plot that engages us till the very end.

How many more mirrors are coming my way?

Tears at the Uneven Bars

I was watching He Kexin's (the link is from an older performance - not Beijing 2008) performance on the uneven bars and the heartbreaking fall during the the transition from high bar to low bar. The fall was shocking, to say the least, especially since the commentators had been waxing eloquent about her special skills of release, her formidable stature as a competitor against Team USA and her concentration.

I was quite impressed by the little girl (she also faces an age controversy 14 or 16? - a little girl, nevertheless) and quite in awe. And then she fell and I was even more impressed by how her face betrayed no emotions as she walked over to the place where she could powder her hands again and then went on to finish the rest of her routine, calm and collected. After she was done she waved her hands to the crowds and walked off the stage into the arms of her coach and her other team mates. That's when her face crumpled into tears, the first contact, the first hug. They took their turns consoling her and soon enough I found copious tears flowing down my cheeks as well. The scene was heartrending for me.

So many hours of training, so much personal sacrifice goes into training for Olympic perfection. As I sit around wasting time and being lazy beyond laziness I think about their disciplined minds and bodies, so much control, such sheer perfection from such a young age and yet, at the Olympics, somehow something goes just slightly awry, landing slightly out of bounds in the floor exercises, taking an extra step after landing from the uneven bars of the vault, even if they didn't make a single mistake during practice or warm up sessions, why does it happen? No one is immune to pressure, or rather, to Mr Murphy's Law.

Another little girl, Deng Linlin, on the Chinese team, another fierce competitor in one of the tiniest frames I've ever seen, was seen praying, her eyes were closed, her lips were moving, what was she saying to herself, what was she repeating under her breath before getting on the uneven bars?

These moments are so poignant, so touching. It's also interesting to view the contrasts between the Chinese faces - the determination on these young faces is a sight to see. Their faces signal that nothing short of winning would do. There is no uncertainty, no doubt.

The Americans have a very strong team as well, coached by Marta Karolyi. Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson were very impressive in the qualification rounds, despite Nastia's fall from the uneven bars, and they looked as determined and fierce as the Chinese. But their team members didn't look as though they were ready to kill, they didn't have their game faces on. They looked good but uncertain, as if in their heads they were thinking...oh God...please let me do this well...please, please. It wasn't surprising that China took the lead. Although the competition between these two teams is shaping up to be intense.

Veiled

Magritte’s veiled lovers had graced her walls for quite some time now. They took her back to the time when they believed in nakedness and transparence; when they sought mates who could peel each layer away and display admiration and awe at each revelation.

They believed in mysteries back then, and surprises. They hoped for secret gardens and wondrous treasures around every hidden corner. Their fevered brains found lush oases and sparkling streams in believable mirages.

Hopes were never dashed and surprises could never be unpleasant and so they sought surprises; they lifted up a rock here and peeked behind some fronds there, they heard a bird chirping and held butterflies in their palms.

That didn’t last too long.

The world sought warriors, they soon realized, not lovers or dreamers, and warriors needed camouflage.

It wasn’t difficult to learn how to hide, concealment came easy and made for better first impressions, they learnt. They found masquerades alluring and not for the mystery anymore, nor the thrill of discovering what lay beyond.

They veiled themselves away. They didn’t want to look into each other’s eyes, to spot the beast that lurked within. They hid behind fake laughter and feigned concern, their smiles never reaching their eyes and their hearts never touching. They loved being masked lovers, loved the artful mastery of disguise. They loved the colors of their veils and they loved who they appeared to be. They knew deep down that they were equally adept at concealment.

The lovers grace her walls now as a reminder that veils need to stay in place that they must do what they can, to keep them secure, to keep them in place.

She has seen them slip and she has been unnerved by the ugliness revealed.

She has been confounded by emergent contempt and has reeled from resentments unleashed.

Most of all, she has ruminated about the incipient desire to run and hide and to seek enormous distances from the rent and vanishing veils and the starkness of naked selves.