Blindness and Seeing

In Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago's novel Seeing there are two political parties. Both have a set rhetoric. Rhetoric that makes vacuous promises within the parameters defined by the ideology of their respective parties; parties similar to the conservatives and liberals of every democratic nation in the world.

On election day, in Seeing, no one shows up to vote, election officials at first believe it had something to do with the incessant rain. People are encouraged to come in and exercise their franchise and finally toward the end of the day they start trickling in and casting their ballots.

One assumes all is well at this point and the reader of the novel could never imagine what the author would have in store for them next. When the votes are counted, however, it turns out that about 83% of the ballots are blank. Everyone, with the exception of 17% of the people, cast a blank ballot!

There are no winners, no losers. It is rejection en masse of all politicians, a deep disenchantment with either side, an unprecedented case of extreme electoral disillusionment.

This transpires in the first few pages of the book and for those who haven't read it yet, or intend to read it (something I highly recommend) I am not about to insert spoilers.

Seeing is the sequel to his novel Blindness which has been made into a movie, set to release in a few weeks. In Blindness we see a contagion of blindness. One after another, people start succumbing to a strange form of white blindness apparently spreading through contact.

The government responds with classic inaction, reacting by forcing an evacuation and setting up a quarantine facility somewhere at the outskirts of the city and then forgetting about those afflicted.

In the sequel, Seeing, sight has been restored, clearer than it had ever been before.

I read these novels a few years ago. Our wonderful rainbow colored economic bubble, in the United States, was inflating at a nice pace. it was even sprouting little bubbles that were drifting and swirling all around us in the forms of innovative derivations from traditional financial instruments.

The ideas presented in these novels didn't appear oracular then. Even the associations between the first novel and the sequel seemed distant.

Now the bubbles have burst.

Two words crossed my line of vision today, "virally connected". They brought forth an immediate association with Saramago's two novels.

The contagion here is spreading and it isn't restricted to the boundaries of the United States of America. Tainted milk isn't just a Chinese problem and leveraged futures not just an American one.

The solution? Once again, hopelessly deadlocked politicians with a nebulous solution loosely termed a "bailout". Who or what exactly is being bailed out is quite the mystery. We know there is a document that has grown from two pages to a whopping one hundred pages. No one knows what's in the document. They aren't familiar with the "letter of the document". The POTUS himself is sending panic through the system, suggesting that if the "document" isn't signed then it would cause widespread panic!

Strangely enough, it is an election year in the US. We have our conservatives suggesting they would conserve something no one cares about anymore and liberals promising to liberate us from the shackles of conservatism while the voters wonder what they're doing in the middle with clowns to the left of them and jokers to the right. The candidates have admitted to being unfamiliar with what lurks within the "document".

Blank ballots anyone?

Listen to the candidates debate...

Remember this?

How would Milton Friedman, the one who shaped Reaganomics, have reacted to the Paulson plan?

Conservatives garner tremendous support because they reject big government and are largely perceived as the ones who would ease the tax payers’ burden by cutting taxes. Paulson’s plan proposes large scale government involvement.

Earlier in his campaign Barack Obama was heard praising President Reagan and his policies; his call for less government, in an attempt to appear more centrist. Both candidates were promising tax cuts, albeit for different classes of people.

Now both sides are screaming for more regulation, more oversight and more government intervention. We can’t fault them for that. The nation faces a financial crisis and taxpayer dollars are being set aside for a proposed $700 billion bailout (click on the hyperlink for humor and enlightenment) and yes if our money is going to be spent in this manner, to absorb the fallout from the actions of a greed-driven Wall Street (remember how greed was supposed to be good, not so long ago?), then yes we deserve a foolproof plan. We deserve accountability and oversight, kudos to the candidates for insisting on bipartisan collaboration on this issue.

Both candidates have issued a “joint statement” where promises were made to set aside differences in order to work on a resolution together. The statement included five points of action credited to Senator Obama. There was nothing, no proposed roadmap or negotiation goals from Senator McCain. Tomorrow morning we’ll see both candidates meeting on this with President Bush.

This morning, as I was walking to work, I was inwardly cringing at Republicans attempting to brand Obama as “elitist”, at smirking right-wing talking heads who greet maverick moves with cheers of support. I was thinking about the last eight years of acting on gut feelings, on messages received during direct conversations with God, of boldly going where no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. I was wondering why they were always so keen on rejecting intelligence, analysis, considered viewpoints. Can no one see that this is the reason we find ourselves amidst a raving Idiocracy?

These were my idle Wednesday morning commuting thoughts. Then I got to my desk and logged on to the New York Times website for some news with my coffee. Imagine my surprise when I read this in a very informative article by David Leonhardt:

“Most members of Congress have no expertise in the byzantine details of mortgage finance — or even have aides on their staff with such expertise.

“The problem here is none of us has that kind of advice,” Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, who knows more about Wall Street than most of his colleagues, told me. ”

Congress has no one on staff to advise them. Chuck Schumer believes no one really understands or knows what to do. And they’re getting criticized left and right about classic Democratic dithering and interaction! They are failing to respond with the requisite urgency to the $700 billion plan! How unpatriotic of them.

Again, no one knows what they are doing. No one can tell whether what we need to pay is $700 billion for this rescue effort or just perhaps a $100 billion? What is the right amount? No one has a sense of what these assets are really worth and what their future selling price would be, what premiums if any could be realized. Just how mortgaged does our future need to be to the mortgage-backed securities crisis?

Why don’t our senators and congressman know what to do? Why do we elect ignorant officials? Why are we so convinced that intellectualism as defined by education, thinking and reasoning is not all that it is touted to be?

I am glad that some of them (Democrats) now realize how little they know, admitting ignorance is after all, a great first step toward enlightenment.

Senator McCain has admitted to wanting to be president simply because it has been his lifelong ambition. Should Americans vote him into office just to see the fruition of his ambitions, to reward him for being a POW? He has also admitted to a lack of understanding of economic policies. Can we afford someone in office again who professes a lack of understanding about economic policies?

His advisor was a consultant to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They claim he hasn’t had anything to do with them. Yet they paid him $15,000 a month. What did they pay for? McCain was asked about Rick Davis. He claimed that the man had nothing to do with them or that he had ever been paid. He invited an examination of Rick Davis’s records!

Then we have Carly Fiorina, the ex-CEO of Hewlett Packard who was ejected with a $42 million golden parachute in 1995. When questioned about this McCain responds that he believed she did a good job and that he had no knowledge of her compensation package. Is McCain’s distracting sideshow, the pounding of the lectern about caps on CEO salaries, based on Carly’s advice?

He wants to fight greed, he wants to fight evil. He wants to stress his heroism at war while conveniently sweeping Keating Five under a rug. He also talks about the economy being fundamentally strong. When questioned about that he changes to the populist tone of the American workers being the fundamentals of the economy and reiterating that he thinks the workers of America are strong. Perhaps he has failed to notice that the strong workers of America are increasingly unemployed!

He has voted with Bush 95% of the time, so how is he going to be any different from the man who has been in charge for the last eight years? The cowboy who got on his horse, just like the horse thief, the rider in his favorite painting who resembles him, and ran the country right off the cliff? Does McCain have special skills to help us clamber back up to safety? Does Sarah Palin? She counts, you see, because she has been overheard calling their ticket the Palin-McCain ticket!

Does anyone remember the Beardstown ladies? Can hockey moms, with pitbull attitudes, lead the country out of a financial mess? Grandmas cannot dole out maverick investment advice and hockey moms, with a fondness for witch hunting pastors, cannot run the country, no matter what the red states believe, not even after a two day long crash course in foreign policy. Moose hunting and being second in command to the “leader of the free world” require different and mutually exclusive skill sets. Retreating to the governor’s mansion in Alaska and going back to “seeing” Russia from a little window is a better option for such characters than being put in a position to take on Vladimir Putin. And there is nothing sexist about this statement. If the vice presidential nominee had been a soccer dad who felt that a baseball cap was the only difference between his kind of people and…pitbulls…my reaction would have been the same.

It’s so easy for so many people to be fascinated by mavericks, to be wooed and hypnotized by purveyors of “common sense” and gut instinct; rough riders and “action” minded individuals who criticize others for their words not translating into sufficient action. They fail to realize that there exists a continuum of thoughtless action and dithering inaction. Neither extreme works, but somewhere in the middle of that range, there is room for higher ground, where it’s conceivable that thoughts and actions can coalesce seamlessly. Our elected officials must show that they can be capable of such enlightenment before we place our trust in them.

This campaigning season has been bitter and contentious. There has been a lot of mudslinging, lots of spin doctoring, lots of election winning promises made. Suddenly none of that matters. The financial crisis ensured that. Reaganomics won’t work, laissez-faire policies have been rendered obsolete and meaningless, tax cut promises will not make sense anymore because we will bear the burden of the bailout for years to come. What then can the candidates promise? The times have changed, expectations have changed.

David Brooks had this to say in a New York Times opinion piece entitled – The Establishment Lives!:

“So we have arrived at one of those moments. The global financial turmoil has pulled nearly everybody out of their normal ideological categories. The pressure of reality has compelled new thinking about the relationship between government and the economy. And lo and behold, a new center and a new establishment is emerging.

The Paulson rescue plan is one chapter. But there will be others. Over the next few years, the U.S. will have to climb out from under mountainous piles of debt. Many predict a long, gray recession. The country will not turn to free-market supply-siders. Nor will it turn to left-wing populists. It will turn to the safe heads from the investment banks. For Republicans, people like Paulson. For Democrats, the guiding lights will be those establishment figures who advised Barack Obama last week - including Volcker, Rober Rubin and Warren Buffett."

It's possible that some people who actually know what they are talking about may be at the helm of this new world, steering us into a preferred future, if the Democrats win. If the Republicans win things won't look quite so good. Senator McCain, who admits to the economy not being his strong suit, was seen hobnobbing with corporate raiders and tax evaders...to add to his entourage of failed CEOs and influence peddlers.

So one may ask what Senator Obama brings to the table and why we should place our trust in his stewardship, a valid question, given his inexperience.

I would vote for him because he brings intelligence and education to the table, because every time I listen to him he makes sense. He brings strength of character. He has shown fortitude in being the community organizer that he was when he could have been making millions of dollars in a law firm. Right there he showed what it meant to dedicate one’s life to public service. Because he owns one car, an American made hybrid vehicle, unlike his opponent’s stable of 13 imported cars and seven houses. Nothing wrong with that...except he shouldn't go around telling voters that he doesn't remember ever buying anything that wasn't American made, with an eye on Detroit voters. Yes, he's bought American made houses perhaps! Seven of them.

He brings sincerity and he brings hope. His opponent brings none of the above, not in my humble opinion. And after eight years of an unprecedented humbling of America, a loss of face on the world scene, a ravaged economy, we owe ourselves the promise of hope. We have nothing to lose by giving someone new a chance over the next four years. Elections do happen every four years.

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace just committed suicide. I had been meaning to read him. I had passed his books by so many times at the stores - Infinite Jest - is one that comes to mind. I picked it up and put it back so many times after reading the back cover. I wanted to read it but at 2.6 pounds and 1,088 pages it seemed really daunting to someone who only reads during the daily commute to work and is usually overloaded with other heavy things, tangible and intangible.

But I read about him constantly. This is a speech he gave at Kenyon College, Ohio. I wish I was in the audience there listening to him give this speech. It has made the most sense of all things I have come across recently.

Whenever I've been stuck in traffic or in long checkout lines or when I find that people are just in my way I've tried to take a step back and think about how much of a downward spiral that line of thought really is. Such thoughts often lead to others, as thoughts often do, and after a long chain of summoning, rejecting, whittling and chiseling only one idea or notion remains: doing something for someone else, living outside of oneself. For me these are idle thoughts. Reality usually intrudes in many discordant overtones and I go right back to being a self-centered and self-absorbed person. I know someday I'll be a better human being; where there's a will there's a way and still a lot of years ahead of me.

But this is why the speech struck such a chord. Especially this:

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Next stop is the bookstore. Now I am really hungry for more. RIP - David Foster Wallace.

Of Bipolar Bears, Bulls, Hawks, Doves, Crows...

The first time I ever heard of animals representing the market was in 1986 in a national income accounting class in college. I remember the lecture because our Professor, a student of Simon Kuznets, asked the class if we knew what a bearish market or a bullish market meant. Of course none of us had a clue. She decided it would be best illustrated by an enactment and proceeded to walk around the classroom in a forward slumping, inward crouching walk and explaining that the market behaved in this manner when it was bearish and then she looked up, adopted a loping gait and strode around to demonstrate the bullish contrast.

These days I conjure up an image of a growling, feral, grouchy, slouching bear at every waking hour, it seems. Perhaps I even dream of formidable grizzlies; it's a good thing I never remember my dreams. The image is almost always accompanied by the words "slouching towards Bethlehem", words that first appeared in Yeats' Second Coming.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Joan Didion, one of my favorite essayists, titled one of her essays "Slouching towards Bethlehem", in the preface to the book she talked about coming to terms with disorder in order to ever be able to write again.

I open my eyes every morning to a world that has unraveled just a little more overnight.

A little over a decade ago I remember placing and winning various bets with my rather bearish and Eeyore-ish boss about how much closer to the 10,000 mark the Dow Jones index was going to be the next day. The "bull" was certainly ebullient then. And sure enough it happened, one fine morning, for the first time in its history the DJIA had hit the 10000 mark. Celebrations, felicitations!

It kept up a steady climb over the years, getting up to and hovering around 12000 for a very long time. This morning as I was walking to work I decided not to avert my eyes from the scrolling electronic displays that appear around the city. I had been trying not to let the news about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch hobble my stride but in that instant I decided to face my fears and saw the 10559 number scroll by. It closed at 10609 today! Are we headed back to the pre-10000 days, will it stop there or are we headed right back to the 1930s as money takes flight?

Was this simply a decade long gargantuan bubble we were riding? Did this war torn, tense world give us the rising fuel costs which in turn gave us the worldwide food crises, the inflation, the defaulting mortgages, the collapse of the sub-prime lending industry and other real estate related investments? It is all connected and even a profoundly unaware person like me is aware of macroeconomic consequences and domino-like effects of things. How is it then that the McCain -Palin campaign believes that our economy is fundamentally sound? How can this nation possibly sustain a prolonged war and an ostrich-like approach to the economy, to the nation's health care system, to social security, to the ever-growing energy crisis, to unemployment? How?

What makes so many people cheer on with the "Drill baby drill" slogan when smaller countries like Denmark and Iceland are paving the way and showing others how to wean themselves off fossil fuel completely? Has anyone even heard of the 2000 Watt Society here? How have things ended up in such an inescapable tangle here in this country?

Perhaps it would be a good idea to invest in mattress companies now as people think about storing their hard earned dollars under mattresses.

In our lifetime we learn to expect the cyclical nature of things, we retreat and reemerge and continue on until we finally move on, leaving future generations to come to terms with the roller coasters of their lives, but what if all of a sudden one is gripped with a fear that things won't be quite so sinusoidal anymore? What if the bleeding is arterial and cannot be stemmed?

There were serial bomb blasts in Delhi a few days ago. A group called the Indian Mujahedeen took credit for the blasts. The blasts were ostensibly in retaliation to actions of the Bajrang Dal. A few weeks before that, all of a sudden, one started hearing about Christians being attacked in the eastern Indian state of Orissa. This morning I read about churches and monasteries being attacked in Mangalore in Karnataka, India. Before that I read several stories of India's CRPF unleashing their brutality against Muslims in Kashmir. The CRPF! I'm certain their mandate includes serving and protecting and doesn't include kicking and beating widowed, pregnant women in the belly, women officers!

What could ever justify that behavior, what history, what deep wounds? Are the reports I am reading fabricated? I don't want to believe they are true. There is 'us' and 'them' rhetoric flying around everywhere, retaliation, counter-retaliation, nothing but violence and no signs of reason or sanity prevailing anywhere!

Another memory returns, this time of Elie Wiesel's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. My best friend's Dad had brought to our attention his speech, it had been printed in the Times of India. After my friend's Dad talked to us about the speech I remember having saved the newspaper clipping for a very long time. It had made quite an impression on me. What's memorable about that speech is Elie Wiesel's denunciation of anyone who chooses not to take a side, the right side.

Neutrality is cowardice disguised. If one wants to feel proud of ones humanity one needs to believe that and act on it. But how far does one go to discover how deep the wounds really run, to discover who is blameless and who is to blame and which side is indeed the right side? Are we all nothing but feral beasts when faced with desperation and utter hopelessness?

There are those of us, including yours truly, who will live our lives as armchair warriors and talking heads (although I am more of an armchair devil's advocate or fence-sitter) . We'll get on our soapboxes (just like this) to tell others what we think is wrong with the world. There will be long and pointless debates about who did what to whom first and where it all began and who deserves to be punished or compensated.

Another class, another lecture, comes to mind. This time a class on negotiations and a professor explaining "hawks" and "doves" to us. Some take a hawkish and violent, militant approach to settling a dispute and some are pacifists, mediators, hearing out each side and trying to come to a well-reasoned solution that usually settles around a compromise of sorts with all parties perhaps losing a little ground.

But the rest of us, the armchair warriors, the media, the bloggers are probably all carrion crows, cawing and enhancing the message of chaos, doing our bit to spread paranoia as we feed a frenzy and do our best to divide public opinion while cultivating a defense for the side we perceive is "right".

The beast slowly rises and slouches towards Bethlehem.

Manhattan morphs again

Broadway has been sliced in half. Vehicular traffic is now restricted to half the road. A portion of the remaining half has now been painted green and forms a bike path, the rest of it has a granular, jute rug like appearance and sports wrought iron patio furniture and potted plants.

This, we hear, is a result of the mayor's determined stance against congestion in the city. Some folks aren't too happy with this transformation. Broadway, after all, is a major conduit of traffic in and out of the city. In the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" feature it was amusing to read about the "New York Naysayers" who display their classic New York skepticism in refusing to believe that this mayoral initiative will ever succeed.

I have been crossing Broadway to get to work for several years now. It has been chaotic and frenetic for as long as I can remember with speeding bike messengers, bewildered tourists, jaywalking pedestrians and clogged lines of cars and buses spewing copious pollutants into the air. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined it would be transformed into "Broadway Boulevard" as part of a Fashion District transformation project. People traveling along and across Broadway never looked like the kind of people who would ever entertain the idea of just stopping mid-stride to sit down and just look around, doing nothing at all.

But this startling development certainly lends credence to the idea: if you build it they will come. As I cross Broadway these days I stare in amazement at the busy, important looking people sitting and staring at the yellow cabs and city tour buses making their way through the much narrowed boulevard, emitting carbon, still not green. It isn't Central Park after all, despite the potted plants, it isn't an island of green in the middle of a concrete jungle, it isn't very pretty...but the chairs beckon and people who never felt a desire to sit en route to work, now sit, sipping coffee, finishing up lunch and watching traffic. A very strange development indeed.

I am not a naysayer, I like this attempt at forcing change. I like this subtle reinforcement, through less than subtle means, of the need to stop for a few minutes, to take a breather, to slow down and find a few minutes in the day to collect your thoughts as you're going about your business.

Cliched as it sounds, I am very conscious of the passage of time these days, there aren't enough hours in the day. I am in constant motion. I make up lists of things to do and I check them off. I do this everyday, I rarely glance away from my lists and when I do glance up I find that I've grown another year older, or two.

I blinked one day and I found Broadway transformed into a living room. Changes like this sometimes make me feel like a rock, a stream flowing all around me, and at other times like an object hurtling through space, like a shooting star, disintegrating as I go. So this "living room" then is a sign, perhaps a beacon, signaling a stop and underscoring a need to let every moment sink in.

Soon the congestion will abate as the automotive traffic finds alternatives to "Broadway Boulevard". Drivers and cab users may consider public transportation, bikes, pedicabs or walking and then we might have ourselves a real outdoor living room...reminiscent of other calmer places and slower times.

A Dream: Serpentine Romance

"I met another school friend on Facebook today."

"Really? Who?"

"Oh, I probably haven't mentioned him to you, he wasn't a friend but we loved his eyes, he had these lovely long lashes...Mohan."

"Hmm...what's he doing these days?"

"He runs his own business in the Bay Area and has invited us over for lunch today!"

(keep in mind, we live in NJ...3000 miles away from the Bay Area)

"Ok, let me take a quick shower and then we'll be on our way."

"I'll get Anoushka ready in the meantime."

"Hey, Anoushka! Let's get ready we're going out to lunch!"

"Where mommy?"

"Oh, California."

"Ok, can I wear my princess outfit?"

"Sure honey!"

"Mommy, Mommy! A snake, there's a snake here!"

"Where,oh...that's ok, it's dead. We'll get rid of it later."

"Mommy, no, it just moved!"

"You're right, it is moving a little."

"Let's get Daddy...he's in the shower."

"Daddy, Daddy, snake, hurry, snaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!"

Just then the snake comes awake completely and slithers toward Anoushka and me at great speed as we stand waiting outside the bathroom door, yelling...he's really close, about to strike, when in one swift move Anoushka stomps on its head and kills it.

The snake appears to draw a last breath and then goes still.

Then the tail moves...just a little...it wiggles and then the skin of the tail falls away and a woman emerges.

Except, she's no ordinary woman. She is only about two feet high and appears to be fashioned out of shiny, beige colored cubes, strung...or rather...beaded together...a necklace woman. She unfolds herself and walks over to the portion of the snake that's the head and lays herself down on it.

The snake's head then appears to shake and gasp and the skin from the head now falls apart to reveal a similarly beaded, two feet high man. He sits up and stretches as Anoushka and I watch him, enthralled.

He then unfolds himself and stands and the necklace woman slides her hands into the necklace man's hands and walk towards our bedroom window, before disappearing...and leaving the snake skin at our feet.

Mystic Curry

This article of mine was printed in the Sep-Oct 2008 issue of Reesha, Bahrain Air's in flight magazine.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

They danced a quickstep and did a foxtrot. Their feet barely touched the ground as they floated and shimmered across the stage in a television reality show called, "So You Think You Can Dance". The judges observed, stern-faced, noting the framing, the aesthetics, checking for the elusive element of “connection” between the partners and delivering the verdict, often harsh, often showing discontent; some aspect of each performance always found lacking, in their opinion. Most contestants walked away dejected.

And then it happened! They came to do The Bollywood!

A pretty young woman of Chinese descent and an African American gentleman appeared on stage, dressed in traditional Indian clothing; exquisite jewelry, brocaded lehnga and chunni and proceeded to dazzle the audience with an energetic and beautifully choreographed dance from a recent Bollywood production called “Om Shanti Om”. The judges were awed, the audience screamed and the dancers couldn’t keep the smiles off their faces. The judges were thrilled with the global focus on this popular primetime TV program in America.

Watching the show the other day I couldn't help feeling somewhat pleased that something so uniquely Indian could be so appreciated by a global audience. For some reason that brought curry to mind...a place called "Curry in a Hurry" on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan or curry being offered at an Indian restaurant in a little whaling town in Connecticut. For what are the songs and dances that the world will come to identify as "The Bollywood" if not a hybrid presentation of musical influences from the different parts of the Indian subcontinent; a choreography assimilating various influences in an attempt to please a global audience.

Curry. Confluence. Convergence. Cumin. Cardamom. Cinnamon. Coming together. Curry is all these things and more. If it wasn't for the trade in spices and pepper, trade in the very ingredients that make up curry, there wouldn't have been an East India Company; created to provide Britain a competitive edge over the Dutch when it came to spice trading, there wouldn't have been a British Raj, the jewel would have been missing from the imperial crown. Christopher Columbus, Vasco Da Gama, they all set out in the search of spices, how different would our world have been if it wasn't for these intrepid voyagers? It isn't hard to see how curry, a combination of spices that tickle the palate and provide the sensuous and pleasurable experience that can only come from delectable food, shaped our world.

The origins of the word curry are not clear. Some say it originated from the word karai (a cooking wok), some attribute it to kari patta (a certain kind of leaf used for flavoring) or the south Indian kari (a word for sauce). But I have also read some reports about it being an English word all along, with its roots in the Latin word cuire. Whatever its origins when we attach the word "curry" to anything, chances are we are referring to the perception of a uniquely Indian experience.

As a child I remember chicken curry or goat curry being a perennial favorite. Even vegetable preparations were called curry; to our family curry was synonymous with gravy. Which is why when I migrated to the United States, some twenty years ago, I felt confused when at the mention of Indian food I got asked, "You mean you add curry?" I had considerable difficulty understanding that question because in my mind curry was gravy - how could curry be "added"? Gravy, after all, wasn't something that got "added", the food was prepared in gravy. I recall being puzzled about their notions regarding curry. Only later, while browsing supermarket aisles did I see the little vials of spice, usually quite exorbitantly priced, labeled "curry powder"; a homogenized mixture, a reduction to a single unremarkable entity, its features dimmed and blurred, generalized and simplified.

I was never quite sure what was in this mixture called curry powder. I used it to cook some standard Indian dishes but the taste was never quite reminiscent of Mom's cooking. It felt artificial, like McCurry in a jar - a term I attribute to a friend to whom I was explaining curry.

Here's what he said after hearing me out, "It's probably that combo of spices, not often used in the American kitchen, which lends that oh-so-familiar smell to Indian restaurants. The smell which makes me say, "mmm...smell that curry?" Which is probably a reasonable thing to say, although until you set me straight, I was smelling the smell but incorrectly attributing it to just one spice...McCurry, assumed fresh, as if the restaurateurs had a mystical place to which they trekked to pluck fresh curry...like using fresh parsley instead of parsley flakes..."

The generous sprinkling of just such a powder probably goes into the chicken tikka masala, declared a British national dish in 2001 by Robin Cook, then foreign secretary. Mr Cook intended it as a salute to the multicultural nature of present day Britain, a reflection of how Britain adapts and absorbs external influences but his comment attracted considerable criticism, challenging the "authenticity" of what many perceive as a mongrel dish that doesn't have much to do with India.

Somewhere in the flurry of criticism, the critics missed the point Mr Cook was making about Britain's cultural plurality, about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The fact remains that chicken tikka masala is a very popular dish there and it undoubtedly represents a collaboration, a confluence, a convergence of complementary tastes just like curry itself - a pleasing and tantalizing mixture of cinnamon, cardamom, cumin, coriander, curcumin and anything else, the recipes of which moms whisper in daughters' and daughters'-in-law's ears from one generation to the next.

My supermarket curry powder was tasteless, bland, formulaic-created over an assembly line. I was indifferent to its taste, unable to make a mental adjustment whereby a certain culinary richness was about to be traded off with blandness; the price to be paid for leaving home. However, I wasn't inclined to think of the experience as lacking authenticity. In fact, the words "authentic Indian cuisine" make about as much sense as the words "curry powder" made when I first heard them. Even the things that are now perceived as Indian, for instance, chili peppers and tea, were brought over from other places in the 1600s. The Moghuls brought over Persian flavorings, the Portuguese brought over the Goan Vindaloo preparations; cuisine now circling the world as authentically Indian was acquired and seamlessly integrated over the last several centuries.

South Indian cuisine bears no similarities to North Indian cuisine, Eastern Indian preparations are distinct from Western Indian ones. Southern and Eastern Indians are rice eaters, north Indians prefer breads. I was once asked by American friends who had neighbors who hailed from the eastern Indian state of West Bengal if I required a daily diet of fish. I was surprised at the question, I am not a vegetarian but fish doesn't feature as prominently in my daily diet as it would in the diet of someone who is from that part of the country. In the Western Indian state of Gujarat sugar is added to almost all preparations, people from the north or the south find that practice distinctly odd. The permutations and combinations of spices and the proportions in which they can be combined are dazzling in the distinctions they achieve across regions.

This may be the reason why "curry" continues to serve as a metaphor for cultural identity. In an American context, Indians are often stereotyped as the IT professionals, call center employees, motel and convenience store owners, doctors and engineers or people who still arrange the marriages of their children. There are second or third generation Indians in the US who are even more prone to generalizations that enable a distancing from other Indians who have just arrived, or from their own parents and parents' friends who attend desi parties bedecked in Indian finery and seat themselves in a segregated arrangements of males on one side and females on the other.

This to them is an "India in the ubiquitous spice jar", a perception of Indian-ness that's easily discarded in assimilation drives.

"Curry" however, cannot be defined and discarded as a bland, homogeneous mixture in a spice jar on a supermarket shelf.

This hot, spicy, tantalizing sauce is made from fresh spices, mixed in different proportions, improvised constantly, in the hands of gourmet mothers, aunts and other cooks, who go about adding a pinch of this and that and coming up with something very subtly different from a similar preparation in a different hand. Each rendition is unique, distinct just like wine in the hands of a vintner or French perfume with its distinctly identifiable floral notes or like American Jazz and Indian Classical music, improvised at each step, defying expectations, surprising the audience, evolving at each instant, adapting and changing with times, places and persons.

Motion

It has been a few days since I acquired Haruki Murakami's - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I have been craving a richer taste of it ever since an extract was published in the New Yorker.

I hadn't flipped it open until last night because I am still in the middle of Michael Cox's very engaging novel - The Meaning of Night: A Confession, Jodi Picoult's - Nineteen Minutes and Kiran Desai's - The Inheritance of Loss. But I couldn't resist the pull of Murakami's memoir and caved, adding to the collection of books I am reading simultaneously; one in the bus, one in the bathroom, one in the gym while I exercise on the elliptical machine and one when I'm just sitting around in the living room (don't ask me why I do this...I've never been known for my razor sharp focus and dedication to the singular).

For days now I've been trying to grasp at stray thoughts that tease and titillate. They beg to be captured and tethered but when they appear I am either in the last stages of wakefulness... just before I drift into sleep, or showering, or walking to work.

The thought that keeps coming back during my thirty minute walk to work is more like a picture, a moving tableau accompanied by a sense of the city as a gigantic living and breathing beast with veins and arteries, of people being inhaled and exhaled out of it each day. I see hundreds of people flowing out of Penn Station or the PABT and in my mind's eye I see a time lapsed scene where people wrinkle and age and slowly shed their skins until they're nothing but bones and then the bones scatter to the winds and a cycle is complete. (I haven't done an adequate job of describing this thought and might refine it and see if I can touch it with some eloquence in future edits).

This morning I was thinking about us moving through life and of vinyasa (motion that rides the breath) and of flowing through life. Lividity signals death; blood pools when it stops flowing. I imagine for an instant that I am nothing but mass and energy moving rapidly through the universe until the time that I wear away the mass through the friction generated by the motion...pure energy now. I picture an Olympic runner on camera, how his facial skin appears to be flowing away from the skull, stretched...it sometimes appears as though in his fight to the finish he's leaving everything behind, even his skin.

But this is how life must be, this is how it is. The illusion we feed ourselves is the one about laying down roots. I was in one place for twenty one years and have been in another for twenty, I've been in the same house now for six years, I may be here another ten, but in the grand scheme of things, in the reality of eternal motion, twenty or ten years are about as meaningless as six. Especially when as one grows older a year appears to materialize and dissipate within the blink of an eye.

So Murakami's book about running fascinates me. He runs religiously, he runs to stay fit but that is a very minor reason for his running. His books of fiction have enthralled me, I've wanted to say something about them but I haven't found the words to do it. For instance in his book - The Wind-up Bird Chronicles his protagonist, Toru Okada, who is advised by a wiser, older person to take the stairs and climb to the highest heights when it's time to do that and to descend to the deepest wells when that's what the occasion demands. Isn't this how life is? Sometimes you scale great heights and at other times you sink to the depths, always riding the same breath, always moving, always like driftwood...flailing and resisting never helps much.

In his book - After Dark - the characters are in constant motion throughout the night, in a city that doesn't sleep, never sleeps, and where reason gives way to blurry surreality. It throbs and moves through the night just as people within it move, change, grow a little bit older as an omniscient narrator in the form of a 'viewpoint' tracks their motion. The viewpoint reminds me of a device engaged in time lapse photography just as my mind's eye is when watching people being inhaled and exhaled into the city.

His memoir reflects the motion that foreshadows all his writing and reading his work certainly lends a new perspective to how I view my own life.

Good advice from Jodi Picoult

"Carve out a bit of time every day to write, and make sure you do it - and nothing but that - even when you don't feel very motivated. Read a ton. Take a workshop course so you learn to give and get criticism. When you're stuck, and sure you've written absolutely garbage, force yourself to finish and THEN decide to fix or scrap it - or you will never know if you can."

Good advice from Jodi on writing. Need to take that workshop and need to learn how to carry garbage to the finish and then fix it...instead of not fixing it and simply putting it up on the blog. :)

Dog-ears

A very good friend of mine, who reads this blog frequently, will be horrified, mortified and possibly petrified by the graphic pictures below. I need to apologize to him in advance for this assault on his sensibilities. I have observed the reverence with which he handles these precious possessions of his, how he tries his very best to maintain them in their pristine condition...something I just can't do!

Here's what I do instead:


I should be less shameless and apologize to all the book lovers who abhor this practice...but I can't bring myself to do it, I can rationalize and justify it: this is the effect books have on me.

I can remember where I stop reading a book. For some odd reason, I remember the numbers of the pages where my reading was interrupted and it isn't important for me to use dog-ears in lieu of bookmarks.

My dog-ears are used as notes on the margin.

Sometimes I don't want to forget what I've read. Some of what I read sends me off on odd tangents and I feel as though I am leaping from one thought plane to the next. When this happens I want to mark that page, I want to be able to get back to the same place, to relive that experience.

I usually fold the page from the bottom corner. This is what you see in the first image. But then, chances are I'd find something equally memorable on the next page. When this happens you see something like the second image: the backwards dog-earing of a dog-ear.

As I am doing this I often wonder if I would remember the passage that made me stop and think but I've tested that and I find I can almost always get back to it.

In the introduction to his book - Cultural Amnesia - Clive James says:

"The book I wanted to write had its origins in the book I was reading. Several times, in my early days, I had to sell my best books to buy food, so I never underlined anything. When conditions improved I became less fastidious. Not long after I began marking passages for future consideration, I also began keeping notes in the margin beside the markings, and then longer notes on the endpapers. Those were the very means by which Montaigne invented the modern essay, and at first I must have had an essay of my own in mind: a long essay, but one with the usual shape, a single line of argument moving through selected perceptions to a neat conclusion."

I haven't had to sell books to buy food, not yet, but I'm often in a moving bus or car when I am reading and I find it quite difficult to write in the margins with a steady hand.

However, I do love buying second hand books where passages have been marked and lines underscored. I love establishing that mental communion with a reader who handled the book before me; I love sensing that connexion with a stranger I never knew.

Perhaps my curious multiple dog ears will make someone wonder about me, they may say (if they're like my friend), "What a slob this person was!"

Or if they're even a little bit like me they'll pay closer attention to that page and find the sentence that had captivated me years ago, before my book ended up in their hands.

In the meantime, I keep my books close to me, on an overflowing nightstand, making mental notes to myself to open them up to disfigured pages, in an attempt to further explore the tangents on which I had been led...just as an aspiring aspiring essayist should.