In no particular order...

...the things I thought about today when I thought I wasn't thinking at all...

Akutagawa Ryunosuke's short story – Rashomon – A fired servant contemplates the depths to which he could possibly sink in order to survive. He does this as he sits outside the temple where dead bodies are discarded. He walks into the temple and is surprised to see an old woman removing hairs from the head of a dead woman’s head. This deeply offends his sensibilities he shakes the woman, wants to find out why she is doing what she is doing. He is told that the dead woman used to sell snake meat as fish when she was alive and that she is doing it to make a living for herself, selling wigs. Upon hearing this, the unemployed servant is instantly transformed into a thief as he steals the old woman’s robe and runs.

I Love Galesburg in the Springtime by Jack Finney – One of the short stories was about a young couple building a new house from an old blueprint they found. The house is magnificent but when the couple move in they undergo a gradual transformation into people who might have lived in just such a house a couple of centuries ago. Their mannerisms, their dressing, even the weather patterns they experience go back in time.

Akutagawa again…and Haruki Murakami – I am intrigued by the narrative style they both used, Murakami in his novel – After Dark and Akutagawa in his short story called Green Onions of the writer/narrator taking on the role of a moving, all seeing camera. I am inspired by that approach.

Endless thought loops - not just endlessly looping thoughts by why they loop in the first place!

How visceral my contempt for winter really is.

What was it about the extra large button on the coat of the woman in the subway, about her solid looking platinum wedding ring, her sterling silver bracelet, her widely flaring pants and long pearl necklace that made her look so much more elegant to me than other female passengers on the train. And why wasn't she holding on to something while the subway lurched its way to the next station? Was she a germophobe or was she trying to prove to herself and others her contempt for seeking support?

How dependent I am on lists for functional efficiency.

The passage of time again...this is an endless loop. This particular thought loop appears to have its beginning in a couple of suits that my Dad used to own - a brownish/olive green woollen fabric. I liked how he looked in them but he acquired them sometime in the late sixties and my memories of him wearing it cover a four or five year period starting in the early seventies. But when I picture those suits now I think of discussions about their purchase and how old I thought they were even if they were purchased just five to six years before my noticing them and being aware of them. Just like anything that happened four or five years ago takes on an ancient history tinge for my daughter. Anything that happened before she was born is so remarkably irrelevant for her, a time when she didn't exist. And yet my memories of the European car tour with my husband in 1999 are as fresh as if I had just returned from that trip. I know I got myself a fancy haircut in Paris and when I got back home, I learnt how to say that in French, in my French class, to the teacher who wanted a description of my vacation in French, "J'ai coupe mes cheveux" (accent on the e in 'coupe'...don't know how the keyboard does that). Was that really 10 years ago...how is it possible! I am still wearing some of the clothes and shoes I owned then!

How this thought...about the passage of time...about how it flies or how it drags...or how it feels...is such an irrelevant, nonsensical thought. It defines idleness!

Endangered Eclecticism

There is some opposition to the digitization of media. People talk about the tactile experience that they will sorely miss – the texture, the feel, the folding quality, the experience of turning the page, even the dog-earing, the highlighting, the underlining, the notes in the margin – all this I can understand and will miss, like others, if we come to live in a world where there are no newspapers and no magazines. However, despite our reluctance to let go of the tactile experience in reading, the demise of print media is imminent. Maybe not today, not tomorrow and not even in the next several months but I wouldn’t be surprised if our printing plants stop humming after five years or so.

So what happens next? Some folks believe that customized content, delivered electronically, is the wave of the future. I signed on to be a part of just such an experiment being conducted by my former employer, Time Inc. – an experimental magazine called Mine. Mine is going to select articles for me from five other magazines of interest to me. They had me fill out a form where they requested my answers to a few “seemingly random” questions ostensibly for them and for their sole advertiser - Lexus (makers of a car that will have 22 customizable features) to be able to help serve me better.

The questions chosen were almost as incomprehensible to me as a Rorschach inkblot is to the person being tested. They wanted to know whether I’d like to learn juggling or celebrity impersonation, whether I’d like to have dinner with Leonardo da Vinci or Socrates, whether I like pizza or sushi and whether I like singing in the car or not! What would my choices tell them about me? And how come I wasn’t given the option to choose neither?

I am certainly intrigued by this proposition and can’t wait to see my first issue of Mine. I am very eager to see what they selected for me because I would prefer pizza to sushi, even if I don’t really care for pizza. I would never in a million years consider learning how to juggle but I wouldn’t want to take classes in celebrity impersonation either. I showed a preference for the latter since I can do a good Elvis – “Thank you, thank you very much”. So which article would they choose for my perusal? Socrates and Leonardo…I wouldn’t mind being seated at a dinner flanked by them both but what would showing a preference for Leonardo get me? And as far as singing in the car is concerned, of course! I can’t even dream of not singing in the car! So what will they divine about my preferences?

Ironically this idea which is an “out of the box” approach for traditional print media is an approach that strives to shove us all into different boxes. Wonder why the old Malvina Reynolds song comes to mind:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

Somehow, someway we are all going to end up in little self contained boxes. No more wide horizons, no range of choices. If I go to the iTunes store and select “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds its “Genius” feature will try to sell me ten different songs from the same artist or from that genre. It would be unfathomable for the folks at iTunes to believe that perhaps that was her only song that I ever liked. Amazon.com – my favorite online bookstore keeps trying to feed me more of the same stuff as well.

I don’t know what to make of this approach. I certainly don’t want my eclecticism endangered. I like confusing the heck out of them by selecting Portuguese Fado music, Indian classical music, western classical music, Scandinavian Nyckelharpa tunes and Appalachian fiddle music. Sometimes I purchase a classic rock song and at other times something from the Heartless Bastards or Fleet Foxes. I even bought something of Celine Dion’s! So what do they make of my musical tastes. Which marketable box are they going to put me in?

Do others feel their eclecticism as endangered as I do? It does seem as though we are turning our backs on the smorgasbord that life can be as we sleepwalk through our lives doing the same things every day, reading the same authors, the same genres, the same magazines, listening to the same type of music and drawing ourselves into am ever tightening circle of individuality. And the more such behaviors we exhibit the more they try to box us in.

I don’t think I want to continue to be the person I have always been. I want to sample everything, explore, experiment and evolve. I think their "little boxes" approach is equivalent to some sort of cultural/social inbreeding. I don’t think this apprehension is unique to me. I think we all get tired of limitations and familiarity does tend to breed some contempt. So why is it that they think they can sell us more of the same?

If Mine is successful, I am sure other publishing companies will jump on that bandwagon and soon we’ll all have our tailor-made content, happily reading only what we want to read and blind to all other ideas, opinions, possibilities.

Is this what we really want?

I am sick of the news!

I am sick of everyone, everywhere splitting hairs all the time. Yes, like every main streeter out there I feel a sense of outrage at the AIG bonuses and I am angry at the top executives whose bad decisions have incrementally added up to the crisis in which we now find ourselves. I am also very sick of the top executives never really having to pay for their incompetence, of their always finding a way to shed workers in order to send Wall Street the message that they are capable of making "forceful" decisions. It is all very sickening and nauseating in the extreme but at some point in time the nausea has to end in dry heaves!

At this point I am sure I am not alone in being sick of feeling sickened. I want our government to tax away the bonuses from the AIG executives who haven't considered returning it willingly. I applaud the people who are considering returning every penny of it. That is all that needs to happen. I don't want senators crying out for these people to commit suicide. I don't want people lashing out at their kids, their families, I don't want their neighbors spitting at them, threatening them, I don't think they need to stop living like free citizens because the media provokes escalating degrees of animus against them. The money either gets willingly returned or it gets taxed away, that's all. The associated drama is quite unbearable. I don't want to hear about the reasons why Chris Dodd felt he needed to introduce a loophole in original bailout bill that allowed these bonuses to happen. The blame game is irrelevant.

Why do we spend so much time assigning blame and reliving mistakes when we never have any intentions of learning from our mistakes? Has history ever shown that a post mortem of past mistakes stops their recurrence? If it did then why would history repeat?

I wish we could just move forward with the decisions that we collectively believe will take us out of the deep well in which we now find ourselves without peanut gallery comments from the press and the party that isn't currently in a position of power (unless of course they have something other than criticism and naysaying to contribute).

Obama has been in office for a couple of months. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has passed and it will help achieve some gains. How beneficial it will ultimately prove to be remains to be seen. The crisis didn't take shape overnight. It was years in the making. It is highly unreasonable for people to expect it to turn things around immediately, that is, within a couple of months of the new president taking office.

The pretax dollars that I can now divert to my transit expense is certainly helping me out quite a bit. I am also thrilled to learn that the federal government will pick up sixty percent of the medical expenses of people who lose their jobs and therefore their medical coverage. These things are not necessarily as obvious but they will go a long way toward restoring confidence in the groups of people worst affected.

It is too early to criticize every effort, it feeds the downward spiral, fosters negativity. The talking heads and the pundits need to retreat and stop the hair splitting analysis for sometime. They are simply feeding a frenzy.

JUST A CON

Not answering prayers is a modus operandi that reeks of the most egregious herding tactic ever used by any supernatural entity. This Machiavellian omniscience must stop! This entity needs to stop thinking it has a broad panoramic vision of it all.

This master puppeteer has been making it so hard for one to be oneself!

If I could have been myself I would have been a singer who could paint, wield a scalpel in intricate neurosurgery, travel unrestrained, shop without guilt, live on desserts without sacrificing a svelte silhouette; even in a lumpy astronaut suit. But for some reason these prayers have gone unanswered, ignored, landing on deaf ears as if I didn’t exist, as if I am not here taking up space and consuming precious Planet Earth resources! It’s as if I am being told by Him or Her or It, “Talk to the booty, ‘coz the brain’s off duty!”

This is an elaborate and highly unintelligent design that resembles more of a herding tactic than anything else. There also appears to be a perverse element of reverse psychology in the behavior patterns of this “entity”, this “shepherd”, this Border collie of a supernatural being that is barking, nipping and steering us poor sheep like folks into undesirable pastures.

“Ah you wanted to be a painter or a singer, eh? Nope, unh unh, ain’t gonna happen! See those little boxes, all 17,179,869,184 of them? Well, that’s where you get to play my child. Every morning you’ll turn on a machine and play in these little squares. You can leapfrog through them, play hopscotch, put little numbers in them, add them, subtract them, multiply them, divide them, sum them if something’s true, and look things up vertically or horizontally without turning your machine upside down or on its sides. Trust me it is a whole lot of fun. Oh how you’ll thank me! You will love it so much you will wake up at the crack of dawn, or even before the crack of dawn, you’ll put on your smartest clothes, you won’t even care about breakfast, you’ll be so eager to hop onto a bus that will transport you to this magical and wondrous world where you can lose yourself in cute little Arial font numbers wearing tutus and pirouetting in little boxes every single joyous day, trust me on this. I know a thing or two about what people want. I mean really want. They just don’t know how to ask.”

We could scream and shout and counter Him or Her or It by asking them to recall the time when we were first learning to play with numbers and the teacher wanted to teach us how to subtract using the technique of “borrowing”. Our intensely empathetic, artistic soul, had balked at the prospect, refusing to believe that we could “borrow” from an adjacent number as small as a one, rendering it zero! We couldn’t believe we were expected to strip a one of its oneness and here we are in a world where we are making numbers do so many things against their express wishes! We are amortizing this and accruing that, inflating this and deflating that while the world teeters on the brink of an abyss where numbers are traipsing in a frenzied dance of death.

Where to now oh magnificent shepherd?
How many more prayers are you going to ignore?

Do you ever answer any prayer? No. It’s all about your selfish needs and what you want! The perversity is mindboggling! Remember the nights I stayed awake praying for a math score in any number of unit tests that would bring up my yearly math average to an acceptable number? Did you ever listen? No! Not once! And here you have me smack in the middle of mathematical convolutions and gyrations. When did I ever give you the impression that I loved Math?

And I know what you are going to do next. My daughter is too young to know this but you are not paying any attention when she says she wants to be the most famous lemonade maker in the world or when she says she wants to be a dog whisperer or a rock star or a drummer? Are you? Oh it’s not going to be so long before your game with her is up! Sure keep up the Tooth Fairy and Santa charade for awhile but she’s a smart cookie, that one! Oh she’ll soon realize how not on the cards her lemonade making dreams are!

You ought to be ashamed at yourself, really!

These times...

I think these times are not conducive to writing. I don't want to show blind optimism and summon up the old standby of "hope"...not because I am not hopeful that things will improve but because I am tired of repeating the cliché that once things hit rock bottom the only way out is up. We are hardwired to believe in hope. But it certainly doesn't inspire writing. Perhaps it would if hope came with a timeline, or if we had a crystal ball. Then I could write about my dreams for the year 20xx, I could make plans, come up with a Plan B and see it come to fruition.

I can't write about doom and gloom and end of days either. It clashes with the "hope" that lurks and teases in an annoying, yet endearing manner - with its puppy dog face - and I can't really give it a good clout and blow it to smithereens.

Perhaps it's better to just ride it out without opinions, without planning reactions and counter-reactions to things that are yet to happen. The more we act out, blindly, through fear, through conjecture, the more we'll influence the outcome through our warped reactions. No one knows where things are headed. One can only observe, let the dust settle around us.

I thought of "dust" because of Steven Millhauser's short story in the latest issue of The New Yorker: The Invasion from Outer Space made quite an impression on me. I haven't stopped thinking about it or playing what if scenarios in my head in idle moments.

The story is simple yet profound and, at least for me, what is said, so effectively presents that which is left unsaid in all its starkness. Millhauser's invasion from outer space is anticlimactic in the extreme as it turns out to be nothing but yellow dust falling from the sky and settling in and around every person, every object. No slimy aliens, no monsters, robots, other forms of alien invaders, just yellow dust. Fear and trepidation get lost in disappointment as people go about their business, cleaning it off surfaces, brushing it away and moving on with their lives. The dust turns out to be a fast multiplying, photosynthetic organism, but harmless enough, since all it does is replicate and accumulate.

The lines that impressed me the most were:

We have been invaded by nothing, by emptiness, by animate dust. The invader
appears to have no characteristic other than the ability to reproduce rapidly.
It doesn’t hate us. It doesn’t seek our annihilation, our subjection and
humiliation. Nor does it desire to protect us from danger, to save us, to teach
us the secret of immortal life. What it wishes to do is replicate.

An invader that simply wishes to replicate! Invaded by nothingness. What if...?

The other line that chilled me to the core was:

Through our windows we can see the yellow dust covering everything, forming
gentle undulations. We can almost see it rising slowly, like bread.

It is so easy for us get used to a new reality, to take it in our stride and find ways to cope; brushing things off where possible, scrubbing or hosing things down. Always coping, rationalizing, adapting to a new reality, never letting go of the raft we call hope.

In this story, learning to live with a photosynthetic, replicating organism, accumulating in our lives in tiny increments. In our own lives waiting and watching as as old premises vanish and old behaviors are rendered instantly anachronistic.

I still wake up in the morning, get dressed, get to work, spend time with my family, eat, sleep and watch TV as I always have even as I silently register each change.

I observe more people yelling at the top of their lungs on sidewalks and subway tunnels, talking about Christ being our Savior and threatening dire consequences come Judgment Day if the call isn't heeded.

I walk by even as I know that the next day will bring another evangelist to the subway station.

I see good looking, well dressed families singing in informal train station choirs, collecting the dollars and quarters people throw at them.

I see stores getting boarded up, I take in the 80-90% discount signs.

I see local restaurants and delis losing their lunch hour crowds as people start brown bagging their lunches.

The newspapers, the ones that are still around, report on the unprecedented job losses, on established businesses failing, of the stock exchange plumbing new depths.

I am sometimes alarmed at the reports of governments cutting back on policing and education budgets because in my mind these should be the last things to go in times like this, when anomie is the general norm.

And yet, life goes on, as we continue to do the things we do. Maybe tomorrow I'll brown bag my lunch as well. I'll take fewer vacations this year, eat less, spend less, make all the necessary and incremental adjustments that will help me continue to cope with the slow accretion of this new "dust" in my life...until one day I wake up to find a landscape that I don't recognize at all...or will it transform me in a manner where recognition of a former landscape isn't an issue at all because I've changed as much as the things around me...evolution?

And so these times are not conducive to the act of writing, especially for a blogger that claims to be introspective in the extreme but finds introspection pointless these days. She prefers riding the waves and seeing where it takes her if she survives the choppiness.

Performance Woes

I had resolved to turn in early today but sleep is elusive. In my mind I keep practicing a show tune that I am learning to play on the violin called - "Old Man River". I have been practicing it, listening to the CD and then trying it again but it is the most challenging thing I've come across in my two years as a beginner violinist. The song requires a frequent switching of the strings and nimble fingers. It also needs to be played at a very fast tempo; metronome setting for quarter notes at 158! I can barely manage 100.

But it is managing to keep me up at night, I am almost tempted to throw off the covers and saw away at the violin, so what if it is 2:00 AM. But sense prevailed and I am writing about it instead.

But before I started writing about it I was also thinking about the ragas that I've been learning and how my guru has asked me to perform the one raga that I found the most challenging, at an upcoming concert. I have been going over the composition, the alaap, vistaar and taans in my head as I try to summon sleep. Instead I find my mind wandering off to transcribing Raag Purvi on a staff....wondering if I could play it on the violin if I was able to write it down...how would it go...B C# E F# G G# B C...ascending and C B G# G F# E F E C# B...descending would that be right? Would I then be able to play it? Once again...the thought wants me jumping out of bed and giving it a shot...but here I am writing instead; not sleeping at all. Brain bugs!

Then I start thinking about the upcoming Purvi performance and my tendency to forget what comes next and the ensuing nervousness. Except, in this instance I probably won't forget the lyrics, the words are quite memorable, as you'll see in a minute. Especially memorable since I remember practicing in front of my parents once and recalling how they were barely able to suppress their chuckling whenever I poured my heart into it and sang it. They ruined it for me for good. Every time I come across a particular phrase in the song I find I can barely keep a straight face, and I am sure laughing during a performance, or trying to suppress laughter during a performance would not be conducive to a flawless performance. So here are the words, followed by how it translates for me:

Eri maika saba sukha dino
Doodh poot aur anna dhana lachchmi
Piya payo govind rang vino
Eri maika saba sukha dino

Adhama uddharana jas bistarana
Kripa Karan dukha haran sukha karan
Ajij ke sab layak kino
Eri maika saba sukha dino

So it translates as:

Oh my girlfriend, He gave me every happiness in the world
Milk, sons, grain, wealth and prosperity
I found a mate like Govind himself
Oh my girlfriend, he gave me everything

He lifts me up to righteousness and helps me spread grace (?)
He is merciful, takes away sorrows, brings happiness
He made me worthy of my loved ones
Oh my girlfriend, he gave me every happiness in the world

What's laughable here you ask? Well it is hard for me to picture a conversation of this nature with a girlfriend, telling her about all the milk and the sons he gave me! That is the chuckle inducing part...it starts deep belly laughs that are so very hard to curb. Wouldn't you agree?

I need to forget every bit of rustic Hindi I've retained in order to do justice to these elegant Prof. Bhatkhande compositions.

Another Raag I recently learnt was Raag Todi, it is beautiful I love humming it, singing it, except for the unfortunate lyrics again. They go like this:

Langar ka kariya jin maro langar
Ka kariya jin maro langar
Angwa lag jaye langar
ka kariya jin maro langar

Sun paye mori saas nanadiya
Daudi daudi ghar aaye langar
ka kariya jin maaro langar

Now, "langar" to me means lame, someone who limps...so this song, so full of pathos, translates as follows:

What is the lame one to do, the one that has been struck lame
She has no choice but to stumble into her lover's arms

But then she's fearful of her ma-in-law and sis-in-law
listening in
So she runs/limps back home

That is in essence the song. When I learn more then I guess I will be taught how to sing the lines "langar ka kariya" in the development of the sthai (first stanza) and the words "sun paye mori saas nanadiya" in the development of the antara (second stanza)...but how will I ever do justice to the songs when I can only picture shrewish mother-in-laws and sister-in-laws hiding behind bushes, spying on the poor lame one, ready to jump her! I think the song needs to be delivered with oodles of karuna rasa (pathos), it would not be right to treat it as a hasya rasa (laughter), but ...it's more like "Singer ka kariya..." (What's the singer to do)

Trying my best to forget the lyrics, but the visuals refuse to let go!

And now I need to try for that elusive sleep again.

Practice makes perfect ...does it?

I thought things are supposed to get easier with practice but I am not seeing much evidence of that lately.

I’ve been walking across (west to east) Manhattan everyday for the past year now. The walk lasts anywhere from 20-30 minutes based on the level of briskness. The brisker the better - say the health and fitness journals - so I walk, making up my own little games along the way, for instance the one where I take two steps per sidewalk square for as long as I can sustain it and the one where I resolve to cover each white strip of the cross walk in a single stride a la the Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover. So shouldn’t this walk now be the easiest thing in the world for me? Painless?

I should be stronger, muscles trained, breathing steady, I should be in a good position to break into a run any day now; the crowds should be gawking as they see me pass by in a zippy flash, after all I have been trying to walk faster and faster!

But hey…what’s this? Sounds like the patellas registering a protest, threatening a strike! Instead of zipping across town I am now a hobbling geriatric. What happened? Instead of adapting and strengthening they chose to just get worn out, synovial fluid depleted, cartilage rubbing against bone.

Agnes Oaks, principal ballerina with the English National ballet, who has been dancing since the age of 10 said in an interview that injuries have often been the low point of her career, that they have stopped her many times. She has been dancing for twenty eight years, putting in several hours of practice everyday, why is it then that she is still prone to injuries? With so many years of practice and experience hasn’t it been possible to learn how to avoid injuries?

But that’s ballet. I am just talking about plain old walking! I have been walking for many years now. I can’t quite recall the precise moment of delirious joy when I had the epiphany that walking on the soles of my feet wasn’t just possible but much more convenient than crawling around on all fours. I rose and have never looked back. My heels got rougher…they figured they had to, in order to resist and retaliate against the pounding they took. They didn’t just shut down and quit on me. So why can’t the patellas join the party?

The more you do something, the better you are supposed to be at it. It is supposed to work with mathematics, music, dance, writing, airplane flying, sailing, spacewalking, surgery, toll collecting, paper pushing…you name it… hence the universal insistence on experience. If you’ve done it enough you should be doing it faster, better, smarter, or so the story goes. One can tack on another layer to this, the “self-fulfilling prophecy” layer.

So if you tell yourself that each repetition is making you better and stronger at any activity, if you believe in yourself and have a Paul Coelho like faith in the universe egging you on in your endeavors then you are doubly assured that things are going to fall in place, sans missteps, wrong turns, twisted ankles and smarting knees. The flipside is supposed to be true too, i.e., if you have low expectations your performance is dismally proportionate to them. Which is why the Little Engine That Could kept telling himself - "I think I can, I think I can".

And yet something always goes wrong – especially when you want it all to be as flawless as ever –like the presidential oath getting flubbed because the Chief Justice thinks he has it all memorized, leaving some talking heads wondering if we indeed had a president!

I keep digressing to presidents and ballerinas, maybe trying to see if I am in good company with my walking woes, my music playing woes, battles with rhythm and tempo, my work and home and time management woes and my occasional absent mindedness …wait…occasional??

That’s one thing where practice has actually made me perfect: from leaving water bottles hanging on trees, losing lunch boxes, pens, pencils, giving my Mom a blank look when asked where the spare change that a vendor returned disappeared and coming up with no better explanation than, “it flew away with the wind” to more recently, and on more than one occasion, wearing a different shoe on each foot – wondering why I developed a sudden limp - standing in an elevator wondering why it wasn’t moving while repeatedly hitting the button that corresponded to the floor I was on. Yes, when it comes absent mindedness – I am honing this particular science to perfection!