RamGanapathy.com

Category: Musings

  • Along the Bridge

    I feel I am trying to paint a large white blank canvas using an unsharp pencil. I need sharp focus, a sharper language, maybe a blunt intellect. I overthink and ramble.

    I am ambling across a variety of fronts – from rabbit holes to ecstasies, from fantasies to fallacies, with a fuck-all focus. How do I wrestle this lazy ass hummus out of the soaking shit-bed I am in? How do I climb up the foggy steps on the Ladder of Literature?

    If I were to write a story, and bring in a slush of thisness, I only have to look through the window:

    He cycled along the bridge, wet as a wiener, the cranky cars evading a crash-laden rainy afternoon, the cranky girlfriend expecting a promised evening, all in the hopes of singing the blues at the fifty-dollar-ticket-concert, all in the hopes of surviving the cranky and crash-laden relationship. He cancelled his gym membership to find the time for their walking routine, for their favourite momos from the Tibetan couple on Saturdays. He was introduced to them by Tracey – his customer Tracey, who lived across the street from the Tibetans known for their mouth-watering momos at the Eumundi markets. Tracey once left her wallet atop the car, too focussed on the hot momos on her lap, drove around for a good forty-five minutes, settling into the car park, to then glimpse the strange thing on the car roof. This became Tracey’s crazy ‘what-am-i-like’ story during introductions. She relished telling and retelling this to her colleagues and customers and to any new acquaintance like me – only for me to promptly and shamelessly weave it into this clumsy cluster of a chronicle.

  • Tapping on the Floor

    Writing post-lunch, I feel the gravy drowning my gut. I am ready to write soundy words from gleeful images in my mind. The laptop is not on my lap. The monitor trembles as I punch keys. No, my fingers dance around the keys like a 80s pop star, hopping between colourful buttons on a bright floor. My fingers dance on the key floor from years and years of typewriting practice. I remember showing off at university, how good I was, how fast I was, how accurate my typing was – only to be admonished by the fellow computer-lab’ians : stop banging the keyboard. Its not a typewriter for godsake.

    It wasn’t a typewriter. I looked at the blue screen of the booby CRT as I punched a key. It blinked a hazy yellow font back at me. It taught me learnt a lesson. Typing on a computer is not to make it repeat what you say. It is to make it think about what you say. How to make the computer think? Well, that was the day I took baby steps towards programming.

  • A Word To Begin

    Who said you can’t focus after a heavy meal. My eyes roll in slow motion, the hip collapses into the sofa, while a mild breeze from the river below hits my cheek with a gentle praise, my fingers grip a dancing pen whose wild strokes fill the void of my story with a voiceless word.

    I begin.

    This is what my writing has come to. I scratch and stutter and stumble and suffer. I find it easier to stay admiring the bubble inside this fancy pen I hold. It resembles a mini fish tank, with pebbles and fluff but no fish. The dancing bubble at the top stares back. As I shake and scribble, the whole galaxy is stirred, many little planets move around.

    I play God.

  • Who are these Books

    These books are collected, sorted and organised in racks by the librarian lady. She walks with her trolley, pushing it with one hand while holding books on the other. Does she read the books she handles each day?

    Can anyone ever read all the books that look at us from these shelves? Some are sitting tight, pushed by their neighbours, some stand with a slightly slant angle, unable to bear the weight of their companions. A few brave ones face me with their title page crying, “READ ME!”.

    Some say, “Pick me up”, politely. Some stand with stylish poses, while a particularly thick lady there looks weary, perhaps no one touched her for a long time except the librarian.

    In them are wrapped consciousness of authors, living and dead, shut to silence until anyone opens their chapters. They wait for anyone to flick their pages to switch them on.

    One sentence, one word even, can change a person. When he needs it, when he absolutely deserves it, a book appears in his life.

    It never leaves him.

  • Old library, new squiggles

    I am at the Quyeanbean library. Specifically, my hands are on a white table engulfed by a green fortress of a desk partition blocking an old window overlooking an old city. A city they say, is one of Australia’s historic inland cities. The city looks like a country town. I say that even though I never lived in country towns, never visited them much. Perhaps my impression of a country town is from cowboy movies where lean Clint Eastwoods stand in the middle of a mud-dirt road holding a gun, eyes wrenched, with a hat obstructing cold, grimsome looks.

    I take a sip of the flat-white-with-one-sugar. One sugar, I always insist. I never check what or how much the barista adds to the cup. I don’t even know the composition of the so-called flat white. It’s not white. It’s brown. Well, I don’t even know that for sure, I drink with the lid closed. It tastes brown. And it’s not flat by any means. Flat means bland, spineless, tasteless. This coffee is hot and deceitful. This coffee, or the first sip of it, already induced enough neurochemicals in my system, enough to make me write this piece, sitting at the desk, leaning closer and closer to the page, my hands scribbling squiggles of blue ink on a yellow page, my breath bouncing off the page, mixing with the slice of coffee I just ingested. My elbows are squeaking and slipping by the shake and thrust of my writing hand.

    I write a lot these days and I seem to flow on forwards by a stream of consciousness, dwelling on the moment. My face is stiff, lips curled, eyes clasped on the topic that I found or made sense of, from the string of last few words imprinted on the page. My hand isn’t stopping, it suddenly relishes the attention it’s got. It is writing and at the same time being written about.

    Who is writing?

  • Floating on the floor

    It is 1:30 in the afternoon, the radio is on, placed on the table – the only table in the house. Paati(grandmother) has just settled down on the kattil (bed) with a double pillow. I am sitting down, on a mat, opened my geography book. Listening to the violin’s pull and swings (Carnatic music), I was bored. I hated it, but also liked it for some reason. It made me feel sad. The music itself, and the fact that I am alone at home with Paati, not with my “friends” who might be doing more interesting things like playing cricket or climbing trees – things I suck at. The reverberating music caused paati to doze off almost, yet I cannot sleep. I look at the ticking wall clock – it is stuck at 2:20 for a long time. I like watching the second-hand tick tock its way around. The clock has a funny face. It laughs at me. I am offended. I go back to my book. The stomach cries out a few burps. I slightly relax my posture. From sitting straight on the floor, I now lean back to my left using my elbow as the balancing fulcrum of my body – which all of a sudden says fuck it, and goes full horizontal.

    The song diminishes, the literals are repeated – the vocalist says “sa”, and then “re” and very soon switches to “sa” but he doesn’t say “re” – he sticks to “saaaa” and so it goes. The violin stays strong, the percussion instruments – a mridangam and a ganjira – sounded so tiny and diminished that the vocalist must have shushed them to the background. I cannot see them – a TV in the house was still a few years away. But on that Tuesday, on a warm and sultry afternoon, floating on the floor under a twirling ceiling fan that made a hiss at every turn, my mind slipped on the words from the book which was about South American Inca civilisation, its mountains, how arid the conditions for agriculture were, and reading big words like “metamorphosis” and what not.

    The violin was wailing now, and the vocalist had receded to the background. The mridangam and ganjira were talking to each other through their beats. How can they repeat each other so correctly? I dwindled, diminished and descended on a slope that slowed me down, until the music and my mind came to a complete stop.

    Oh I better wake up. I have to finish this lesson before I can ask Paati to let me go play outside. The clock still laughed when it moved its second and minute hands so slowly at me. It keeps at 2:20 still. Is it playing with me? Oh, no it is 3:20 now. But it is still laughing. Paati snoring and I am looking at the hissing ceiling fan and it slowed down suddenly, circling slower and slower until it stopped.

    Power cut.

  • New Map on an Old Wall

    Three weeks ago, the entire kitchen wall in our office was filled with maps of the world. Diversity and inclusion week was being celebrated. We were asked to highlight the place we were born, by pasting coloured stickers on the map. Australian continent is deemed down under, but we placed Australia at the centre of the world. I mean, the wall.

    Last week at office, I noticed a new map of Australia on the same wall. A different one, with blurred border lines separating a huge number of “states” and “territories”, all highlighted with various colours, with new names. New, to me – a recent immigrant.

    As a child, I loved colouring maps. I was fascinated by borders, routes and names. 

    “Where are the border lines?”

    I always wondered how the boundaries of states and nations were made. I don’t remember much, but I would ask, who drew those lines and how. During trips to a temple in the adjacent south Indian state, I might have pestered my dad or an elder cousin, “Did we cross the border already?”, “Where is the line that i saw on the map?” I wonder if they might have pointed at the river and the mountain ranges as the bus entered the border town. I never understood.

    Years later, the much grown up adult me would figure it out. Those borders on the map are not real. They are a socio-political construct. Nothing to do with geography.

    “Routes that create territories”

    In the past, the invaders and colonisers used maps to discover new territories. To then change the landscape, peoples, culture, everything. They say Map is not the territory. But those conquerors used maps to make new territory. Bruno Latour says, “The great man is a little man looking at a good map”.

    We trust a map so much these days that we are lost without it. We take it literally, or almost fatally, as this German driver did (from a story I read in an old copy of Readers Digest).

    The semi-conscious middle-aged man was being questioned at the hospital after his accident, “Why did you drive your car at high speed directly at the barricades. Didn’t you notice the exit was blocked for repair. That too, on a sunny day?” His reply, “I followed the GPS on my car”.

    Names: old – new – old

    The city I grew up – Coimbatore – is near the foothills of the beautiful hill station, Ooty. Its historical name is Uthagamandalam. The British made it their summer capital of the south. The name was a mouthful though. They tried pronouncing, but made a mess of it, naming Ootacamund. The locals might have resented it, even if they couldn’t have resisted that change. Eventually, it became Ooty. 

    Thirty years after the British left, the local government decided to change the name to its old Uthagamandalam. Still, a few locals resisted this change. But they might have figured:

    If the names could be changed then, 

    the names could be changed now.

    The new (old?) colourful Australian Map

    That map on the kitchen wall last week was to mark the National Reconciliation Week. The AIATSIS map is a “visual reminder of the richness and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia. It was created in 1996 as part of the Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia project and attempts to show language, social or nation groups”.

    Maps, with its borders, routes and names, decide the way we see the world. They don’t just tell us where we are, they determine who we are.

    Perhaps, we don’t stop with a new map on the old wall.

    We bring the old map back to the new minds.

    (This is from my speech delivered last week at our Toastmasters club on the theme of National Reconciliation Week in Australia, which is all about “relationships between the broader Australian community and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”. Please note, while I am still learning about this important topic, my attempt was to touch on the related topic of maps, through stories, anecdotes and insights.)

  • Blank

    Blank

    I couldn’t write a blog last month. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to write one of those self-deprecating takes on a life experience and fill it with wise-cracks. I was struggling for ideas.

    I was actually struggling for words to describe the state of my mind.

    Situation in India

    Everyone seems impacted by COVID, not just counting the unfortunate ones invaded by the virus. The visuals on TV last month were striking – ailing men and women standing in long queues to secure hospital beds, oxygen cylinders or anti-virals. Haunting scenes of bodies that lay queued up in front of a crematorium. Social media, especially twitter was abuzz with cries for help, but in equal measure, with quick and life-saving responses from strangers. The state of my mind tasted like a cocktail of despair and hope. 

    Heavenly prison

    As I talked to my parents, friends, uncles, cousins, ex-colleagues, almost anyone from the land that birthed me, I tried to listen more, but found nothing helpful to offer. My wishful words sounded empty. I watched all this nervously from a safe distance, within the safe comforts of a western country that has a much lower population, a better system, and lucky. Also, cocky. Australia conveniently closed its borders and threatened – with a jail term and a ridiculous fine – anyone trying to come back to the country. The state of mind : angry and helpless.

    Help?

    I am one of the 18 million Indian diaspora spread around the world. What can one individual do, after all ? Of course, I try to support my immediate family and friends in any which way I can – mostly monetarily, given travel restrictions.

    What else could one offer, beyond money and empty words ? I saw Indian-origin doctors offering virtual services to ailing patients in India. I saw millionaires sending flights-full of useful materials. I read about corporates vaccinating their employees. I came across inspiring stories of nameless individuals helping out strangers in dire need.

    I realised then, my craft as a software engineer is not directly useful to my people at the moment. Or maybe i don’t know what to do with my skills – beyond earning a monthly salary.

    What can i do or make?

    Eventually, I joined a small group of the Indian community here in Canberra, who organised a South Indian vegetarian food fair in the temple, to collect funds for a hospital in Coimbatore. We all prepared idlis at home and sold it at the temple. A decent collection resulted that should be helpful. Well, something necessary if not sufficient. As I did my bit around the kitchen, I wondered if this was all I could do.

    The state of mind: feeling inadequate.

    Coping strategies

    Though my family is largely unscathed (fingers crossed), my parents are yet to be vaccinated. I fear we are sitting on a time bomb. Meanwhile, life goes on; work consumes my days, leaving the night wide open for dreadful anxiety. Often in the middle of the night I wake up to check whatasapp, hoping not to catch a text or a missed call.

    When no actions are possible, I turn to distractions. Movies, sports, trivial news in social media, celebrities, anything. And books, especially on philosophy.

    Kural and Senaca

    I turned to Thirukkural – the Tamil classic text from 300 BCE, written by an unknown author (we call him Thiruvalluvar) who has written 1330 non-religious yet sacred verses or Kurals (couplets), seven words each. These kurals are like morals and commandments covering three key aspects of life: virtue, wealth and love.

    There are 10 kurals that cover how to deal with sorrow and despair, each offering a unique coping strategy. A few explain the nature of sorrow and suggest being realistic. A couple of kurals advise us to defend against the incoming trouble. But, a few kurals insist fighting back: trouble the trouble to make it run away, or something of that sort. But this kural below has the best strategy of it all, and I remember being surprised when I first learnt it:

    இடுக்கண் வருங்கால் நகுக அதனை

    அடுத்தூர்வது அஃதொப்ப தில்.

    If troubles come, laugh; there is nothing like that, to press upon and drive away sorrow. (Translation, courtesy valaitamil.com)

    Laughter is indeed the best medicine. But, the state of my mind ? Not funny.

    The Stoic’s take

    In the end, I got a better medicine from the greek stoic philosopher, Seneca, who is now getting more popular after 2000 years.

    Light griefs do speak; while

    Sorrow’s tongue is bound.

    I figured, my mind was at a state where no words or thoughts could spring.

    Blank.

  • Recapturing the Saturday 4pm zone

    If there was an election to choose the best time of the week, my vote is for Saturday. Particularly, i will tick the box : 4pm Saturday afternoon.

    There is competition. Sunday is popular and highly rated. It prides itself as the first day of the week, and a holiday. It is precious – and that, paradoxically, is its downside. The pressure to do something relaxing, while being constantly reminded of the slippage of time, that drags us towards yet another week that is still to be planned.

    Monday stands no chance whatsoever – infamous for its morning blues. Historically, it hasn’t proven to get better during the day, as one bears the brunt of many mails, calls, actions and the sudden realisation: should have worked during the weekend to catch up.

    Tuesday is the day people wake up to the reality of the week. So, it won’t win as there is no time for frivolous elections.

    Some of us are mentally dead by the time we scrape through Wednesday. It is nevertheless a decent contender for the vote, as I have noticed a lot of people pre-maturely celebrating its evening as the beginning-of-the-end-of-the-week.

    Thursday is usually a serious day, when the managers chase their teams to see what could be salvaged for the week. The last chance to “begin” something, as it would take at least two days to do an acceptably shoddy job of what was originally estimated to be a week’s effort. As the philosopher of our times Alain de Botton says, “Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”

    Friday is like a celebrity who simply expects everyone to vote for her, being famous for the TGIF theme (Thank God its Friday!). She doesn’t realise the truth: people don’t really thank God for giving them a Friday; they are just relieved that the week is soon over.

    What is special about a Saturday? At one end, we have the morning, which begins with a “hangover” of the arduous week – the unfinished business still lingering – followed by weekend chores and errands. Saturday nights at the other end, have a special significance in the popular culture – a time set aside for entertainment, a chance to catch up with friends. All of this require planning, scheduling, coordination. Effort. But there is something about an undemanding, effortless Saturday afternoon.

    Illustration by Sowmya Ramanathan

    It is that period, when it would be too late to finish anything pending for the current week, but too early to worry about the upcoming week. A golden, yet fuzzy time space that overlaps the boundary between the weeks. A land without rules, ruler or expectations. A zone to indulge on a meaningless pursuit where no one keeps track of your time. No one cares.

    I have cherished the memories of many such blissful Saturday afternoons of my childhood days (late 80’s). Life was simple. Less TV, no social media, and there was such a thing called boredom. A scene from a typical Saturday 4pm: My mother eager to prepare the perfect afternoon snack, enthused by her weekend wish coming true – being taken out for shopping earlier in the day. My younger sister quarrelling with me over trivial things. Me being physically outmanoeuvred by her yet again; we end up disrupting my dad from his well-earned nap after a gruelling work-week. The unimpressed grandma admonishing us for making a fuss. All of that brought to a peaceful end by the spattering sound of the spicy bajji and the smell of filter coffee. The nourishment for not just the body.

    Growing up, the sweet Saturday afternoon zone got shrinking. Weekend homework increased, priorities changed, we all got busy. Still, those afternoons were a medicine, a recharger of sorts, where time stood still for a brief while, preparing us for the countless weeks ahead. It was all about leisure, less focus on doing anything specific and more about just being together, often spent talking about a random, point-less matter that appears meaningful when I look back.

    2020 was a tough year on many respects. Nevertheless, it was a blessing in disguise. After many years, i sense to have re-acquired this “zone”. The recent year-end break was a great time for me, my wife and our daughter to do what the younger-me did with my family during those Saturday afternoons: be together and do nothing in particular.

    I did something after all. Picked up a few of the books that were staring at me for a while. One in particular blends with this Saturday 4pm mood. Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, by James Suzman is all about how we humans have completely misunderstood what Work means, missing out on what our (hunter-gatherer) ancestors had an abundance of: Leisure.

    Stepping into 2021, i promised myself to dwell more often on this Saturday 4pm zone that i voted for.

    What is your vote ?

  • Chasing faint memories from a distant past

    These days, im spending more time in the past. Not sure if that’s due to reduced anxiety levels I have about the future. As you might have noticed from my blogs, I’m a sucker for nostalgia. The further I travel to the left of the timeline however, the more intriguing and demanding it becomes, since it is a struggle to recall events from the baby years of my life.

    It strikes me that I don’t think much about my (paternal) grand father these days. Maybe since my grandma filled the space – she continued the journey with us for thirty three more years. I don’t even have his picture at my new home.

    I feel compelled to write about him. For the sake of my kid who will otherwise know much less about her ancestors. And for my own sake. I borrowed his name, after all.

    I will start with what I have. A few incidents and images of him are indeed registered in my head.

    I remember him walking me from the school. Wait. No, he is lifting me up on his hips as he collects me from the primary school, walking back home along the road. He does not talk much. I remember him being tall. When you are a kid, everyone else looks taller. Gee! I don’t recall much more of him.

    Then, I get flashed with another image: We are somewhere a temple in Ernakulam, standing on the elevated slab / base which has a big tree. I see my aunt (his daughter) teasing him to jump to the ground. My grandpa ignores the challenge stating he could have readily done that, if he was a bit younger.

    Now, that is amazing. I don’t think anyone narrated this incident to me. When you really scratch your head, the grey cells do play out a scene from the past. If you think I am hallucinating (I hope I am not), take a look at the recent breakthroughs in neuroscience, about the way we remember the past and recollect from our memory.

    But I cannot forget the day he passed away. I was just seven years old. In the morning, I was sent to school and don’t remember if I had said “bye” to him. Later, I watched my uncle walk in to the classroom requesting my teacher to let me go home early. I saw a crowd of relatives and neighbours in the very small living room. I see “him” lying on the floor. There were many other aspects of that day that clouds my memory, but I remember this weird feeling, as clear as sky: I tried to cry like everyone else, but couldn’t.

    He was not known for displaying his emotions. A shy and often silent person that he was, he had a tough life. I try to recall the narrations I have heard as a child from my father, about his dad’s life:

    My grandpa’s family owned a restaurant near the bus station in Erode. As an independent adult, he ran the kitchen in the weekly train between Erode and Ernakulam and must have impressed a certain gold merchant who decided to get his last daughter married to this tall and handsome man.

    Moving to the city of the bride, he sets up his own restaurant in the main streets of Ernakulam. Not much later, he faces revolt within the larger family which unfortunately leads to the sale of his only asset. With cooking as his only skill and, faced with limited opportunities in that small city, he takes up the job of the chief-cook in the same shop.

    I wonder how he felt that day he was downcast as an employee from being an employer . It must have crushed him. Not surprising then to learn that he packed his bags, took his wife and son (my dad) to a bigger city:Coimbatore. There he would work for many hotels and eateries – some of them still thriving even today. He has made dosas in Bombay Ananda Bhavan, spun jelabis during Diwali, delivered pooris to students by 6 am, served the canteen at the famous Central theatre, together with a coffee specialist who later became a famous restaurateur.

    I asked my father why grandpa had to change so many jobs. It seems he flinched and revolted often against people in the kitchen who were lazy and indifferent about quality and hygiene. He once threw an entire vessel of sambar down the drain when he spotted a floating insect. The next dish he cooked was weeks later, in a different hotel, several kilometres away which he had to cover by foot. Those long walks continued for some years.

    My grandma somehow managed to run the show during intermittent job “breaks”. The four children growing up and taking odd jobs even as they were finishing studies, also helped.

    The only regret we all have is, by the time the family clawed back to the middle class level, he had left us. He didn’t see the first black-and-white TV we bought. He wasn’t around when we watched our first movie at home at 10 pm (African Safari). He didn’t get a chance to push a button on a machine that would crush rice and deliver flour in an hour – relieving him from the physical pain of handling a manual stone mill grinder. And he didn’t answer the first phone call we would receive at home. He missed the convenient motor bike rides. He didn’t sit in my car.

    I feel guilty from not retaining him in my mind. But it is actually worse: I miss the chance of a meaningful conversation with him. That would have added some colour to the teenage years of me and my sister. Even for today, as I deal with tricky questions on career and life as such. A man who lived for 67 years, migrated to various cities, walked much distance, silently and on barefoot, fed hundreds of thousands of mouths, would definitely have something to offer. It feels like I am missing an important book from my library.

    I will need to explore, talk to uncles and aunts. A bit more about my grandpa’s lineage might be even more interesting. The ancestry might be traced to one of the agraharams (village) in Palakkad. I vaguely recall an incident narrated by my dad about someone (grandpa’s uncle?), a police constable who lost his hands while trying to arrest illicit-liquor vendors during a night raid. That explains why grandpa, his brothers and cousins chose to arm themselves with cutlery instead.

    TN Seshan, a famous son of the Palakkad soil, the man who revolutionised the way elections are conducted in India, says, “Palakkad is famous for producing cooks, crooks and civil servants”.

    My grandfather was a cook. My father retired as a civil servant. That leaves me in a strange predicament.