What are words worth?

How do words get taken away from you? How do they mutate and reconfigure around entirely new meanings, only weakly related to those that they held when you owned them? And then, through repetition and constant association, they solidify into these new forms, their other histories hidden behind impenetrable layers, where they have not been erased altogether.   I live in a house whose name often elicits a curious look, raised eyebrow, a muffled cough, a judging eye, or even a vigorous nod of approval. But for even the least politically minded, the name is evocative of something. For some of us, it is the wave of negativity, divisiveness, and violence unleashed by the events of a December three decades ago. For others, it may represent the righteous assertion of identity.   But the name etched into the gate pillar, now fading and diminished when compared to the glitzy lettering on neighbouring walls, has nothing to do with the politics of place and claimed heritage. It is a simpl...

There’s a mood going around the social media space these days. Well, it’s always been there (think TBT) but the time granted to many of us under lockdown has caused it to pervade all social spaces, including that most insidious one of all—WhatsApp. Or maybe it’s just my own family, stemming mainly from a recently-retired spouse who has decided to turn family archeologist and dig into the photo archives, unearthing gems that some of us would have preferred lay buried, maybe to be discovered long after our own time. This tidal wave of nostalgia that’s breaking across all my family WhatsApp groups is partly driven by his daily morning photo uploads that have replaced the floral Good Morning messages that have fortunately become passé. So, there’s a train of chubby baby pictures (causing my own children to silently face-palm) and faded black-and-white wedding pictures of previous generations and numerous group photographs that unleash a volley of “who is...?” queries and responses ...

Call it the market, call it the Hallmark effect, but there's no denying that every year around this time something gets into the air. No amount of cynicism--or realism--has been able to take away that sense of specialness brought on by images of snow-laden fir trees and green-and-red ribbons and gingerbread and rich plum cake. No matter that I live in a climate where there is neither snow nor fir tree and nicely laced eggnog is hard to come by. And no matter what my postcolonial consciousness knows about the constructed nature of history and the mediated nature of contemporary culture. Come December, the strains of The Nutcracker and Jim Reeves' Christmas carols courtesy YouTube mingle in my home with the evening telecasts of the Marghazhi kutcheris  from Chennai. It's been a few years since we pulled down our little artificial tree and the handmade ornaments made when the kids were in preschool and kindergarten, sit with it in the loft, packed away in tissue paper, al...

Journeys of any kind—physical, mental, virtual—are multilayered things. There is the experience of the present, in terms of the stimuli of the immediate; then there is the remembrance of the past, the paradigms and the vocabularies that frame the way we see and respond to these stimuli; and there is the anticipation of the future, the steps we need to take to further immerse ourselves or shift direction, along with the wondering about what it all means. Further we are all constantly narrativizing our lives, plugging moments of existence into a storyline, imagining the way we will be read on social media, and shaping the retelling of our journeys to provide coherence to the ongoing script of the self. Maybe the yearning for coherence and meaning forces such a perspective, and who am I to argue with that, being as culpable as anyone else in this project of self-making and self-presenting? These past few months have been particularly poignant for me in relation to this pro...

When I opened this blank page I intended to write something quite different. I had bounced between windows and chased hyperlinks trying to wrap my head around the issues of the day. Battling patriarchy and the right to take offense, corruption in politics and everyday life, parochialism in national awards, our dismal rating on the human development indicators, and so much else. How does one make sense of anything? Easier, so much easier, to burrow inside a chosen fictional world and take flight with one (not-too-intense) fantasy or another. But again, that's not what I am writing about. I wanted to wonder, instead, about the layered nature of our moments. For instance. I sit here at my laptop which sits on a large rosewood desk covered in kalamkari fabric which I know needs to be pulled off and washed; my mind is half directing my fingers on the keyboard but they seem to have a life of their own; the other half (quarter? tenth?) is taking in the constant sound of the television ...

Ja (right) with Maxine, at the Alternative Network meeting, 2004 I opened the newspaper this morning and way down at the bottom of page five was a small insert in remembrance of an old friend and sometime mentor, Janaki Iyer, known simply as "Ja" to many of us.  I myself took a decade or more to make the transition from "Mrs Iyer" to "Janaki" to a very hesitant "Ja"--the diminutive seemed not to do justice to a woman who in a very gentle and quiet way had touched so many people, young, old, and like myself, somewhere in between. First, the specifics. Janaki was a teacher from start to finish. After many years of teaching in an upscale Bombay school, she moved to Hyderabad and, with an enthusiastic friend, started Ananda Bharati, a learning space for children of migrant labourers, in a small room in the YMCA, Tarnaka. Many of those children went on to join the mainstream school system and complete their secondary education; a few even obtai...

They run through your head like a series of faded pictures; a smile here, a laugh there, a couple of sentences spoken in a voice just beginning to become familiar, a few sentences scribbled in haste in a classroom, an unopened email, an image of a young man sitting on the steps or lounging in a chair with his friends, answers given with a bit of nervousness and a lot of motivation during an interview. The feelings and thoughts that populate the room where we sit, remembering Rattan, choke the air, the smiles have disappeared from the faces of a normally boisterous group of students from both years of the MA program. We make our polite speeches that hide more than they reveal, because emotion is something that can only be referred to in a controlled, structured manner in an official forum. But this is necessary too, this acknowledgment that we all share regret at a life cut short all too rudely, that we recognize the irreparable loss that this has forced upon a family and on friends, ...

It's a quarter past five and I walk sleepily into the kitchen, my hand reaches for the medium-sized coffee filter and I not-so-precisely measure five heaping spoons of fresh grounds into it and with the other half of my brain pull out the milk to boil. I put away last night's clean and dry dishes as silently as possible, knowing the early morning stillness magnifies the sound of a tinkling spoon into something resembling cannon fire in the slumbering mind of the still-sleeping household. I watch the milk first slowly and then rapidly rise to a boil thinking of Kanthiamma, my maternal grandmother, tell me it's a good sign if the milk boils over. (Well it's done that several times over and I haven't noticed any unusual good luck coming my way.) I make my coffee and as I lift the tumbler to my lips I wonder whether it will be a "perfect coffee day". My friend Mahrookh visits my wandering mind at that moment, saying in her inimitable Tamil imitation "sari...

How does one talk about one’s parents without falling into the usual traps of sentimentality or its opposite? Without recourse to familiar narratives of support, opposition, nurturing or its absence? There is the temptation to qualify every statement I make with a disclaimer, a sign of embarrassment perhaps, so I shall do this all at once before I begin. Everyone has stories to tell about their parents. Each one of these stories is unique, touching, formative. Every parent-child relationship forms and grows within specific circumstances which render it special. Within every nurturing relationship there is the possibility of its absence, its distortion, its corruption. Laughter, love, anger, sadness, conflict, confusion...these and other emotions/states of mind are the building blocks of all relationships, and the claim of their presence in one acknowledges both the unique and the universal nature of the relationship being described. And the list could go on. But I suppose I shoul...

If we count the milestones in our life by the years we pass, then last Sunday was, I guess, a marker of sorts. Two score and ten, a score short of Milton's defined life span for man. But why should one birthday, even if it is the beginning or end of a decade, be particularly noteworthy? That's one of those unnecessary questions, I guess, but having turned the half-century mark (and please note how it seems more significant once you attach the "c" word to it!) I suppose I must be granted the luxury of wondering. Phone calls, emails, the occasional actual paper-card that comes in the snail mail, handshakes at work and hugs at home (and sometimes vice versa), frantic messages the day after saying "OMG I forgot!" and (the best part) presents you said were not really important but were happy to unwrap anyway. Did I forget the sugar highs and the blind eye to blood glucose levels? What about the arthritic knee that is beginning to makes its presence felt every t...