What are words worth?

We had just been let off by the taxi at the corner of the block in the Prezelauer district of Berlin where my friend Elfriede lives. Dragging our 20-kilo loads along, my daughter and I trudge along the street toward her house. I have my eyes on the sidewalk and almost bump into a tree trunk—and look up to find it’s not. In the roughly carved recesses of what was once a tree, are bookshelves, the books inside protected by curved glass that could be opened with a push. No locks and no latches. The books look well thumbed and put there by caring hands, not just discarded after a quick read. Later, Elfriede explains it to us. People in the neighbourhood drop off books they have read and would like to share.   Others pick them up, or just leaf through them while sitting at the café next door, sometimes leaving another book in exchange.   Charming idea. A lovely woman I meet at dinner later in the week tells me that if she finishes a book while she’s...

I tuned into NPR's Fresh Air this morning (do you 'tune in' on the internet?) and looked to the list of stories on the right panel to find one I had not listened to earlier--an interview with Maurice Sendak on the occasion of the publication of Bumble Ardy. It was a great interview, conducted graciously as always by Terry Gross of Fresh Air. The interview itself made me think about a variety of things....the artistic imagination, the world of the child, death, relationships, fear and the whole host of things we all deal with as human beings. After listening to the interview, I went back to the home page and noticed something I had missed earlier--a special Fresh Air show dedicated to Sendak, on his death, just yesterday (May 8). The show features excerpts from several interviews with the children's author and illustrator, and reminiscences by other writers and journalists. From then on it was a short journey to discover the several other tributes paid in newspapers ac...

When you visit a place that has occupied your imagination in different ways, your experience is continually overlaid by the made-up pictures that you hold in your head, and you can't get away from a feeling of second sight. Shyam Selvadurai's Cinnamon Garden introduced me to Colombo through an evocative and heart-breaking story, its events and people set in a lovingly described landscape that took me through the streets of the city and the roads of the countryside in ways my physical travels will perhaps never surpass. So my all-too-brief visit to this city was spent looking around the corner for places I had already been to in the novel. Other stories of course have also contributed to my imagined geography in less pleasant ways: news reports of the 26 years of conflict, the Channel 4 documentary that gave the term Killing Fields a different temporal and spatial setting, the UNHRC petition against Sri Lanka, Rajiv Gandhi's assassination and so much else. And then of c...

There's a half read book in the seat pocket in my car: Andra Levy's "Long Song". There's a volume by Tehmina Aman gathering dust next to the bed. And there's a third, dust-jacket-covered, few-times-opened copy of Philip Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" on my desk. All this quite apart from the many bought-and-waiting-to-be-read books on the shelves, pushed further back each time I go to the bookstore and emerge defeated, two more under my arm. I'm sure many of us have experienced this space between stories, the hiatus between books. You finish one, are overwhelmed by the craft of the writer and the sweep of the story, and wallow in the imagination of a brilliant writer, wondering if it will be surpassed, and knowing full well it will. There are many others awaiting your attention but you feel reluctant to break this spell, to enter into yet another world that has been painstakingly built for your occupation. Weeks go by and you...

For the past month and a half, I have been getting to know my neighbouring state a little bit better. With some of my colleagues from the University of Hyderabad's Department of Communication, I've had the opportunity to visit different parts of Karnataka and speak with some of those who are trying to bring public health care to the poorest communities in both rural and urban areas. As part of the wide-ranging public health initiative known as the National Rural Health Mission, the Karnataka State Department of Health and Family Welfare has been attempting to scale up the intensity and range of its activities. The specific project that drew us in was the strengthening of the Department's IEC activities (Information-Education-Communication), particularly, building the capacity of its frontrunners (the block level health education officers) in social and behaviour change communication (known in the profession as SBCC). Supported by UNICEF, this effort involves training the 17...

After months of wanting to get out there on a Sunday morning and scrounge around the street bazaar for more books to stuff into my already bursting-at-the-margins shelves, we finally made it! Three regulars and one newcomer from our three-month old Book Club met on a Sunday morning, bright and early (well...tennish) near St George's Grammar School (remember those grey school tunics?) and set off to stare at the books on the footpath. The first few displays we came across, just past the Taj Mahal hotel (we could already smell the dosas we had promised ourselves), were not very inspiring, despite snazzy titles and lurid pictures of women in sixties' hairdos on the cover. One title in particular caught my eye: "The curse of the singles table: A true story of 1001 nights without sex" by Suzanne Schlossberg. Intriguing, that, and perhaps nothing like Sheherezade's tales spanning a similar period! Gouri was the first to spot something she liked, and before we knew it...

It's close to midnight on the second full day of my winter vacation--or what is supposed to be one. I find that I am sitting here at my laptop catching up on email, listening to rough cuts of the upcoming shows on Bol Hyderabad (the campus community radio station of the University of Hyderabad), reading student work that needs to be commented upon, preparing for a series of workshops I have committed to... in short, it doesn't look like a promising beginning for a vacation! And I thought University life was going to be a picnic compared to the corporate or NGO sectors! Whatever happened to the life of quiet reflection peppered with the occasional ruminative lecture that academics are supposed to be privileged to have? When I switched jobs last year, I thought I was entering a space where there would be time for some amount of purposeless reading, for writing (things other than reports and promotional materials), and for stimulating intellectual debate (unlike the heated argum...

As we travel into town on an uncharacteristically quiet Sunday evening, the Bangalore roads are relatively traffic free, but the driver of the Meru cab decides to take me by the "easy route" where we will drive uninterrupted by traffic lights. He swings off the four lane highway into a quiet side street that seems to go on and on in the darkness, and I am beginning to wonder if I should have insisted on the bright lights of the main road. But just as my anxiety is beginning to take a dangerous turn, he points out to me a looming wall on my left. It is very high, and soon we come to a pair of massive gates that seem to hide something very important inside. "That's YSR's son's house," the driver notes. "Jagan. That's where he stays when he comes to Bangalore. He owns this whole stretch of land." I made suitably amazed-disbelieving-indignant sounding noises. Just enough to make him go on. "I once took a passenger in there, he was a guest...

Sometimes, when the students in my writing class toil over their assignment (though toil may be an extreme description of the level of engagement, sometimes!), I decide to take a mental walk with my own words. A couple of weeks ago, this is what resulted: You walk in, the world on your shoulders and in the undependable ink of the whiteboard marker, you're ready to deliver it, spell it out, deconstruct and analyze it, so that they can pick up the pieces and fit them into a jigsaw of their own desires and motivations (parentally fed/denied/rebelled against). There are alternative words for ambition that escape you, as your gaze flits from furrowed brow to glazed eye to drumming fingers and snapping ball point pens. Perhaps that's too strong a description for this pressure-- a heavy, blanketing, blinkering cloak-- they wear to the classroom. The world stays on my shoulder but it feels different, lighter, made less serious by the skeptical minds th...

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, ...

I'm just back from an hour talking about something I find it difficult to stop talking about, with four others who appear to be somewhat similarly inclined. Not a crowd by any standards, but a group that represents a beginning. The idea to start a book club has been brewing for a while now; every time I find myself in conversation with someone about a book I've read, or a friend asks me to recommend reading for a child with a voracious appetite for the printed word, I can feel a certain excitement about words and the ways in which they turn into stories, offering windows into lives of others, worlds that I would never have access to without the channel created by imagination. Oftentimes these conversations have ended with the suggestion that we should start a book club. After many months of prevarication and a bit of a push from a young friend, it finally happened, and that's how I found myself in the brightly painted library of Little People Tree with four others, talking...

Last night I listened to a Professor of English and Ethnic Studies, Dr Wilfred Samuels, read (rather, sing) the poetry of a man I had heard of but only vaguely. While I am no stranger to African American literature (Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are among my favorite writers), the poetry I was less familiar with--other than of course Maya Angelou whose " I know why the caged bird sings " has inspired many a high school student to delve further into the poetry that breaks free from centuries of oppression. But I suppose those who know African-American literature would know that you cannot speak of the poetry of Black America without speaking of Langston Hughes. Dr Samuel's, in a deep and resonant voice reminiscent of the negro spiritual, gave the audience a Hughes poem that runs as deep as its title: The Negro Speaks of Rivers Says Hughes, in a refrain that runs through the rendering of the poem like an undercurrent to the river of thought itself, "My soul has ...

Three books, a dozen teachers, two expert voices, and a brightly painted room. The result was an hour of reflection and enjoyment, an escape into a space we had forgotten existed. Our own pleasure in the magic woven by words, the ability to travel into experiences not our own, and the possibility of discovering empathies--if not answers--in these narratives. When we at Teacher Plus were wondering what we could do to make the day special for our own community of teachers, we hit upon the idea of a session where teachers would turn listeners--not for the purpose of taking ideas back into their classrooms but to rediscover the simple pleasures of listening to a good story. The books we chose were simple, easy to obtain volumes that told stories that, despite their varied setting, were universal in the themes they addressed: boisterous classrooms, distracted students, difficult teenagers, and the never quite defined aims of education. But these themes were not wrapped in polemic or a...

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...

As I scanned my bookshelf and ticked off in my mind the books I had finished reading, it struck me that works in translation comprised about 80 percent of my list last year. I don't consciously look for translated work, other than those by writers in Indian languages (being handicapped by my relative inability to fully appreciate the written word in the Indian languages I am familiar with) but it turns out that many of the non-Indian writers I had read last year were also in translation. Allowing works of imagination (and information of course) to travel across linguistic and cultural boundaries leads to a wonderful movement of ideas, creating connections in a relatively effortless manner. Of course, I completely appreciate that the act of translation is certainly not without effort, in fact requires a special talent that is able to transfer mood and meaning to an alien language in a way that leaves no sense of a "foreign tongue" in a reader's head. The best translati...

A couple of weeks ago I came home from a book launch with a nice fat hardbound copy of the novel, Amitav Ghosh's "River of Smoke", signed by the author with an inscription to my daughter. This copy joined my set of three of Ghosh's books, each with a signature and a personal note. Then there's the signed copy of Chimamanda Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun" alongside Alexander McCall Smith's "No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" with his name scrawled on the fly-leaf. Other authors have scrawled their unrecognizable or distinctive black-ink John Hancocks on other books, from Mark Tully to William Dalrymple to Kaveri Nambisan. Each of the inscriptions brings back a story of a meeting, of a specific context of experiencing the book. And I treasure them all. I know, ten or twenty years from now, when my bibliophile daughter takes over my bookshelves, she will feel the same fondness for those old volumes, maybe a bit yellowed and dog-eared, bu...

Walking down the middle circle of Connaught Place, New Delhi, one does not expect to run into celebrities--it's sort of the back alley to the corporate world, lined with rear entrances to offices and the occasional restaurant kitchen that serves the capital's circular centre. We were on our way to the bus stop after a long day's work, in a rush to reach Jantar Mantar before the 5:45 bus to RK Puram. Approaching us was this tall, slim, black-clad figure...walking barefoot, and instantly recognizable behind his dark glasses. Like the starry-eyed twenty-somethings we were, we stopped him and instantly whipped out any paper we had and demanded an autograph. He stopped, smiled pleasantly, and wished us in his soft Hindustani, and signed. While we stood there gawking and overcome that we had had an exclusive encounter with the country's most celebrated artist in this unlikeliest of places, and away from gheraoing crowds. I have no idea where that signed notepad went--perha...

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...

This morning my friend and colleague Sushma texted me to say she would be coming in late to the office. Given that we all deal with such things as children's exams, admissions, dropping them off some place and picking them up at another, I did not think much of it, and did not ask why. But when she did come in, with a somewhat harassed expression, we just had to sit down and listen to why. The corridor outside her house, a green space of potted plants and a bird's nest, a sort of oasis in her urban high-rise, had been totally trashed by rampaging monkeys! Thinking the abundant greenery housed more than just pretty leaves, a gang of four hefty monkeys tore through the vines, pulled down cables that interfered with their search, and finally broke some pots in anger, not having found any fruit or other comestibles. When they finally ran away, Sushma and her husband were faced with a disaster coloured in terracotta and spotted green--bits of broken pots, scattered mud, leaves an...

The trees along the road, overlooking people's compound walls, peeping over the crumbling walls of historic sites, and of course, the view from my balcony...all have together given me some great moments the past few weeks. And so the Haiku emerges, distracting me, of course, from the traffic, but also bringing a smile to my lips as I navigate the rushing hours of the day.  The very amateurish photos are grabbed by me as I rush through the day.  Please read this as a work in progress...as new images and words come together, they will find their way here. And I must mention the debt of gratitude I owe my friend Sadhana, whose enthusiasm for the wonders of nature is infectious!  26/3 Quotidian joys: the purple jacaranda against the blue sky 27/3 Copper pods burst into flame, blazing a bold yellow along the highway 30/3 Silver oaks witness Traffic’s mad, rude rowdy rush To distant nowheres 1/4 The rain trees' branches  spread their generous arms like waiting grandf...