When did you last try to live a legend?

At Baijnath, legend has it that nine men can lift the large smooth rounded stone lying innocuously in a dusty arena outside the temple complex - kewal ek anguli lagaake (by using just a finger each). I challenged the men - my driver and the two from Haldwani who had found me at the riverbank and offered me fish food to throw to the rohu - to prove it true. They seemed eager to defend their masculinity, and soon we were calling out to other men passing by to join in the test. Here are the seven who formed the backbone of the team. Since the stone would not budge, they beckoned a rather senior citizen and a 14 year old gawper sitting on the railing. Women, they were firm, could not be part of the fun, since the legend decreed only men.

No luck in the first attempt, but the second time round our valiant nine, hooking one finger each under the stone, had lifted it up to their shoulders.

Over the Weekend -

- was at Kausani (here is a dreamy blog post on this hill station, which for the author has been "a fixation since I read about it in my Hindi textbook in school"). Working holiday, travelling to write, turned out to be quite marvellous, and not the least because S was a wonderful travel companion. Filled with curiosity and wonder and adventure, lots of bonhomous wise talk, and a love for walking.

And why is it that every time I return from a holiday, I find the carefully worked out schedule in my head has fallen by the hillside?

And I am all expansive.

In My Midriff

He had done all those
things
one would want to do in secret
with a language.
Like scratching his own back.

(from Riding Two Horses)

Sivakami Velliangiri has just released her chapbook In My Midriff (downloadable here from Lily Press). Her poems are by turns deceptively tranquil, eerie, and blazing with feeling. Such as

and thunder softer than the cracking
of a neck at an unusual hour.

(from Napoleon was the First, Hitler was the Second, So Are You the Third Antichrist?)

The striking imagery takes off from folk tales and modern tales, and can be often feminist (as in "To My Alma Mater") or very sexy (as in "Naughtiest Girl in School 1970").

BNP wishlist

Blank Noise Project is doing some amazing work. It has turned street sexual harassment into a subject of street performance, which can be quite a compelling method for influencing public attitudes.

I have my stories of harassment. There is this that happened two years ago (please try to be trigger-happy in the Jasmeen way, not mine!) - remembered more by being recorded on the blog. But what about that durga puja long ago, when I was shoved by one man, slapped across the butt by another, trying to make my way to another pandal with mum and brother and maid through thousands of people all out on the streets of Ranchi? Why does that memory stay somewhere at the top of all of my childhood memories?

Fortunately, today I've come quite far from the shame so many women are taught to carry around our bodies. I can choose to ignore innocuous looks and stares. If there's a stare I don't want, I can stare it down, or if that does not work - heckle it. There is a sense of power, of being able to do something, which means I can brush off these incidents from my mind more easily.

One of the first times I felt empowered this way was while walking down a crowded Brigade Road with my parents in 2003. A man pinched me and started walking away. Totally unrehearsed, I turned and grabbed his collar. Just a few minutes later - yes, fair Bangalore has its fair share of roadside romeos who all seem to be on this road - there came along another guy. I communicated some pretty unflattering things to him too. But what I remember most is being drunk on the knowledge, for hours after, that I had done something. The exhilaration heightened since this had happened in front of my parents, who had possibly never before seen - whom I had possibly never before allowed to see - me as a sexual being - being harassed, giving it back.

Yes, I celebrate my outrage. Let me say this again - I am fortunate in this. Still fear, shame, guilt, trauma remain a reality for so many women - across classes, regions, ages, education levels. Sexual harassment remains normal for so many men - ditto. Which is why the BNP initiative is so important.

Yet, I wish some things were different:

1. That we did not use Section 354 in the flyer, with its conservative moral tone and language.
2. Or the equally archaic term, "eve teasing". Even though, it is true, this is the term most laypersons recognise immediately.
3. That we did not list "leching" at someone as harassment. After all, we all lech. I lech. What is good leching? What is bad leching? What if someone wants to be leched? Can't you, when someone looks, "lech" back or (in many spaces) publicly object and get a public reaction/sympathy?

Some of BNP's strategies are fun. Can you imagine a row of women standing at a street corner, lolling or nervously purposeful, and a "stranger" tries to harass? Can you imagine the full force of a score or more eyes turning to him, boring into him, probing him? Wow. Kudos for imagining this and performing this, all of you at BNP.

Silly Photo

Okay, so I know my tree climbing (see right) and feet photos already, according to some, qualify for this, but every tag deserves a fresh attempt. So here it is: me at holi this year. After having prepared bhang ki thandai for the first time (though, honest, did not drink since its mother drug had handed me a not-so-pleasant time a few months ago) and, of course, many colours.

Also: tagging Em, Gautam, and Rakesh.

chhutiiiii

Having just finished a long, really long translation assignment, I sat down to journal. Today I deserve a break. Pizza delivery chains and other assorted stories for the editor can be written tomorrow. But surprise, I found my pen resisting any structured sentence or thought. I wrote no-sense, doodles, childlike sunfilled daubed up words. Happily. Make sense of this, the pen laughed. Don't you have enough sense in your life already? What will you do with so much of it? Just let go sometimes of sense, elegance, structure and your hair will grow much wilder, bushier and blacker. You'll see.

chia did it

all black clothes
perpetually blessed

with white fur

Capacity

The inaugural issue of DesiLit magazine is just out. It features my poem "Capacity". Read here.

Chia at the Jangpura parks

If you ever come across this gorgeous one and a half year old at the Jangpura parks, do spare a few minutes (or more) and join her in her gambols.

What is ggkiss?

A throaty, monster kiss. The kind you want to nuzzle down your lover's neck and hair. In the middle of the workday, with the dog -- to your left -- blissfully asleep on sheets and pillow in disarray.

Notes on the new house

D and I did up the house today, with prints, posters, paintings and assorted masks. The house is already so much more ours. A charasi Buddha A. and I had always tussled over (he insisting on putting up egg-yolk-whatsits his mommy had painted - apologies, aunty!! - if I ever mentioned this lovely old thing) serenely sits over the mantelpiece. This, now, is the shelf below the kitchen pass-through window which gives me kicks no end. The house even has - and this is what sold it to us - a foldup drinks bar! And it is open and spacious and has a third room S and I use as our writing space. So welcome aboard to this part of the journey, friends and comrades.

Blogspot banned by the govt of India?

And Typepad? Neha V's continually updated post on this here. Can you access either domain?

Just discovered -

yogabeans! YOUR INTERNET SOURCE FOR PLASTIC ACTION FIGURES DEMONSTRATING ASHTANGA YOGA

(How? Through google, of course. And the random science of hyperlinks.)

- and have not been able to stop (a) being fascinated, (b) laughing.

Archivists

It should be possible to eternally save
simple odes from simple boys
and those other buoyant sms-es
from lovers, friends and well-wishers
      on your phone
without the fear of
running out of space, or losing or damaging the instrument
or them otherwise giving in to mortality.

My feet

Hear ye, hear ye all friendly graffiti artists...

...in Delhi - I promise you a wall to paint red or the color you like, very soon, in the new digs. Dream up ideas.

Monday pre-lunch

I'm at the workplace already, instead of going first to the writing office Susan and I now share. Much writing may not happen this week:

(a) Am doing a photography workshop with Sunil Gupta and need to explore ideas visually (and know that I'm not a natural or an expert in the language of images, and some of my co-participants are quite stalwart-ish!).
(b) A major transition comes up again - a house shift.
(c) Have to, have to finish off some freelance assignments for dear editor.

Guess where I return? To my favorite part of the city - Jangpura Extension. Yes, it was with the lover I discovered this area and it's ironic that I return when he leaves. But I'll have exciting neighbours: the corporate film dude, the grass cognoscente dude, the best nonfiction writer dude, a whirling dance troupe, a longterm jangpura devotee, and others I disremember right now. And of course, Chia the dog will be the third member in the household.

I'll miss the Def Col parks, in particular Sukun and Shanti. And the Barista, my sometimes-office, with the most best waiters on the planet (except when they're under orders from the absurd management not to let in people after eleven pm).

Da Vinci Code in Ludhiana

(Sent to me by NS)

Not My Feet

Clicked by Monica

Ditty

Writing poems in rhyme is fun!
Sometimes it makes your pen and mind faster run.
             Not only with a meter Shakespearean is a poem empyrean.
             Nonsense rhymes and nonsense words
             hold some merit, have some worth.
Nothing "important" may come out this way --
say, for publication --
we only hope to let our pen hold sway
on the page - such fun!
             My poems, tied to the need to be good
             sometimes brood
             too much alone in my head.
             I must save them from sleepibed.

Circa 2 Nov 2005