In the 'Fairness' of things

Somewhere in the vicinity of 10pm.

Barkha Dutt speaks about today’s cabinet reshuffle as she approaches a break. “Stay tuned! When we come back... blah blah black sheep”

Commercial: “…New Nivea whitening deodorant for fairer underarms!”

Come again…  Fairer what..!? “New Nivea Whitening DEODORANT FOR FAIRER UNDERARMS”

Instant Thought (IT) 1: Think of Salma Hayek or Capt. Niobe, using the New Nivea Whitening Deodorant For Fairer Underarms ( from hereon referred as NWDFFU).

IT 2: How do you ask for this ‘product’ at the store... “Arrey, woh fair underarms wala deo dena(or deejiye)!” Like, you know, for places where you don’t really have something like a Big Bazaar and the gali wala cosmetic store called Ladies Paradise is the only place where you get this stuff. Interesting people might as well call it the Ladies Parasite.

IT3: This is awesome shit!!

I’m mean, seriously. Fairer underarms! That’s the new thing after the natural nikhaar!? Its hard to believe. So... ahh…well… I went on to go check it out. No. Online. By no means a minor feat… you know, to lurk around a website that is completely pink; filled with hearts and stars and small cute dogs and designer nail polish( ? what the hell is that) - www.makeupalley.com Those interested can visit. Surprisingly, there is a considerable amount of statistical data available on the website. NWDFFU is not doing too well with a lowly 2.7 lipsticks out of a max 5. And I am not bloody kiddin' you. This is too just too silly to make up; this one comments says, “…As for the whitening, I did see a little, but not enough…” Not enough..!!?  What do you mean “not enough”. Bleach yourself lady and hope you shine like a fluorescent bulb. I mean.. i don't get it.. of all the things, you would want to brag about your fair underarm..?! Really?

Enough crap. Truth be told, I never really pictured Colonial hangover get this far. Never. I’m dark; but then I’m a bloke and for some(& that) reason I’m not really expected to compete in the marriage market. (Alas!) Okay some competition in the dating market. But what the hell... this is absurd! Shameful; not to mention. In this part of the world you could ridicule someone calling her dark.  I mean, ‘Ja Kalmoohi’ is just not the same as ‘Ja Chudail (Also a Delly Belly song now)’. NWDFFU is a surprising new product but in many ways not surprising in the entirety of the way our society thinks. Sad...! And that is to say the least. Six and half decades have not been enough to clean up the Gori mem psyche. I’m but a nobody to impose my ideas. But ‘Fair is beautiful and dark is not’ That’s an idea I have a problem with. I do not want to start with Halle Berry, Beyonce, Nandita  Das and some of my own dusky friends who are just as lovely as women get.  This whitening thing, quite frankly, freaks me out. 

These are some possibilities for the future... I don't rule out anything now.

New Complan with fairness additives.

Gillette shaving gel, advanced bleach formula.

L’Oreal fairness lipstick- because you’re worth it.

Shalimar Basmati – Now genetically modified for fairer Indian Skin.

Who knows! Some day Dell will come up with an India special version of its laptops with lower radiation, lower brightness, lower whatever LCDs for reduced skin tanning for the obtuse fairness obsessed Indian market.

Dark is good. Dark is awesome. Most importantly.. its YOU that are awesome. 

Women, Get over it.

More importantly: Men, Get over it too.

Did I mention ba ba BLACK sheep anywhere? Oh..! The Cabinet reshuffle..damn.. chuck it now.. next time. I feel so totally stoned by stupidity. 

Have a nice day. Outdoors.

Mrs. Dalloway - Let it sink in.

Given my credentials of not having attempted a single review in my life, I think a ‘Mrs. Dalloway review’ is almost at the edge of travesty. To be frank, I believe there may be very few among us, who could

actually do justice to a book as compelling a Mrs. Dalloway.

I was drawn to the book following the film, ‘The Hours’ based on Michael Cunningham’s novel by the same name and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. While The Hours (film) left me shell shocked and jolted to the core by its sheer brilliance of screenplay and acting prowess; Mrs. Dalloway left me speechless, literally. I feel so utterly handicapped over words and ideas to describe it, let alone critique it. This is but a very humble attempt or perhaps even a tribute to a great book by a greater writer.

First and foremost, you need to forget any and every preconception you have about how to write or read a novel before you embark upon the Virginia reading experience. Woolf does not comply or confine herself to the structures of chapters or volumes. No chapter, no volume in the entire book. Woolf does not feel the necessity of a central plot to bring forth the very core of our emotions. She does not feel also, that it is so awfully necessary to terminate sentences with a period because she wants one to flow into the other. She therefore, is undoubtedly, a maestro at the usage of the semicolon. If you ever lecture to a class full of English literature students and wanted to cite an example of the ‘stream-of-consciousness’ style; Mrs. Dalloway is the piece.

Woolf accomplishes, with almost eerie and spectral freedom, movement in and out of the heads of her characters. She meanders (for that could be the only possible word) through Clarissa’s (Dalloway) thoughts about a black car with royalty inside, Sally, ‘her’ Elizabeth; husband Richard, her lover of yore Peter, her parties, her ideas of life and freedom and inexorably … Septimus. Septimus, is a character that went on to become my personal favourite due to the absolute lucidity with which Woolf portrays the horrors of war through a man ripped apart by voices, daydreams, hallucinations and finally death. But even death is put forward in such sobriety that it shouts out what were but hidden words of Septimus. Virginia’s characters in the book are never larger than life. All placed rigidly in the post World War I era, each having their own unique, queer, yet ‘real’ niceties, opinions and prejudices of the English elite society to which they belong.

In ways more than one, it is a work on social issues through inner sentiment. It is a work on mental trauma, its obscurity and stigmatization. It is also, to a large extent a work to the cause of feminism. It is also a work on death, its various forms, its precursors and consequences. Mrs. Dalloway is not your regular novel to be read once and put back to the shelf. It demands re-reading; because the more you read, the more you realize what you missed out. It glues you and you live with its words.

Woolf once quoted, “A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.”

This is an excerpt from the book.

“Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”

I think she proves her point.

Love and Hate

I’m writing this for one: not to forget that I can/ I do write some spiteful stuff. And secondly, to vent out this sense of limitless frustration credited to a harrowing time I have had off late. Some related, some not. My head is such a storm its probably stupid to bind it in words. Stuffed. Stifled. Enraged. Bogged. My head is such a storm with so much of random annoyance that I can’t seem to figure out a structure to this piece that would even start to make some sense; So much that you don’t want me to get started. Or maybe you do, because you all, like half a billion other people in this country, me included, put up with so much of ridiculous shit everyday with no accountability or justification or even a basic wakefulness of shame on the part of the ones we rely on: Government, Brethren or Ourselves.

1. Recent Rambling

The Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corp makes roughly 1.5 rupees as profit for every kilometer it runs which I hardly need to tell (unless you are a complete imbecile), is an awful lot of money. I pay 20 rupees up from my flat to my office and 20 rupees back. It’s a distance just over 8 kilometers at the other end of which I reach my office at 9. Strikingly, I would now have been one and a half hours in traffic, jostling human beings, human-like beings and outright devils, all damned to a fate similar to mine. I deserve better. Enough said..? No! I stand; Almost all the while, almost all the days. I can’t hand over a ten rupee note to pay the bus conductor five bucks. Lest, Lo and behold: the over lord yells, snarls, grins, swears, (farts?) among other gestures repeating the phrase ‘change daena boss’ at least three times to reemphasize his authority and my stature as a monetary retard. All this in return to the crores and crores of rupees we contribute to the exchequer. All this in return to a requirement of paying 20% more tax if you don’t possess a PAN card! Very particular don’t you think. Inflation, Taxes, looting auto-rickshaws with meters as decorations, bribes: Nothing ever seems to get the constructions to finish, the dust to settle, the crowd to diminish, spay the littering stray dogs, calm reckless raging drivers, stop the air to literally stink from the open drains, stop every single day from being a maddening adventure to keep oneself in one piece. And I’m still talking about one of the most ‘cosmopolitan’ cities in the country. How do we manage to put up with all this? Wrong question. Why? Be extra cautious; you might just land up in shit here, in every sense of the word. Not trying to paint macabre images into your head, giving you an objective view on reality; if you didn’t notice you know.

2. Religion, Region and the Rest

I don’t hate India. I’ve been a passionate Indian all my life. I wear blue for an India match: hockey, badminton or cricket. I cheer for Force India, even though there is so little Indian about it except VMallya & NarainK, debated and sometimes even fought with foreign nationals, mostly white guys (no offence) for my national pride. I’ve been a big ass lover of India. I will remain so because I choose so. A bit too passionate sometimes. Although even in a secular country like ours, you sometimes need to wear your patriotism on your sleeve if you are not a Hindu. No No! Don’t give me that! No communal jargon here. I know better ‘coz I’ve been asked once to address my problems to Bill Clinton. I know better ‘coz my parents have been notified, more than once, that their Hindi sucks because well, they are Christian. Yes! To clarify however, both of them are Keralites, or popularly/derogatorily Mallus. So as per me, they can speak much better Hindi than most of Hindi speaking India can speak Pashto, Cantonese or Bulgarian. Dodge this: “Teri Englisss toh achi hogi… tu Christian hai na !” I mean, where do I start to explain things to someone who starts a dialogue with a statement like that? With a punch to the nose?!

I’m a rather dark skinned; malayali Christian who’s lived almost his entire first eighteen years in Varanasi; home to a so called ‘fairer skinned’; demographically Hindu and linguistically Hindi dominated ancient civilization. So word for word, I’m a fairly rare breed, having quite some hands on experience on the famed Indian diversity. The great melting pot of history, today I feel, is boiling to the brink. We have seventeen languages written on every Indian currency note which I once proudly explained to a German who said Germany was an extremely diverse nation. What is pride in an alien land is the source of political plundering back home. Demand for as many as 10 new states presently exist: so much so, one could make a famous, historic, founding father kinda political career out of a regionalist agenda: I don’t even want to get started with religion. I wonder how long it will take them to pillage this nation over region and religion; I hope it takes a wild blue yonder in eternity. But why point fingers at the ones who are always pointed at. We ourselves are no mean replicas of the devil himself. ‘Saala madrasi’, ‘jahil bihari’, ‘UP wale bhaiyya’, ‘a complete behenji’, ‘illad hi rahega’ are perhaps a few examples of a ‘tolerant, civil India’. Although proud of its better faces, it’s a dirty diversity in some ways, which in no measure rises above the level of racism over which the western world is so brutally patronized. In a society which still conforms to castes, religious stereotypes and even untouchabilty, we carry out the worst form of racism. Yeah, I heard you, “Common, no untouchability anymore. At least among educated”. Advice: Google ‘Doms of Banares’ and try speaking to one if you ever get a chance to. It will change your life. No one of the majority of India, dead or alive, can do without him, but no one will treat him human.

I have so much more to stab the rosy picture with. Cinema, respect for history-tradition, sports, language, the Indian typecast, friendship, love, intimacy. I will sometime, when I am overwhelmed again with a fit of rage for a nation I so love.

Bangalore

3March, 2011