The Niece Tales

Without a doubt, some of the happier moments of 2009 involved The Niece, a beautiful black rose slowly unfurling under Sydney's varied skies. She is an adored and cossetted child and we spoil her a great deal, happily she remains unspoilt.

The Niece is diverted by very many things these days and these are also our introduction into the life of the modern child. The other day I learnt all about the Night Garden, somnolent and brightly coloured. Consequently, the terms Iggle Piggle, Upsy Daisy and Makka Pakka have made their way into my life. I am now an old aunt - in fact my interaction with her is far different from that with my cousins when they were babies and I joined in their boisterous games - yet I could't resist teasing her by inverting her toy and calling it the Downsy Daisy. The Niece was very amused which made me think, "here is a child well on her way to recognising the pleasures of twisting language".

The Niece in fact is one of those children who likes books and the written word. Any passing book brings out a shine in her eyes, duly recognised by a bookworm like me. She is also one of those children who absorbs the contents of a book - the other day I was reading her a book on going to school and a thoughtful look fell across her face, no doubt she saw parallels between her own recent schoolgoing and the toddlers in the book.

As the above picture of the infant Niece shows, she had good taste in books from very early on in life. Very bad pun but Trotro is a mighty fine read :-)

And that is the last post for a year in which I have impressed myself with my discipline in blogging! A Happy New Year to family and friends who have read all I wrote and encouraged me to persist.

Life, Circumscribed

Three things that linger on from my India visit:

Lecturing Pyaremohan, bro's driver, on educating his children, in particular his daughter. On one such day, Pyaremohan slightly wistful and telling me that his social milieu did not permit the freedoms my brother and I enjoyed.

R Mall at Vikhroli, a vast cavern in which staff were stationed like so many chess pieces - much like a game with live chess pieces as played by Mughal emperors. Harrassed staff at the Bata store in the mall who earned 3000Rs a month and dared not ask for a raise - for nipping at their heels were people ready to do the same job for 2000Rs.

My cousin in Pune who seemed to inhabit the worst of both worlds. Her husband does not work - at home or elsewhere. She works for a meagre wage and comes home to cook, scrub and raise the child.

Rain

After a warm Christmas Day, rain and colder weather today. A grey-green day with a slightly melancholic and reflective mood is just my cup of tea.

Priests in Love

When we were young my brother and I stopped by a house on our way home and many minutes passed – hell, perhaps an hour or so passed - before our mother found us, thwacked us and hauled us home. What had drawn us to the window of a stranger’s house was a documentary on the Nullarbor Plain. Such bleakness, that too in B&W, appeared to have enthralled two under-10s enough for at least one of them to remember it as the first memory of Australia. Other films then came along, most notably Picnic at Hanging Rock and Walkabout. In retrospect it is surprising that Indian TV had Australian offerings, even if these were in odd time slots and few and far between.

Australian landscapes drew me in as nothing else did.

I had a dim memory of a film that I saw that involved a doctor coming from the Australian mainland to an island. A memory of the seas and an island with sandstone houses remained with me even though I remembered little of the film. Then serendipitously I came across the film – or more correctly telemovie - some time back. Shadows of the Heart (unfortunate title!) is a film so unknown that even in this age of the Internet barely any information on the film exists. This is perhaps not without reason given that its themes and treatment are slightly dated (nothing after all dates as much as a film made in one decade but set in another). In the film, a doctor – a woman - goes to an island armed with modern ideas of medicine and finds an island mired in religion and superstition. Doctor meets priest, predictably clashes with him. Then of course free love meets its repressed counterpart. Both settings and characters are rural picturesques. Lessons are learned on both sides. Duty prevails. You get the drift.

The reason the movie struck me this time around was in its treatment of the priest. These days Catholic priests as kiddie fiddlers are so embedded in the popular imagination that one forgets the moral dramas of the past where a man of the cloth would be torn between his duty to God and a grand passion for a woman. This conflict is not as laughable as it may seem in the present. Anything which demands moral purity of its adherents – think the freedom movement in India – is bound to create a tension between earthly desires and a call to duty. It can of course pervert the nature of earthly desires as with priests accused of pedophilia and this is of course the dominant narrative of our age but it need not be the sole narrative. The sentiment of duty above all too is old-fashioned (in the film both the priesthood and medicine are more akin to a calling). The other old fashioned theme the film sets up is that between modernity and tradition with the doctor and the priest representing these opposite poles in early twentieth century Australia. And of course it deals with the emancipation of women – a woman doctor in that time was sufficiently rare (the film appears to be based on a memoir in part). These themes belong so much to the past that viewing the film one gets the feeling that it is only the landscapes of Australia that remain somewhat intact.

Coincidentally a priest similarly torn also pops up in Lilies. This is on the ABC but I must admit that it is not exactly riveting and I watch it more as a backdrop to my evening chores. Back in India, when one saw so little of English drama one might have watched it but here I have seen one too many. Right now it is all repressed passion and suffering and I have no idea of how it will end but one presumes he remains a man of cloth.

PS: Priest is a modern take on this theme and more effective in being an undiluted examination of the church and celibacy.

Nullarbor picture from here.

Love My Way

Having heard a great many good things about Love My Way, I finally borrowed it from the video library. Not being the best with long running dramas, I managed to watch the three seasons over a period of time. This did not in any way deter me from enjoying the series, praise for which is well deserved. Its themes are fashionably gritty at times, the conflicts of its 30 something characters can sometimes be clichéd but the drama transcends this to achieve a somewhat poetic and ruminative quality. It is helped along by some marvellous performances by the main cast which functions together so well that it is hard to say which performance outshines the rest. And it captures a certain kind of Sydney, confined to life along the eastern suburbs, very well.

Love My Way Cast: From left: Brendan Cowell, Ben Mendelsohn, Claudia Karvan, Asher Keddie and Dan Wylie.

Normally I am never fully engaged emotionally with anything I watch. No matter how moved one is by a movie you realise once it is over that it is artifice and that you have been suspended for a length of time in a world that could plausibly exist but most emphatically does not. Few movies or dramas engage you enough to blur this distinction and oddly enough Love My Way, in spite of some TV soap elements, did. In fact its second series, which was pretty dark, left one with the distinct feeling of being dragged down till it ended on a positive note and brought you back up again. I think part of this comes from its writing which has been well thought out and makes for consistent characterisation. I cannot think of any other Australian product on television that comes close. It has never aired on free to air television here (it started life on Pay TV which has a smaller viewership) but perhaps it would not have been as good under its constraints. Die hard fans would probably want a fourth series but the three series in themselves are a sort of compact whole; essentially a time capsule of the lives of a bunch of affluent and bohemian Sydney 30 somethings in the first decade of the 21st century.

Milk & Honey

Probably my favourite song of the past year and one I listen to almost every other day-as sung by the incomparable Nick Drake.

And - ah, the pleasures of youtube! Here's the Jackson C. Frank original.

No Man's Land

When I lived in Brisbane, I used to go quite often to GOMA. I think it was post the Asia-Pacific Triennial-anyway for a short period GOMA had a couple of Indian artists including NS Harsha. A couple of his works were like "Mass Marriage" below i.e. a composite of many images, e.g. a series on "sleep", which formed a whole. You can spend a lot of time looking at the works because it is very detailed and each image is different from the other.

It appears the sixth triennial has now rolled around and The Australian's Christopher Allen is quite underwhelmed by the Indians:

"Interestingly, the Indians, not only heirs to a great civilisation, but from a functioning democracy and tolerant society, do not come off particularly well in this exhibition. Subodh Gupta is described as amongst India's most prominent contemporary artists, but one struggles to think what his enormous mushroom cloud composed of brass pots and pans could possibly mean. The brochure may tell us that it "shifts an image of destruction into one of abundance", but that's empty verbiage. There's nothing abundant about pots and pans treated like rubbish in a tip. As Peter Nagy observes, he's good at "selecting icons and symbols", but arbitrary conjunctions are not good enough. Being big and spectacular is not a substitute for making sense. Much the same could be said about his brass motorbike. It's interesting to read the history of this machine and its manufacture in India, but that doesn't make the work significant....Gupta presents himself as rooted in Indian culture, but this turns out to be quite superficial. The world he now belongs to now is that lucrative no man's land we call the art world."

You can see the installation on the GOMA site.

Reading Allen's piece I wondered if the last lines are true of much in India these days i.e. we are a culture unmoored and grounded only by our participation in the no man's land of the world economy.

Then again, this is a year in which the Guardian art critic decided to dump on Hirst - and the commenters gleefully concurred. And Hirst in turn proved to be a common bully with a guy named Cartrain who seemed to be remarkably adept at taking the piss.

Maybe it's just the art world.

Charles LeDray

Charles LeDray makes installation art - largely in textiles and ceramics – and also in miniature. The pictures in this post are from an exhibition called Mens Suits. Apparently the exhibition is “large amounts of men's clothing - suits, shirts, ties, gloves - all different, all hand-made and intimately detailed, and mostly appearing second hand” which was three years in the making – and made single-handedly. Sort of a thrift shop leaning in the direction of immaculate attire imbued – to borrow a Japanese concept – with a sense of wabi-sabi.

Pink Whirls

Another flower post.

This one is an osteospermum more commonly called "Pink Whirls". Those petals make it seem like a spoon flower though.

Also taken at Mt. Coot-Tha.

In Krungthep

My brother lived in Bangkok aka Krungthep Nagari for awhile, this was written after my first visit. Revisiting my observations of August 2005 induced a great deal of lunch time nostalgic reverie.

Sydney is the Big Smoke of Australia but for an Asian things can seem pretty quiet around these parts. If you spend a year buried in Sydney where the sky has a blue permatint and barring the constant low hum of cars, the loud mobile phone wielders on the local train, the pounding music of the stores and the kaw kaw of seagulls nothing constitutes noise, it may well be that before long you will wish a holiday in more raucous parts of the world. And when you step off in the early dawn into the liquid heat of Bangkok, you know that this city is an antidote to your year in Sydney. A week in the city however merely affords fractured impressions. The river (Chao Phraya) and endless languid trips on a ferry. Fetid and clean klongs (waterways). More water in large pots on pavements housing pink lotus plants. Masses of pale green closed lotuses wrapped in banana leaves and immersed in large buckets of water. Spectacular wats (temples) seemingly serenely afloat on a concrete city. Large photographs of the queen. Shops, stalls, carts, goods, locals, firangs. Clusters of monks in yellow and orange robes, silent and everywhere. Dank Chinese shops (remarkably identical all the way from Singapore to Bangkok). Small perfectly formed eats. Iced coffees in plastic bags to ward off the heat and give a caffeine kick. More entwined pretty boys than Sydney. It can all seem a bit like the pictures of ubiquitous LP editions on Thailand. All of this was enlivened by an endlessly amusing game (for us) that my father and I devised - finding the Sanskrit equivalents of names ranging from Kanchanaburi to Thammasat. Even more endlessly amusing was my father's intrepid expeditions on local buses where the incongruous alchemy of his bad Thai and the commuters bad English magically transported us to desired destinations. Some things remain etched in memory. Wat Arun studded with the porcelain ballast of Chinese ships of the 1800s and looking for all the world like a modern art installation which makes use of discarded objects, an artist's comment on Thai-Chinese history. The emerald green landscape, misty rain and the Khwae river at Kanchanaburi - a stark contrast to the war museum it houses (the bridge on the river Kwai is here). The tranquility of Wat Bowon which is off the tourist track. Like many Asian cities, there is something seductive about Bangkok. Maybe because there is little room for anything else but people, the cities seem to reflect everything from a rarefied, sophisticated existence to the intimacy, squalor and corruption of spaces that coalesce into each other. Just the kind of place where a million stories can be born.

Picture credit: swamibu

MEMORIAM

Over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost

From IN MEMORIAM, Alfred Tennyson

For my uncle who unexpectedly passed away last year.

For Mistress Camellia Sinensis

For a long time I wrote nonsense verse, most were on my friends (sadly I can write them no more). And for the longest time I drank loads of tea till I moved to Australia and was hard put to find a decent cuppa unless I went to one of the tea shops or made it myself. This poem is from my archives and it's sort of slight and amusing when read now. The title and tone comes from the medieval poets I was obsessed with then e.g. Skelton's poems. The nerd in me went for the botanical names for tea and coffee. Here is the poem below.

Camellia's a lovely lady
Wonderful, totally heady
And I swear by God above
She's the one I truly love.

Sweet Camellia's wonderful colour
the rich honey, the amber pallor
do completely intoxicate.
My love shall never abate.

The fragrance of Camille
makes my senses reel
I long to hold her close
And then my love disclose.

Camellia, I shall never leave her
For I suffer the love fever
Men long for Coffea's kisses
But I wait for Camellia Sinensis'.

Hibiscus

I love the combination of red and green, even through a festive season where they are overused dominant colours.

And I love hibiscus.

Oddly the flower to the left is a hibiscus though nowhere near as showy as its common cousin. And its petals feel a lot sturdier. The leaves look different too. Apparently it is a Hawaiian Hibiscus, though I can't find a link to the exact species.

Picture to the left taken by my brother at Mt. Coot-Tha Botanical Gardens, Brisbane

Two French Novellas

For a very long time my mother had a copy of Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse and then it got lost in our travels. For one reason or the other I never got around to reading it but it always carried the suggestion of something quite chic and sophisticated and of course there was the evocative title. I spotted it at Basement Books a few months ago – the book included Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile - and of course ended up buying it. It was a pleasant enough read though I am sure for someone who was young in the 60s, as my mother was, it must have been fairly radical and the kind of book you would carry around to establish yourself as hip, chic, well-read and the like. Sagan was in her teens when she wrote the book and it is full of the ennui of that age. The two young girls in both books are tantalisingly poised between childhood and adulthood and the corrupted kind of innocence that they possess is both affected by and capable of affecting the adult world. Both books have very young heroines who enter the world of an older man/older woman, I am sure there is much to be read in this re attraction to a father figure and betrayal of the mother figure. Sagan writes flawlessly, it is hard to imagine that she wrote this in her teens for the novels are beautifully constructed, airy and spare. But the themes are eventually slight; they are really novels for young people.

Marguerite Duras wrote a few fictionalised accounts of her early life in Vietnam but unlike Sagan’s book, hers are an account of time recalled. Duras reworked the theme, which included her sexual precociousness, in several ways but the most well known is The Lover (thanks probably in part to a soft porn film version of the book). The books are quite dissimilar though both are slight (something the French do very well), well-written and deal with the romance or affection between a younger woman and an older man. Duras’ book is a lot more tough-headed than Sagan’s perhaps because it was written much later in life and has very much to do with memory and recollection. The older man happens to be Chinese so there are also a number of race/colonial connotations to the events of the book. Sagan’s mother figures are good women but Duras portrays her mother in a somewhat negative light though the reader can’t help but feel a little sympathy for a woman raising children on her own on a small salary in a foreign country and ultimately defeated by it. Surprisingly, it is not the erotic content of the novel that registers as much as Duras’ portrayal of being young and poor in the stifling and hidebound society of the French in Vietnam. The Vietnam Duras evokes is muggy, hot and the endless mud flats stretch into the horizon. Eventually Duras escapes it. Sagan’s heroines grow up and are left with a seemingly permanent sense of mournfulness, Duras grows up and becomes a writer filtering her troubled adolescence and reflecting on it through her fiction.

My November Guest

It's been another hot November weekend. Just the time for a late autumn poem:-)

My November Guest
Robert Frost

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

mumbai twenty-six eleven

The ABC had a short doco today on the terror attack of last year. Still so incredibly sad, this post is simply in memory of those who died last year.

My cousin, Ramya, was part of a Nat Geo doco on the attacks. She is a Mumbaikar and spent months on it so it must have been an emotional exercise. Given the lack of cable here, it may be awhile before I catch it.

Climategate

Normally I don't post stuff on politics or science though I follow both. So this post is a bit of an exception.

I have been following the news stories on “climategate” (I am using the popular term though attaching gate has becoming something of a cliche), which appears to have first broken at Air Vent, when I can. Outside of a few science and climate blogs, it appears to have been largely covered by the right wing papers (quite naturally) though it does raise reasonable doubts about the conduct of the researchers involved. Most of the press appears to have taken a hands off approach and some have suddenly turned ethical and not published the hacked material. There is a good deal of discussion on the science itself, a posting by a climate researcher and the group appears to be fairly key researchers but I don't mean to get into that as I do not work in the area. The point that got my attention is the bit on the submission of documents in response to an FOI as well as the characterisation of the material as hacked. It all reminded me a bit of Glenn Greenwald’s effective rebuttal of Joe Klein’s rant.

The media publishes all kinds of material, mainly salacious, under the pretext of “public interest” but are apt to invoke privacy when the material compromises them as with Klein. Likewise scientists. In a profession based on transparency and counter-checks, it is odd that the emails actively discuss ways of evading FOI requests. Like the closed clique of Washington politics who Greenwald lambasts in his article, the whole process of influencing peer review, manoeuvering the appointment of editors and creating the Catch-22 of not allowing publication of papers by researchers who come to different conclusions and then dismissing the authors for not publishing in peer reviewed papers speaks of a clique that doesn’t seem to be answerable to anyone, least of all the public (nothing here that you can understand, move along seems to be the general approach). It’s a pity that most news sites and blogs have been dismissive (apart from Monbiot) – their only stance appears to be that it doesn’t compromise the decades of research by many groups on climate change or change anything at the UN sponsored fest at Copenhagen. This may be so but it still doesn’t address some of the issues raised by the emails. Then again, after many years in research, all of this is hardly surprising.

TN Sleaze

There is clearly something in the water in Tamil Nadu. In the mid 80s it was a video of unsuspecting schoolgirls lured into compormising positions that was doing the rounds in Thanjavur District. And some salacious tale that has been duly filmed always seems to be around from my experience.

The Collared Shirt

One of my favourite pictures from the Sartorialist site is the one below shot in Delhi.

I think it's the shirt that does it for me for it reminds me of young Indian girls a few decades back who wore the buttoned up collared shirt with a skirt and preferably pigtails done up with ribbons. Why this is on the Sartorialist is of course because along with the rest of the outfit it is a contemporary interpretation of the shirt-and one that is very well done.

Judging by the pictures on flickr few girls wear the skirt-blouse these days though I did spot this charming picture (also below) on the site.

And here is another one that incorporates the shirt into a dress inspired by Kahlo. Here simply because all things Kahlo are generally aesthetic.

Four Films

A few weeks ago I happened to see The Dreamlife of Angels which follows two girls in a small town in France. Both girls are drifters in different ways. Ill-paid jobs at a clothing factory bring them together and soon they are living temporarily in the house of a girl in a coma. One of the girls, Marie, has a mother who is a victim of domestic violence and is rather fearful and closed in nature. Inevitably her barriers fall and she falls in love with an unsuitable man which results in her descent into paranoia and the break-up of the friendship. The other, Isa, discovers the diary of the coma girl and begins to visit her and read to her from her diaries. In the interlude before all this, the girls also flirt and establish a friendship with the bouncers at a club who are sweet on them. Things escalate, Marie dies and Isa returns home. The ending of the film is in yet another factory as Isa starts a new job and the last lingering shots are of each of the women around Isa working (if one observes a pattern in my random posts it may be that many touch on women working at what are seen to be menial or tedious jobs!). The movie’s exploration of young working class women is very effective and it has generally good performances. But at least part of the movie’s success rests on Elodie Bouchez’s gamine Isa, her performance is very tender and warm-hearted. As an aside, doing the inevitable google search, I found the inevitable way out article :-) This one is on Gregoire Colin, who plays the cad. More than Mr. Colin, I am in total agreement with her views on Mr. Pitt!

The reason I saw Dreamlife was because I had seen Bouchez in a movie that is probably my favourite coming of age film, Andre Techine’s Wild Reeds. Techine’s film, set during the Algerian War, has four young actors who sort of represent different aspects of the country. Standing in for Techine himself (the film feels autobiographical) is Francois who is sensitive and well-read and just coming to terms with his homosexuality. Bouchez, plays Maite, young and earnest and a girl who has absorbed her mother’s communist principles and is a little in love with Francois and later with Henri. Serge is the rustic who has his way with Francois and would like his way with Marie and also has a brother who is killed in the war. Lastly, Henri is the new boy and a pied-noir, full of resentment at being forced to return to France and at the abandonment of French-Algerians. Techine’s film essentially follows the usual coming of age set-up i.e. the experiences of the group over a summer and how they are changed by it. But unlike many other films it also grounds its characters in an adult world and explores the different ways in which they themselves move towards adulthood. Plus it is subtle, warm and rich with details. Bouchez is the only woman and all three boys are a little in love with her or admire her. And she is entirely admirable in the role bringing both strength and vulnerability to her character. Trailer here.

As it happened, last week SBS also saw it fit to screen two movies that dealt with colonialism in Africa. The Wedding Song is set in Tunisia but it is not particularly about Europeans in Africa. Instead it explores the friendship between a Tunisian Jew and a Muslim and the strains put on their friendship in the wake of the French capitulation to the Nazis. It is distinctly feminist in tone; in fact it creates a luxuriating and intimate feminine world - with more than a tinge of lesbianism - which is under strain from masculine influences. Unsurprisingly it is directed by a woman and like many other movies directed by women, it is lensed in a rather sensual and tactile manner. I don’t think it quite gets where it wants to but it was still an interesting piece of cinema. The Murmuring Coast, also directed by a woman, is set in Mozambique and deals directly with the effects of colonialism on both parties. At it’s centre is a Portuguese woman who comes out to Mozambique to marry and is repelled both by the change in her husband and the brutality and indifference of her fellow countrymen. It too draws a distinction between the feminine and masculine worlds of the colonisers, but it is also more political in tone dealing as it does with the last years of the Portuguese colonial experience (the movie is set in the 60s and of course Portugal was in India too until that decade). This movie too is beautifully lensed and evokes the period with its mix of idealism and despair very well. Plus it is one of those films that have a pervasive sense of atmospheric melancholy and decay.

Pelicans

Clearing computer junk today and stumbled on these pictures taken in the winter of 2006 in Kiama by a friend, Michelle Wang, who currently lives in Shanghai. Normally I am not a fan of pictures of exceptional clarity but I really liked these. We were amused by the pelicans, a few were indifferent, one was quite the diva both aloof and vamping it up for Michelle's camera and one was quite eager to pose and stuck close to her. Click on picture for a larger, clearer view.

Below picture taken on the way to the blowhole. Norfolk pines & blue skies = classic coastal NSW landscape.

Words+Gardens

Words I read this week:

taupe, teal, louche, lambent, solipsism, epicene, versimilitude, saxifrage, pompoms de coton, poet shirt, obstreperous, bathetic, gemütlichkeit

I was flummoxed by a fair few.

And an extract of Villiers-Stuart book on Mughal Gardens which discusses swimming arrangements for purdah ladies and bad British design.

"To return to the swimming pools. Certainly there is nothing so exhilarating as a swim in the open air; but among the changes due to the British Raj and the consequent copying of European fashions, one of the greatest drawbacks to Indian women must be the loss of their fine water gardens. Indeed, in India we all lose by the neglect of Indian garden art, but none of us lose more of health, delight, and happiness than the gentle purdah ladies, whose lives are, in truth, rather cramped by contact with our ideas when this entails the loss of their beautiful terraced roofs and pavilions, and the introduction of the open, exposed garden which they cannot enjoy. A recent instance will illustrate my meaning. On the outskirts of a famous Indian city, not far away from the old Mughal gardens in which I was sketching, fine new buildings for a girls school were about to be opened. The school was a strictly purdah school-a comparatively new idea. The daughters and future wives of the Indian rulers and nobles were to be educated there, and fitted to become in after life good and helpful companions to their husbands and sons. By the particular advice of our wise Queen-Empress, their own best traditions and customs were in all cases to be adhered to. The opening ceremony was made an event of special importance. Princesses and officials wives were gathered to meet the great lady who had snatched one day from a long round of other duties in order to be present. One could imagine how beautiful and useful the buildings to be opened might be-an Indian garden of girls; a modern maidens palace, such as the garden-bower of Kadambari, the Gandharva Princess. One could picture the dark arched entrance; the main building with its cool fountain court and airy terraced roof; the pavilions and class-rooms built against the high enclosing garden- walls; the swimming pool and the swings; the cypress walks, the squares of flowers and fruit trees, the plots laid out in grass for games,-the whole combining to unite the best of Indian and English common-sense and art with the pleasant freedom of complete security. And the reality? It was a large, solid, red-brick building of the British public institute order, with praiseworthy 'Indian' trimmings by way of decoration, but with little Indian feeling; low walls, a gravel sweep, a dry, bare-looking garden, the whole surrounded with hideous matting screens-for was not this a school for purdah girls?"

Arranged Marriage

Whilst in India I had a brief chat with one of my nieces, a girl of 18 with a great deal of self-possession. I asked her if she had a boyfriend and she replied that she didn’t and that she is a “one man woman”. I was a little surprised to find this phrase still around but what she meant was that she had no intention of “fooling around” before she got married. As she wanted this marriage to be a happy occasion, she expected to have an arranged marriage. The happiness of this occasion I found could be marred by many things, most of all her father’s old-fashioned attitude to marriage. Girls who were “fooling around” however did not appear to contemplate a future different to hers, most appeared to be like the 20 something I met on a flight to Kolkata who had plenty of boyfriends with whom she engaged in varying degrees of intimacy but was eventually planning on an arranged marriage.

If the statistics are right, at least 95% of marriages in India are still arranged. It persists even amongst the middle classes, where education and employment for women is now common. It is not that Indians are immune to romance; the arranged marriage for example comes with its own romantic mythology. But in “real life”, as Indians are wont to say, tradition often trumps love. In some cases people expect to bypass entanglements and segue straight into adulthood by way of the family approved marriage. In others, a failed love affair is often followed by a retreat into the familiar world of the arranged marriage. And sometimes, the desires of early youth and a liberal upbringing where the ideal of romance is more commonly found in a French movie than a Bollywood flick, give way to the somewhat dispiriting landscape of relationships in India as one grows older. People are left on the cusp, hoping for a romance around the corner and unwillingly submitting to the process of having a marriage arranged. Whichever way it is arrived at, the hold of the institution over the Indian imagination seems far too firm to be dislodged by any of the changes that sweep the country from time to time. One may depart from a traditional upbringing and sometimes move to foreign climes and habits but many return like homing pigeons to the traditional marriage.

Even those of us opposed to the notion of arranged marriages thus grow accepting of it. You cannot after all force a revolution in mating mores.

And yet I couldn’t help thinking that far-fetched as it may seem, the arranged marriage is a continuum of attitudes that prevent people from entering a temple. For the persistence of the arranged marriage is also the persistence of caste. As an example, it appears likely that caste considerations will dictate the arranging of a marriage for the 18 year old niece. Change occurs within castes but intermingling and introducing new modes of living into the family still seems to spark off tension. Last month, for e.g., Chetan Bhagat released a book that is a fictionalised account of his own marriage and the parental opposition that preceded it. In one of his interviews, he touched on its potential to kill the tenderness and sweetness of a love affair. Even accounting for deeply held beliefs it can at times seem that something dark and fearful lies at the heart of the psychological violence (and often physical) directed towards falling in love in India. And whilst other forms of caste discrimination are not as visible these days, with the arranged marriage it is upfront and we are presented with the notion that it is purely parental love and duty directing us to our predetermined futures.

And of course there is the great adventure of love itself. Cristina Nehring bemoaning the anodyne love of our modern age in her book, The Vindication of Love, writes of being “derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love”. Her book takes its title from Wollstonecraft who combined her intellectualism with the messiest of love lives. Indeed Nehring’s book is partly a defence of Wollstonecraft’s feminist reputation. And of course the idealization of romantic love, nay passionate, unheeding love of the kind Nehring describes, has a long history in the West. Perhaps Nehring is taking the argument to its extreme and most people’s romantic lives fall between the two poles. Yet - admitting for appearances being deceptive - it’s hard to see the young people I met in India committing themselves to any such passion. And more importantly approaching it with the truth it deserves.

Slow Saturday with Jacarandas

Today was pleasant and sunny so I went to the Rocks and the Quay. The jacarandas are in bloom so I spent some time with them drinking lemon sencha tea as I couldn't lay my hands on lavender tea.

Walking back, there were a band playing on Pitt Street Mall (above). They seemed to be enjoying themselves and in fact were pretty good and had a sizeable crowd listening to them.

The lemon sencha and a cool afternoon also allowed me a leisurely read of the newspapers. I am afraid I laughed immoderately when I read Richard Glover's account of a Keating day (read only if familiar with Oz politics and Keating's massive ego). The laugh scared away the pigeons but the seagulls are built of sterner stuff and hung around. Also noted that the indefatigable Don Watson (previously speechwriter to Keating) is continuing his assault on weaselly management speak. Much needed when even shootings happen in a Soldier Readiness Centre.

Links for today

Regretsy kept me laughing all of today (most fun if you are familiar with that handmade emporium, etsy).

And as a lemonhead and chocophobe, this article hit all the right notes.

Caravana / polly&me

It appears that Caravana has shut shop, at least I can’t find them on the Web.

Caravana, started by Cath Braid and Kirsten Ainsworth, was profiled by ABC in my first years in Australia. The story in itself, of two Australian girls creating fashion in a conservative and idyllic place, Chitral, was remarkable. Subsequently, I read their profile in Dumbo Feather, Issue 3. I have seen their pieces in Cambodia House in Paddington and they are as rich and beautiful as the visuals below. They draw a great deal on daily life so that they are more than just clothes with pretty designs (pictures below from here).

Happily it appears that Cath Braid is working on a different project, polly&me, and it appears to have expanded to include artworks - I quite like the idea of Gupshup! Some of the artwork is really interesting and I am adding the site to my list to follow its progress.

It can’t of course be easy but I admire women who go off to completely different places and set up a business. I find Ock Pop Tok equally interesting, both in terms of its textiles and it's back story.

Nina Kinert

Nina Kinert is Swedish, a singer and I am kind of enjoying her opaque lyrical stylings on motorcars, bumblebees, dandelions and chocolates (inexplicably Wiki tells me it was used to spruik Saab).

Heirloom Tote

My grandmother has a slow, particular way of working that doesn't result in immense output. Neither does it result in anything showy and grand. Rather her work is modestly proportioned and the pleasure lies in the perfection within it. For example, she was not inclined to feasts and complicated dishes but to her everyday cooking she brought something alchemical so that it was always elevated beyond the commonplace.

She had been taught the gentle arts, I suspect by the nuns of her school years, and was an adept needlewoman when young. Here too her work was modest, neat and polished. She didn't make very much given her large brood and unfortunately very few samples remain of her work. For a long time she had a bag she had made (it's macrame) and then perhaps as she has got older, it got misplaced. Last year I found it amongst a pile of other things and retrieved it. Sadly, a part had faded, otherwise it is in extremely good tick. After a lifetime of moving, I am sentimental about very few things. One is a photograph of my grandmother when three, to this I decided to add the bag. Here are pictures below:

I think the thread used for the bag is not dissimilar to the one used in spinning a top. The highly even nature of the knots indicates the care my grandmother took with making it. Apart from the bag itself, which I think dates back to the 1940s, it's handle has survived well thanks to my grandmother's care. It is wood and simply carved and something about it is very handsome and reassuring.

The other bag is a beaded bag from Shillong.

A particular, sweet ache

I think I would like to visit Portugal.

Though much nearer home, fado (kind of Portuguese blues) is sung in Goa too.

Driving Ms Moulee - III

Given the nature of Mumbai traffic, I spent a lot of time on the roads. And had plenty of time for chats with Pyaremohan (nickname for my bro’s driver).

Pigs seem to feature in many ways in Pyaremohan aka PM’s life. He had bought a piglet a few months back intending to fatten it up for Diwali. The pig had been duly photographed and looked rather fetching. His wife, who fed it daily, had grown attached to it but the pig, showing good sense, hid behind her whenever PM approached. I suggested to him that in the home movie playing in the pig’s mind he was the dark, evil villain. For some reason this made him laugh no end. Sadly the pig was killed on Diwali for a festive meal.

One afternoon was so hot that I decided to get a fix of sugarcane juice. We took ourselves off to the best purveyor of the stuff in Mumbai from I don’t know – time immemorial – the Rajawadi Rasvanti Griha (RRG). PM had never had the ambrosia offered up at this place and promptly stretched himself out on its spindly bench, drink in hand, and started querying the owner. PM does this all the time, seeking to affirm that he is a man of the world who can get something for nothing. The RRG owners are characterised by their vow of silence so wringing conversation out of the owner proved way harder than wringing juice out of the sugarcane. RRG Owner: 1, PM: 0

Thanks to a loan from my bro, PM now had a motorcycle. Which he polished and kept lovingly and referred to at least as often as his wife.

Karwa Chauth was on during my visit. The proceedings of the day and on PM’s return home were explained in great detail to me. So tender was this that I am quite sure the man is still very much in love with his wife. I asked him why he didn’t keep Karwa Chauth but received no answer.

I had bought a pot of Australian cold cream for PM's wife and sister. Only to find that he intended to use it to help soften and lighten his complexion.

The wife wanted a gold necklace for Diwali, which fact PM mentioned to me everyday. Each mention was followed by his observation that “Sir” (my bro) was the greatest employer in the world. It is widely known that I am dim-witted and take everything at face value. Nevertheless his persisting with the story and a few other incidents finally attuned me to the PM way of thinking which was intended to make me apply my wayward mind to the problem of what could be done to benefit his family. In this case it was of course arranging for the necklace. This simultaneous exaltation and request for handouts can be faintly exasperating (I think Robyn Davidson’s Desert Places touched a bit on this). On the other hand the social system in India works in this very same mysterious way and those of us not adept at deciphering the language of supplication and favours may well be foreign and exasperating to the likes of PM. And to be fair, a few tales of evil employers rung true, rare is the person in India who is not anxious to extract every last bit of a rupee paid and even rarer is the person who does not confuse a salaried domestic employee with a slave.

We went a couple of times to Powai and PM sadly proved true all stereotypes regarding his gender by refusing to ask for directions and getting us lost each time.

Conceit

I read David Brooks' column at lunch time. And its true that 90% of the people you meet believe they are doing a great job - and the other person is rubbish.

Lazy Sunday

Lazy Sunday. After a hot beginning to the weekend, it rained all morning. Further proof that Sydney is inching towards the Melburnian “four seasons in a single day”. Consequently, apart from the grocery shopping, I haven’t been out today and have been entertaining myself with magazines. And a book gifted to me by my cousin as part of a Mad Men themed present, The Golden Age of Couture. Expectedly, the book had plenty of stunning women in stunning clothes. As also brief write ups on designers I was not aware of like Jacques Fath.

Only one picture really captured the behind the scenes toil to create these dresses and here it is below:
Though it may not necessarily be toil. One of the few movies I watch on and off is Brodeuses. As far as the story and the film goes, it is slight, lovely yet nothing out of the ordinary. But it is slow and contemplative and captures the rhythms and joys of women’s work, which for some reason makes for hypnotic viewing (at least to this viewer). In the movie, the work happens to be embroidery for the haute couture houses. Trailer which is kind of ordinary, here.
And now onto something even slower, contemplative and silent. The DVD lined up for tonight is Into Great Silence.

On a Building Site

I am still jet lagged but thought I should post something before the month slips by. India was of course hectic and it will take awhile to unpack my thoughts. This time I did manage to meet a few people and make a few out of town visits. One was to Poona which has changed a lot since the mid 80s when taking the Army bus into town every fortnight from Kirkee was the highlight of our lives. Poona remains a slow city, a trait it shares with Bangalore, perhaps the coolness of the air is responsible. Vaguely alarmed by the vast number of people we know with more than one property in India (we have our old flat and little else), we did a mini recce of "investment" flats in Poona. It makes sound economic sense but the idea of multiple residences is something I am still not fully comfortable with. Plus the residences in India suggest nothing other than monotony and ennui. From singularly unaesthetic building blocks to independent houses that are mainly concrete with touches of the grandiose, nothing made one want a second home. Inevitably, we came to no decision on buying a flat.

One of the places we went to was still in the early stages of construction. As is common in India, the hired workers lived on site. Apart from the nascent building itself which served as transient accommodation, there was a small, temporary brick establishment which boasted a garden of sorts (at another such place, our driver scored a couple of free gourds). It was clean and well tended and the garden was probably a source for much of their diet. People who build these residences are considered marginal and displaced. In my youth many a middle class writer, filled with burning anger at the injustices of life, felt compelled to point out the inherent irony in people without houses building houses for others. And yet, without romanticising the poverty, the workers seemed to have a camaraderie of sorts and their ability to create this temporary life - and share it as with our driver - was to me remarkable.

Apart from the vegetable patch, we also came across the goats below as well as a couple of chickens. Both looked well fed and I have no doubt they are intended for the cooking pot. As it happened, our driver too had been looking after a piglet which was fat enough by Diwali to cook a festive biryani. In Sydney, they would be part of an "alternative" ecological lifestyle, here they were the persistence of old patterns of life which require economy and prudence in managing a home.

A Village in Mumbai

I had forgotten the unexpectedly rural nature of the little pocket of Mumbai where my grandparents house is located. It is a "cooperative housing colony" i.e. cheap residences built on marshy land as post independence Mumbai expanded. The initial tiny and roughly built residences are now quite changed as those with money built the squat, concrete and storied bungalows beloved of modern Indians announcing their arrival into the ranks of the comfortably off. Somewhere in between, the residences were modest and aesthetic cottages. Few now remain, the picture on the right below is of two residences that were the norm in the 70s and the 80s. It is also a long time since I saw common house sparrows (picture below left) and they along with squirrels seem to have made a comeback of sorts. And while cows are common in all parts of Mumbai, the picture on the left below has a somewhat bucolic setting.

Rarely for Mumbai, the residences are set on their own land and boast tiny gardens. A fair few were in bloom. The three above are trumpet flowers, rangoon creeper and ixora.

Travelling around Mumbai, you are lost in the ceaseless, anonymous roar of the city. But the colonies, enclaves and societies of the city are tiny domestic worlds with ordinary rhythms and routines and sometimes as with my grandparents place are unexpectedly quiet. The banana seller above has been making the rounds of the colony for many years as do other vendors of small goods.

And I quite liked the signage above for the school bus as well as the one hung by an irate householder whose intent is clearer than his spelling.

Mumbai

is very hot. I had quite forgotten how muggy October is.

In the morning when I take a walk, the harsingar tree (quite lovely) has shed overnight. It's a tree that is rare in Australia, in spite of obsessive gardeners bringing species from all over the world.

My grandmother is old. She seems querulous, absent minded and happy in company by turns. Her sisters are old too. But the passing of one of their husbands seems to have put a bit of vigour in them in the way arranging funerals usually do. My cousin, eighteen tomorrow, and always by far the youngest at my grandmother's place still looks like a fresh flower placed in the midst of a mansion that has seen better days.

The traffic is abominable. It is almost as if cars have been stacked along the road from land's end to the northern reaches and they make their incremental moves until they reach their destination. I am not sure how my brother has managed to work for near on two years here.

Every single person I have met has asked me about the attacks on Indian students in Australia.

The first few days of domestic help who come in to wash and clean are always unnerving.

Sadly, the maid and chauffeur at home are both careless about educating their daughters. No matter how dull the son, money and care are poured in equal measure into his education. In spite of government incentives, the daughter’s education seems incidental.

Vintage!

I had never seen op-shops before coming to Australia. In India clothes that have had a prior life are given away within the family or to the domestic help and no one would think of actually buying second hand clothes.

Though the contents of an op-shop can widely vary in terms of quality I think what first fascinated me was that they stocked clothes from a different era. For e.g. I had seen a great many American movies from the 80s but never seen any of the clothes featured-India in the 80s offered very little when it came to Western women's clothing. So it was interesting to see the fabrics and cuts employed in earlier decades. Later when I discovered shops that branded themselves vintage (and consequently were more expensive but also had more quality control) e.g. Broadway Betty, C's Flashback, Grandma Takes a Trip, The Vintage Clothing Shop and the like, I did pick up a few pieces. It of course helps that I am not a trouser person and more a skirt/dress person - the choices are plenty.

There are several op-shops around where I live, perhaps it's the competition that makes everything cheap as chips (ever so often they have a promotion and the already low prices are further slashed). Whatever the reason, I have never seen the clothes I see here in the op-shops I patronised earlier. Perhaps it's because the suburbs around here have a slight European flavour. I like browsing in the shops on a Saturday (unusually for op-shops they are also open on Sundays). Since the suburbs also seem to host very many theatricals, there is actually a section devoted to theatre clothes that have been given away which is quite interesting to say the least.

Last week I picked up a tunic that I quite liked (below). The fabric was slightly thick and the bottom half had thick broad stripes that had the texture of a painting. The dress had a label - Mila Schon - and it indicated that it was Made in Italy. It turned out that the label is fairly well known. Though the op-shops have a separate designer section it's not something I am very interested in - this in fact was wrongly located. So this was a bit of an unusual buy albeit one I quite like.

This week I picked up a frock which appears to be have been stitched at home (below). It has a sweet neck detail and I like the print where butterflies seem to be go up and down. Also I like its touches of mauve. The fabric is a slightly shiny and silky synthetic which is rather unusual these days but I can't place the decade.

Neither can be worn at work but I hope to wear at least the frock for my niece's birthday this weekend.

I also really do need to get a camera, it is hard to take good pictures with just the mobile and the Mac :-(