What a strange power there is in clothing

The Sartorialist is on my blogroll and I check it once in awhile. For the most part it is an engaging photojournal of classic fashion on the streets with more than a few nods to quirk. But this one caught my eye because it takes a classic template and then makes it so bold and original. It helps that the subject is easy on the eye but not everyone can dream up and carry off that mix of colours and patterns.

The Sartorialist is respectful, indeed it only records "good fashion", but HHC puts a bit of snark in its comments on Indian/Bollywood fashion. Its not exactly my favourite site but a bit of a guilty pleasure given it names and shames an astonishing amount of bad Indian fashion (by the looks of it extremely derivative these days). For the most part I don't care what people wear and I don't buy into fickle ideas of what constitutes dressing well but at least some posts in HHC beg the Q, "what was that person thinking!'.

Title Quote by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Mad & Bad, Blame PMS

One of those "what in the weird", wtf news segments. On the plus side, I like it that it is classified as entertainment. As someone who has hardly any pre-menstrual symptoms and never having met anyone with such a clear link, I am perhaps not in a position to judge whether women do suffer from PMS. But linking female behaviour to hormones does not seem that far removed from other charming "medical" certainties like female hysteria. Like female hysteria, it is also an effective tool for putting down women as irrational and incapable of decision due to their specific femaleness. I have had colleagues and relatives asking me in an amused manner whether I had PMS just when I am debating a point with some passion (for the record, amusingly these Qs have happened when I was not hormonally impaired, in so far as anyone of us is not hormonally impaired on any given day given that the damn things are a part of human physiology). The sad thing is that there are legions of women buying into any behavioural diagnosis related to menstruation, whether it be the effects of PMS or menopause. Both these days pass for legitimate illnesses rather than just the nature of things.

Cloudstreet

Its a long time since I read Australian fiction and I am just through with a very well known work, Cloudstreet. Tim Winton's book is a chronicle of Australian working class life, most of it set in post war Perth. Its account of two families (the aptly and amusingly named Lambs and Pickleses) who share a house (the eponymous Cloudstreet), is somehow simultaneously a generation spanning linear novel and a poetic, fragmented account of a particular kind of Australian life. Poetic in spite of employing throughout the direct and salty form of speech favoured by most Australians. The book plunges you into all the features of post war Australian life - a rural upbringing, migration to suburbia, gambling, prudence, strong family bonds, fire, water - and its main characters all ring true. Winton also alludes to the themes of the day like the wars and its impact on Australian life, the Menzies years, the work life of the city, the Nedlands monster et al without losing his focus on the two families. The book is also very successful in evoking that other motif of Australian fiction, the landscape. He makes Perth and its environs come alive till you can smell and feel the West Australian world the families inhabit. And he is exceptionally successful in evoking watery landscapes, fitting given the role it plays throughout the novel, especially in the life of Fish Lamb, the slow boy who partially narrates the story. Winton also has deeper themes going on, Cloudstreet with its ghosts of a white lady and black girl past and its recurrence sense of evil, for example could stand in for a nation where black and white history has been divisive. Cloudstreet is eventually rid of the ghosts - Winton uses the consummation of Rose Pickles and Quick Lamb's relationship to signal this, presumably a new generation literally banishing ghosts past. While most of the characters are working class or of the land, there are two exceptions. With both, Winton falters. One is Toby Raven with whom Rose Pickles has a brief relationship. He is middle class (or upper middle class), clever and college educated with smart friends with a taste for the different (literally given the Italian establishment he and his friends frequent) and a journalist. His role in the book is clearly to act as a counterpoint to the Lambs and Pickleses. Rose is an outsider to this world and he serves as a catalyst for her flight back to Cloudstreet and into Quick Lamb's arms. However, Winton makes him so much of a poser that he becomes a caricature, almost as if the author had a few axes to grind with the Australian literary establishment. The choosing of a journalist figure and someone who denotes a life of the mind as an object of ridicule also rather sadly reinforces the anti-intellectual strain of Australian life. All the more surprising given that this novel is not cast in the populist mode. The aboriginal figures in the novel on the other hand are distant, almost other worldy, and here Winton falls into the trap of black fella spiritualism. Both Lambs and Pickleses "see" them but they are not real figures and even though Winton's language itself does not falter, the reader is left with the idea that they only serve as mystical clap trap. In fact the only reference to a real aboriginal person is the native girl, part of the stolen generation, whose ghost inhabits Cloudstreet. As a result the working class are given direction and are allowed to experience epiphanies by the people who once inhabited the land but there is no allusion to the racism that one can reasonably expect to have been present in at least some working class families in post war Australia. Nevertheless these are minor quibbles about a book I really liked and I hope to read more of Winton's work.

Spare-Ohs

Right now I am liking Andrew Bird, here is the man in Montmarte.

East+West

'Tis the season of Slumdog but a foreign director making an Indian film is not entirely new. Shadows of Time takes Indian melodrama and an excellent cast and its German director ratchets everything down a few notches to make an intriguing and good looking film, albeit slow. Both Slumdog and Shadows of Time also have a childhood romance - the abundance in which this theme features in Indian movies is analysed somewhere in here.



L: Shadows of Time R: The Pool

I have yet to see The Pool which takes an American short story and transplants it to Goa. It has had glowing reviews but given that it seems decidedly quotidian it is perhaps more an indie circuit film than one on the path to the Oscars.

Spotted on Etsy - Porcelain

From Bailey doesn't Bark
L: Four Seasons and R: Ants on my Cup

Driving Ms Moulee - II

Conversations with Pyaremohan were not extensive this time around given the nature of my visit. Still, seeing me limping around with a bad foot, he joined countless others in giving me medical advice. Apart from recommending a hot compress (cold compresses apparently are for delicate parts like eyes whereas the lowly foot needs a shot of intense heat), he also hesitantly offered to provide me with some pig fat balm if Dad (as he calls my father) was willing to tolerate it in his apartment. Dad it turned out wasn't inspite of his carnivorous youth but I left the possibility of some pig on me (pun purely unintentional) open. Coincidentally a book I was reading at the time, Cloudstreet, also served up pig fat as a recipe for burns so the Pyaremohan Apothecary had some basis for its medications.

Pyaremohan in fact seemed to be in slaughter mode. Having returned from Haryana where his kids had been shorn of their locks, he now needed to sacrifice a goat (if I remember correctly) as a follow up. This was to take place on a Sunday.

Me: So will you get someone to sacrifice the goat?
PM: No, I do it myself.

The headless goat and defatted pig left Dad in some distress and he swore to lecture Pyaremohan, then desisted. Dad is after all a lamb at heart, and there is no saying what Pyaremohan would do to a lamb.

The Haryana returned native also saw it fit to once again delight me with the dubious charms of Haryanvi music videos uploaded on his mobile phone. These chiefly consisted of some rustic lad singing lustily to his lady love, a shimmering vision purely due to her bright and sequinned dress. Mostly he described her charms, she responded coquettishly and it wound its way to a predictable end. The backdrops were of some interest. In one, a college, students sat in outdoor classrooms. Young love blossomed in natural surroundings but the video had little to indicate that the college had lofty aims like Santiniketan. Many had a large white house, obviously an architectural mistake popular in the state (or perhaps the producer was on a limited budget). I mentioned to Pyaremohan that the videos appeared to be repetitive. I suspect no more will be shown to me, though I remain intrigued as to what passes for entertainment in the provinces.

Before I left, Pyaremohan invited us for a quick lunch. He lived fairly close to the airport in a wadi, which had a number of tightly packed residences and was also almost entirely Haryanvi. A clutch of children made quick salaams and ran off to play, the women dutifully served us. It turned out that all of them were good looking in a delicate fashion (Pyaremohan's sister-in-law was in ghunghat, a fact he mentioned with great pride, inexplicably she threw it off when he left the room though Dad and my brother were around) and also capable young women in a patriarchal system. Some elements of patriarchy were familiar but also mildly shocking, Pyaremohan's sister for example could only make limited use of her training as a beautician, her husband deciding what could be "allowed". In fact the whole visit left me with the impression of a family and culture where the men were swaggering, macho duds prone to drink and the women, within the constraints of their lives, marshalled all their intelligence to raise a family.

I think I do not need to know anything more about Haryana for awhile. But for anyone interested, youtube hosts one of Pyaremohan's beloved songs.

Design Blogs

Indian design blog with some impressive visuals. Love the admixture of purple and charcoal grey in this picture.



Image source here.

And another one that features lots of info + the author's own work (below)



and that of other bloggers/artists:

To Blog or Not

Its been over a year since I started blogging here. Unlike with previous blogs, I have managed to update this one fairly frequently and hope to continue to do so in the future.

One of the reasons I periodically abandon blogging is that I write for people I know or for myself. With a blog you cannot be sure that people you know will read it and given its public nature it does not function as a personal scrapbook either. In all probability, hardly anyone reads the blog. Yet, when I write, the very fact that its notionally a public forum can change the way I write. An email to friends, the notebook in my cupboard and a posting on the blog all vary. Of all these, a posting on the blog is my least favourite mode of expression. But it is easier and so I continue.

Initially I had intended to put up small essays and eschew the visual. Again, the nature of blogging is such that you cannot really express anything formally (perhaps other blogs do but I personally find it hard to write a post that is not casual). Further, linking to other sites and pics becomes an easy way to "update" your site and whilst it has its joys, it also feels lazy. Consequently, I don't always enjoy what I have written in a blog and periodically return to my journal only to abandon it again.

On the plus side, Blogger is not the best tool around but it did get me interested in structuring a website and the way it functions as a electronic pillow book, albeit with less lofty ambitions. Right now I don't have the time or inclination to change the present set-up but it is something I would like to explore.

तरुवर की छाया

Pradip Kishen's Trees of Delhi is idiosyncratic in its classification and an absorbing ramble through the capital's existing trees. Inspite of its many gardens, Delhi to me (my predominant memories of it date back to the 70s) is thorn scrub. But I also remember the spring flowering of gulmohurs (whose flowers can be eaten) and jacaranda followed by amaltas and copper pods as summer approached.

Flickr hosts a number of pictures of just about everything on earth. The one below is the amalta.



But a picture cannot of course capture the sensation of walking down a cantonment road in summer, the street ablaze with yellow, the sun pouring down your back and then going home to sleep off the afternoon in some cool corner of the house. A Sydney summer is not in the same league.

Spotted on Etsy - Crochet

They have loads more lovely crochet work.

Funeral Rights

Thirteen days after he died, my uncle's funeral ceremonies ended with a feast. I went around to invite a few people and they all looked ashen faced. All parties shuffled their feet, spoke banalities, attempted sadness but no one really articulated that an invitation to a sumptuous lunch was a somewhat inappropriate ending to an unexpected tragedy. For both my uncle's age and circumstance meant that the ceremonies had divided the family. What eventually took place was the entire thirteen day traditional ritual, an expensive one to boot. Moral relativism meant that no one could quibble, it made people happy, it was the way things were done. In fact the days had more than a tinge of gaiety to them, expected when people are at home with little else to do. Yet nothing in the funeral rites felt right. On the one hand, there was a disconnect with the ritual itself. It is not possible to believe in this thirteen day journey of the soul, not because one is deracinated, but because it seems as foolish as the proposition that the earth lies at the centre of the universe. The persistence of what should be cultural artifact is perplexing. More disconcerting to me is that the rituals also perpetuate region and caste even though in our daily lives we are somewhat removed from both. Even more disconcertingly, they require a vast expenditure, a public display of wealth and benevolence that has more than a faint reek of vulgarity. Yet they do bring a psychological satisfaction, especially to older people steeped in tradition, and this becomes the rationale for continuance. Others had a rightful precedence in how the last rites were to be conducted. But whatever I felt was completely divorced from the events I was passing through.

Fifteen years separate my mother's death and my uncle's and yet nothing had changed in the way we as a family chose to conduct ourselves. One can't force change so I merely felt sadness that my family had never chosen at any point to eschew the obscurant aspects of the religion. Our collective minds, clever and inquiring in some ways, become closed when it comes to so many matters. Hindu reform is not unknown, many people I know follow their own dharma, their own pieties, their own charities, not necessarily those prescribed by the shastras (which are so open to interpretation that everyone has their own long supremely correct way). We, on the other hand, chose to follow the shastras (at least as practised by Tamil Brahmins in Mumbai) and will continue to do so in the name of tradition. Left to myself, I would rather that we had dignified both my uncle's passing and our mourning with discretion and simplicity.

Closet Therapy

A Perfectly Organised Closet is Heaven Indeed. Many a fruitful weekend can be spent on it. And much like the writer of this post, I have an untidy dining table but an organised wardrobe.

Le(s) Fils

On the flight to Mumbai, I watched Le Fils de l'Epicier, a modest, charming French film that follows the return of the prodigal son. The son of the title (Nicolas Cazale) is a prickly, depressed lad who takes over his ailing father's grocery run through the villages of Provence. Initially acerbic, full of resentments and conscious of unpaid bills, he begins to like his eccentric old customers, softens, finds love (with the charming Clotilde Hesme) and has a rapprochement of sorts with his father.

I was put in mind of it when I had my customary glass of sugarcane juice at the Rajawadi Raswanti Griha. The taciturn middle aged bhaiyya was absent, replaced by a young lad who may or may not have been his son. Like the grocer's son, he was abrupt in taking my order and keen to settle payment as quickly as possible. One lives in the hope that age and experience will soften le fils de vendeur de jus de canne à sucre (the French mouthful for a sugarcane juice seller's son as provided by this translation site).

I went home for the funeral of my youngest uncle. It wasn't the best of times, the bookends of the siblings had fallen off leaving my grandparents remaining fils a shocked and disoriented middle. It is already more than three weeks since the event and some of the early shock has subsided. While my uncle's absence was sudden, its aftermath is likely to play out over time.