Three Things

First, I never knew about the Hungry Movement.

Second, I had little idea that a photo album on members of a literary movement could be interesting.

Third, I like the picture of the gentleman above for its general air of insouciance.

Beside the lake, Beneath the trees

On the IIT Campus, Powai Lake is the more respectable lake. The Director’s bungalow is adjacent to the lake, so is the Guest House and so is a temple and you can walk or cycle along its length at any time though I have known the odd mugging to happen. On the other hand, Vihar Lake is its much wilder cousin. It lies outside the campus and behind a swathe of hostels and when I was a student at the Institute it was well known for illicit swims, illicit pot and police patrols. Not much I think has changed though the campus itself has. On my last visit a few years back I was stopped by men in uniform for trespassing and rescued myself and my companions by a simple show of temper.

I like Vihar Lake because I feel at ease with it, I never tire of it.

It was in IIT that I had my first serious relationship. In the beginning it was sweet, tender and passionate and of course the deepening of a relationship signifies a transition into adulthood when you begin to make plans to marry, to last the distance. But that phase didn’t last very long and it got caught up with other events in my life, mainly my mother’s illness. There was a long period of confusion and pain before whatever lay at its core disintegrated. In retrospect, it is surprising that both of us lasted the five odd years in a suspended state unable to step off or go ahead. In that period and even before we began the relationship, we used to go often to Vihar Lake. Then of course it all ended - and The End was bold, italicised and underlined. In its aftermath I felt unmoored, unhinged and then tender with hurt, much had been lost far too quickly. For a long time I felt adrift and tired. I think I wanted peace between us, instead everything was silent and cold. And any attempts to change that went badly awry so it was left at that and life resumed its normal rhythms. The poem below was written around that time. Sometime after writing the poem, I destroyed the pictures taken at Vihar as I did everything else. Yet you don’t bargain for the fact that despite this you remember the details of the pictures.

When we meet again
Green lava is softly poured
Mud is moulded, paths bored
And hills are sculpted by falling rain

When we meet again
The lake lies spread beneath
Grasses are trampled underneath
Bedraggled by the falling rain

When we meet again
You trail heavy equipment
To capture hills, lake, contentment
And us under falling rain

When we meet again
Set aside a few hours of idleness
Set aside the recent bitterness
And watch silently the falling rain.

Many years have passed since I wrote the poem. I recognise the sentiments in it, in many ways I am still the same person. Yet I have changed and been tempered by life and subsequent experiences so it’s not a poem I would write today. People are always eagerly bustling into the future and claiming that the past is a forgotten land. But the past is always with us, it’s how we look at it that changes. Now when I read the poem I feel regret for the past. I remember us not saying enough and declaring every passing emotion. I miss our foolish young selves, I miss our earnestness. But I also recognise these feelings as a simple nostalgia for my youth. Slightly rearranging the quote from In the Mood for Love, though the things that belonged to it by and large exist, that era has passed.

Image taken from the IIT Site

An Old Mistress

I am not a fan of Catherine Breillat’s work though the ending of Romance, with a filmed childbirth, has a sly sense of wit about it. For the most part, her idiosyncratic, feminist and sexually explicit oeuvre has the subtlety of a sledgehammer. An Old Mistress, not as controversial and more accessible than her previous films, received much praise and may I add my own hosannas for this film. It is adapted from a French novel (written by Barbey d'Aurevilly according to wiki) and from the movie it largely appears that the story is set in a post Choderlos de Laclos era (de Laclos wrote Dangerous Liaisons, of which the best filmed version must be the Korean one). Here Breillat has the basic story to work off and does it justice. Briefly, an impoverished roué and dandy, Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Aït Aattou), decides to marry a wealthy aristocrat Hermangarde (Breillat regular Roxane Mesquida) but before he does so he must break off with his older mistress of ten years, La Vellini (Asia Argento). He has broken off the affair in the past but always returned. The marriage has the approval of the girl’s grandmother in spite of advice to the contrary. She appears to have known more hell raising times than the life of the 1830s crowd and besides seems to like the boy. The core of the story is the re-telling of the ten year affair by de Marigny to the grandmother so she “knows the man her grand daughter intends to marry”. Central to this is how de Marigny woos La Vellini and the loss of their child post which their love becomes a “barbarous love”, an addiction neither can successfully quit. The marriage does take place but La Vellini is not so easy to quit. No points for guessing the ending, this is after all a French novel and a French film. Suffice it to say that though de Marigny tries to escape a mistress who becomes “so totally organized for pleasure she always needed it”, he remains both a prioner and slave to his passion for La Vellini.

Like most of Breillat’s works, there is a certain kind of “flat” look to the scenes. There is no background music and before you get into the pace of the film, there is a stilted theatricality to the scenes (which eventually works in its favour). In setting up what is in some ways a triangle between de Marigny’s mistress, proposed bride and her grandmother, Briellat is able to explore many facets. For awhile de Marigny is deeply in love with his innocent, young wife and enough so to believe he can walk away from his mistress forever. Vellini is not a whore but she is simply too outré for polite society. The actress who plays her has a tendency to schlock, there are a few scenes where she draws and licks blood, this she does with such relish that you expect the movie to suddenly take a diversion into vampire territory. Nevertheless through her feral performance, her exotic persona you can see why de Marigny would be compelled to return. Though Breillat gets a lot out of her cast, it’s the grandmother (Claude Sarraute in a tender, intelligent performance) who is the standout. The film is also not as sexually explicit as the regular Breillat film; it's more your standard European art house fare. The only explicit scenes draw blood - the removal of a bullet and a chicken being drained of blood.
I don’t normally watch DVD extras but I did with this film because I was a little curious about Breillat’s methods. Breillat appears to have been ostracized by her country to some extent (though this film seems to have rehabilitated her with a Cannes nod) hence her identification with an author she says was strictly Catholic and yet battled the hypocrisy of society at large, the novel itself was scandalous in its time. Breillat also talked about the costumes – the look of the film is sumptuous due to its period setting – her selection of fabrics current in the 1830s, her attention to how these would look in close ups, her attempts to meld paintings and to borrow some of Dietrich’s outré look a century later for La Vellini. It all makes for a movie that is definitely a period film but has Breillat's stamp all over it and is a small triumph. Plus Breillat seems to have had a lot of fun making it.

Tea, Friendship & Murder

At my old workplace tea was served in a tray. It was the last vestige of the brown saheb culture of the company so there wasn’t china or a tea service of any sorts, just a sweet brew served up in brown and much stained plebeian mugs. For the most part of my time with the company, the person who brought around the tea was a constant. But in his absence, we would have a succession of different people. One of them was a smiling young man from Tamil Nadu who managed to make the usual slop a very drinkable brew. He was one of very many “annachis” who did the menial jobs around the company. Many of them lived in Dharavi and would come around to chat on finding I spoke Tamil. Some of them over stepped the mark, some were entirely diffident but the tea man was pleasant and polite yet reserved. This with a certain sense of self-worth made him different from the others. He was also a good looking lad which perhaps set in motion a series of events that eventually came to a head. The first inkling of trouble was his absence one particular morning. Later in the day, the local police arrived and the news went around that the tea man had been arrested in a murder case. The company of course swung into resourceful panic mode. The tea man was a contract worker and this was just one of several jobs; he had no union representation and the company soon delinked itself from the man and his fate. For awhile it was a juicy scandal and a melange of fact, rumour and spite swept through the workplace and then it faded from people’s memories.

It turned out that the tea man had committed what appeared to be a crime passionel. Though we had a pleasant friendship I knew little of his romantic life so I was surprised to find that he had killed a man over a girl. What I knew pertained to his family in Tamil Nadu. He had two sisters and an old mother who depended on his income. He hoped to get the sisters married and then marry himself. It was the average Indian immigrant story bar a certain happiness about him which was perhaps due to the girl or just a seemingly even temperament. To him could be attributed that trite phrase “a nice person” which made the whole murder inexplicable. There were perhaps some clues here and there. Like many a young lad on his own in the metropolis he liked his drink. This he never mentioned to me, he had a certain air of gentlemanliness which forbade him from discussing the seamier aspects of his life. But I, brought up amongst people who drank, recognised the signs of excessive liquid refreshment. In the days leading up to the murder, he had been quieter, more bleary eyed, we put it down to his perpetual concerns about home and a bender. In the evenings I dimly recollect a small child waiting at the gate and they would go home together, it was the only time he looked like his old self. Then the murder.

The tea man it appeared had been in love with a bar girl. It’s likely it went well for a time. It's likely that she entirely reciprocated his passion and was faithful. Whatever the case, it appeared that at some point there had been a betrayal or an imminent betrayal. There were whispers of the unknown parentage of her child, I do not even know if the tea man had been led to believe the child was his. All of this had come to a head one day and led to steady drinking through the evening and the night culminating in heated words and then a stabbing. The man died and by the early morning the tea man was in jail and had confessed to his crime. I never saw him again.

I think I meant to visit him; I certainly felt I should. When I voiced this thought my friends were aghast. But of course other people’s opinions do not matter; I was not afraid of the tea man but a little afraid of what such an association might bring post the murder. Because of course I could not stop at one visit and my mind wavered when I thought of many visits to the jail, the degree of emotional commitment required. This of course was overheated imagination, all that the tea man required was simply a gesture of care. I had timidly raised the point of bail only for it to be shot down; no one wanted a murderer in our midst. In any case it was unlikely to be granted. For awhile the annachis tried to rally around him and provide some support but this too faded away. It was through them much later that I heard that he had been disappointed that I hadn’t visited, that he had felt that I at least would not refute the friendship we shared. In their eyes too was disappointment. The hardest moments of life are when we fall in our own estimation and at no time did I fall harder and faster than at that moment. It was by then already too late to make the gesture. The case had gone to trial, the tea man was sentenced for some inordinate number of years and dispatched to Yerawada. The man he murdered died quickly but the tea man’s life seemed set to ebb in agonising slowness. It’s hard to imagine what prison life must have done to him. In the meantime life moved on. The annachis left and so did I. The regular tea man died and the company marched into the future and got tea dispensing units.

In the murky depths of the thick, sweetened tea of Mumbai’s chaiwallahs lies the debris of overboiled tea leaves. When I drink cups of that tea, a rare occasion as the years go by, I try to decipher the fate of the tea man in its dregs. What I knew of him might have been a facade, maybe it hid darker impulses. You could think that the perverse end to the love affair undid anything that went before. But all things in life are based on instinct and trust and then and now I cannot judge the tea man. It could not be said that our friendship was anything like the intimate ones I enjoy with my own peers, yet it is true that the tea man considered me a friend and I him. It was also true that I had felt the murder to be an aberration; I didn’t know what the tea man felt but he had by all accounts been badly shaken and willingly confessed. An excess of feeling can take one to the brink, one reason why an impulsive murder is not seen to be the same as a premeditated one. It is difficult to condone murder; then again life is not anodyne.

My friendship with the tea man was slightly unique in that gender and class had been transcended. It may not have lasted. The tyranny of time and distance puts paid to most office friendships. But the circumstances and the abrupt break of ties make it a friendship that is hard to forget.

காதல் Letter

I have been reading Let's Call the Whole Thing Off: Love Quarrels from Anton Chekhov to ZZ Packer on my train ride to work. Most of the stories so far have been good, which is more than you can say for many anthologies.

On the train rides I have been thinking of things I always wanted to write about, this post is about my grandparents in the early 1940s.

My grandparents married in their teens and for a brief while wrote letters to each other before setting up house together. My grandmother had studied in a convent school in Kumbakonam* before being pulled out for her wedding, she probably diligently absorbed all that the good nuns taught for my grandfather says that she expressed herself quite elegantly in her very best cursive Tamil. These letters ceased when they did set up house, romantic love itself must have lasted longer. Their tales of living in a small place in a marginal suburb in their initial years in Mumbai and struggling with two small children certainly have a sense of romance about them. I cannot say how long it all lasted because we know so little of the early years of a grandparent apart from what they choose to tell us. And as with many Indian women of a certain age, my grandmother will never admit to even a hint of romantic feeling. We know about her letters only through my grandfather who destroyed them on her request. So it is that in my living memory any romance has been replaced by - as Sontag would have it – the deadly, deadening combat of marital wars. But even the seemingly unhappy marriage may not be so, as a child you see each quarrel as fatal, terminal, ugly, vicious but later you realise that the hidden mechanics of any relationship will always be invisible. Now we just take a certain bristliness in their marriage as routine.

Yet I remain touched by those letters. I can see my grandmother, a lissom form in her nine yard saree writing those letters, this a reconstructed image from photographs of her. I can see my grandfather, young, handsome, poor and a sharp witted, well read lad from the provinces writing poems in response, this a reconstruction from photographs and his reminiscences. I think I am touched by it because at that moment they are not my grandparents but simply a young, hopeful couple from anywhere on the brink of life, in a moment of time when everything to come can only be good.

*note that the town has a website and styles itself the Cambridge of South India, the alumni naturellement are "eminent stalwarts".

Poladroids

For precisely a week, I was quite obsessed with making polaroids via the Poladroid project. The last of my experiments is pictures of people I like - or nearly always like - original pre-polaroid pictures naturally taken off the web (and the award for my favourite pic goes to - drumroll - Lorca!). And just by way of trying to make this post a little more than a polaroid showcase, some well known factoids on them.

L: Federico Garcia Lorca: Spanish poet, killed in the Spanish Civil War at age 38.
R: Marcel Proust : shares my birthday :-) more seriously wrote In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past, right up there amongst the best books ever written.

L: Octavio Paz; Mexican author, political and ambassador to India in the late sixties.
R: Eric Rohmer; French New Wave director, apolitical and still making films that are essentially the same yet watchable.

L: Agnes Varda: also French New Wave and living proof of rocking it at age 80.
R: M.S. Subbulakshmi: divine voice, iconic and a different kind of role model for growing old.

Scent of the Green Papaya

Scent of the Green Papaya is a languid film that immerses the viewer in the sights and mores of what seems like 1950s Vietnam.
Its story is pretty simple; a young girl comes to work as a servant in a household. She is quiet, observant and diligent. The wife treats the girl like the daughter she has lost, not so the rest of the house. The family falls on hard times, the girl – now grown up – goes to work at another place. She falls in love with her employer and has his child. And learns to read. It’s a quiet film, some people would call it a film that is imbued with Buddhist philosophy. Surprisingly it has a fair few nasty undertones (also found in Cyclo and Vertical Ray), maybe all the better to underline the proverbial lotus in the mud. Some of its scenes are also reminiscent of old Hindi films i.e. the dutiful, unhappy wife, the wastrel husband, the cruel mother-in-law, the goodness of a servant, a sort of vanished way of life. It is not a perfect movie, nevertheless it is such a tranquil, calming film that I watch bits and pieces now and then, particularly its scenes of water in domestic life. Part of its appeal is that it so expertly recreates the natural world with which the young girl has an affinity – even more astonishing if you think that it’s not shot on location but on a set in France.

Barcelona Metropolitan Disco

“Faux” News, Limbaugh and the like have become the voices of the conservative movement in the US. But Whit Stillman’s trilogy – albeit now located in the slightly distant past – is an intelligent take on the conservative ethos and a witty riposte to the prejudices of the Left. The first film of the trilogy, Metropolitan, is loosely based on Austen’s Mansfield Park and documents the life and times of the lingering remnants of the "urban haute bourgeoisie". Like Mansfield Park, it is interested in morality and an exposition of the morality occurs by way of numerous conversations and juxtaposition of characters. It is easy to see its characters as upper class twits but Stillman’s films locate the sweetness, the manners and mores of an old, genteel upper class that is slowly fading, indeed the tagline for Metropolitan is “doomed bourgeois in love”. In this world, the word bourgeois (or for that matter preppie) is not a dirty word, it merely indicates a certain decency and rectitude, even perhaps the dignity that David Brooks touched on in a recent NYT article. Stillman further underlines this in Barcelona which has Stillman regulars Eigeman as the loudmouth, obnoxious American and Nichols as the lost, slightly insular and essentially decent American in the eponymous city. The film is slightly meandering and has some clumsy moments but Stillman again makes use of a lot of conversation to provide a glimpse into the perils and otherwise of an American in the world. The movie has a surprisingly hilarious takedown of Anti-Americanism amongst European intellectuals, a sort of antidote to numerous portentous European movies on the US. The Last Days of Disco is probably the weakest of the trilogy and is often simply a nostalgic look back at the dying days of disco culture. But it is full of repartee and humour and both Sevigny and Beckinsale are very good as the good and not so good girl, respectively. With its predecessors, it shares the same features of making an intellectual case for “goodness” and its rewards as it were, in this it runs counter to so many films that document the dysfunctionality of the upper middle classes.

In being so talky and in its constant theme of gently satirising the social and romantic dynamics of the young and comfortably off, Stillman’s films are a lot like Eric Rohmer’s. Rohmer’s oeuvre is substantial unlike Stillmans’s slim output and I am not sure if Rohmer is a social conservative, though I suspect he is. The filmmakers do differ in other ways of course, even though they share the similarity of working with good actors who haven't gone on to commercial success. For one, Rohmer’s films always end with ambiguity, even in a film that looks headed to a straightforward happy ending like An Autumn Tale, Rohmer chooses to end with a character with unresolved feelings. Stillman on the other hand is very much the American optimist, the good get their rewards, the romances end conventionally (Barcelona, for example, is nearly undone by a simplistic ending that rings false).

There are very few Stillman shrines on the Net, this one seems to collate most of the reviews. And a detailed essay here. And a glowing paean to all three films in City Journal, which is a bit of a conservative rag. The films are actually available intermittently yet cheaply in Sydney though I note that Last Days/Metropolitan are expensively priced on Amazon.

In Praise Of.....Insects

The cockroaches have departed for the winter. And it is not yet the season for bogong moths, the only other insects that make their way to my high rise apartment. So I am having an insect free existence at the moment.

The cockroaches came from Brisbane. In Brisbane, they proliferated in the long, hot and wet summer. Brisbane cockroaches are different; they are small, brown, numerous and fly through windows. They don’t lay sacs, merely minute black eggs that are impossible to eradicate. Faced with an invasion, I tried everything from sage to boric acid to supermarket chemicals and kept it under some kind of control. I cleaned and packed each item before leaving. But they did arrive in Sydney, by way of a few eggs in an unreachable light fixture in the microwave. Clever. In the summer, they multiplied but not in any great proportion. Now they, like parts of the population, appear to have departed to warmer climes.

Apart from one occasion when a mouse traveling over my foot resulted in a ladylike scream, I am highly tolerant of most domestic animal and insect forms. Until I went to Brisbane and faced a cockroach plague I had rarely stamped on one; there, I regret to say, I took to stamping them out with some zeal. And because I loathe mechanical and chemical traps, it is not just roaches that have inhabited my house over the years. Still, the zenith of living with animals and insects remains Brisbane where everything from possums to ants lived in my large wrap around verandah. I didn’t mind them one bit and they didn’t mind me either. Apart from the roaches, let’s just say we resided in comfort without disturbing each other’s business.

To have insects roaming at free will in the house can seem a dereliction of domestic duties. People are always calling in pest control on sighting just the one and by definition cleanliness is the absence of insect life. Such an open confession to harbouring insects can therefore be like confessing to bad breath for example and equally detrimental to one’s social standing. Still, I admire their ingenuity. And I admire roaches most of all - their non-stop energy, late night partying, their fuck you to every attempt to control them – indeed one suspects that insecticides are their drug of choice. Yes I stamp on them when they start taking my generosity for granted but I admire them enough to have once penned a poem on them.

I am not sure when eradicating insect life became so important; is it those Baygon ads? Yes you don’t want locusts eating the crops or termites burrowing their way through the foundation of your house or leeches feasting on self (unless you are Demi Moore). But for the most part, domestic life forms are hardly bothersome. When I was growing up it was commonplace to spot centipedes, millipedes, frogs, snails, lizards, spiders and even the odd snake without anyone being unduly bothered. Now there is no everyday natural world to observe because we are so busy stamping it out. Instead we go to zoos to see exotic or “cute” species worthy of our attention and take our children along for good measure.

For the moment, things are quiet around my house. As the weather warms, a few insects will return. Mindful of my social obligations, I will keep them under control. But to the few roaches and moths around, I shall wish good health and cheer.

The Consequences of Love

Sulaiman Addonia's novel, The Consequences of Love, is set in the Saudi Arabia of the 80s and ticks all the boxes - Middle East setting, veiled woman on the cover, blurb on forbidden love in the desert kingdom - which makes it au courant. It is not the kind of book I usually pick up, however pick up I did and found that Addonia's writing style, pace and plotting is so brisk and fluid that the novel is hard to put down.

Briefly, it is the coming of age tale of an immigrant lad (part Eritrean, part Ethiopian) in Jeddah. Being Jeddah, the tale includes homosexuality, religious police, beheadings, lashings and also a near religious, passionate love affair at its centre. And it is very free of the hip irony and cynicism that is so essential to modern literature. As a result there are a fair few sections of florid sentiment and prose so that the novel at times seems on the verge of being an overblown romance. Parts of it are also simplistic, it is in some ways an immigrant view of the country (you wonder for example if the country has an educated class, how people negotiate the rigid rules of the society and the like). But it is so imbued with a certain passion and feeling, an honesty as it were, of what it is to be an immigrant seeking love in Saudi Arabia that this overcomes any defects that the novel may possess.

Addonia’s hero (let’s use an old fashioned word here), Naser, flees the war torn region of Eritrea as a child – he is in fact sent by his mother – and ends up in Saudi Arabia with his uncle and brother. He is eventually abandoned by both and goes to work in a café where young waiters serve as temporary sexual partners before the patrons get married. A love letter gets dropped near his feet, it is from a young girl who Naser nicknames Fiore and she is also a non-Saudi. She wears pink shoes as an identifier in the “black and white movie that is Jeddah” - the book in fact uses the colour motif very well with the pink shoes standing for the vibrancy of life itself amidst its denial. The novel then traces the fervent evolution of this romance through love letters and secret meetings marked of course with the tension and subterfuge required to sustain the romance in a country where open contact between men and women is minimal. In doing so, it also provides a vivid portrait of Jeddah itself.

Though the central romance is embedded in a number of incidents that deal with the indoctrination of young men by the muttawas, the men who volunteer for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, the homosexuality amongst men who are denied access to women until marriage, the shabby treatment of immigrants in Saudi Arabia and the repression of women in Saudi society, Addonia never loses sight of the love affair. The book is as a consequence intensely romantic and erotic. And the more so because it requires extreme ingenuity on the part of the lovers to bring about their moments together. It is also very idealistic, purity lies not in the denial of love but its consummation. Fiore herself is an intelligent woman and one who feels and cannot deny the siren call of life, her virtual enslavement by the culture she lives in is meant to be affecting and it is. The other female character in the book, Naser’s mother, is equally strongly drawn, if anything Addonia rather heavily underlines the limited options for women in many societies.

I was a little surprised that I was moved by the novel. I think this has largely to do with the fact that it is heartfelt and sincere and all the tired tropes take on new meaning.

The Garden Circa 1987

I don't believe I have written any poetry since the beginning of the present decade. At one point, it was an obsession and a lot of it was imprecise rhymes. Some of it was simply a recordal of the events of my life; a large part of it was doggerel written for the amusement of my friends (needless to add they had star parts). I keep things I write because reading it many years later helps recapture a long forgotten mood.

My grandmother is now 82, our relationship much changed from when she visited my student hostel in 1987 for my graduation ceremony. Reading this poem again reminded me of her view of education as a state of purity. Her feel for flowers, fragrances, the neatness of her person. And it also reminded me of the courtyard around which our rooms were laid out. Here the tulsi grew wild and fast, in this it was a lot like the girls in the hotel. But to my grandmother it was a signal that auspicious things are found where Saraswati resides. As for the white ghostly blooms that grew in abundance and had their own distinct perfume, they are the "sontakka" (picture below). I can never pass one without recalling one of the happier times of my life.

THE GARDEN

My grandmother stands and observes

The careless, vagrant growth of basil

As under a morning sun that enerves

Flowers slowly unfold to dazzle.

In the evening, the scent of flowers

Hangs heavy over the rooms

In the fading light my grandmother hovers

Over white, ghostly blooms.

She has now spent many years

Coaxing growth in several plants

Urging life, gently wiping fears

Catering to every whim, fancy, want

Yet they reward her with hesitant buds

Or an occasional bloom that delights

Today she is wistful that here life floods

Unheralded, uncared, impervious to slight

In my room, she falls to musing

"This soil is imbued with learning

And innocence, chastity, desire fusing

Fill this air, this soil with yearning".

Thus consoled, she now returns

And thinks perhaps her garden could

bloom if her ancient bones relearn

The lessons of her past girlhood.

1994

~*~

Image Source

On Smalls and Sarees

The boutique lingerie shop – the one that falls somewhere between the fetish shops and the department stores and appears to be aimed at the new bride or date night for the marrieds or the improper rendezvous – has been hitherto foreign territory. Last week, in search of a gift, I ventured into one and was immediately plunged into a scarlet, pink, black, white, lace and satin world of flimsy smalls. All that fragile fabric was held in place by bits of metal and plastic – in some cases a lot of it. For the most part they were innocently naughty and to underline this a few sported the Playboy bunny. But most of all they looked uncomfortable, especially the corsets which looked suitable for spanking Swinburne or to be more current, Max Moseley, thus contributing to masochism all around.

I bought the gift and walked away a little contemplative. After six years here, I can say with some authority that in these most liberated of times (every woman can wear a trouser, every woman can wear shorts!), the clothing choices for Western women remains a fraught territory. The magazines are clogged with women writers bemoaning the perils of the change room mirror, addressing the question of “does my bottom look big in this”, the lack of age appropriate clothing, deciding on “what do I wear today” and offering tips to be beach ready. Immensely irritating as all this, the truth is the sartorial choices of women here, particularly once they start working, are boring (the professional dress must hew as close as possible to what men wear), functional (sportswear or the jeans and T) and inappropriate (where everyone upward of 25 wears variants of clothes aimed at teens). Add to this the tyranny of the dress size (now almost an identity marker; some women will only shop at stores where they are a "size 8"), the unforgiving and uncomfortable materials du jour (lycra), the fashion for near bare shoulders and tailoring itself which makes the proper fit all important and necessitates many trips to the change room and the task of dressing oneself becomes an unpleasant, time consuming task.

Even if the days of corsetry seem long past, much Western clothing is still meant to truss you up and keep things “in place”. People no longer wear pantyhose and with good reason. The alternative, however, cannot be unfashionable woollen socks so many a girl will be caught shivering in the night air and claiming she is not cold. Eventually you mutate the pantyhose into tight body stockings and dispense with any outerwear (see Lady Gaga, Duffy). Ditto “body shapers” to keep bits and pieces firmly tucked in. Both shirts and trousers must be adapted to varying feminine forms and they do this with varying degrees of success, which inevitably leads to the boredom and – if the writers are to be believed - the terror of the change room. Skirts are fitting and tight, not easy to walk in. And last but not the least the crown jewel of uncomfortable fashion, the tapered toe and the high heel. So essential is this deemed for the professional heterosexual woman that I was a little surprised to find my modest and plain shoes being deemed “butch”. Add to this the whole weekly beauty regimen of removing body hair, getting your hair set and the like and it becomes that whatever you do, you must be in a stage of discomfort or at least arrive at it by way of discomfort.

And therein lies the nub – you can submit yourself to this refashioning and mutilation of the self or you can settle for the no fuss, ordinary. There is no middle ground. But it is fertile ground for public humiliation, albeit light hearted, of sites like Go Fug because a million things can and do go wrong.

In India of course, smalls of any sort are comparatively recent. To the best of my knowledge my great-grandmother never wore any underwear (a point of view I might add that found much favour with my hostel mates who wished to be “boyfriend ready”). Ditto stitched clothing - in Tagore’s Farewell my Friend, the fashionable girls wear blouses with their sarees, in some of Kerala’s temples, stitched clothing is still banned. Indian garments therefore tend to be fluid with little that is constricting. The modern saree, an uncomfortable if elegant marriage between Victorian dress and the yardage of draped cloth that is the basic saree, is still simple to wear once you know the basics. The word tailoring may only be loosely applied to the salwar kameez. Add to this the bewildering array of prints and colours in India which makes regimentation impossible and the task of dressing up in India is relatively painless even if this seems contradictory to the cumbersome “look” of our garments. Like in Herrick’s poem, sweetly flows the liquefaction of the Indian garment (bar the fussiness). And you can arrive at it in a matter of minutes.

Environment Blog

I found this site because I had some interest in the fortunes of Vedanta, on which I had done an earlier post. It looks like - ahem - they have gotten themselves an environmental award.

On to more positive things i.e. the blog itself, which is both informative and impassioned. And it has a lot on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, I have always wanted to visit and often wished my father had wrangled a posting there which alas he didn't. Plus it has a few posts on weaving, of which I know nought technically, but which is a bit of a passion of mine. Spent a lot of time browsing around and not a minute felt wasted.

PS: The above picture, so evocative of all those "majhi" songs, is from this site.