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.