The Niece

The niece, Dee, is now an adorable tyke of some 18+ months. Redundant statement given all aunts find their nieces adorable.

I have watched her grow in the months since I came back to Sydney and right now she's at that happy stage where she walks (more and more confidently), intersperses her baby talk with many legible words and has a cloud of hair that eventually escapes attempts to keep it neat. If you amuse her, she will reward you with a low gurgling laugh and you find yourself surprised at the happiness induced by it. She has her moments of annoyance, at other points she demonstrates a remarkable patience with the constant babble of the adults around her. Like any toddler these days, she is used to the camera and poses and pirouettes with ease. She also knows that everything she does is subject to admiration, increasingly a lot of things she does is thrown out with an awareness of being secure in an audience.

She is a happy child. Being the first child/grandchild, her upbringing has involved a lot of people and everyone has brought both love and conscientiousness to raising her. As a result of having people around her, she's also spoken to in three languages and we marvel at her ease with all. My cousin is considerably younger than me and was an adorable tyke too and it sometimes catches me by surprise that she is now a mother.

One thing has remained unchanged with the niece. Her face has always held a calm and sweet expression (though her father finds the days of constant calm and sweetness long gone!). That still sweetness always reminds me of the lines from the Frank Marshall Davis poem, Flowers of Darkness:

I see the flowing night
Cameo condensed
Into the lone black rose
Of your face

Jamdani Upcycled

Jamdani in a new avatar

Image from DosaInc run by Christina Kim (click picture for larger view). Site also has heaps of other interesting visuals/write-ups.

Found via this site, where you can see more pictures.

Boyl(e)ing Point

Continuing the widespread coverage of Ms. Boyle, the Sunday papers today also have a bit of Boyle. So I might well as provide my comment.

Boyle is routinely referred to as frumpy, ugly, hairy: no one it appears can refer to her without employing one of these terms. Yes its a reality show but like Australia's Got Talent, I assume Britain's Got Talent has loads of ordinary people. Its not the Idol series of manufactured pop stars as much as a weird melange of people who sing well to those who snort water up their noses. Boyle looks pleasant, slightly plump and middle aged. On BGT, she had on the kind of dress that one might wear to the wedding of an acquaintance. She's neatly turned out. In short, she's ordinary like scores of us except that she can sing far better than most. But the papers write as if she is a freak on par with a PT Barnum circus (it might be fair to say though that Britain's Got Talent conceptually is little better). I shall gag if I hear the word makeover, virgin and ugly in relation to Boyle again.

I have a colleague who is always making lists of things that suggest that Western civilization is in definite decline (Big Brother tops the list). To it can be added the fatuous coverage of Boyle. Let's just ignore the pressure and temperature conditions of Boyle's Law and say that the volume of gas is increasing.

Marimekko/Cloth

Image Source

The forest - or atleast the garden - on your bed.

Reminds me of the rain trees on the IIT campus.

More Marimekko here.

More B&W in Julie Paterson's Cloth designs which have a very strong Australian sensibility, design influenced by the outdoors and with a sense of the carefree.

On the left, currawongs, on the right, boardwalk.

Cavafy's In the Evening

Experience tells me
it wouldn't have lasted long.
The stronger the light
the sooner it's spent.
And anyway the hand of fate
soon stalled it.

While it lasted it was good.
It had the scent of summer roses
in pure mountain air
where we lay on fresh green leaves
body to body.

An echo from those peaks
came whispering back
across the granite rockfalls
of the past -- a letter
full of the passion of those mornings.
I read it and re-read it
as the slow light faded.

I went out onto the balcony
to seek some alteration
of these long sad thoughts
by gazing at the movement of my city --
footfalls on the evening streets;
the stir of the lighted shops.

~Constantine Cavafy~
Poem Source

More Cavafy poems here. Cavafy always puts me in in mind of Lawrence Durrell. Not because their styles are similar but because of the presence of Alexandria in their work-Durrell also did his bit to popularise the poet in the English speaking world. Durrell's ripe and lush prose, not to speak of a tinge of colonialism, is out of favour these days (I must admit I never went beyond Justine) and therefore his reputation is ready for a resurrection. Why did I read Justine? Because Indians must be the last breed out there reading English literature written in the first half or so of the twentieth century, principally because a lot of it was available in India.

The Woodbutcher's Art

Taken from Handmade Houses (published in the early 70s). Pic sources: 1 and 2. Pretty much my ideal house and shed I think. The photographs also have a timeless quality, they may well be paintings or early 20th century black and white photographs.

Measure for Measure

NYT's Measure for Measure has come to a halt. Kind of sad since it introduced me to Andrew Bird and Jeffrey Lewis (also his illustrations).

Which in turn led me to Lewis' very cute Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex song. And Bird & Loizeau's duet London Town. And then on to Loizeau's L'autre Beau Du Monde.

Hazlitt

The popularity of the most successful writers operates to wean us from them, by the cant and fuss that is made about them, by hearing their names everlastingly repeated, and by the number of ignorant and indiscriminate admirers they draw after them : - we as little like to have to drag others from their unmerited obscurity, lest we should be exposed to the charge of affectation and singularity of taste.

~William Hazlitt~
On the Pleasure of Hating

It was formerly understood to be the business of literature to enlarge the bounds of knowledge and feeling; to direct the mind’s eye beyond the present moment and the present object; to plunge us in the world of romance, to connect different languages, manners, times together; to wean us from the grossness of sense, the illusions of self-love; — by the aid of imagination, to place us in the situations of others and enable us to feel an interest in all that strikes them; and to make books the faithful witnesses and interpreters of nature and the human heart. Of late, instead of this liberal and useful tendency, it has taken a narrower and more superficial tone. All that we learn from it is the servility, egotism, and upstart pretensions of the writers. Instead of transporting you to faery-land or into the middle ages, you take a turn down Bond Street or go through the mazes of the dance at Almack’s. You have no new inlet to thought or feeling opened to you; but the passing object, the topic of the day (however insipid or repulsive) is served up to you with a self-sufficient air, as if you had not already had enough of it. You dip into an Essay or a Novel, and may fancy yourself reading a collection of quack or fashionable advertisements: — Macassar Oil, Eau de Cologne, Hock and Seltzer Water, Otto of Roses, Pomade Divine glance through the page in inextricable confusion, and make your head giddy. Far from extending your sympathies, they are narrowed to a single point, the admiration of the folly, caprice, insolence, and affectation of a certain class.

Hazlitt again on the literature and writers of his time. Kind of sums up most of the modern book store.

Bharat Se Bollywood Tak

In the past few months, I met a few Indians transplanted to Australia at a couple of drinks and dinner occasions. In the mixed crowd, discussion turned to things Indian, largely Mumbai blasts and the like. And then to lighten the mood, Bollywood. I confessed to rarely watching the films. The firangs having a love affair with the genre, of which these days there seem to be a fair number, were mildly discomfited. The transplanted Indians accused me of being a traitor. Though the mood was light-hearted, I was a bit surprised that not watching a Bollywood flick was suddenly on par with say, supporting Pakistan in a cricket match. Surely it wasn't always like this. After all in the not too distant past, friends had made the pilgrimage to Huma-Heena & Ambar-Oscar but did not insist on dragging me along on the grounds of patriotism.

I don't think I thought much about Bollywood till I moved to Australia. It is not a genre I am particularly fond of, perhaps this was because of a two year period in Kanpur when my mother, severely depressed, would dress us up and take us to see a movie every week at the Armapore theatre. My brother and I were then 9 and 11, respectively. Not one of these, from lurid movies with Sulakashana Pandit to Manmohan Desai crowd pleasers held any charm for us. More often than not we were piled onto our parents scooter with the bribe of a masala dosai to follow. Happily this movie going did not last but the prospect of spending three hours in the company of Bollywood is not one I look forward to even today.

When I moved to Australia, the reinvention of Bollywood from a guilty pleasure to a pop form in search of cultural studies was just beginning. "Bollywood on Bondi" was held, Lagaan had had good press, Bride and Prejudice was in the offing and so on. Kind people struggling to sustain a conversation would often turn to Bollywood. It was perhaps in all innocence, the way one may assume the popularity of a Friends or a Sex in the City in Sydney, but it did get a bit tiresome. It is a feeling not different from what an Australian may feel when questioned closely on crocodile wrangling. Indians I met would suggest getting together in the weekend to watch the "latest Bollywood film" - which set off memories of Kanpur sans masala dosai. If it played a minimal part in my Indian life, it seemed a wee bit omnipotent in my Australian life.

Partly, this is because the genre is now so emblematic of India. The movies of the 70s and 80s do not stand for anything except a general silliness and geniality, a means to kill three hours of existence with a stew of family values, songs and villiany writ large. More often than not it was also a social activity, few were the occasions when movie going did not entail a minimum crowd of ten. The morality of the times also meant that your elders disapproved, the suspicion that cinema was a corrupting influence lingered. Ergo, you watched fewer movies. These days that sentiment is old fashioned. Bollywood itself has changed to a self conscious form, a bizarre cocktail of moth eaten values admixed with money, raunch and music though the inexplicable plots remain intact. It is also India Resurgent, one can fashionably out oneself as addicted to the phillums and deconstruct their campness. Bollywood has been Warholised.

But we are also now beyond Warhol. Not too long back, SBS ran a series on Modern India. The episode, Manufacturing Dreams, dealt with the influence of the genre on Indian culture and its elevation from a disreputable form to one that had infiltrated daily lives. Even the middle class has been co-opted. The episode followed a wedding planner who relied heavily on Bollywood for inspiration, dance studios teaching Bollywood naach, middle aged women (and their mothers) demonstrating their jhatkas on national telly and the like. India came across as a reality show based on Bollywood in which everyone is an extra doing their bit. The soothing voice in the background remained neutral but the proceedings were a little cringe inducing. I am in no hurry to get myself into a theatre to do my bit for Mera Bharat Mahaan.

Trawl Bridge Street

TRAWL BRIDGE STREET

Sun throughout the day, cold throughout the sun.
Nobody on the streets. Parked parks.
Still no snow but wind, wind,
a red tree burns in the chilled air.
Talking to it, I talk to you.
I am in a room abandoned by language.
You are in another identical room,
or we are both on a street your glance has depopulated.
The world imperceptibly comes apart.
Memory decayed beneath our feet.
I am stopped in the middle of this unwritten line.

~Octavio Paz~
Translation: Elliott Weinberger
Image Source