True Courage

DEATH said it

Tiffany Aching said it

Sam Vimes said it

Granny Weatherwax said it

“Evil begins when you begin treating people as things.”

Of course Terry Pratchett said it…through them all.

And if you think about it, most of our problems stem from just this…

“He should move away/die/believe only me/ walk only in tight circles/… for me to succeed/ be happy…” 

he=Thing

“She should wear only saris/ think in whispers/ live in seclusion/be my slave….then all will be right in this world” 

she= thing

Once people stop being irrational, weird people in our books... once they stop being human beings with joys and sorrows in our eyes and become things that can be changed/controlled/ subdued according to OUR whims and fancies…that's when the trouble starts and evil brews.

Letting people be people requires courage.

Understanding others despite differences in culture/sex/social status/religion requires courage. 

And true courage is rare.

I remember a newspaper picture of an old man, wearing white sitting alone in a room with a walking stick held tight between both hands. The background was black and the tables and chairs in the background had merged into their shadows. It made him stand out more in his white clothes. 

The picture held my gaze while the story below was of a courage so rare that it made me stare harder at the picture of the old man with the walking stick and eyes looking away from the camera...a picture of grim repose.

That old man had handed over his only son to the police because he found him raping a minor. 

In our society, people have been known to harbour criminal relatives and paint them as pillars of society just to save face...because we want no one to know the depths of depravity in our family. It helps us hold our head high in public. Yet this man had not done that.

He had not treated that minor as a thing to be suppressed under the cloak of his family's respectability.

He had courageously stood up against the wrong and even admitted to it in public...he had treated that child as a person not a thing.

That's true courage.

It's not just me...

I thought I was the only one...

The only one who couldn’t review books.

I love books and if I don’t read anything in a day the day feels incomplete...yet for the life of me I find rating books even books that didn’t catch my fancy as hard ... 

I feel completely inept in saying what I liked or disliked about a book. 

I had accepted it as one of my unworkable flaws till I read this...

“But while I can read Middlemarch and the Dunciad…as happily as anyone, I have this little region missing in my brain, that extra lobe that literature students possess as a matter of course, the lobe that allows them the detachment and the nerve to talk about books (texts they will say) as others might talk about the composition of a treaty or the structure of a cell. I can remember at school how we would read together in class an Ode by Keats, a Shakespeare sonnet or a chapter of animal farm. I would tingle inside and want to sob, just at the words, at the simple progression of sounds. But when the time came to writing that thing called an Essay, I flubbed and floundered. I could never discover where to start.”

“How do you find the distance and the cool to write in an academically approved style about something that makes you spin, wobble and weep?”

-Stephen Fry in Making History 

Of course there are books that I love and books that I leave without a thought...yet it seems somehow sacrilegious to sit down and note the good and the uninteresting parts.

There are many books that I dislike but I dislike them because I either have outgrown them or have never grown into them.

Love stories rank high in that list of dislikes.

I blame my mom’s collection of Woman’s Era for this!

My mom had a collection of these fabulous magazines…they must have been from the 1960’s because the ones she had were published in Britain. She took them out with her pile of other stored loves once a year…and those few weeks that they were aired I read them.

Stories that looked like this... though I don't know if this was from Woman's Era

The fact that I read them again and again very year from the time I was 6 to the time I was 15 made those short love stories and serials a part of me…so much so that when I was introduced to my first Mills and Boons in school I left it after the first few pages because I just knew what was going to happen in the next hundred odd pages and worse it was not as gripping!

Yes, fans would disagree with me but those earlier stories were indelible from my mind and after those years of immersion nothing ever came close to them.

So I love, love stories but have never grown into any other…

Memory.

The full stop in the heading was intentional. Memory is not a word it's a never ending sentence...but with these few memories I wish to enchain the past and stop it from fading.

There are a few things I shouldn't forget...

My first school birthday party, the first time an eagle almost landed on my head, the big doll with blinking eyes that I never really played with, the first pup who widdled into my life...there's so much that I was forgetting

And now I wonder because my memory stretches far. I remember words, expressions and smells and sometimes I feel I remember what I wanted to happen as what happened. Does that happen to others too?

And filling spaces between memories of relationships are memories of certain books. The time I first read them is firmly drawn in my mind and every time I see their cover or read about the author that memory comes rushing back…

Richard Bach:

I am in class 8 or 9, so I must be around 13 or 14. I am going back home from my yearly Delhi visit, travelling in a state run, non-ac rickety bus with my mom and I am reading The Bridge Across Forever. The searing heat, the dusty wind the torn butt-aching seats are lost in the background while I read about Bach and his soul mate Leslie. At that age the mere fact that I am reading a love story makes me feel big enough to unscramble the awaiting adult years…wish it were that easy…

Then as I read I realized that its not just a plain vanilla soppy love story it also talks of the many spiritual dimensions of this love… I am in absolute adult-understanding heaven! Of course now I realize why soap operas with villainous aunts and conniving cousins never ever entertained me again…

It spoilt me forever… made me expect more out of books and people. As the wise say: expectations lead to disappointments but that’s another story.

What I remember: Leslie and Bach accomplishing the astral projection of their bodies in shimmering souls and seeing their beloved cat also do that along with them!

Writing, me and an odd book review

I am quite chuffed up these days...

One of my longest projects as a ghostwriter and one that really taught me to sit down and hammer away at words every day is finally getting published!(for the record it took me 2 years to write around 900 pages)

And though I can't say anything more about it other than  the fact that it deals with the part of astrology we all find interesting...the one thing we identify ourselves as... the book also has a very different and controversial (for some traditionalists) take on it...

Well, it also has my name in the acknowledgements...so there that's the end of hints..

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Being me... I have been trying my hand at more kinds of writing. So have added financial copywriting to my list of 'write-things-I-can-do'. Yes, it is interesting...and let's see what we make of each other.

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Had pre ordered Terry Pratchett's Shepherd's Crown and just finished reading it. Tiffany Aching is my  2nd most loved protagonist of Sir Terry's books after Sam Vimes (and Granny Weatherwax  and Vetinari and ...)

Ok let's just say she is my 2nd most loved protagonist and leave it at that.

But and this is a big But...

I read The Truth by Terry Pratchett just before reading this. And though Sam Vimes is almost a passing reference in it and Granny Weatherwax is not there, but the Patrician and all the others made up for it.

For people who have never read Terry Pratchett the most misleading  thing you can ever say is that he writes fantasy. Long ago he learnt the art of writing fantasy in such a way that the wars between mythical looking creatures is just a backdrop to its 'intrinsic humanity'. I call it humanity because I just don't know what else to describe it as. Sir Terry shows the mirror to so many human frailties, foibles, prejudices, rank bull headedness, stupidity, love, generosity and everything I left out...
Its an education in humanity just to read it...

And as is inevitable some of them shine more than others for me.

The Truth shone far, far more than the Shepherd's Crown.

sample some-

“The public thinks big, sensible, measured thoughts while people run around doing silly things” 

“I have certainly noticed that groups of clever and intelligent people are capable of really stupid ideas.”

“But too much reading had taken its toll. William found that he now thought of prayer as a sophisticated way of pleading with thunderstorms.”

“There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. 
The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer?
And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman's eye. ”

"Ah," said Mr. Pin. "Right. You are concerned citizens." He knew all about concerned citizens. wherever they were, they all spoke the same language, where 'traditional values' meant 'hang someone.'"

"everything about the man could be prefaced by the word "badly," as in "-spoken," "-educated," and "-in need of a drink." 

Taste of Life

Today I realized how much I love gooseberries. I miss them too. They remind me of my childhood. 

You won't like them if you like sweet fruits. My children surely don’t….they even expect sweet oranges every time. The sour ones get a yucky face thrown at them. 

Tell me do you remember always having sweet oranges? I don’t … yet blame it on (my) bad parenting. My kids expect them to be sweet all the time. That’s the reason they don’t like gooseberries. Gooseberries are sweet some times but most times they are sour and slightly bitter with a sweet aftertaste. They taste like life.

Like life…. 

No one ever promised that life would be sweet and always to your taste but seems that’s what we end up teaching our kids now or maybe they learn it from watching us.

Kids who jump off buildings when they are shouted at in front of the whole class, kids who kill themselves if they fail an exam, kids who prefer death to the ignominy of being singled out for punishment. I remember my dad laughing about the caning he got as a child from his teachers, he looked back with little resentment and a lot of pride at proving the teachers wrong when he achieved degrees higher than them. 

Is it the fruits we feed our kids…sweet apples though out the year, sweeter grapes and sweet mangoes? Or does it go deeper than that? Do we tell them that it’s fine to fail? Do we tell them our failures with pride and show them what we learnt from them? Do we even allow them to fail?

Hug them, talk to them when they cry. Say it's ok to fail.Say you don't think any less of them because they failed; that tomorrow is another day and ...coz you and everyone before you failed too..many times.

Show them your hurts and wounds so that they learn that wounds heal, hurts seem to wane… with time. Everything goes with time. 

So that they don’t leave before time.

Imaginings on a door

I have a cracked door. I love it. Its my imagination door. The laminate peels in different places, and in those peelings I see things. Do you see things, people and animals too? Come let me show you.... 

The first one is a village woman carrying a pot on her head. And the other...why that is a stump-footed Russian soldier marching holding a gun on his shoulder  or he can be doing the Polka!

Now this is so obviously and antennaed alien.

There are too many here, so lets me just tell you about the two big ones (I am still deciphering the codes in the others). The first is a rocket taking off and the other, why its a dog sitting with his legs spread out in front.....just turn your neck to the left and you will see it:)

Is it only me? or do you do it too?

The Magic of Stories

Stories and storytellers were once thought to be imbued by magic. They were called during calamitous times to make peace with offended spirits and again in times of prosperity to keep the spirits happy. There is something truly magical about a well-told story that makes you leave your world behind even if for some hours. Its magical to read a line like- ‘it was the best of times. It was the worst of times…..’ or something like ‘it begins, as most things begin, with a song.’*

Stories reigned supreme in times when books were not plentiful. Now, that there are books and the net we have lost touch with stories, but that’s ok, for there will always be enough to keep it going for the next turn when they reign again. It’s a cycle. Just like no one knows what keeps a cycle going no one knows what makes a story magical, though we all have opinions on it.

Dramas, plays, movies are the mediums. The story is king. Yet what is there in a story that makes it so different from the anecdote Uncle Pain used to tell? The anecdote that went so:
“Yesterday I was driving down to my office when I saw an astonishing thing. You know that crossing where the beggars come. Well, they didn’t come yesterday and though I had nicely locked the car and put the windows up for you remember that case in Mumbai Mirror where three beggars kidnapped a person in broad daylight. Well, anyway I looked around and they were all sitting in a group further down the road eating cake!! Can you imagine that! It must be one of theirs birthday, but still cake from that begging money? When they can use that money to send their children to school.”

No matter how hard Uncle Pain tries that is not a story. That will never be magical. Now listen to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx7ta3k6fY0
PS: Its in Hindi

Many writers and educators have dissected good stories and have come up with a blueprint for a great story. If you check on Google you will find them. Its like good music, starts with a slow hum, builds up expectations, gets you involved, spins the characters around, plays with their emotions and yours and finally lets you off in a dazzling climax. A few more uplifting tones carry on after the climax to make the story seem more believable.

I went to a story writing class and that’s the crux of what was said. What was left unsaid was the understanding of characters, the slow and almost tedious development of a story and the long confusing hours as you develop situations and paths for the characters only to have them walk another way. Yes, there are courses for them and people teach it, but I think someone said this for acting, and I am borrowing it for writing too

It cannot be taught, but it can be learnt.

Its hard work to create magic but it’s the work I like. Then again, maybe I am bewitched by it.

* The quotes are from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman