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She Laughed Like A Child

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She laughed like a child, without inhibition. Her open-mouthed laugh baring teeth and the pink palor of her tongue was endearing. And in that moment, everyone watching her turned believers. They believed that the joy in her laughter was permanent. They believed that life was joyous moments strung together. They believed that sadness was an impossible myth. Everyone who saw her laugh was sure that they were in the exact place they were meant to be. They did not question. They did not complain. They let the pleasant feeling of being sprinkled with stardust wash over them. They surrendered to the transient feeling of contentment.

I found it strange that no one, ever, not even once, had stopped to think what it was like to watch her cry. Well, when I saw her laugh, that was my first thought.

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She had been like this forever, laughing only in public and crying only in private. But no one had noticed. When the first sob left her lips, she had tried to ignore it. Accounted for it, first under periods, then under stress and finally under L for loser. When the sobs grew louder, loud enough to echo, she trained herself to purse her lips and swallow the sobs. Swallowing a sob is not for amateurs. It made her sad, mad and then more so. And she ended up crying some more. But when all the sobs were eaten and the tears wouldn’t stop, she decided to experiment on how to make things better. Soon, she noticed that decadent food made her cry less. She cooked all the world’s finest food in her kitchen and ate it too. While she ate, she felt great. Her cheeks stayed dry as long as they were full. She felt as if a hole inside her was getting filled. But eat as she may, that hole never filled all the way to the top. Sometimes, she would have to stop eating from not being able to breathe. Another trick to dry her tears was to watch TV. Television sent her flying into an imaginary land where she was forbidden from crying. A world where everyone wore wonderful clothes and no one was ever unhappy.

No one ever saw her cry. She cried alone in her room, standing expressionless in front of her mirror, eating her dinner or cleaning her bathroom. She cried quietly, the only outward indication being the overflow down her cheeks. It was a steady flow of clear liquid, compromising the downward turn of her mouth, falling down the top of her dress, outlining the heave of her breasts and puddling at her feet. When they had puddled a while, they flowed outward, along the natural slope of the room, across her floor and out the door. Though they hesitated momentarily on the stairs, wondering what it would be like for tears to be seen flowing down the street, they cascaded down the stairs, one step at a time like sobs that now did not exist.

No one noticed the tears flowing down the street being joined by other streams of tears. There were many tears like hers but they all sat crying locked up in their own rooms.

Can you imagine a world where all these tears would get together and skip rope? Skip rope till they grew out of breath and all they could keep track of was the rhythm of their skip. When the tears mixed with the nascent sweat on their indoor skins, their heart would beat all over their being. Tears and laughter would step aside for perseverance to pass through every inch of the body, aware only of the muscles shaking off its lethargy. In that moment, everyone watching them would cease to exist and the only truth would be the resilience of their bodies.

The Misogyny Of Your Smartphone

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I am not someone who talks to my smartphone. Wait, I do talk to my smartphone like how I talk to my pressure cooker and sometimes to my books and plants. Analogously. So let me rephrase that. I don’t talk to the virtual assistant on my smartphone. So it had never occurred to me that your smartphone too could be prejudiced against women because arguably it’s more likely to be created by a man.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BMOxrZOgyvz

Imagine a day when you are shopping online and your virtual assistant says, that dress is totally asking for it!

OR When you mark a parlour appointment in your calendar and it says, please revise this appointment, who will make dinner for your family?

OR When you are chatting with your girl friend and it says, that girl needs to have a baby!

Well, I don’t need another voice in my head and I hope that day never comes.

Have you heard of the frequency illusion or Baader Meinhof Syndrome? It’s when a concept you just found out about suddenly seems to crop up everywhere. And like a true student of psychology I think I have that affliction. Since writing my last blogpost on being a woman (though not something I just found out), I’ve read Susan Fowler’s account of misogyny at Uber and now this.

Leah Fessler studies the responses of virtual assistants Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Home to sexual harassment by their users. Some response is positive, some coy and some don’t understand. But they rarely say Stop harassing me!

The writer looks into what makes these bots the way they are. And the study shows the “acceptable standards” of what constitutes sexual violence against women and how technology is perpetuating our deep-seated sexism. There is an opportunity here for technology to save the day. And I sure hope they take it.

Tech companies could help uproot, rather than reinforce, sexist tropes around women’s subservience and indifference to sexual harassment. Imagine if in response to “Suck my dick” or “You’re a slut,” Siri said “Your sexual harassment is unacceptable and I won’t tolerate it. Here’s a link that will help you learn appropriate sexual communication techniques.” What if instead of “I don’t think I can help you with that” as a response to “Can I fuck you?” Cortana said “Absolutely not, and your language sounds like sexual harassment. Here’s a link that will explain how to respectfully ask for consent.”

Read the full article on Quartz:

https://qz.com/911681/we-tested-apples-siri-amazon-echos-alexa-microsofts-cortana-and-googles-google-home-to-see-which-personal-assistant-bots-stand-up-for-themselves-in-the-face-of-sexual-harassment/

Why I Love A Man Called Ove

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Buy this book here.

Amma’s bank, better known as the bank Amma worked for, adopted core banking (CBS) in 2008. This meant customers could access their bank accounts not just from their branch of the bank but from anywhere. Maybe a year or so before that they began digitizing all their records and moving transactions online. Amma must have been in her forties then. A lover of a good challenge, she religiously attended all the training classes the bank organised and even took computer classes privately. But that wasn’t really enough. I really feel for people of her generation. People who have been thrown under the bus by technology.

Here was a branch full of technically illiterate people tasked with the serious business of banking. Previously, if money was by chance transferred to a wrong account, they could simply call up the customer or make a visit and appeal to the goodness of their hearts. Now there were passwords and levels of access. She and many others from this offline generation did not understand technology how digital natives do. They shared logins and passwords and in most cases didn’t bother changing it from the default abc123*. It was common for Amma to receive calls on her days off, asking her how to, say print a passbook or renew a fixed deposit. Pat came the reply. Press Ctrl+P and press enter. Press f12 and hit enter. They got by with keyboard shortcuts they’d memorised. And if the key wasn’t working on that particular computer, well, tough luck because no one knew what else to do.

And that’s why I relate to Ove. He could very well be an elder in my family. He has lived a life of tough physical labour and tougher tragedies. He built his own house from the ground up. He buys the same car every three years and repairs it on his own. He has lived through his share of tragedies with the crutches of discipline and values. He takes great joy in working with his hands. A Man Called Ove is Fredrik Backman’s novel about the lives and times of an emotionally stunted offline man in an online world. Will this old man adapt or perish?

Dark humour has rarely been as delicious and moving as it is in this novel. Ove’s interactions with a world he does not understand makes for immense hilarity. But the elephant in the room is the deep despair of incognizance, of not understanding how things work and why they work a certain way. Ove’s wife is the babblefish who translates the world to him. When the very pregnant Parvaneh and her family move in next door to Ove, he has no idea that his life is in for a slam dunk. There is also a cat whose relationship with Ove is marked by utter disdain for the other. This motley crew tumble along through the story gaining more characters, becoming worldly and always making your heart beam. Oh, did I mention he is the grumpiest man on paper?

A Man Called Ove is like a marble cake; there’s a ripple of immense despair all through this funny book. But you come out the other end beaming, in love in this man called Ove. Must read, even if it’s the only book you read this year.

Buy this book here.

Live And Let Live

When the news of the actress being kidnapped in Kerala first came out, the reactions from the older men in my immediate family was as expected.

One said, it must be staged. They (including the actress) must all be in on it.
The other said, why did she have to travel that late at night, all by herself? What was this “work” that could not wait till tomorrow?
Yet another said, this actress, she is known to be “that type”, no?

https://youtu.be/UMyC-W969ZQ

On Sunday, the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists (AMMA) held an event in solidarity with the assaulted actress. At this event, Mammootty administered the oath to protect our womenfolk and make Kerala safe for women. In his 1995 movie The King, the same Mammootty as Joseph Alex IAS famously delivered the ‘sense, sensibility, sensitivity’ dialogue. The same dialogue that ends with him pulling close his subordinate by her raised hand (Vani Vishwanath‘s character) and saying, I know how to make sure you never raise your hand at another man, but after all you happen to be just a woman. On most days, I would sweep the irony of this under the rug. But not today. In his speech he said, masculinity is not in making a woman surrender, a man’s job is to protect a woman. I would like to say to the world at large, I don’t need your protection. What I need from you is to respect me enough to let me be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C85Uv6hcgf8

What if it had been me? Would my family have reacted the same way? Maybe not within my earshot. Beyond it they would have said, I told you so. They would blame my mother for how I was brought up. Because clearly they weren’t a part of that. They would have blamed the principal of my school for she showed us how to be independent. They would blame the hip, city college I attended though it was regressive enough to put Victorian morality to shame. They would blame everything. The books I read. The company I keep. The man I married.

Once when I refused to be dropped off to some place and wanted to drive myself there, I was told there is no need to be such a feminist. Every time I leave home to catch the train back to Bangalore I routinely get asked if I have forgotten my dupatta. And every time, I pretend not to have heard to avoid a scene as I leave. When extended family wants me to have a baby, it’s always a boy first and then a girl. I am also the one who needs to have a child “to be tamed”.

I stopped taking buses in Kerala when bus travel became nerve-wracking with abuse. When people breathed down their fake outward morality on me, I stopped interacting with them. When they began polluting the air I breathe with their obsession for perverse sexual violence and their abuse of little girls in icecream parlours and otherwise, I made myself a home far away in the trees. A place where I could think for myself. A place where I could filter the information I receive. In Malayalam we call it kannadachu iruttakkuka, meaning to close your eyes to make it dark. Recently I read something about sociological works arguing that women’s migration from Kerala is not only a strategy to escape patriarchy but to come back with a better means to fight it. From my safe space here I write, mostly to assert my sanity than to change the world.

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In 2015, T & I drove across India over 40 days. We took turns driving, though T drove more because he loves driving. To me, driving is just a chore, something I know to do like cooking dinner. I chose the most exciting terrain to drive like Zoji-La pass in Leh where it was snowing, the expanse of the Agra-Delhi expressway, the Nilgai-studded highway to Kutch and the beautiful Bombay-Pune highway.

We were entering Kargil and daylight was fast depleting. T was driving. From Pathankot, three of our friends had joined us for the trip up to Ladakh. So, in the car we were four women and one man. When we came up to one of the army barricades where we had to prove our identity and the identity of the vehicle we were driving, I, along with my cousin, stepped out. We headed to a tent by the side of the road where a couple of men stood huddled around two officials, all peering at a ledger. The army official, on seeing us, called us out of turn. Madam, are these your vehicles’ documents? Yes. Is there a man with you? Huh? He needs to come to complete this formality. We tried resisting. You mean, you want the man in the car to come and show you the same documents that I am showing you right now because he is a man? Yes madam, we don’t take documents from women especially if there is a man travelling with them. But I also drive this car. That doesn’t matter Madam. This is for your own safety.

End of story. We had reached a no-go situation. My cousin who is Hindi-speaking and more outspoken than me, went at them for while. We were both fuming but there was nothing more we could do if we wanted to enter that army-protected area. We gave in. Well, this is not an inspirational story. As I write this the frustration from that day returns with alarming force. On most days I like my situation in life where I choose how I want to live my life. And then there are days like these.

Everything good that you learn should start from families and in schools. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, teachers and students should know how to live their own life the way they want without dictating how another person should live theirs. Maybe that’s what we need to teach our kids. Respect. For self and others.

What Should I Be Reading In South Indian Fiction?

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​Do you read books in written in Indian languages? If yes, then let’s be friends!

I’ve always been interested in reading regional Indian fiction in translation. First it was contemporary writing, then Indian fiction in English and now I am on the lookout for South Indian fiction. With The News Minute review, this obsession has also found validation.

What does contemporary writing in Andhra and Telegana look like? I have no foothold in Telugu fiction to even begin reading. I intend to remedy this by reading Gogu Shyamala.

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For Malayalam reading I just go by instinct. I’ve read very little in Malayalam so I pick up books indiscriminately at the Mathrubhumi Pustaka Mela (book fest). Routinely, they suspect I’ll buy too many books and send a sales staff to follow me around. Must admit though that I’ve not read all the books I’ve bought.

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Thanks to the Marriage Act of 1955 I have a minion who reads in Kannada tasked with introducing me to Kannada literature. My first brush with Kannada literature was when we visited Poornachandra Tejaswi‘s wife Rajeshwari at their beautiful home near Chikmagalur. Though we arrived unannounced, she was extremely nice to us, offering us tea and taking time out of her afternoon to chat with us.

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For Tamil, I have a supplier in Chennai. She and I have had a live gtalk window to discuss this among other things since 2008. She introduced me to books by Ambai, Salma and Ashokamitran.

I have always read been based on recommendations by friends. Mainly because in college I didn’t have enough money to buy all the books I wanted. I used to read whatever was available in our hostel’s library that was a really pretty name for a shelf of books. Once I could afford books I had phases. If I liked a book, I would read another book by the same author and then another till I got bored. When time started slipping away and reading time had to be pulled out from a magician’s hat, I became very conscious of what I read.

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Finally, today I have the time to read and the money to buy books but now, I have a new problem. With South Indian fiction, I have few pointers to lead me. I am basing my reading entirely on my intuition and the jacket. But I’d really appreciate any direction you could offer. Below are a few books that I plan to read this year.

What else do you think should I be reading? Let me know in comments below.

What Is It Like To Be Gay In Small Town Karnataka And To Love In Fear?

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This article was first published in The News Minute on 20 January 2017.

Book: Mohanaswamy

Author: Vasudhendra; Reshmi Terdal

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Pages: 280

Buy this book here.

I am not gay. But I don’t have to be to relate to Mohanaswamy’s heartbreak when he loses his long-time lover to a woman.

Just like Mohana’s sister, as a teenager I have also called someone gay as an abuse without fully understanding what it meant. I have also felt lonely being single. But it’s not the same thing, is it?

Though I can relate to Mohanaswamy – my sexual orientation, my marriage, my children – their very existence will never be questioned. I will never have to think twice before holding hands with my partner in public. What I do in bed will never be on top of anyone’s mind when they meet me. My love will ever be shrouded in fear.

That’s why it stings when the author says, “As a young man, people pestered him to get married, even offered to find him a bride. But when he came out of the closet, nobody had a heart large enough to advise him to find himself a boy and settle down”. He is talking about you and me here.

Vasudhendra’s short story collection, Mohanaswamy, gives glimpses into the life of a gay boy growing up in a small town in Karnataka. Each story is an experience that Mohanaswamy or someone he knows has been through simply by not being heterosexual.

Growing up in ridicule before he could understand why he stood out or what it meant to be gay, his life is a constant struggle to keep his desires and identity under wraps. Mohanaswamy, originally written in Kannada in 2013, was recently translated into English by journalist Rashmi Terdal.

It’s not often that you find an exemplary English translation of regional writing.

Rashmi uses simple language and delivers the sentiment without diluting Mohanaswamy’s diffidence, desolation and despair. By retaining some lines in Kannada, she has packed these stories with the local flavour that brings home the fact that homosexuality is not ‘happening out there to people we don’t know’.

Mohanaswamy believes, “If I learn to ride a bicycle, I will turn from gay to straight”. Reading those lines took me back to my if-onlys: “If only I were thinner, fairer and prettier.” I attributed everything wrong with my world to one of these three things. Growing up was quite baffling for me. I imagine growing up gay can only be doubly so.

While mother had had the ‘becoming a woman’ conversation with me, I guess she assumed I would behave like the ‘well brought up girl’ that I was and not put my parts to use ‘prematurely’. In fact, when the chapter on ‘Gender and Reproduction’ came up for study, our teacher made a fellow classmate ‘take the class as punishment’.

Where do young people get their information from? True that the web has opened up our access to information but hasn’t it also made information highly subjective? In his time, Mohanaswamy devoured magazines like Rathi Vignyana “hoping to find something, anything on gays”. When he found bits and pieces of information it was often seeking a remedy for “this tendency” and the responses were grossly misleading.

I too have read my share of questions in women’s magazines and got my perspective skewed. Recently when a good friend from college came out as a transman, it weighed heavily on my conscience that I didn’t have the slightest idea of his struggle. Even if I knew, I wondered how I’d have supported him then because I knew nothing about transgender persons. And I what I know today is still very little.

Mohanaswamy, a Kannadiga software engineer homosexual protagonist, leaves no more wiggling room to get out of the discussion on a basic human right: to love without fear.

This is an important book for Indian fiction. A coming out for Vasudhendra himself, Mohanaswamy jolted its audience into joining the discussion on gay rights. Here’s a namma huduga, Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award winner (Nammamma Andre Nangishta, 2006) talking about homosexuality. How do you sidestep that?

He brought into the fold all the girls and boys and their parents in semi-urban and rural areas who don’t speak English, who don’t have Internet access, whose people don’t have the vocabulary or the agency to discuss these things and who don’t afford the anonymity that cities offer.

Heartwrenching is Mohana’s quest for love in familiar and unfamiliar places alike. His long-term relationship, his one night stands, friends he is attracted to are all covered in a shroud of fear. Fear of being outed. Fear of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. Fear of facing the world alone.

What is it like to love in fear, to live in fear? “Why should we be so scared? Have we murdered anybody? We just love each other,” says one of the characters.

Effortlessly, Vasudhendra manages to dispel the impression that homosexual people are lawless, faithless heathens. Mohanaswamy is a devout follower of Krishna. In times of struggle, he always relies on faith to pull himself together.

Once, he is even in a relationship with a priestly yoga-doer. One of his dates, described as dark-skinned like Krishna, asks him, “Are you a Brahmin?”, and Mohanaswamy answers: “A gay belongs to no caste. People from no caste or community will accept him within their fold”.

Prejudice, caste-based or otherwise runs deep. I believe the key to dispelling these prejudices lies in conversations. When I shared the news of my friend’s coming out with mother, she used a Malayalam slur for gay that I was surprised to hear her use. But she also said, “It must be very tough. I hope he is happy”. And that’s why I live in hope.

Add Mohanaswamy to your must-read pile in 2017 because not only is it relatable, heartbreaking and very well translated, but it is also one those seminal books in Indian fiction that you want to have read because it will be talked about for a long time to come. My wish for this book is to be prescribed reading in our otherwise useless Moral Science classes. Buy this book here.

I Am A Mountain Person Because I Love A Good Challenge

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I have never been excited by the ocean. It could be because it’s always been in my backyard. I could go whenever I wanted though I have few memories from my childhood of being at the beach. There is also the Indian mentality of not getting into the water. Until I visited Unawatuna beach in the south of Sri Lanka and swam in the ocean, going to the beach was always an unnecessarily hot and boring activity. In my family, you went to the beach to “feel the wind”. “Kaatu kollan” best is apparently Kozhikode beach.

I’ve never actively thought about it till now, but I might be a mountain person. Mountains are a challenge. A challenge that me with my abused lungs, asthma and bodyweight find super hard to master. Two years ago a couple of us drove to Yelagiri over the weekend; a tiny hill station 160 kms south east of Bangalore. There we trekked up stone steps for maybe 30 minutes and I was done. Panting and out of breath, my lungs were breathing fire. It felt like someone was pushing down a massive weight on my shoulders. Of course I made excuses for taking breaks including the juvenile one that I was waiting for the other friend who had trouble climbing. We still laugh about that. An hour or so into it, when it grew dark and started raining hard, I was the happiest to return. That must have been a max of 800-1000 metres.

https://www.instagram.com/p/ia7xs5JYba

Walking and swimming aren’t challenging activities to me. I enjoy both and can do them endlessly. Once, in Gokarna, we walked some 17 kms along the beach in a day. We got up early, walked out of our stay and just kept walking. When the sun beat down on us too hard, we got into the water to cool down. When we got hungry, we stopped by one of the many shacks by the beach and had our fill. When there was an opportunity to people gaze, we plonked on the sand and did just that. We beach-hopped from Gokarna to Kudle to Om. We could have kept going if the day was longer.

Though I don’t like to leave the house on a regular day, I would like to believe that I am an outdoorsy person. I love being in nature, sweating it out and being under the cool shade of giant trees among the chatter of birds. It is precisely this romanticism got me hiking in South Korea. And of course Crossfit, the fitness regime that changed my outlook to life. In our 20 days in South Korea, we completed four treks. And I was blown away that I was physically able to do it. And for that I have Crossfit to thank. It’s the trainers there who taught me to push myself. Not to give up when breath becomes laboured. That the human body can take a lot more exertion than we are used to on a regular day. Crossfit taught me that when you think the climb is going to kill you, it’s just your brain messing with you. Keep on going on.

Bukhansan: It’s a fortress on a mountain that serves as the border of Seoul and it’s still heavily guarded. The path is clearly laid out with steps here but you are not allowed to take pictures towards the city. This day hike is best for people who enjoy surveillance.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BL2MpjEguYE

Seoraksan: We stayed in a windmill-themed lodge in Sokcho on the foothills of the Seoraksan mountains. We took the easiest trekking route that took us through two waterfalls before climbing up to a viewpoint. Since Seoraksan is to the north, though it was early October, the leaves were turning and it was beautiful. Trekking is a popular activity in South Korea and you will see many senior citizens, mostly older women (called Ajummas), climbing up nimbly in gaggling groups with packets of orange and Soju. The good thing about crowds in Korea is that they don’t litter.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BMGZ0WPAWXe/

Hallasan: Located on Jeju island, Hallasan is a dormant volcano. Access to the upper reaches of this mountain is restricted. There are endless steps built onto the cliffside of this mountain and you just keep on climbing. The winds are strong and the scenery is breath taking. You get to see little hills called oreums, made when the Mt. Hallasan erupted millions of years ago. When the mountain plateaus out before the mid-way shelter, we were told that we were the last ones on the property and we had little time to get back down. The downhill was an eerily silent descent broken only once by a toy-sized cargo train from the shelter that offered us a lift!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BMJEx7fg0fI

Our best climb in South Korea was in the company of one of my old friends from college, Thressy Maxwell. From Busan, we took a bus to Okpo and onward to Gujora beach in Geoje. Late October being off-season, the streets were silent, most services were shut and the atmosphere was perfect. We bought her favourite fried chicken and climbed up a bamboo forest to reach a sort of a tiny fortress with a view of two beaches. We had lunch there, just the three of us, shared stories and found a different path to walk down. I will always remember that place when I think of Thressy and of Korea.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BMOxuVDgKfV

Looking forward, 2017 intends to be the year I get fitter than I am right now. And one of the big motivators is a secret desire I’ve been nursing since I read Vasudhendra’s Mohanaswamy. To climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Thank god I have friends who think it’s a good idea and are ready to indulge me. It’s a tall order even for a fit person because of the high altitude and the low temperatures. Not to mention that I have the lung capacity of a week-old balloon. And Kilimanjaro is a dormant volcano that takes a week to climb. And as of today I know nothing more about it.

Let’s just say that’s how challenges are born and accepted. There will always be a way to make it happen. There is a story about Vararuchi in Eithihyamala. He and his wife are on the road (deshadanam). When each of their babies are born he asks if they have a mouth. And he asks his wife to abandon them because the gods who gave the child a mouth will also find a way to fend for them.  Africa trip is not till October. I have over six months to prepare. Though I am not religious, my faith is based entirely on the naive belief that the powers that be will not put me in situations I cannot handle.

Talking about practice, perseverance and preparedness

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Isn’t it incredible to imagine sunrises atop mountains, exalt at the graceful ease of a dancer or be amazed by someone’s weightloss journey? How often do we stop to think of the practice, perseverance and preparedness required to make it happen? Perseverence. A perfectly mundane sentiment. The art of putting one step in front of another, hour after painful hour, when no one is watching. Even on cold mornings or after bad days, mot Skipping practice. Planning ahead to bend schedules to accommodate meal, fitness or whatever needs to be done to achieve the goal.

I know a thing or two about another P- procrastination. As we speak, I am hatching plans to summit a mountain; this one is way out of my league. This article is a reminder of how badly I will regret being ill-prepared.

If only I’d been fit on the Kedarkantha trek. Standing at the summit, I would have marvelled the golden shimmer of the sun on the mountains. Instead, I was fishing for a spot to sit down. I would’ve clicked pictures, made a hundred memories. Instead, I sat on a rock eating an apple.

Swathi Chatrapathy from the Indiahikes team writes about her trek to the Kedarkantha summit and her regret of being unprepared for such physical exertion. Was her next trek, this time to Rupin Pass, better than the last one? To find out, read the story here:

https://indiahikes.com/regret-trek-kedarkantha-completing-rupin-pass/

Mission Jackfruit aka The Chakka Murder of 2017

Jackfruit tree known as plavu

Jackfruit. Chakka in Malayalam. It’s one of the few things left in this world that can bring a smile to my Grandmum Grumpy Face. Gmum where G stands for grumpy, has had enough of this world as she reminds us multiple times a day. But present her with the prospect of a jackfruit-related activity and she perks up like a politician seeing a TV crew.

It was no wonder then that the talk of this hallowed jackfruit began the minute I got home. Never mind that I had bought an exorbitant air ticket at the airport and waited all day to board this late evening flight. Never mind that I got home well past her bed time. And never mind the minor detail that the occasion for this emergency visit was my father being hospitalised. All she could talk about was the jackfruit.

She talked persuasively about the possibility of me looking into the plucking of the said jackfruit. It’s like the art of persuasion was child’s play to her. I don’t know how she does it. She never once asked if I would do it. But in the end I found myself in the mid-morning sun, staring up at the jackfruit tree, armed with a cane pole.

The night before Mission Jackfruit, she hunted down specific aluminum vessels of varying sizes for the much anticipated jackfruit disembowelment proceedings. Meticulous as she is, she had counted the number of fruits on the tree, called plavu in Malayalam. And there were 48. Guess Douglas Adams got the number wrong after all.

When the day of the jackfruit killing dawns, the excitement is palpable. Three of us, minions at her bidding, have emboldened her efforts. We are in a trance. Now she is shooting out commands faster than a machine gun. And now we are running around, willing ourselves to run for cover but involuntarily being efficient. We are mavericks prepping ourselves to go out into the big bad backyard and battle the plavu for a chakka.

For breakfast, Gmum goads us to fuel up with extra doshas and tea. When we reach the scene, we inspect the fruit hanging way above the rest, at least 15 feet above ground. And without further adieu, Mission Jackfruit, also known as the Chakka Murder of 2017 is underway. Being the only person under 65 years of age, I am entrusted with making the chakka kiss the floor. I have three supervisors, each one lower in rank than the next, with varied opinions on the best technique to tackle the situation. And I thank God for the extra shot of patience I took this morning.

Gmum cheers me on from the sidelines with an age old saying, Pennu Thuninjal Brahmanum Thadukkilla meaning when a woman decides to take action even Brahma won’t stop her. The minute I hit the chakka, my crew springs into action, like a school of piranhas, taking it apart and cooking it multiple ways, leaving behind delicious end products, all within the hour. This crew would make a stellar car stealing company selling spare parts.

If Gmum were a superhero, her wand would put both Spiderman and Harry Potter to shame. It collects sticky jackfruit latex called chakka mulanju. It’s primarily used for sealing pickled mango jars and she’s had it as long as I can remember. And if you wish to rain down the wrath of the Gmum on yourself, I dare you to touch this wand.

All parts of the chakka other than the core and the pokey rind are edible as Gmum has demonstrated time and again. She used to even salt and dry the covering of the seed (tholi), and the stringy covering of the flesh (chauni) and fry them as chips. Not one to waste anything, she would also use the inner layers of the rind in avial.

  • Chips: As kids we grew up on endless supplies of chakka chips. I still gawk at the price of little packets of these in stores and imagine Gmum suffering a stroke when I tell her its price. Cut off the ends of the fleshy jackfruit segments so that you are left with similar sized pieces. Now make long slices of equal measurement so that they cook evenly. Fry in hot oil and stir till crispy. Then reduce the flame and add salted water. If the flame is high, the oil could overflow and catch fire. Gmum says “kilum kilum” is the sound chips make when they are done. I doubt we will ever get that sound right. And you can buy chakka chips online now.
  • Moloshyam: Cook the fruit in water with salt, turmeric and chilly powder to taste. When they come together, add a spoon of coconut oil and a sprig of curry leaves. Chakka Moloshyam makes it worth the year-long wait for jackfruit season. This tastes even better when eaten with piping-hot kanji. Variations include adding a paste of coconut and cumin and occasionally shallots.
  • Mezhukkupuratti: Another simple recipe is to crush shallots, whole red chillies and curry leaves and saute them with the fruit.
  • Seeds: Chakkakuru added to both moloshyam and mezhukkupuratti make it yummier. But do expect some music from the rear.
  • Chakka Varatti: If you prefer sweeter things, try chakka varatti which is essentially a jackfruit halwa. Made best with sweet ripened chakka, the flesh is cooked and then ground to a paste. Cook this paste with ghee and melted jaggery on a low flame. Starting with this semi liquid, stir till it darkens, leaves the sides of the vessel and easily forms a ball. Making this sweet is also a good upper arm exercise. This preparation can be stored for a while and be used in chakka adda which is a flat steamed/toasted rice dumpling filled with gooey jackfruit goodness.
  • Pappadam: Grind cooked chakka to a paste along with cumin, pepper and salt. Spread in circles on cloth and dry in the sun. These can be stored and fried as required.

This is all in a day’s work for Gmum. She is more than half a century older than me but she still does more work in a day than I do in an entire week including crossfit. When we were both younger, I remember how she used to work like a horse from four in the morning to ten in the night; in the kitchen, around the house and in the backyard. Now that she is unable to work like that anymore, she has taken to employment generation for her minions. We are currently considering nominating her for the post of employment minister for the nation. She would give Make In India a boost that no one saw coming. If that’s not available we could settle for head of Vigilance or CBI, for such is her skill in triangulating information from seasoned evaders. Watch this space for more on these appointments.

Book Review: The Travelogue Which Is Not About Destinations

There Are No Gods In North Korea by Anjaly Thomas

This article was first published in The News Minute on 12 January 2017.

Book: There Are No Gods in North Korea

Author: Anjaly Thomas

Publisher: Niyogi Books

Pages: 235

Buy this book here.

I have been in heaven. It’s just as the Mahabharata teleseries had me believe. It’s pure white. You can’t see where the snow ends and the sky begins. Before I become the next trending topic, let me clarify. I was on a tram (technically a funicular railway), on the way down from the Cairngorm mountains, the highest mountain range in the British Isles. Let me back up a little to give you a better understanding. I was born and raised by the sea in tropical Kerala and the coldest place I had been in before that was Bangalore. The grand plan was to save up enough money to see my first snow in Scotland. 2009 turned out to be the coldest European winter in two decades and the Cairngorms the snowiest mountain in the region.

Anyway, the tram was bringing me down from the 3500 ft view point. We came up and over a slope and I saw it. A white space. It was not a blanket of white. This was a white with depth, a white where you knew that one was snow and the other, sky, but you didn’t know where one ended and the other began. And that’s why I travel. To experience the atmosphere. To take in what it feels like to walk into the shallow, friendly ocean in the Sri Lankan south. To be humbled by the sheer volume of water that is Niagara. And to be surprised on the WC by a seat warmer on a wintery day in South Korea.

There are No Gods in North Korea by Anjaly Thomas is a travellogue of her experiences across Asia and Africa. Interestingly, this travellogue is not about destinations; it’s about the meaning of travel and how travel transforms you. She travels in North Korea under the guise of a school teacher, she almost gets married to a Masai man in Kenya, she has a run-in with a Hippo in Uganda, she underestimates the Turkish winter and freezes and her adventures are exhilarating and endless. But for the author, travel means change, freedom and giving back to society. While she travels through exotic locations, she carries with her the will to contribute to those societies. She wasn’t always as thoughtful. And then she met Safak Deniz who changed the course of her travel. And her.

Predictably, the most forbidden destination on the itinerary is of course the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The North Korea Anjaly sees is a strictly scripted guided tour with no room for error. It’s a country riddled with poverty where the guests are served lavish meals while the tour guides eat rice and kimchi in a separate room. Pyongyong, the capital city, has no street lights for lack of electricity. And only beautiful people get permits to live in Pyongyong. All guests are warned to toe the line for their own safety. Here, a simple act like dancing in the rain could get you arrested but for Anjaly that’s a moment to feel alive. Anjaly’s “first love as a traveller” however, has always been Africa. It’s indifference, it’s acceptance and it’s magic have cast a spell on her so much so that she has returned many times over for hiking, camping, pub-crawling and volunteering.

Imagine feeling like the only person in the world. My favourite part of the book is when Anjaly goes in search of space. She transports you into the vastness that is Mongolia. In her words, “So big, so much, so far, so huge and till the end of the horizon there were only blue skies kissing the earth erupting in a colourful fusion of wild flowers. Edelweiss grew everywhere and so did buttercups and wild geranium, and to say that horses galloped among them in a big happy group is the ultimate compliment to the uniqueness of the place. We drove up the hills, through rivers, across fields filled with wildflowers. And oh, the wildflowers! I had been told it was wildflower season but I still wasn’t prepared for meadows full of yellow, white, blue and purple.”

My  trips are usually planned for around two weeks. The first week is exhilarating. I am eating, hiking, experiencing, picture-taking. Being a creature of habit and a homebody, by the middle of week two I begin to miss my bed, my curd rice and all things familiar. By the last day, I am dragging my feet, ready to watch TV in the hotel room, missing the predictability of the daily grind. After all like Robert Frost says in Birches,

“I’d like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.”

Similarly, halfway through this book, the writing begins to shuffle its feet. The narrative becomes sluggish and repetitive. The author’s call to backpackers to give back to communities in the countries they travel to is definitely noble. But it’s impact is lost in ghastly editing, a charge that rests squarely on the shoulders of the publisher, Niyogi Books. They even have my pet peeve, confusing “lead” the metal for “led”, the past tense of lead (as in lead the way). Towards the end of the book, it begins to read like a hurried journal entry made at the end of the day by a tired traveller.

Read There are No Gods in North Korea for how the author beautifully captures the unmoored life of a traveller and the occasional need for a buoy: “And again, I missed something I did not have. Something, to hold me to one place, any place on earth”, she says. But if bad editing bothers you as much as it bothers me, stop and think twice about all your bad decisions before picking up this book to read. About travel, she repeatedly says, “visit without expecting anything”. I couldn’t agree more. Be flexible in your travel plans, be open to experiences, accept challenges and be ready for change because you will not be the same person on the other side of your journey. Buy this book here.