August Occasion

Of  all the views that windows can provide, looking out into a leafy tree from a bedroom or a study window, is something to be grateful for. The dense foliage provides a curtain of green, shuts off the household on the opposite side of the street that you may have no desire to watch and provides a world of soothing green through which one glimpses the sky.

 A flamboyant Silk Cotton tree grew in front of our house a few years ago. Every March having shed all its leaves earlier, it stretched out against the blue sky and exhibited its large deep orange flowers to the world. Each flower had its own little green holder and the display against the bare branches  was like an enormous breathtaking  ikebana. It attracted its share of birds and people, but one stormy summer, unable to compete with concretisation, it loosened its roots, gave up its will to live and leaned against the street's overhead wires, ready to leave. 

Irate residents whose power supply was  short circuited  since the tree grew outside my house, rang our doorbell. Offering consolation as we mourned the loss of the tree, we contacted DESU and then diligently pleaded with the forest department to help us.  DESU responded  immediately and fixed the wires, but the tree teetered precariously. Many phone calls were followed up by  escorting FD officials to the site  for inspection. Eventually we received a sanction, authorizing us to cut down the tree. For a sum of money the tree was chopped down in a couple of hours and then carted away as well. The process took a week but at the end of it, the silk cotton was sorely missed by us and our neighbors, after the resumption of  the electric supply restored their equanimity.

Maybe it was  collective longing that allowed the seed of a mulberry to sprout and grow, but six months after,  a mulberry bush,  began growing a few yards away. The nursery rhyme that talks about people going around a mulberry bush, didn't encourage us to think of the young mulberry as having any tree potential. Yet in less than three years, it was a large tree, moving quickly from its slender bush like form to a stately height,  well over  thirteen feet with a canopy of leaves on the street.

  I know of no paeans written to the Mulberry Tree. Even the nursery rhyme  only suggests a nondescript bush in the landscape. The tree in lived experience, sets up a whole series of narratives.  In early December it switches off its photosynthetic processes, so by the end of the month the tree is covered with yellow leaves that are sometimes the only source of colour during sun strapped Decembers at Delhi.. 

The leaves drop quickly off  in January and the tree is bare for a few weeks before the stems  quiver with bursting nodes and  suddenly, magically almost overnight fresh  little  green leaves appear. While the leaves captivate with their new leaf green, the mulberry goes  into bloom and  soon thereafter  little green fruit make an appearance all over the tree. This mulberry has purple berries  and  hordes of visitors, feathered and  on foot, some  with school satchels, others with carts and cycles  stop by to partake of the abundant bounty. The ground outside is stained purple and so are the bird droppings all around the house.

Watching the rain pour itself out on the leaves is another activity that provides for hours of unending reflection. Today I was privy to  yet another of the mulberry's secrets. A little bird around four inches in length with a long tail had been around awhile, but suddenly there seemed to be more of them.  They darted about each morning, little enquiring long tailed bundles of yellowy green, and they seemed to take in all the details of the tree shaded potted sit out. 

 I was diverted by a movement in the tree and on close observation  from an upstairs window saw that it  came from  the  inside  of what resembled a bunched up leaf cluster. This  cunningly stitched nest that the greeny yellow birds had  put together, high up in the tree which is now well over twenty feet,  was quite difficult to spot. I have watched these birds before, soaking in the  sunlit air before  the onset of the evening. The mother and her four fledglings sat on one branch while the father perched guard over them on another overhead branch.  I did not know then that these were tailor birds or that they stitched mulberry leaves to build their nest.

  

Sparrows in Spring

I have a kitchen garden. Actually, "garden" is possibly a gross exaggeration  because  these are really eight pots at the corner of my kitchen, beside a sunny door where I grow, basil, aloe vera, thyme and  four pots of  hardy  twenty-year-old karipatta (karuvapillai) treelings that  are regularly harvested  for garnishing  foods, ranging from sambaar  and upma to vermicelli and sharp chutneys. As any passionate cook would aver, there is really no substitute for fresh herbs, and I try to keep my herbs organic, by feeding them  used tea leaves  and coffee grounds as manure.
When tall houses sprung up and blotted out  a fair share of  sunfall, a three foot high sandstone ledge began to house the kitchen garden pots. The karipattas stretched and flowered in  endless sunshine, but also drew the attention of large black ants, which attracted by the moist pots, built their nests under them and around the roots of the plants. This was not a very happy situation, since ant colonies tend to be persistent. However  instead of bringing out the gamaxine and malathion I tried using simple solutions like detergent water and turmeric powder to discourage the ants. The black ants were willing to relinquish the kitchen to me since they didn't particularly care for the  turmeric boundaries I had drawn, but  the karipattas  remained a favourite haunt, over the last couple of years.
 In fact, the ants  felt so much at home that they took to farming woolly white aphids  all over the karipattas. Eventually, white aphids, in some stage of evolution clung to all the stem nodes . While aphids  hosted on karipatta stems, the kitchen garden territory became a confrontational space between  the black ants and their aphids and me. Things got  really sticky at this point. Sticky in fact is the operative word as far as aphids are concerned. They secrete a sweet fluid which the black ants harvest off their bodies and distribute to the entire  ant colony. Meanwhile, the aphids feed off the plants where they are  housed and stunt their growth, eventually damaging the plant all together. It is extremely difficult to  get rid of aphids and doing it manually is cumbersome and unattractive. Divesting sticky cocoons from the interstices of stems, is a messy business and the goo  clings forever to the fingers and the leaves. Operation  Black Ant  grew in prominence and  I resigned myself to the gradual withering away of the karipattas.
 I had however reckoned without the spirited sparrows who lived in the nearby bougainvillea bush. They developed a taste for the aphids and made flying visits to the  karipatta source several times a day. Very soon,  the  aphid plantations were wiped out since what was intended as ambrosia for the ants was transformed into  choice meat for the sparrows. So one fine day, the karipattas were free of aphids and the black ants relinquished their hold on the karipatta territory by  abandoning the colony site that  had begun to  demonstrate signs of  active hostility.
The karipattas grew back to their full glory,and played their stellar role in culinary achievements but this year has brought in new contenders for the karipatta's favors.The sparrows nest in  various  niches occasioned by the backyard and in the spring they are busy building nests. They have taken to lining their nests with karipatta stems and leaves. So most tender stems are jabbed at by sparrow beaks and hacked from the plant. Some of them are picked up and transported to the nest. I would have thought that  the karipatta wasn't exactly  brilliant nest-building material, from the sparrow's point of view, but possibly in the absence of alternatives, the fragrant, quick drying karipatta has its uses. Perforce I wait for the sparrows' nests  to be completed  and the eggs to be laid before I can claim the karipattas as my own.
These days, I have a  regular morning engagement, that of  reclaiming all the fresh karipatta  leaves lying  in my backyard once  the  charge of the sparrow brigade is over.   I use these intercepted leaves to garnish  my cooking.  A small price to pay, as were it not for these feisty little birds, there would  be very little karipatta aroma in our lives.  I accept with grace  that  this hands-on training of  retrieving karipatta leaves,  has reconnected me to the values of conserving and sharing local  natural resources equitably.

Winter Wedding Wave at New Delhi.

Winter weddings at New Delhi are extraordinary. The weather is cold, the bride and groom are  usually happy to marry at an unearthly hour, everything is brightly lit up and copious amounts of liquids and solids float around, followed by quantities of  food and angheetis and electric heaters  efficiently keep the cold away. The most fascinating people at weddings are usually  the women, and Delhi's women are nonpareil. For, nowhere in the world, with temperatures inching closer and closer to the lower single digits would anyone brave the cold in the manner that Delhi's women do,. Wrapped in the most exquisite benaras, tanchoi  and kanjivaram or in the latest  newly restructured saree, with stilletoes and heels sinking into the soft lawns where wedding parties are held, Delhi's women dare the elemental cold with incredible aplomb. Gracefully they pull their heels out of the soft ground shoe by shoe and unfazed by the absence of any warm accessories, glide over the lawns with apparent ease, often accompanied by well layered males.  Not the  fault of the women, this practice.  The festive saree is actually  a very demanding animal. Confine  it with a cardigan, restrict it within a coat , or drape it with a shawl, (never mind if it is pashmina with a jamawar border) any of the aforementioned  attempts asphyxiates  the  aesthetics of the saree. Therefore it becomes de rigeur to wear a saree without  any other distractions. These days, even  the blouse just about manages to pass muster by making itself as inconspicuous as possible.

A whole host of weddings are held in the second half of  December at New Delhi. Purist friends down South  who believe that the month of  marghazi, is ideally spent in pursuit of the life spiritual, completely overlook the powerful impetus provided by the United States of America in altering cultural practice in India. Many young Indians who study and work abroad, fall in love and  get married in situ. For friends and  family in India, this new tie is reiterated with a celebration during the December break.  So late December weddings are now in vogue and have been on the rise over the past few years.
 Ania and Suvir  celebrated the marriage of their son Tariq with Piyali  and hosted two ceremonies for the newly weds. The first of these was a charming mehendi and choori  day-time ceremony on Neel's front lawns at JNU. The sun shone, flowers bloomed, glasses tinkled, the bride sparkled in orange, the groom beamed  and  conversations continued while we all partook of a delicious kashmiri repast where despite being curtailed by my vegetarianism, I came away feeling that baingan and lotus root should only be cooked as per  kashmiri specifications.
The dinner and drinks and dancing  that followed a couple of days later was  great fun and will be something Ania and I will remember for reasons more irregular than the nostalgia of watching young Tariq (whom i  met when he was not even eight) now  a strapping young man with a pretty wife, stepping into a life all of their own. It so happened that Ania and I wore identical sarees  on this occasion, right down to the golden peacock woven red border and this was  by sheer coincidence. So with much shared laughter, we captured this on  camera.
Just yesterday, Ania sent me a picture of the two of us at the mehendi ceremony with a header that exclaimed "I can't believe it but at the mehendi too we were dressed alike!"
I am putting both sets of pictures on the blog, because this is really quite an unlikely occurence.

Usually, whatever I end up wearing  uncannily  replicates the colours of the tapestry highlighting the wedding  pandal  and furniture. This time round, I seem to have tuned into the colour-vibrations of the mother of the groom, without quite knowing it! Maybe this could serve as an indicator of intuitive bonding between old friends...or even be the start of a new custom  wherein mothers of the groom or bride could colour coordinate  their clothes with their close friends?

Stirring Out and all Stirred Up

Went for a long walk today, inspired by the  City Makers Collective which, was conducting a walk under the aegis of the Indo-Global Social Service Society in the Capital  today, with the aim of  reclaiming city spaces for homeless citizens. The route of the walk was exciting: The start was from Nigambogh Ghat, Yamuna Pushta and it was scheduled to end  at Hanuman Mandir,  Connaught Place.  I love particularly the symbolism of the planned walk. Originating from beside the life giving  river and Nigambodh ghat that stands sentinel to countless death-rites, the walk moves into the hustle and bustle of the city centre, culminating at the temple of Hanuman, the legendary monkey who consoled and protected his exiled king Sugriva, who was also homeless. Hanuman also leapt a hundred fathoms away from his own personal life and reached another kingdom as scout and messenger on behalf of yet another homeless exile, Ram. In fact,  he  used his tail as an incendiary torch to  rub home the message to the powerful king of that country that  his  destitute friends meant business.
 As a Delhi resident, I have visited all these places and my thoughts stayed with the walkers in spirit  as this is probably one of the most wonderful ways in which  an entire year could be wrapped up, while  the new year waited around the corner, with yet another knotted bundle of hopes and frustrations.
 Unable to participate in the walk  for a host of little reasons that crop up everyday,  I took off later in the afternoon for what used to be a regular haunt from my house in Safdarjang Enclave to the District Park. This is an expansive walk, past the newly made lake and the ruins of the madarsa and the Hauz Khas monuments and back, and remains a debatable distance of three or four kilometres,  that  no one at home has really settled. The walk took  around forty-five minutes  and the weather was crisp and the sky was blue, because for some part of the day, the sun had stopped by and dried up the grey air. One encounters unusual birds, ranging from green pigeons and  common barbets to the peacocks and tree-pies and the abandon  of bougainvilleas and the general lush foliage proves very soothing. Today, I observed that there is really very little public place available on the street, for someone with no home to go  as well as  the average pedestrian, the old and  the infirm.
The entrance to the park is eight hundred feet  from my home and I need to go past moving cars that honk me out of the way while I totter over to the side and lean on a parked car. The options are usually an ungainly dive to the side of the road, towards an occupied pavement, where either car or unsanctioned private hedge or fence holds sway. Occasionally, there are closed iron gates. These are illegal and are a display of resident ability to provide apparent protection  from passing cars, burglars and chain snatchers and pick pockets and louts. The only qualification required to cross by the small side entrance  is a robust disposition and  knees that measure thirty inches from the  level ground .  Clearly, the denizens of the world of Avataar were measured when these gates were made for unless you are extraordinarily tall and able, you  might as well as stay at home. If you are old, feeble or unwell, then you had better stay at home hadn't you, suggests the honk of  the  man  at the wheel of  a big black car.
 We had a functional circular fountain in the  district park. Our elected MLA  put up a rectangular one on the opposite side.  We have got used to this eyesore, especially since we are now allowed to walk in the  park again, post Common Wealth Games and the tennis stadium has withdrawn miles and miles of  stainless steel pipe fence intrusions. The children's section is desolate. One sunken rail-engine shaped jungle gym is all that remains of what was once a bustling park with loads of activities for small children. The walk itself is exhilarating, even though sections of the park remain unkempt, sometimes  even unattended. The return to the world beyond the park, however, remains intimidating.
 The road outside the park is an arterial road. it  has an endless build up of traffic. There is also one speed breaker,  but  cars don't take kindly to  all this. What business have pedestrians at the ends of roads?, they say as they refuse to pause at the break in the verge. Occasionally, if after a long flow of cars, one  finds a gap  and starts towards the  verge, the next car coming  from  quite far away will  see you and accelerate,  adding to the exciting unpredictability of  whether you will reach the verge or whether the car will get you first!  Having dared the impossible and achieved it,  I got  back into the  smaller lane inside the colony  considerably  invigorated. Seeing a car  heading in my  direction, a nimble dart  into the edge of what seems an empty parking space seemed  a quick remedy. Not quite, I found out as the car behind  noiselessly crept up, just missing my feet and taking up the parking space. Halt, pause and then recollect breath. Squeeze out of the slit between two parked cars and then  begin counting the lanes back to the house. Successfully complete the side gate high jump movement  and  land in the middle of a street to be  immediately accosted by honking  cars driving in opposite directions who don't understand why there should  be pedestrians on roads designated only for vehicles? Stumble home somehow and feel thankful for the possibility of being alive and not having to live on the street.  Maybe  I should stay at home, safe?  Unless, we can work towards a recognition of  sharing public spaces for a multiplicity of  needs, the  pedestrian will need to mutate and grow wings in order to survive in this hostile space.

Diwali Dhamaka

Diwali Dhamaka

India celebrates countless festivals that  endorse the community's sense of a collective. Festivals are in that sense inclusive and generate a shared space. This is true of Holi, Ganesh Chaturthi,  Dusshehra,  Durga Puja,   the collective mass at  both Eid and Christmas. Most festivals are followed by community feasting in large numbers. This is a fun filled space, with the bustle of people, the rustle of special or new clothes, the excitement of doing something different from the everyday and the delight of eating wonderful food with friends, acquaintances and families. Spectacle centred festivals  such as the staged  Ramleela,  the bringing down of the  putlas of Kumbhakaran, Meghdhoot and  Ravan during Dushshehra,  the display of stunning  Durga idols or the humungous Christmas trees that  dress up for Christmas, each of these occasions  would be unimagineable without the collective participation that is so evident. In fact, this holds true even for low key festivals such as Teej, janmashtami and Onam. 

I wonder year after year why Diwali has always been an exception to this rule. Yes, people do meet and exchange gifts and sweets and this is bumper season for corporate gifting, but celebrations remain largely personalised and exclusive. Card parties are played in closed circles. Everybody decorates their homes with all manner of electric lights, flowers , rangolis and candles .Each household has its own  exclusive  Lakshmi puja  and  a private diwali dinner, which is punctuated with  extravagant  firecracker displays. In households recently acquired through the grace of competent builders,  the first Diwali in the house is celebrated as if firecrackers would be shortly going out of fashion.   Never mind if the lights and air and excitement is snuffed out for all the neighbourhood plants, trees , animals and people.

 Since many laws have been implemented to encourage civic-mindedness in the Delhi citizen, why dont we add a law  mandating collective firework display  only in public maidans? It could be organised in a manner similar to other community festivals. This would not only bring back the spirit of collective participation, but will  leave our  eardrums  and  those of our children intact, our lungs more capable,  our hearts less subject to palpitations, our pets  more calm,  our vehicles more safe, diminish  threats to life and property that  unsupervised playing with fire causes, rekindle solicitude for the old and the infirm and those who seek quiet as well as happier  MCD karamcharis the morning after! Thus we could achieve that perfect state of collective beatitude that all religions purport to create लोकाः समस्ताः सुखिनो भवंतु ll which translates as  the future possibility of happiness for  every living being in the world

Ratna Raman.

Anti-social Algorithm

Yesterday i saw a movie called  The Social Network preceded by all the razzmatazz that movies are presented with nowadays. You drive to a mall, eat at the food court and post-meal plunge into a movie which is often an escape route to another world. The mall with its escalator starts the process as you are transported to a surreal world of upper-end shopping and a palm tree paradise where you can  eat all kinds of food for a price.
 The movie begins with a young woman and geeky young man in a crowded pub, having a post-modern conversation. The young man wants to be part of an exclusive social group and the young woman wants out. Post split up, she retires to her room while he sprints back through the long corridors to  blog bitchily about her and simultaneously create a site where sets of twin  pictures of all  women candidates at Harvard  are uploaded for a comparative vote  by Harvard males on female hotness quotient. The site is so popular that  the entire  university's computer system crashes. An investigation is held and the young man is suspended for six months. The young woman,  hurt and humiliated, gathers herself  up with dignity and moves on.
  Young man, Mark Zuckerberg is sought out  by three upwardly mobile Harvard males with  an exclusive network  idea for  fellow students. Zuckerberg goes one better  He ties up with  friend Eduardo as business partner and  Sean Parker of  the 90s Napster  fame provides cutting edge inputs. Facebook is born in the year 2004. The rest, as we all know, is history.

 Facebook feeds into the social demands of  the very privileged young  and gives them an outlet through which  to construct  their virtual identity. It moves very quickly from  exclusive social networking to  a slow unfolding of the narcissism and  exhibitionism that is a major  preoccupation with people who occupy Ivy league colleges slated as being among the best places in the world. This Peter Pan world where you never need to grow up is now international and intercontinental.
 Facebook has iconic status in our  modern cosmopolitan  consumerist society which willingly engorges on everything that is offered, advertised or flaunted.  Yet, what is so different about this whole new world?  The change is  possibly in the external details. We have moved from the streets and alleys to the virtual page. The life lived outside of the electronic page  however hasn't changed. Greed  abides and so does the lust for power and control. Women are objects of desire and occasional arm candy and essential eye candy. Men with exceptional  good looks, athletic or intellectual potential, don't really require to acquire much else, let alone a humanistic education. They engage with very little outside of their own self-image and decadent lifestyles. Such are the new  Cyber lords who have replaced  earlier feudal lords.Otherwise this is a  dog eat dog world where someone has to be top dog .The trick is to be cool, stay cool , market the coolness  at the highest premium  and hit the jackpot with a new brand.
Friendship is en passant. Friends and relationships are set adrift whenever  expedient. Codes and rules arent written.  Players settle things among themselves principally in hard cash. Money Power runs this game and  fame reassuringly frames itself around successful lingerie brands and  facebook frivolities. Losers throw themselves down bridges and winners take to revenge, alcohol, wild music, sex and dope. This is the new global world where Dorian Grays take to Stocks and Shares and pop goes community and collective welfare.
 The world  has shrunk and so also has the  human imagination. Once our mythical heroes battled dragons, supplied fire and water, ploughed and tilled land  on behalf of the entire  human civilization. This is so not happening here!   Human potential  has diminished and the human imagination  is now self serving, meretricious, cynical and facile.
This is the sad part. Exposure to technology driven knowledge highways is still an empowering and enabling source for large sections of the world.  For the founders and users of facebook these insignificant details belong to a world which  exists way beyond the fringes of their virtual world. Hopefully, this is an ill conceived and incorrect assumption. A different note is struck by Erica, the young woman who breaks up with Mark. She is a facebook user but wont accept his request to be her electronic friend.   We need to believe that more dissenting voices such as hers do exist,  even if they remain outside of  facebook

Marvellous Medicine

Have been puzzling over the treatment for cancer that is available for people who are visited by the disease. There is chemotherapy and there is radiation. and  if one is lucky, in a manner of speaking, chemotherapy and radiation are prescribed as adjuvant therapies. This means that one can have surgery and excise the cancer growth at any particular site, get rid of the existing cancer and then follow either or both methods to prevent the recurrence of cancer again in any threatening re-infestation.

The good thing about cancer is that if it is detected early, the chances of survival are strengthened. However, the therapies prescribed to help survivors of cancer who have had surgical intervention remain as scary as ever. Chemotherapy is intimidating  because the  very notion of  going in to attack the cancer cells with all guns blazing and bombing every living cell in the body is a terrifying and terrible project. Chemotherapy subjects living cells and marrow to a  blitzkreig and creates a collateral damage that is reminiscent of war by a superpower out to annihilate some small  voiceless nation which can only cower in fright. Not very surprising, if one were to recall that the protocol for cancer treatment really comes to us from the US and Europe.  Alternative treatments,  practised outside of the allopathic system, however varied, suffer from inadequate monitoring and documentation and are at best only seen as preventive strategies, never as curative options.

Yet even within  prescribed and valorised systems of  allopathic cure, grey areas persist. For instance you could have a small carcinoma of the breast and elect to have  a lumpectomy. If you have more than one tumor, this is termed multi-focal cancer and usually the total removal of breast is recommended as multifocal cancer indicates an aggressive cancer and normally, after a mastectomy, chemotherapy is prescribed.. There are a series of tests that the retrieved cancer tumor is subjected to. It is checked for IHC,  for HER-2 and then there is another test, the latest gold standard that is called the Onco type DX test. Examining tumor tissue at a molecular level, the OncoDX test predicts the likely benefit of chemotherapy and the possibility of the recurrence  in early stage cancers of both the breast and the colon.

 Cancer treatment is expensive and simple tests like the IHC and the more complex Her-2  are expensive. However, they are now available here in India. Unfortunately, facilities for  Onco DX  testing for tumors, the Medical Oracle for Chemical Oncologists, do not exist in India.  Samples have to be sent to America and some of  New Delhi's posh hospitals  offer such privileges. The costs of this test are so prohibitive that  79 out of the 80 people who are afflicted by cancer cannot even think of getting an Onco DX test done, which could accurately predict whether they actually require  chemotherapy or not.  Access to this test would allow them to escape the toxicity of chemotherapy and its attendant  traumas , as well as  bypass the unnecessary aggression that is waged upon the hapless body.
 For me, this is a significant discovery as i learnt recently that a multifocal tumor could have really low scores on an Onco- DX test. Chemical Oncologists in India and the US hastened to tell me that this was a unique occurence. One is too much a product of a scientific age to believe totally in miracles, but i wonder if the uniqueness of my case really lies in my access to this test?  What documentation do we have on multifocal  node free  breast cancers in our country which were subjected to the Onco-DX?

The test itself has only been around in  the last few years, but if we are working with Indian  demographics, the number of people who may have benefited  from this test could  have been  enormous. Given the fact that breast cancer is one of the more prevalent forms of cancer in our country today, we need to view Onco DX  analysis with far more seriousness. It is possible that if this technology had been  made available in India. we would  have a different set of readings and perhaps a new protocol for treatment based on a different  data bank. So a low Onco DX reading in a  node negative multifocal tumor might not be a unique case given a different set of statistics. For  something like this to happen, or to even move from being a mere  idea, we need this technology here and  now. We need it to be available, affordable and accessible! Our Medical Research Institutes and  Health Ministry Pundits need to do some urgent jugaad in the matter!