A toast, to new beginnings!

It is said that a traumatic experience can change a person. I can attest to that now. In outlook, in attitude, in philosophy, in temperament, I am a different man from who I was last year.

That is one of the reasons I am looking forward to returning to the US, with this long hiatus drawing to a close. But even the other reasons are not that I will be returning to something familiar, but to something different. I am moving to a new apartment (No roommates! Finally, I will have a clean kitchen and a clutter-free home!), and there are some new directions to work on for my research. I guess there is something about new beginnings that lifts one's spirit.

Meanwhile, in Chennai, my home is being wiped clean of every trace of me. My old clothes have been donated, my footwear thrown away, my books put into cartons and stored in remote locations, my photograph on the wall of the living room pulled down; anything that yelled "Prashanth" has either been hidden away or thrown away. I don't even have my own room anymore. No, my parents aren't planning on selling me or anything, its just that I've spent five years in a hostel and two years in the US, and old things need to make space for new. It is all mildly depressing, but home is made of people, not things. So I'm fine with it. It reinforces the feeling that I am starting with a clean slate.

It has been a time of new beginnings for many of friends, too. Some are graduating with doctorates. Some are joining grad programs. Some are changing jobs. Some are getting married. And they are all excited about it.

Go and fetch your glass, for I want to raise a toast. To fresh starts. To new beginnings!

Cheers!
Prashanth.

Reading list

I was chatting with a blogger friend about books and realized I'd better make a list of books I've been meaning to read. I thought I'd put up the list here so that passers-by (that means you!) can make suggestions for me to add to the list.

Edited in: Found one social networking site that isn't socially destructive - Shelfari, a place to share your book discoveries with your friends. Every book is automatically a community through a central database, putting together user reviews, discussion forums, etc.


Regular Fiction:

Shantaram by Gregory Roberts

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

The Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera


Masala Fiction:

The Quest by Wilbur Smith

The Alexandria Link by Steve Berry

The Inscrutable Americans by Anurag Mathur (shifted here on Kaushik's insistence!)


Fantasy and Science Fiction:

Into a Dark Realm by Raymond Feist (Second Darkwar Novel)

Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson (Fifth book in Malazan Book of the Fallen - one of the best fantasy series ever written)

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein

Prophecy: Child of the Earth by Elizabeth Haydon (Sequel to Rhapsody)

Canticle by R. A. Salvatore (Beginning the Cleric Quintet)

Keeper Martin's Tale by Robert Stepanek (Beginning the Ruinmist Chronicles)

Renegade's Magic by Robin Hobb (Concluding the Soldier Son Trilogy)


Non-Fiction:

Bookless in Baghdad by Shashi Tharoor

The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen (Currently reading... super so far!)

A Short Story: Can you bring me some colours?

(Inspired by J.)

I pulled the curtains open. I felt a desperate need to get some sunlight, some cheer into the room. But the bleak landscape outside brought no comfort. I had to call somebody, to try and shake off the pall settling on my mood. But who?

There was one. He always knew what to do in these situations. "Old friends are like wine," he had said, "The longer you know them, the less you see of them, but the more you cherish those occasions. Those meetings gain in maturity, in sparkle, in fulfillment, making up for what they lack in frequency." I hated him for that philosophical bent of his, hated him for saying things I did not want to hear, hated him for being right. But he had never let me down. No, he was far, far, more generous than I could ever be.

And I hated him for that too.

I called him.

"Hey. It's me."

"Hi! To what do I owe this pleasure?"

"I have a task for you."

A chuckle. "At your service, m'lady. What can I do for you today?"

"Of late, my world has become... gray. Can you bring me some colours?"

"Ah, but colours do not behave that way. Perhaps if you go to them, they may agree to come back with you. But nobody can simply bring them to you."

"What should I do?"

"I'll pick you up. Half an hour."

--------

He was as I always remembered him. It was easy to talk to him. Most of the time. He was a good listener. It was when he went into one of his speeches or self-designed proverbs that he became unbearable. But he didn't do that as we drove into the outskirts of the city. He always had a sense of timing. Now was not the time. I would have jumped out of the car while it was moving and hitch-hiked back if he did. He probably knew that, too.

We pulled up at a farm just outside the city. The workers there greeted him cheerily and he waved back. "I come here now and then. It belongs to a distant uncle," he explained.

We walked into a beautiful meadow. Cows grazed placidly, and regarded us with big, friendly eyes. The grass was soft and damp under our feet; there were copses of trees some distance away; and the air was clean and fresh and redolent with the smell of dew. Some children were playing tag nearby. He plucked at my sleeve and we headed in their direction.

I looked at him incredulously. Surely he didn't expect me to play! But he had that mischievous glint in his eyes that said that was exactly what he had in mind. And there we played with those kids, running around bare-footed, weaving to avoid a catcher, laughing, short of breath. It was fabulous. I felt free for the first time in a long, long, time.

We sat down in exhaustion some time later. My chest was heaving with the exertion but I was smiling. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a little cloth bag. It was embroidered in beautiful patterns, and by a slight reluctance in the way he pulled it out, I gathered that it was a personal treasure of sorts. He pulled a long blade of grass out of the ground and gave it to me with the bag. "Look at it. Feel it. Your first colour, the green of light-hearted joy. Then put it inside the bag."

I did all that. We walked back to the car. As we drove back, he said, "I'll pick you up tomorrow, same time in the afternoon. We'll go and fetch your second colour." I smiled at him. He smiled back, a little too softly. I felt mildly ashamed. But I got out and went back to my apartment without a word.

--------

This time, we drove up to a little quay by the sea and rented a small boat. But it had a quiet and powerful motor, and very soon I was laughing into the wind and splashing the water as we streaked through it. The sky was cloudless, the most wonderful shade of azure blue. The water was a darker but no less enjoyable shade of blue, and it glistened with golden sunlight towards the horizon.

He stopped the motor after a while, and we floated there - in every sense of the word - with only the sky and the water and the sun to keep us company. A few birds flew over our heads, but they only added to the deep sense of blissful serenity that was creeping into my soul. The whole time, he had said nothing. We just sat there, leaning against each other, soaking up the surroundings. When the sun started getting too low, he pulled out a camera, one of those that print out the picture on the spot, took a snap of the horizon, blue meeting blue in a flare of gold, and handed me the picture. I looked at it for a long minute and put it into the cloth bag, wordlessly, as he started the motor to head back.

As we alighted at my apartment, he finally spoke, "Same time tomorrow." I nodded.

---------

The third day was not quite so pleasant. I was alarmed when we pulled up into a hospital. I hate hospitals. He knew that already. I can't stand the atmosphere of pain and loss, can't stand the sight of blood and violence, am liable to faint at the sight of a needle. But he gripped me tightly by the arm and led me inside. He spoke to a nurse, who seemed familiar with him, and she led us into the emergency ward.

Nobody stood still in that place. In fact, they were always in a rush. And with good reason. In the first 5 minutes there we saw at least six patients wheeled in with gruesome injuries or symptoms. One man had been in an accident, and was bleeding so profusely that the blanket covering him was entirely bathed in blood. They wasted no time in taking him into an operating room.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to run. But he still held my arm tightly. Not cruelly, in the physical sense, but cruelly nonetheless. A nurse and a woman doctor wheeled in another guy who appeared to have been knifed. There were two gaping slashes across his chest and stomach, bleeding red, red blood. The nurse seemed frantic and kept saying that the operating rooms were full, and left to find someone who could do something about it. The doctor examined the man closely and suddenly seemed alarmed. "This can't wait," she said aloud into the air and beckoned to me. "You, press this down against this wound to staunch the bleeding. I am going to stitch the other wound right here. He has lost a lot of blood." And she handed me a strip of gauze. Just like that. I obeyed mindlessly.

It took her only a minute. She then moved on to the wound I was covering and stitched it up quickly and expertly. She examined her handiwork and nodded to herself. Then, she did the strangest thing. She pressed her palm against his forehead, closed her eyes and said a quiet blessing. And left, without a word to me.

I was still holding the blood-drenched gauze. I looked at my friend and he nodded. I put it into the little cloth bag with the blade of grass and the picture of the sea. The grass had left a green splotch across the picture, and now I was adding a blood stain to it. Strangely, I did not feel guilty about doing so.

We walked out and he talked. Here comes the speech, I thought. But this time I listened most carefully.

"You see it as a place of pain and suffering. But I see it as a place of unwavering care and heroism. That blood is the mark of both. Without darkness, there is no light.

The Green of Joy, the Blue of Serenity, the Red of Suffering, they are all part of one tapestry. Look at the embroidery on the cloth bag closely. It appears to be made of all colours, yet it appears to be made of just one colour.

In trying to avoid pain, you ended up losing joy. Life is not meant to be spent avoiding feelings but embracing them. Lose one colour, and you will slowly find yourself losing them all, and the resulting gray existence is even more intolerable than the very pain you set out to avoid."

I cried. I stood there in front of his car and I cried like a baby. He took me into his arms and rocked me slowly. I think I must have bleached the shoulder of his shirt with my tears that day.

I returned his bag a week later, because I sensed it was precious to him. The blade of grass dried up and the bloody cloth turned brown, and I threw them away, but I kept the stained picture. I had found my colours.

X-------------X-------------X

Twenty Four

That's how old I will be tomorrow.

My birthday is usually something I mark on my blog with just a few words, wrapping it up with an indignant "See! See! That's how old I am. I'm not a kid anymore!" But not this time. I want to say more this time, because, in many ways, this has been my most difficult year. The most brutal, to be precise.

There is little point in dwelling on what happened; a lot of bad things happened, each different but related, each independently mind-numbing, but together, almost lethal. And yet, I feel obligated to at least make a note of what I did wrong. My best friend, an avid war-game strategist, put it in his characteristically blunt but accurate fashion, "Nobody can stand alone against an attack on multiple fronts." That was indeed my mistake. In my infinite ego, I believed I could put mind over matter, mind over emotion. And I believed I could do it alone.

I've come out with my body and spirit badly shaken, but with no lasting damage. I hope. My improbable saviour was actually this blog, and my blogger friends. Well... not so improbable. But I have learnt my lesson. I'll try not to bear every burden by myself. Not while I still have friends. As John Dorian would put it, "I can't do this on my own, I know, I'm no Superman."

Cheers,
Prashanth.

Talk to a girl about dragons...

... and likely she will think you are so weird that she will not talk to you again.

Or at least, that was the situation a few years ago. Perhaps, after reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, they are more forgiving of such things. I do not know.

The thing I like about Harry Potter is that it has successfully crossed all boundaries that traditionally bind the fantasy fan demographics. People of all ages read it. As many girls read it as guys. As many... er... normal people as geeks read it. On the other hand, the good old fantasy hits like Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, and Lord of the Rings do not have such a universal audience. They are generally considered the province of weird and immature geeks.

Case in point: I made a joke about Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in that short story and nobody thought it was particularly out of place. Consider instead if I write a story in which one guy asks another for the fifty rupees he owes him and the chap makes a Jedi-like gesture with his fingers and commands, "I don't owe you any money." If anybody laughs I will go on to a Yoda-style "Return my money, you must. Else, in grave danger you are." But I don't really see anybody laughing.

I was quite chagrined to find out how few people have in fact watched Star Wars or read Lord of the Rings. I remember a conversation with a friend that went something like this:
She: A blogger called Wookie commented on my blog... who or what is a Wookie anyway?
Me: Chewbacca is a Wookie.
She: Who or what is a Chewbacca?
Me: Chewbacca is Han Solo's co-pilot.
She: Who is Han Solo?
Me: sigh.

My brother happened to make a passing mention of Lord of the Rings to my s-i-l a few days after his wedding and she reportedly asked what that was. Once again, that made me go sigh. So much for the educated young woman of today! If I block a doorway, stamp my umbrella on the ground and yell, "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!" she will more likely send me to a mental asylum than pretend to be a Balrog.

But, wait, all hope is not lost, young fantasy-lover. Thanks to J. K. Rowling. The day will come when a guy can talk to a girl about dragons and she will ask him what his favourite kind is.

Cheers,
Prashanth.

P.S. Try this party riddle and let me know if anybody laughs. I am not responsible for any health hazards that may result, though :)

Q: Why didn't Umpire David Shepherd go to Bilbo Baggins' farewell party?
A: Because it was his Eleventy-First birthday!

Are kids these days losing the reading habit?

The Hindu today carried a news item that caught my eye. Incidentally, it had appeared in the New York Times yesterday. [link]

Essentially, what it says is that the habit of reading for pleasure is disappearing among the younger generation. They are either hooked on to their computers, X-Boxes, iPods and other gizmos, or they hang out with their friends. Reading is fast becoming "uncool", and though the Harry Potter phenomenon has helped, it has not quite done enough to arrest the trend.

Although this is neither new nor unexpected, seeing something as a hard statistic rather than a vague gut feeling makes a certain impression. This disturbing trend is not unique to the US. It is quite visible even in India, granted of course that the situation is not as bad.

For practically my whole life, I've been subjected to comments on my addiction to reading. Too many times have I heard some acquaintance of my parents say something like "Are you still reading a book a day? How thick are your glasses now?"

These are the same people whose kids spend as much time watching television as I do reading books and end up with far thicker glasses.

These are the same people who chide their kids to be more like "clever" me who "studied at IIT", never figuring that reading at an early age improves a child's mental faculties.

In the United States, parents lose influence over their children's lives at an early age. So it is not easy to place blame there... it is a somewhat complex social issue. But in India, if someone never got into the reading habit, I would place the blame squarely at their parents' feet. Not that the rest of the world has no role to play, but because parental influence is the easiest controllable factor.

But the complex social issue I was talking about, is that the loss of the reading habit is a small scene in a larger play. American society as a whole seems to be headed on a path of intellectual decline. I am reminded of an article I read in the bulletin of the American Contract Bridge League, talking about how poker seems to be the only card game kids are interested in playing. The game of bridge has precious few takers these days among the younger generation. Bridge simply doesn't offer instant gratification the way poker does. It takes a long time to learn to play well at bridge, and the game is less dramatic. It is infinitely more rewarding - for an intellectual person. There are similar statistics on the decline of participation in chess and in fact, all activities that involve deep thinking.

I really feel that Indian society can easily avoid falling into the same pattern, because of the strong emphasis on academic performance from a young age. If only our school system trained our youth to think instead of learn by rote. If I get into the contrast between the Central Board teaching and testing system vis-a-vis the Tamil Nadu State Board, I will end up talking forever. Suffice to say that I think the two important influences in a child's life in India - school and parents - need to be fixed. A little more awareness, a little more effort, and our country will be so far ahead in the world that nobody can catch up with us.

Cheers,
Prashanth.

Potter-mania hits town

Did you see Harry Potter's new hairstyle? It no longer resembles mine *sigh*

Did you see that girl who plays Luna? She's way too good looking to be playing Loony Lovegood...

Helena Bonham Carter is perfect for playing Bellatrix Lestrange.

Those Thestrals look scary na... wait, I shouldn't be able to see Thestrals...

Have you bought your tickets yet?