Snakes and Ladders ...

Everyday morning I play this game; game of snakes and ladders.

In mornings, I zig-zag through a chaotic maze of traffic laden roads to reach my office. For a sky dwelling God who does play dice, the tiny red dot of my car moving through this plane far below could very much appear like a coin moved through a snake and ladder board. There are five traffic signals on my way to office from home. As I shift through this game board, the sky dwelling God rolls his dice. I speedily approach a traffic signal from afar; the dice stops; the traffic signal suddenly transforms into a snake; or a ladder; dictated by the dice.

Its a snake; its green now; am rushing towards it, the last car in front of me is passing under the green light, and it turns red; it unleashes a barrage of vehicles from the other side. I am swallowed by the snake, set back, bogged down, for minutes before it lets me go.

Sometimes its a ladder; its green now; am rushing towards it, the last car in front me is passing under the green light, and it stays green; I glide past unhindered. I have climbed up the ladder, shaving off minutes from my lap time.

God rolls his dice again. I am nearing the next snake; or ladder.

Free radicals ...

I was generally practicing Brownian motion on the nostalgic Calicut beach.

I ended up there on that fine evening after a hectic day filled with lots of traveling. Before the sun began to paint the skies crimson, I settled down somewhere on the beach with my bare feet dug deeply into the sand and was looking around in general.

There was some kind of religious convention going on at the far end of the beach. Somebody was talking about how God had intended women to be modest and servile to their husbands and why it is so violating the God's decree for women to disregard these social shackles. Two days before I had attended a wedding, where while pronouncing the couple man and wife, the priest read out words from the holy book which went like, "like how your grandmothers served their husbands obediently, you should serve your husband, and God will bless you". I remembered another book I read, which was explaining the cultural system one should follow for better allegiance to a faith, which went like women should treat their husbands as Gods and their leftover food as divine.

I could not help but appreciate the cunning and orchestration. How generations of male manipulators have used the religion as a tool, in the pretext of ensuring a stable social structure, to bind the other sex to a subservient role, and how they have pretty much succeeded in it. The surprising thing is that it is universal! It transcends the boundaries of most religions and rears its face in various forms targeting the same goal.

I accepted this little bit of 'zen' with a rather disappointed heart and generally extended my gaze to the setting sun.

There was a family sitting some distance away from me. A father, a very normal looking man, mother, looking probably very religious, and two teenage girls, their children. Both the girls looked like of college going age, one probably one or maybe two years younger than the other. The girls did not look particularly bound by religion, the elder girl maybe a little.

The elder girl looked more mature, the younger one more peppy and energetic. They were sitting way up on the beach from the sea and the surf. The younger girl obviously wanted to run into the sea, get wet, and laugh out loud when the waves hit her. She was prodding the elder one, egging her to come with her, she did not want to go alone. But the elder one kept refusing, acting like its not appropriate. She tried her mother next. But mother was a definite no no. Fed up, she started pestering her father, he seemed unmoved. During one of these moments her eyes collided with mine staring at her ingloriously; amused by this unfolding drama. One second I got scared, fearing I might be mistaken for a shameless loathsome vulture. But instead I saw a faintly timid smile creeping across her lips and she instantly dropped her eyes. I kept my smile in check with some willfully exerted control.

The father was unmoved. He just kept staring into the setting sun. The elder girl and the mother kept their stature, what the younger one wants is highly inappropriate. At one stage, the younger one went by herself to some distance near the surf, she stood there, looking back hoping her father would follow. But he did not. She came back sadly, and started pulling her father's arms. To my surprise he got up now, he hooked up his white mundu and went with her to the sea holding her hand. She was wild with joy, she was running, dragging him. She jumped on to the waves, she got completely wet, she screamed like hell. Her father stood by her, holding her hand, he was also getting wet, and he was smiling. Her mother looked on rather disapprovingly.

During one of these moments, her eyes collided with mine staring at her ingloriously. This time she smiled, she did not drop her eyes.

I did not check my smile; and in the background I silently erased the patch of disappointment the earlier bit of 'zen' had caused.

There are always free radicals, unforeseen autonomous forces, operating out there, working and spreading on their own, countering the atrocities created by organized propaganda, pulling the human race to an orange color day.

That time of the year again ...

Its that time of the year again, when schools re-open ...

Freshness of new clothes, books, a new haircut?, well, mixed with the disappointment of going back to enclosures;

But children of this era, do they really know free dom, even when the schools are closed? ...

Wild horse of creativity ...

Here, I'm unleashing the wild horse of my creativity;
Many have tried, for ages now, to reign him in;
Critics, skeptics, fore tellers and schools of pessimists.
All in vain, hes still free, untied, and as wild as ever.

Drops of Joy ...

A queer mix of a bunch of stories by Vaikom Muhammed Basheer in a play at Ranga Shankara.

The play showers you with loads of joy and freshness for the sheer ingenuity of its presentation.

The stories selected from countless of them that Basheer wrote faithfully reflects the soul of his writing, covering various ranges of human emotions in a setting of his own. Translating his writing into another language is very tricky, as most of the time the soul of the story is intricately linked to the writing style and language itself. Sprinkling it with Malayalam dialogs was a nice touch :-) it kept the stories closer to the way they were actually written.

The play experiments with the various schemes available for a play write to convey the story. With dialogs, without dialogs, with its nostalgic music, the narrator in the middle of the story in which he is a character himself and more. If you think of it, you can't do quite the same thing with movies, as they lack the sense of directness a play brings to the audience.

And the play abounds with cheerfully clever ideas to depict various elements of the stories. A bunch of old tyres stacked up for a well, Basheer's gramophone - a strange contraption made from scrap, plates for the gramophone records, palm leaf fans for twigs that Narayani throws up the jail wall, a curled up red cloth for the fire lit in a gas stove, and a garden hose for the 'Vishwa vikhyathamaya mookk' and no Mookkan himself!

Theres obviously much more to a play than just acting!

It must be immense satisfaction bowing to an audience thats clapping so much with joy and admiration.

:-)

The Art of Getting Lost ...

Trekking from Kodai to Munnar ...

Pursuit of happiness ...

How different is your happiness from mine?

What makes you happy may not do the same to me. What erodes you of your happiness may not have the same effect on me. This tends to give an idea that happiness is relative.

But is that really true?

I think not. Mostly human beings can only experience happiness in more or less the same way. Happiness as an emotion that people can experience is not relative. It rather probably has an absolute measure.

Consider this. When someone is most happy, there is not really a way for you to feel more happier than her by employing how many ever of the different devices at your disposal. So, there are probably different levels of happiness that you can experience, leading to this level of most happiness and unless your genetic wiring is not significantly different from other human beings, the happiness that you can experience at each level is more or less the same as others.

What really differs is what can make your happiness go up these levels. Some need to employ a lot of resources to achieve a particular level of happiness. But for some, seemingly simple things are able to push their mind up the happiness levels.

Now from simple economic principles, isn't employing fewer resources to achieve the same payback more efficient? ;-)

Then there is the question of sustaining happiness ... :-)

I hate all that silence ...

.....

No Beginning, No End ...

......

Threads, story telling, books with no pictures ...

Recently, I saw a play titled 'Arabian Night', by Silver Blue productions at the Alliance Francaise. The play unravels itself through five monologues, acted out by five people, sequentially yet simultaneously.

Each monologue represents five threads in the story. They are all part of the same story, progressing in their own line of existence. So each actor makes the mind follow the thread he or she owns, till their quanta of time expires and the mind has to stack it and shift to the next thread as it starts up from where it left off.

The threads do intertwine and the characters do interact. The playwright has nicely used time slice allocation to each thread for conveying this. When there is no interaction, each thread gets a large time slice, and takes me forward a large step through its story. When they are close together and are facing each other, the time slices get smaller, and smaller. Though the characters do talk to each other at these close encounters, the threads never completely lose their story teller posture. And at these times the mind goes to overdrive shifting between the threads, stacking and retrieving contexts that differ only minutely at present.

And there were very few props. So the entire setting is left to your imagination, even the physical separation or closeness between the characters and dimensions of the world in which they exist. I liked to be reminded that I used to like books without pictures better, when I was a kid.

One no-relation phrase that improbability drive brought into my mind as a result of this whole episode was the title of the final year project one of my seniors did, "communicating sequential processes."

:-)