Let My Country Awake

By Mithu Chakraborty

Singapore

In the Black Hole

By Arijit Das
Kolkata, India


I had no idea how long I had been unconscious. I felt sick and weary. My body ached as though every bone had been crushed. I looked around myself. It was dark all around. The darkness felt strange - it was blacker than pitch! It was cold. It was quiet. And it was scary.
I desperately wanted to run out of this darkness. Even in this eternal silence I tried hard to pick up the faintest of the sound that would lead me out of here. And yes, I did hear something. It was a soft thumbing sound. But soon did I realize that it was the sound of own heart. It was pumping faster than usual. I felt my pulse racing.
I tried remembering the events that had brought me here. Could recollect nothing. I tried to calm down. I spread out my arms in the darkness to feel for objects around me. There wasn't anything or any obstacle around. I decided to walk ahead cautiously. So before taking every step, first I would feel for objects around me with my hands. If its all clear then I would stand on one foot while feeling the ground around me with the other.
As I was about to take my first step did I realize something. And I froze. For I had just discovered something that made me doubt if I was still alive. When I tried to feel the ground around me did I realize that I had been floating in this eternal darkness. 

Recycle

By Aishwarya Rajamani
Bangalore, India

Neurons, they sift the specs of memory
Dust away the new, map out a landscape,
Of all the scrap pressed under pressure
Like the piles of brown records from office.
Time-line equals the life-span
And all that is in between pop up
Waiting to be caught and clipped to the roll.


Wheels of roll exhausted,
yet there's more to be clipped and played.
Scrap that has been snipped and squared,
fit into others like a giant,complex jigsaw.

Oh! What a mess.
Oh! What can be made out of rusted, stale junk?

U.N.F.R.I.E.N.D.S

By Arindam Guptaray

Kolkata, India

When we were young we clearly knew who our friends were. If I ask my daughter who her good friends are, she would give me a list of at least 5 friends in the descending order of likeness. I think the clear-cut demarcation between friends and acquaintances lasts till you graduate from college. I can clearly list my friends and enemies from college. I was with them at every social and cultural event.  We would walk with our arms around each other or a hand on a shoulder, an action that only meant we were Homo Sapiens and nothing else. But as we grew older, the definition of friend and acquaintance become grey. Anyone whom we met became our friend. Colleagues from work, the next door neighbor, the dentist, son’s classmates’ moms and even the cute girl at the corner grocery store were all friends. They might not invite you to their New Year’s Eve party or their own wedding but they were still friends. Friends always remain as friends unless they do something really bad like stealing your boyfriend or puking in your bathroom and using your new Ralph Lauren towel to wipe it.

The dynamics of friendship have remained the same from the days of Adam till the end of the twentieth century. There were minor changes here and there. Here’s an example: In the early times it was your prized fig leaf whose desecration by a fellow friend caused you to declare him as someone who wasn’t a friend as opposed to the towel custom in the twentieth century. When you liked a girl you would ask her for her cave number, pigeon number or phone number based on the century of your existence.

With the arrival of the Internet, people thought about toying with the idea of friendship but none were bold enough to add the F word to their software. During the IRC days, you could follow someone (the same concept now used by Twitter), so that if that person was online, you were notified. Yahoo called it Contacts, a definition which screamed out the words “No emotions please!”.  It took a maverick like Google to start calling contacts as friends. Still, the implications were very limited. Based on the census of 2002, only .5% of potential daters exchanged gmail ids, the rest opted for phone numbers.

With the advent of Facebook we went back to the kindergarten days, of clearly defining who our friends are. Thanks to some innovative programs we can also classify them based on their date worthiness, sexiness, wealth and appetite. It was a way to tell the world, “Look how many friends I have, you little anti-socialite!” It only took a few clicks (and sometimes major convincing) to add friends, but along with that came the new word in the English dictionary “Unfriend” (a word that Office 2007 still thinks is spelt incorrectly). You can Unfriend someone with just one click. The list of friends became evidence that can be submitted to the court of law. You are an accomplice to a bank heist? Just prove that you unfriended the mastermind before the robbery happened and go scot free.  An overzealous husband has put a gun to your head for sleeping with his wife? Don’t worry just show him that you unfriended her 5 days before the day he saw you coming out of his bedroom. Who will make love to a person who Unfriended you? Even Othello would understand that.

The problem with the digital definition of “Friends” was that people would unfriend you for trivial reasons.  The paperwork involved in unfriending someone in the pre-Facebook era was daunting enough for someone not to go through it. But now it is instant and easy. People unfriend their friends for trivial reasons. Don’t like the color of the shirt he is wearing? Unfriend him. Her grammar sucks? Unfriend her.  She is a feminist? Unfriend her. He is a MCP? Unfriend him.

I had my fair share of being unfriended by ex-friends.  One ex friend did not like my comment “You are looking beautiful in this picture”. She thought it was too demeaning. How can you judge beauty? The strange part is when asked why she unfriended me, she refused to divulge the reason. The first answer was, “It’s not you but it’s me”. Then she said, “Actually I was arranging my friends in alphabetical order and did not know where to put you!” I think she thought I was a rockstar and my name might be just a symbol like the “artist who was formerly called Prince”. (I am sure this is the reason why Prince changed his name back to Prince). I had to pay a private investigator a huge fortune to find out the real reason.

I suffer from OCD as far as accepting or rejecting friends. If I don’t accept or reject someone within five minutes of the request, I start gasping for oxygen, my skin dries up, I get a terrible headache along with other symptoms that are best left undocumented. Once my wife left her Facebook session open with the screen that had the dialog box open regarding a friend request. I accepted it. Someone on my friend list did not like it. It seemed my wife’s new friend had bought the same sari as my ex-friend. I was unaware of the rule that you can only have friends with mutually exclusive choice of saris.

I wanted to write this article to wish all my friends a happy friendship day. As a protest against Hallmark I want to celebrate it on a day not designated by Hallmark. (An act that will result in being unfriended by all the Hallmark employees on my list). So here it is….

“Wishing you a happy fri………….”! Hey! Wait a minute. How come I have one friend less today than I did yesterday?

Mrs stands for Mistress????

By Samarpita Mukherjee Sharma
Raipur, India

By now, everyone who knows me, is well aware that I hate wrong usage of English Grammar. What I hate more are the people who do it confidently.

Recently, I went for a regular check-up to my endocrinologist. While waiting for my turn to come, I was sent to the assistant doctor/intern who usually does the basics, like check the BP, weight, symptoms and put them down on the prescription sheet. Here is an excerpt from the conversation with this certain lady, the assistant, which I guarantee shall leave you in splits:

[Note: I shall refer to the assistant as Ass, since that is what she ends up being!]

Ass: Naam?

Me: Mrs Samarpita Sharma, file par likha hai

Ass: Age?

Me: 30

Ass: Aap married ho? [looking very very doubtful]

Me: Err...haan

Ass: Fir aapne Mis’ess kyun bola? aap toh mistress hain.

Me: Uhh...nahin Mrs ko Mis’ess bolte hain. Mistress is an offensive word.

Ass: aapko english nahin aati theek se. aap check kar lena!
Me: It is a contraction of Mistress, but when we refer to Mrs, it is for Mis'ess and not the other offensive word you just used.
Ass: Aap galat bol rahe ho. Mrs ko mistress hi bolte hain.

I laugh and leave it at that, deciding I shall take up this offensive [not as much coz she referred to me as mistress, but more coz i had to interact with her] with my doctor whom I know very well. When informed about this funny incident, he was flabbergasted...but in a country with so many dialects and regional languages, it IS very difficult to find qualified people who have the basic knowledge of the English language.

You may ask, so what's the big deal? English isn't even our national language!! Ho-hum! But it's used more in any profession, compared to any other regional language! Deal with it!!

[To those who are still ignorant of facts:
“Mrs” originated as a contraction of the honorific “Mistress”, the feminine of “Mister” or “Master”, which was originally applied to both married and unmarried women. The split into “Mrs” for married women from “Ms” and “Miss” began during the 17th century.]

Seasons of Flight

By Abdullah Khan
New Delhi, India

Seasons of Flight is an account of a journey undertaken by Prema from a scenic Nepali village to a culturally and socially multi-hued metropolis in the U.S. The journey in this case is not only the geographical distance, but also the mental and the cultural one.

When Prema's name is drawn in a diversity lottery for green cards, she decides to leave her village, a caring lover, an absent sister who has joined a Maoist group, an old father and memories of her long dead mother for a place where she will be a complete stranger.

She arrives in the U.S. and finds that things are not as she imagined them to be. And so begins her struggle to survive and find her place in this totally different and new milieu.

Confused, she is never being sure about what she is doing. But one thing she is sure about is that she is not going back. As she drifts from one place to another, physically and psychologically, she meets people with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds and tries to understand the “American way of life”.

Unlike most protagonists of novels by non-resident South Asian authors, she does not mourn the loss of her homeland nor does she regret her decision. On the contrary, she gets rid of the cultural baggage of her home country and adopts the new social mores of her adopted country.

Sexual awakening

She doesn't think twice while having affairs, including one-night stands, with various American men. When Luis, an affable half-Latino, comes into her life, she is strongly attracted to him. She decides to move in with him. Strangely, her Nepali friends don't see anything wrong with her move. Back home, the same people would have branded her ‘a whore' for the same act.

This makes it clear that parameters of morality are not static in nature and changes as we move across cultures and societies.

Though the story mostly follows the protagonist in Los Angeles, we constantly hear echoes of the war in Nepal. The conflict between the Maoists and the Nepali military has been interpolated so discreetly that it doesn't disturb the narrative of Prema's journey. This is what gives this novel, which is largely apolitical, a slightly political angle but the author stays on the fence, refusing to take sides.

Prema's sexual awakening is dealt with in a forthright, but delicate, manner. The sex scenes are direct and devoid of pretension, without shades of vulgarity or obscenity. This is something few writers can accomplish. This is a delightful read about self-discovery, sexual awakening and search for an identity in a foreign land. Lucidly written, the book also gives new insight into an immigrant life in America.

After finishing this book, I felt guilty about missing Manjushree's debut novel The Tutor of History. Now, I will certainly reach out for that.

This review was first published in the Hindu

A Day of Introspection

By Pritha Lal
Springville, Utah, USA

Not a single tricolor anywhere in my line of vision today. No strains of Vande Mataram or Jana Gana Mana, no live coverage of the PM's speech on television.. and yet..for so many Indians like me who are away from their country.. it is a day to retrospect. Got an email this morning.. one of those fun spams that you get about the facts and figures on India and how it should make you proud that the 3rd richest man is an Indian and we came up with the zero and were able to perform surgery ages before any one else.
 Yes, emails like that do make me proud as it should any other Indian.. but being an Indian makes me the proudest... what does that mean to me? That is a good question ? what does it mean to people in our generation when they say that.. we have only read about the Indian struggle for independance in our history books, seen Aamir Khan in Lagaan and Ajay Devgan as Bhagat Singh and gotten goosebumps.. we have only watched LOC Kargill and cried at a sentimental song... do we know what it really means to be an Indian.. ??
 What does India encompass in those five letters.... a civilization, a way of live, a diverse culture, traditions, festivals, ... no to me.. it epitomizes LOVE.. in the highest sense of the term...
 More practical individuals than myself will probably scoff at this analogy, but somewhere behind the statistics and economics of our country, there is more. I am not blind to the issues of population, poverty and politics, but just for today leave that aside and look around you...
 Take a snapshot of the country, beautiful children with dirty ragged faces but eyes that shine with stars.. old wrinkles that hide years of experience and affection, beautiful olive skin tones that are as sensitive as they are sensuous to a foreigner, vast open fields, scorching deserts, bustling metros.. and underneath it all a love that binds so many differing communities and denominations together.. Did I forget Godhra, Ayodhya ? No I didn't , but on this day.. Doesn’t it make more sense to talk about what just happened at Mumbai with the rains and how the spirit of India came alive in the way people helped each other out ? Why don't we talk about that ?
 Why don't we talk about the various charitable institutions and hospitals that work tirelessly for the common man, where it doesn't matter what "insurance" we are on.. no one is left without some kind of basic care ? why don't we talk about the simple tradition of making sure when we have a guest., we always have something to offer them ?, why don't we talk about NRIs who have gone home and set up schools, hospitals and other institutions ?
 Yes, I am romantic in my vision of my country and to me that works, not because I am miles away from it and rose tinted glasses work better from a distance, but because I truly believe in that my country epitomizes the mother's love for a child, the purest and the most selfless form of love - one that is unconditional and all giving..
 I wish wonderful things for my country, for my people and hope that in some small way I will be able to cry and laugh with them and carry this nation proudly in my heart, mind and soul no matter where I am on God's wonderful green earth....


Written on I-day, 2005.