I cried for you, India

Although I can see the Burj Khalifa from our building, it is not close enough for me to see the tricolor lights on it. Moreover, the lights are on the other side, and a busy evening yesterday prevented me from driving up to a vantage point to view it. A night eluded by sleep later, I wake up late but in time to catch the national carnival at Rajpath.  No matter how ritualistic and routine the parade might have become after 68 years, it evokes a distinct sense of nationalism that warms even the white, wintry capital air.

That’s what a national day does. It makes the country a veritable entity to whom we pledge our uncompromising love and loyalty, irrespective of our disagreements with the bigger realities. It puts us in a brief moment of suspended reality and converts each of us into a microcosm of a territory that we closely and passionately identify with. We become citizens and nothing else. Suddenly, we imagine ourselves to be in a faraway fairy tale space from where we will probably never return.

I opened the TV today to a tableau from Haryana depicting the girl child, highlighting the Beti Bachao campaign. To watch the display only after a day I watched ‘Parched’, a gut wrenching movie on the plight of Indian women in its hinterlands, a movie that used every bit of coarseness in its command to tear into my core sensibilities, was strange and ironic.

As the spectacle now unfolds and I watch a nation substantiate its constitution only two days after I watched Aligarh (a movie that didn’t release here and I had to wait for long to watch it online), I wonder about our rights to lead our private lives the way we want it, without bringing harm to others. I wonder about our misplaced sense of morality and righteousness. I am disturbed by the fact that beneath the surface of all the nationalism that I am witnessing before me, there is a different story.

It was hard to come to terms with the travesty of it all. We are free, yet not fully so. We have our rights, yet are hounded and persecuted at every corner. We aren’t what we proudly purport ourselves to be on this day. It’s a false sense of unity that is displayed, a fake feeling of pride that we flaunt. The basic tenets of humanity and liberty have got squished between the rational and the ridiculous. The hypocrisy hurts.

(I must pause here and stand..the national anthem is playing…)

It is sloppy to confess it, but as the national anthem played, stinging tears welled up and I felt a tightness in my chest. Partly inspired by the innate sense of patriotism one can never shrug off, and partly with sadness.

With the most beautiful piece of music I have ever heard in my life playing in the background, I wept for a nation that has yet to emerge from regressive attitudes and moral double standards, from the deep rooted prejudices and parochial mindsets.

I wept for a Republic.

I wept for us.

Just for kicks!

(Canna Lily plant..picture shot on the weekend.)

Painting and photography are fairly recent interests that I started pursuing during brief periods of ennui in my life. Boredom (caused by repetition) strikes me now and then, and that, in my opinion is not a bad thing entirely. It has often inspired me to explore new areas of creativity, hitherto unattempted.

In the initial days of my brush with art, I remember a friend remarking mockingly that I was on the wrong side of age to get started with inane things like painting. There have also been no dearth of comments about how not having a compulsion to do a day job or not having to ferry kids to classes allows me to indulge in recreation of various kinds. Something for something, I would always say.

That said, not all my pursuits have been of much practical use, for they don’t fetch me money. Writing poetry doesn’t, neither does painting; least of all photography. No, they don’t even get much attention or recognition.

Lack of returns apart, I can quote other trivial reasons for chucking my interests if I want to. It is funny how I pore over the camera settings before taking a picture on my Nikon while the husband, who claims to have the best phone camera in town, just aims, shoots and turns in a sunset picture closely as pretty as mine. I smile, concealing my feeble frustration, and give him his due credit. And as if to authenticate my creative claims, I take a picture like the one I have posted with this blog piece and say with mock conceit, “Try creating this piece of photographic art on your phone. Technology, I say, has forced man to jettison his creative instincts. Tut tut.” He gives me a disdainful look and shoves the phone back into his pocket.

If money and mass appeal alone constitute one’s essential definition of success, I should have quit long ago. Of course, there are brief moments of disappointment now and then, but none so acute that will make me give up my exploits.

I will always wait for those pockets of boredom that will make me explore new things to do, like the one I am presently contemplating. New, crazy ideas set the pace of my life and rev it up. The economics of it may not add up favourably and there may be no returns, but then again, there are things we do just for kicks. They keep the everyday blues away, don’t they?

Umbrellas

(Oil on canvas)

The umbrella must be one of the most perverse human inventions. How it hinders the feel of rain on the skin! Education and judgment often robs the most intimate of emotions and experiences from our lives.

That said, nothing represents the rain as much as the umbrella. Curious, how some things are loved for what they symbolize, than for themselves!

And that holds true as much for people as for things.