coming of age

last year i ran away. from people. from familiarity. from the routine. i was tired, ready to scream out against the ordinary. i drove to the hills, perhaps hoping that within the folds of the mountains, i will find clues to understand myself, including the need to escape. i had never taken off like that before. i look back on that day with myself with fondness. i thought i was going to do this often.

but this time around i escaped that very solitude. i sought out people, familiarity, a day where i dont search for meanings, for purpose, where i dont really reflect or take stock of things, where i dont make resolutions.

how is it that what was so right and perfect once is just not what you even consider later. the riddles are much the same, but the routes to crack it change all the time. or is it that there is really no solution, no end of the puzzle ever. the routes are all there is. and as i have gone about avoiding the beaten track and taking convoluted pathways, have i come to a point where i am ready to be surprised by the ordinary and if i am not, it doesnt put me off either.

i dont mind the chit chat of life. the conversations i seek may very well lie in all this general blah. i may never find them but its ok as long as i know i can run away from it whenever i wish to. perhaps the point is that i am an eternal escapist. i am getting to like it now.

Post a comment

There was a time, we could, on any issue, say with ease
No comments, that’s it, and there the matter would cease

Whats this rage now with commenting
Is it a war we are fomenting

A war of words, of sarcasm and wit,
Of ideas, of picking on every nit

(Microsoft word too wants its byte
As I am typing, it says- fragment, please revise)

Back and forth, criss and cross
In the virtual world, even a scrap gathers no moss

Doesn’t all this make life racier
Then why has my cousin singled me as a warrior

the long summer ahead

This pic was taken in the evening of what was one of the last days of winter in the city. It had rained the night before and in the morning, and was very windy through the day. The wind was icy, it must have snowed in the mountains. Not the ones you can see here, for these are just the shivaliks, the starting of the Himalayas.

This time winter and spring played with our linear ordering of seasons. And we must be thankful the pleasant season had actually lasted so long. But then, the human heart yearns for more and more of the good thing, it can never be satisfied with what it has.

Winter is a love story. We keep waiting for love but it creeps in imperceptibly. It always takes you by surprise. And it has layers and layers, each closing in on the other. Shawl, half sweater, full sweater and jackets. Blanket, then quilt, then the rajai. And the heater.

There is never enough that one could have of love. At its peak, I would still want it to get colder, the temperature to drop further. It went to 0 this time, I wanted snow. I went to shimla and walked on snow, I wanted it to snow then and there and stay for days there.

And like love, one fine day its over. Its probably been in the offing for a while, but nevertheless you never know till you wake up one day to declare summer. You can fight the inevitable by continuing with the warm water baths and by not switching on the fan, but you can pin the end, almost to the day. The day you stopped saying ‘I love you’, the day you woke up with bad dreams because it got hot under the quilt.

And then the long wait begins. You think you will never see it again. Yet you keep planning for it. You think you will make do with affairs for love may never happen again and go to hill stations. You think you will never live through summer to see another winter. But you will. When you have given up altogether, the nip in the air returns. This love story will survive. Till global warming do us part?

the house baker didnt build

That would be my house, for one. I mean I can not hope that the house I can afford one day will be designed by Laurie Baker as he passed away on april first.

I first read about Baker when I was 13 or 14 in one of the supplements of times of India and in an article written by cartoonist Abu Abraham if I remember correctly. This article was called- the house baker built- or something like that. its with me still, somewhere among my newspaper cuttings, it was probably the earliest of the collection, a practice which was then pleasure but now is a professional requirement. The writer spoke about his home which Laurie Baker had designed. At one point he says how a room had been so designed as to avoid cutting down a jackfruit tree, and the area around the tree was further made into a small sitting space in the open. He also mentioned that Baker had once designed a house on top of a hill facing the sea. I think it was that line which decided it for me. I had always wanted that exact same kind of location for a house of my own. And had figured that it would mean somewhere along the coastline of India, and preferably the western coast. Years later the Himalayas caught my fascination and became the preferred location for the dream house (though I still moaned about not having the sea side). Ya ya, this is a great deal of wishful thinking but whats wrong with that? But whatever be the spatial location of my dream, I always hoped it would be made on the principles of architecture that Baker’s life and work represented.

You would think all this sounds pretentious, but i dont think Baker would have minded. For Baker was a Gandhian, it seems he considered his chance meeting with Gandhi as the one which changed his life. He is one more instance of the exciting possibilities within Gandhi's thought. He specialised in low cost housing which was simple, functional as well as aesthetic . Most importantly it used locally available material, and avoided as much as possible cement and steel. His buildings blended into the surroundings, and were sensitive to local ecology. He wouldn’t chop trees, remove rocks or flatten a slope but incorporate them all into the structure. I just read that he described his own house as a blanket draped over a hillock. Wow. I have never been in a Baker home, I have only seen pictures. But I do think that a great deal of traditional architecture does make immense sense in terms of weather and ecology.

Baker died on April 1^st. Perhaps it is a way of alerting us to the joke that we have made of our homes and built spaces in the race to become the country with the most malls, the most ugly and energy guzzling buildings.