If the World is Flat, Why am I on Edge?

Climbing Mount Everest in Cupertino

I knew that women could be mean to one another but I didn’t know how catty, until last week, when a charming and good-natured friend invited me on a walk up in the hills of Cupertino.

We wanted to meet because we hadn’t seen each other in over a year and so I suggested that we go for a walk somewhere–you know, chat and be out in the sun simultaneously–at which point she said she had a nice walking route in mind for us.

“You can do a little uphill, can’t you?” she asked before we set out.

We walked up Prospect Avenue, a road poorly named because it’s a rather dull Cupertino artery with no prospects of cheer or challenge. “This road is a joke,” I thought. “I can do this in my sleep.” But when we veered left into Via Roncole, my friend had a surprise for me. In minutes, Via Roncole opened into a greener, wider corridor of homes with stunning landscaping and dense spruces. We began climbing gently.

My sunglasses misted over. I wiped my upper lip with the end of my sleeve. I was starting to like my friend less and less, especially as she began talking more and more. How was she chatting effortlessly when all I could do was feel my heartbeat in my nostrils? I was blowing steam off my ears. This was not like me.

I rarely sweat when I exercise. A personal trainer I once visited told me that if I didn’t sweat while working out, I wasn’t working hard enough. But what if there were people in the world who didn’t sweat no matter how much they worked out? What if I were one of them, lady? When the trainer kept repeating her pet mantra, I dropped her like a dumbbell.

I went back to my pricey YMCA and continued paying up a monthly deposit the way people pay for water, gas and electricity. Typically, at the Y, I’m on my treadmill listening to Anderson Cooper rant about the latest disaster. I’ve broken into a sweat watching him discuss the New York bomber. My pinkies have turned clammy watching the man analyze the latest oil spill. Other than that, my pores, like roll-on deodorants, believe in never letting the world see me sweat.

So when my friend offered to take me for a walk, I expected to hang by her side all cool and dry, my sunglasses snappy on my nose, my hair exactly the way I had combed it when I left the house. But my friend apparently had other plans, one of them being to deprive me of oxygen and kill me before I hit my half-century mark the following year. Half an hour into what became a steady wave of hills leading to Mount Everest, I began wondering if I would reach the end of my journey before I reached the end of the road.

“How come you didn’t tell me I needed to bring a bottle of water, huh?” I snapped at the friend who was fast relegating to the status of a Facebook friend, a mere acquaintance, you know, a pretend friend.

“But I don’t need water on this walk,” she said. We were catching our breath, facing an unending rise of Comer Drive. On the house to our right, sprinklers sprayed and teased. Water wasted down the road. An Evergreen pear was drowning in gobs of water. The lawn glistened under the morning light, wet and glorious. Nature loved water. Everything loved water. I needed water. Who was this woman? Was she a camel?

My friend was breaking a small sweat, I could tell, where her hairline crept by her ears. Noe’s gardening truck passed by. Could I, may be, hitch a ride and leave this walk here and now and elope with Noe into the kingdom of level ground and unfriend this lady fast? But the strips of gossip she tossed at me kept me in step. Every time we reached the foot of another hill, she held out another carrot of enticing news. Now my friend was talking about her son’s two-room apartment in a swanky town. I listened. Good friend to know, I thought, even though this buddy had turned into the fiend in my stable of friends. I was paying for this friendship with my blood, sweat and thirst.

Then she started firing questions rapidly about this and that. “Cannot talk,” I signed, bending and hauling my body uphill. “I’ll tell you after we’re done? We’re done, right?” My shins buckled under me and my Canon hung from my neck like a slab of granite.

“What d’you mean?” she said. “We’re just about to encounter the second of many slopes.”

The second? So we braved yet another nasty hill and, now, her cell phone pierced the morning silence. She wasn’t going to pick it up, was she? No way, she couldn’t talk unless she wanted to sound like a porn star. But my friend reached into her pocket. A long distance call. She began lilting into the phone–like Michelle Obama on a conference call with the White House Chef after a manicure. Is this woman for real, I wondered, envying her boundless stamina. Now water was trickling down her ears but she continued to speak into the phone like she was having her hair styled.

Pretty soon, hills of terraced vineyards rose into view. I marveled at how fortunate I was to live in a place where, minutes from my home, spectacular vistas awaited. The next few uphill jaunts faded in importance as we stopped to admire the reds of the Japanese Maple against rolling meadows of green. Everywhere, on this summer morning, the bird of paradise poked into the azure sky, its orange beak shiny and petulant. Eucalyptuses rose along our path. Their oily scent lingered in the air.

A steady breeze blew, cooling us off as we began our descent towards Parker Ranch hitting plain ground. From here on my prospects looked excellent and I realized now why Prospect Avenue may have been named thus.

I had made it. And now, water? Who needed water? I gave a sidelong glance at my walking partner. She had grown more endearing on our downhill stretch for reasons I just couldn’t seem to explain.

Dear Victoria. Keep your secret.

I was reading about the training of the New York bomb suspect in the New York Times this morning when I stepped out of my front door to pick up a postcard I'd received in the mail. It screamed: “Hello, Bombshell!”

I've been called many things, including "aunty-grandma", by my niece's two lovely children. But no one, not my husband, not my many male friends, no one, has ever, ever addressed me as "bombshell".

In five minutes, I went from feeling anxious about the potential threat of a "bomb" blast in a public thoroughfare to feeling lightheaded about the word's many possible extensions and their connotations.

The "bombshell"  card created for me was an elaborate and, not for want of a word, revelatory booklet. It promised me that it would give me a push-up. It showed me several examples of how today’s young ladies have hydro-thermal lifted breasts powered by under-wired, electromagnetic bras. Inside the booklet, there was a surprise: a card with which I could go over to a physical store to get myself a free power panty.

Wait a minute, I thought. My body is no twin-engine Cessna. Why do I need all that propelling? I didn't jet-set in high-octane circles. Shrugging at the many options for revving up the taxiing curve of my sensuality, I wrote a gentle "thanks, but no thanks" note to the very kind old lady who sent me the card.

My dear Victoria:

I got the card you sent me last week and I thank you for wanting to share your secret with me.

I don't understand why all your models pose the way they do. I'm mortified that my twenty-something daughter refuses to see what I see. Don't you see, how in all their photographs, teens and young adults now pose like girls with a hundred un-Victorian secrets? They plump up their lips, pout them just so and smolder through smoky eyes, their hands on their thrusting hip and their bodies tilted just enough so the profile of their bodies burns through the lens? The cleavage you give your girls amazes me. So much so that we, as a family, have stopped traveling. Last year, when my son suggested that our family go to Kenya to see the Great Rift Valley, I said, "Why, son. Let's go to that store called Victoria's Secret."

My daughter doesn't understand me when I tell her that the models you hire aren't all that pretty in spite of that secret boost and all the other stuff you do for them with your underwear promises.

"Mom, have you even looked at Heidi Klum?" she asks.

"Sweetheart," I say to her. "I don't care how Heidi Plums looks. All I know is that I don't like how she and all the other girls who came after her are staring out of all those big mall windows with navels that measure over an inch. Your brother is looking at those magnified body parts and thinking things."

That same day my daughter goes into your store and comes back with something that looks like a strip of cloth.

"Cute elastic hair band," I say. "I didn't know they made them with polka dots now."

"Mom...um... That's not a hair band."

"What is it? A cloth bracelet?"

"No."

"Okay. I know. it's an eye-patch. You know the kind they give in economy on Cathay Pacific so you can sleep in peace and not see any light until the Asian passengers open their land mine can of noodles."

"Mo-om, stop!" she shouts. "It's just a panty. Can't you see?"

I cannot. You see, there isn't that much to see.

Dear, dear, Victoria. I don't understand. Just WHEN did panties downsize this much? The panties you offer look like they’ll make a face mask for the squirrel that’s scuttling down my lawn as I write.

Here. I'm sending back your card with your booklet. I DON'T WANT my free panty. I DON'T.

If you must offer me a gift, give me one that covers a substantial bit of my skin. Now if you said you wanted a cover for an iPad and Steve Jobs sent you one for an iPod, how do you think YOU would feel?

For now, Vic, I'm okay. Last month, I bought myself a multi-colored pack of low-rise Fruit of the Loom cotton hipster panties at Costco at $6.50 for three. You'd have made ten of those hair-bands for ten times the price with that much cloth, I know.

I have enough and more of the big aunty underwear, the kind that suppress my giggles and depress my jiggles. Yes, I have enough wide-width brassieres which won't projectile launch me into orbiting Jupiter.

So, keep the secret, Victoria. The truth is, for a while at least, my cups runneth over.

L

Awaiting Friend Confirmation: Susie Nagpal

“You’ve never come home. I’d really like you to visit us tomorrow evening with your family. Can you?” The tone at the other end of the line last October was warm and friendly, with a sparkle, a fullness and an echo that rings only in the voices of some people.

My husband and I made it a point to visit her home the following evening. Cars packed the roads leading to her sprawling home. Peals of laughter rose into the night air. The tinkle of glass and metal warmed the growing chill of a fall evening. Sandals lined the porch of her home, building little mountains of silver and gold and rhinestones, mingling in abandon, until you couldn’t tell one pair from the other. We stepped into her charming home.

“Oh, I’m so glad you came!” Susie Nagpal rushed to us from somewhere inside her house, hugged us tight for having taken the trouble to stop at her place on a busy Navarathri evening packed with many other social visits up and down the valley. There were over a hundred people inside the home on this special night but between the hustle and bustle of attending to others, she made sure she squeezed in the time to talk to us and make us feel at home.

That night we caught Susie Nagpal on the periphery of her life. She didn’t know it then but a week after that meeting Susie would be diagnosed with advanced cancer. Today, eight months after I last met her and a little over twenty-four hours after she gave her body away to lung cancer, I wish I had seized the chance to know her better. For over three years prior, we had smiled and waved to each other, tentatively, from our respective cars as we dropped our children. We knew about each other’s existence but we never found the chance to chat. When I was offered the opportunity to host a coffee for her prior to her election into the Saratoga City Council in November 2008, I demurred. I didn’t know her. Did it make sense for me to host such a session? Instead, I attended a coffee for Susie at a mutual friend’s home and offered, like many others, to put up a campaign yard sign with her name on our front lawn.

I enjoyed the coffee session with Susie. In less than half an hour, she impressed me with her clarity, vision and sincerity. I realized then why, even though I didn’t know her well, I could have gone out of my way to open my doors for her at election time. Here was a woman who really believed she could make an impact on the city that had been a home to her for over two decades. During the session, I began appreciating her generosity. She asked us to get to know her opponents. She felt that they were also very qualified and that, in order to make a fair assessment, we must analyze their strengths. As far as she was concerned, she said, she was running, not on their weaknesses, but on her strengths. That morning, I drove back home excited that, if elected, she would be the first Indian-American on the Saratoga city council. I dug the yard sign deep into the soft, yielding ground outside on my front lawn. Not being an American citizen at the time, I couldn’t vote. But I wanted the world to know that my vote was for Susie Nagpal.

Susie’s passing yesterday brought back harsh memories of the demise of my own sister-in-law, a few years ago, at the age of 42. Both women–one an environmental engineer, the other, a gastroenterologist–had pluck and courage, and drive and dreams. Just like Susie, my sister-in-law dragged herself in to work until a few weeks before she breathed her last.

Time is supposed to heal. But every time another one sinks to the grave, it’s a reminder about the ones who passed before them. You may shed tears for the recently passed but you shed fresh tears for those who went before them. Yesterday, I sank into a cloud of despair and frustration about the ephemeral nature of our life on earth until my son came home from school, pressed his pimpled cheek close to mine and wondered, simply, why my skin smelt so good all the time.

In minutes, I was ready, once again, to face the world, although I knew that when the time came to attend a memorial service for Susie Nagpal, I would tear up wondering why I didn’t step out of my car to know her better during the times I hung behind her in the carpool lanes at Redwood Middle School. I regret that, for now and forever, my status on her page on Facebook and on that catch-all book we call “memories” will continue to read “Awaiting friend confirmation”.

A Day on a Bus in San Francisco

Yesterday, in San Francisco, the day rippled boat blue. People spilled out of their homes. Sidewalks shriveled.

On the bus down Van Ness, the driver chirped through the daily route of his day, a kind word to everyone who hopped on and off. Behind his merry twinkle, his bus, much like a bus in India's Mumbai, burst with grumpy lards of people. An Arab family clambered into the bus, stroller in hand. Their toddler, a bottle in his mouth, clung to the ends of his mother's scarf which ran over the top of her head and under her chin. An Amazon in her sixties sat by the front, assuming the role of assistant driver over fifteen blocks. Every time the bus stopped, she would holler, the edge in her voice making me feel sorry for her family. "Make room. Go in. Everybody in front, all the way to the back please." A Japanese girl with skin like roses and whipped cream sailed in, cell phone to her ear–a baguette in an assortment of San Francisco sour dough. I was traveling by a city bus after ten years. Why didn't I do it more often, I asked myself?

The last time I used public transportation, I was in Paris where, for a whole year, I rode the bus and the metro, standing shoulder to shoulder and toe to toe just to go about my daily life. There's something visceral about a daily journey with other people, remaining anonymous, exchanging pleasantries, staring at someone up close and wondering if their life is better than yours. It's exciting listen to a co-passenger chat on a cell-phone, to figure out the life of the person at the other end. I stood inside a packed bus yesterday, my hand grasping the railing tight as the bus braked countless times between lights. My painted toes were crushed, again and again, by sneaker-clad feet. My derriere was pummeled by large handbags and rear ends more panoramic than mine. For a half hour last afternoon, I was a map-holding speck in a galaxy of humanity and I too was trying to understand where I was headed. I clutched my purse. I hadn't heard of pickpockets on the buses in this city but who knew. The city does that to you. It makes you grow spines. Yet, at unexpected moments, it makes you soften, stop to think about another person and step forward to reach out. An elderly Jewish woman in thick glasses heaved herself up the steps, a cane in her hand. I got up to offer my seat. Watching me, a young man across me got up in haste and bade an older gentleman sit in his place. "No, young man, thank you, I've been sitting too long today," the old man smiled back.

Outside, on the roads of this charming city, I was reminded of my life growing up in Chennai, where I went and claimed my little patch of life and the vegetable vendor eked out a living in her portion and the many homeless scrambled for their piece of the action, sometimes snatching what everyone rightfully thought of as theirs. I turned the corner towards where my friend waited. Near the parking meter, a disheveled man tapped the owner of a parked van for a cigarette. The well-dressed gentleman gave him one from his pack, and lit the cigarette, a crooked smile forming on his face. I recalled how many times I'd seen this sight in Paris and in Chennai. What the surgeon-general never told us is that cigarettes bridge enormous social gaps.

I was about to leave for my safe and boring suburban life when a man came out of nowhere.

"C'mon back here, you whore!" he cried aloud, into the air, pushing a Safeway cart loaded with the debris of his life.

Afraid I was being called a lady of the night and quite certain I wasn't one, I quickly turned around to my friend of many years to see if the hapless gentleman could be referring to her. He was not. And then, convinced that the man was calling out to some other woman in the vicinity, we just crossed, a little shaken, right by where the cable car stood clanging, and walked on towards Saks Fifth Avenue, to begin window shopping, on an elastic budget of about $2000, for a new Mother's day wardrobe.

If THAT is my passport photo, should I be checking in at Guantanamo Bay?

I don’t look too bad. 

I don’t have a mouth that promises wild wanton whispers like Angelina Jolie’s. It isn’t bird-like and terse and taut like Jennifer Aniston’s. When I’m not smiling, my mouth droops as if to say that the world isn’t a happy place. That’s about right anyway. My nose is short, pert and just. It comes to the point on most things. It keeps out of other people’s business (unless something happens to justify its mindful meddling). My eyes, evenly positioned on my face, voice my mind instantaneously. They don’t have a gate they open and shut when thoughts wander in unarmed (in the same way my mouth doesn’t have a spam filter when, really, it should). On my best days, my skin shines, sparkles and slithers like I’m on the late side of thirty. 

Really, I don’t look too bad for nearing the half-century mark.

So enlighten me, please, won't you, as to why my passport photos tell me I need to check in at Guantanamo Bay? 

Made for Guantanamo Bay?

Has anyone taken a passport photograph in the United States? At $7 a pop, an ugly passport photo shot on a polaroid camera which blinds you for life is at least twice the cost of a gallon of Berkeley Farms milk at my local Safeway. We've thought of every possible contraption in this country: the post-it note, the whitener, the velcro fastener, the PC, the iPod, iPhone. And just today Mr. Jobs put out the iPad on the shelves. 

Won't someone please create an iPassport app so we click our mugs ourselves and create a passport photo that we like that makes consular officers treat us with more respect when we apply for a visa? Consular offices remind me of funeral homes. The people who go in there look mournful. They are talked to by people who conduct their business looking deathly serious. The visitors are dying to get out as quickly as they can. They spend the better part of the day inside the building and when they finally walk out, their faces are bathed in a curious glow of solemnity and relief. 

As the owner of an Indian passport, I've spent the greater part of my life in consulates. Yesterday at a dreary consulate tucked inside a long hallway going to nowhere in a building in San Francisco, I was applying for a six-day tourist visa. 

"Ma'am. Which hotel you stay at?" asks the lady to whom I turn in my papers.

"You need hotel information? Your website didn't say anything about it."

"I'm sorry. No hotel. No visa." 

"But your website didn't say a thing. I don't have it."

"Sorry. No hotel. No visa." 

"I didn't get appropriate answers to two emails. I called your offices in three states and I didn't get a response from any of them. Nothing, nothing, is in English except a six-line list of documents to bring which, by the way, did NOT, I repeat, NOT include hotel information."

"No hotel. No visa."

"I don't believe this. So I take all this trouble to follow through before my long drive from Saratoga to San Francisco, send you two emails for which I don't even get a decent response addressing my questions, call three offices to find out what else I may need to bring that the small English translation may have missed and all you can tell me is no hotel, no visa and that I have to come back all the way another day to give you the hotel information so you can grant me my visa?"

"Yes."

At about this time, another corpulent visa officer behind me tells me to shut up and settle down. 

"Madame, when you came to America, did you have instructions in a language other than English? Tell me, yes or no. No, yes? So then, now you better settle down, okay?"

The officer tells me to use his computer to book a hotel. In seconds I have the name of a hotel after making a reservation online. The lady officer then gestures for me to go sit in a chair in front of a camera. Another dreadful picture to validate the dreadfulness of the picture I gave her. She stares at my photo and then at my face, shakes her head, pastes two stamps on the visa page, presses a seal on the stamps and waves me away. And, sure enough, every time I get a visa I walk out feeling I'm rising from the ashes. Strange, isn't it? 

Back in the car, I look in my rear-view mirror. My eye-pencil has smudged under my eyes. My hair is out of place. But I don't look too bad. Not as bad as my passport photograph, at any rate.

A Toast to Aging, at a Napa Valley Winery

What better place to celebrate an “over the hill” occasion than a winery in Napa Valley? A girlfriend has aged gracefully. While she is crushed that the female members of her clique are younger than she is, we remind her that the male counterparts are just about ready to harvest their social security and that she is a long time away from that even though her AARP membership is about to arrive in her mailbox.

This is the first beautiful weekend since the year began. Napa valley is baking. The barbecue smell of August skewers the spring afternoon.  The same question rings in our ears. Living in one of the most panoramic parts of the United States, why won’t we head out into the wide, open spaces more often? Why do we seek to go to Europe or Hawaii for a vacation but not even consider taking a day or two every few months to unwind and recharge right next to home?

Even yesterday, with a weekend away from AP and SAT tests, parents like me obsess and find a reason to not head out somewhere because there is so much “work” to do.

“But our children don’t have a life,” a friend in our clique says. "A 50^thbirthday of a close friend is a perfect excuse to make the time.”  So my son joins us, his homework and SAT prep books in tow, for a few hours of down time in a life that’s pressure-packed with unrealistic deadlines, guilt trips, supposedly life-altering future targets and a high school electronic grading system that fluctuates faster than the NASDAQ Composite Index.

It’s many years since our group has walked into a winery.  Every time I enter the cavernous fermentation room where the cool of the dark fuses with the headiness of oak and wine, I breathe deep the fragrance. Is this the aroma of fermenting wisdom, I wonder?  When, after you’re yanked and squeezed and blended by the process called life, you just steep, contemplating what you really are at the core. Does the enterprise of aging slowly dredge away your seed, your bitter core and your veneer so what is left to decant is your essence, an essence that you can now bottle up and market as your true self?

Outside, by the picnic area, the summer sun bores down on the vines curling around the stakes. Our small group of aging married couples laughs about our pet peeves, our advertised obsessions and life with our batty spouses. It's a place where the lust of twenty-five years ago has graduated to trust and is fast decelerating into rust. When you’ve known one another for almost three decades, longer than the wine bottles aging in the cellar of the winery, you can beat one another to pulp and never fear you’re uncorking someone’s dignity.

As I barrel towards the finish line of my forties, I begin to think that fifty may not really be a bad place to be. You're, after all, like a raisin in the sun. Less juicy than the grape you once were. Less shapely than the grape but much more practical. Shriveled–unfortunately, in all the wrong places–but meatier. And tougher, but always sweeter.  

  

Pressure Cooker Steaming

My Presto pressure cooker lost its cool last evening just before dinner. And I’ve been wondering why.

 

Hey, I’m the one who’s been on the boil all week. I’ve been recovering from the flu. I’ve missed a deadline. My brain’s been so fried it won’t cook up the right story idea for a writing contest. That’s not like me: I’m always frothing with ideas. But the last week has been a tease.

 

On Saturday, I grazed the bumper of a stationary white van at a half-empty parking lot. And what do you know, I took ethics to the extreme: I actually left the van owner my phone number starting with the right area code.

 

“Did you have to, mom? You could have snuck away, you know!” my son suggested later, reminding me that the man would never have known that I’d hit him until I pointed it out with a note stuck under his windshield wiper.  And then, on Sunday, my husband just about averted what could have been a major accident on an expressway up in San Ramon.  And yesterday, Tuesday, my son swung our van onto the road, barely missing being rear-ended by a lady who gave him the finger. Did she care to know my son was an even-tempered, good-natured student driver who got decent grades and played a beastly game of Scrabble? Apparently not.

 

Like the lady, it seemed that my cooker, way past warranty, had begun steaming in an unwarranted fashion long before I set it on the stovetop. Did pressure cookers sense the pressure, I wondered? Did they know when their owner was stewing with frustration? Would my Presto have known that the cook’s fence had needed repair for months and that the cook’s husband’s was on the fence over a decision? Could it blow its lid just because the plumbing in one of our bathrooms blew hot and cold like a woman during her monthly flow? Could it fume because the male component of the home hadn’t called the plumber–which, in turn, had made the female component simmer and spout expletives?

 

Yesterday, when my Presto shot up and crashed, still whole, on to the ground and sprayed every surface up and down with kidney bean puree, our family emerged unscathed. The cooker crash-landed two feet to my left, its fifty-pound pressure sculpting a hairline crack on my limestone floor.   I came away with a mild scald on my right shin. My son, who normally hung out in the kitchen at that hour was in his room studying for his SAT. My husband who would normally have been standing right where the cooker had landed because that’s about where he stands while drinking tea or stirring in the sugar was across on the other side of our island kitchen. The debris shot as far as thirty feet away into the family room but all was well, even though our home reeked like Chipotle’s kitchen at lunchtime. My cherry cabinets didn’t need staining this year, that was for sure.

 

In minutes, my husband, whose forte is to be forthright and spill the beans wherever he goes, was on all fours cleaning up the burritoed kitchen. In her rib-tickling memoir, “Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace”, Ayelet Waldman congratulates herself and her husband for sharing housework and she reminds readers that “there is nothing sexier to a woman with children than a man holding a Swiffer”. Yesterday, my man was on the floor with a cotton rag–swiffering, wiping, rinsing, squeezing, cleaning, polishing, buffing.

 

Our Presto cooker had not only taught me that life last week could have been much worse. But, hey, presto, it had brought my husband to his knees.

 

Missing the Cleveland Aradhana in 2010

I’ve been at the Cleveland Aradhana every year since 2005. This year, I’m attending the program via the infinite bazaar called Facebook–through the outstanding photography of Lata Ganapathy-Ravikiran of The Hindu. Cleveland becomes addictive.  Every time I fly back to my home in California after a few days in Cleveland, I come back on a high, a little raga of hope playing in my ears over and over again that Carnatic music in the United States is alive, rooted and growing faster than the beanstalk in the charming English fairytale “Jack and the Beanstalk”.

 
 

Thirty-three years ago, the Aradhana sprouted its first tender shoots in a church basement. The festival was attended by under 70 people.  Then as now, three families living on three continents continue to be its core organizers: Gomathi and Sundaram of Chennai, Gomathi and Balu of Cleveland and Venkataraman from Toronto.  Professor Temple Tuttle of the State University of Cleveland has helped them get the support of the university for hosting the festival year after year.

 

Until a few years ago, feeding the floating population at the Aradhana was the sole responsibility of the two SuperGomathis. They prepped and cooked the meals themselves with help from friends and relatives. On many days, even now, free lunch is guaranteed for the over 2000 attendees, thanks to an army of cooks, some of whom drive all the way from as far as Pittsburgh and New Jersey to come and help at the festival.

 

By noon, a dozen volunteers donning blue caps, aprons and gloves hum around the main cafeteria serving and urging the crowds to move fast. The menu on the day before Easter Sunday is typically delicious: vadai, bisibela, beans sabji, carrot salad, vermicelli payasam, potato bonda, lemon pickle and curd rice.  But the portions are rationed, for obvious reasons. If you don’t feel satiated and want to ask for some more (like Oliver Twist), you may just have to faint for the grant of an extra vadai or filch a pink token from an unsuspecting child in a pretty pavadai who is queued up in front of you.

  

Inside Waetjen hall, Indian culture and breeding kicks in notoriously hours before mega concerts roll out. Each and every seat of the 800-seat theater is conquered by shawls, coats, caps, dupattas and handbags. The territorial owners of these bits of clothing and accessories are outside the theater gossiping, brownnosing with others more famous than they are, or scouting the campus for any other free food at the Aradhana. But free lunch isn't tantamount to free dinner and so the next best fare to sambhar and potato curry is the doughy promise of Rascal's Pizza across the road (Standard Vegetarian Tamilian pizza dressed with jalapeno peppers) or Starbucks Coffee a couple of blocks out.  

 

The other option is to trudge down Euclid Avenue and sneak into Comfort Inn where there’s always food because visiting artistes are accommodated here by the Cleveland Committee. The perks of entering this Aradhana Institution are twofold: the food, and the opportunity to hang out with famous people who also need to eat to live.  To enter this lodging is to know the disComfort of bathing in Puliyodarai gravy. The persistent, oppressive smell of red chillies simmering in tamarind is more nose-numbing than a Cleveland blizzard on an Easter weekend. But Carnatic music rasikas will do anything for a Purvikalyani well orchestrated and so the expectations for comfort in Cleveland are abysmally low on the pentatonic scale of “Music, Gossip, Sartorial Pleasures, Warmth and Food”. 

 

How else does one explain how in the year 2006, Waetjen Hall spilled out into the parking lot outside because a kid, they found out later, set off a fire alarm mid-way through a Pancharatna kriti? Vidwans in skimpy dhotis froze in the glacial air. But for once, women felt vindicated.  They could vouch for the benefits of a resplendent silk sari heavy on zari and threadwork.

 

Despite the vagaries of nature, for ten days around Easter every year, Waetjen Hall resonates with soulful melodies from eminent and emerging musicians. Every year, likewise, the competition among children rises exponentially. The number of children competing increases. Competing younsters steel up like the bionic woman and the bionic man. In order to please more children and their teachers (who are often respected visiting artistes),  the number of awards expands or contracts according to the temperature and pulse of an awards decisions committee. This year, first prizes rained in for seven talented students in the concert competition when, for years prior, a sole contestant walked away with a coveted tanpura and the promise of a concert slot at the Aradhana.

 

I still remember how, in the year 2005, when the first concert competition was instituted, the Waetjen Hall was empty on Sunday evening, long after all the competition results were announced. I went back into the dim theater to retrieve a shawl that I had forgotten in my seat. I recognized, far in the back, in the shadowy corner of the cavernous theater, one boy of 15 who sat crushed and red-eyed, his face sodden with tears. I found out recently from his mother that he was now a music major attending a prestigious music school where all he could think about was music in every possible avatar–jazz, blues, Carnatic, you name it. While in college this boy still performs Carnatic concerts for the community in and around Boston. Like most of the kids who compete at the Aradhana, he continues to be mad about Carnatic Music even though he didn't win that tanpura. The fire and fury of competition may have died.  But the cinders of passion remain.

 

I hope the Aradhana will keep that spirit of passion flying high in every youngster. I wish the Aradhana committee would remember that the festival was created with one purpose in mind–to propagate Carnatic music in the western world, to give performing opportunities for local and visiting artistes based on quality and not cachet and brand name and to motivate Indian-Americans to bequeath the culture to the next generation. Year after year, however, I worry about the culture of commercialism, sycophancy and nepotism that burrows its way into almost every South-Indian organization, ultimately rendering them hollow.  

I begin to wonder. Will the Aradhana remember the reason it came together in the first place and pace, check and reinvent itself through the years? Will the fruits of the Aradhana be deemed more important than its roots? Or will it, like the rabidly growing beanstalk of our fairytale, curl its tendrils around human weaknesses and take us all to the bad giant–labeled glut, opportunism and adulteration–waiting up in the  stratosphere where our eyes can't see?

A topflight editor transplants herself and lands a book deal

When a writer friend pointed me to a story titled Losing It in the New York Times Magazine of March 28^th, 2010, I rushed out to my living room and pulled out the magazine to read what, seemingly, was a heartwarming story of a woman in the writing world who pulled herself out of misery. 

 

In her essay, Browning lays bare her life after being laid off from House & Garden in November 2007, just a little before Thanksgiving. She writes lyrically about how she was sucked into the quicksand of dread and depression but willed her body out of the vortex of over-eating and slovenliness by discovering the joy of gardening and unearthing the meaning of the slow life in a new home.  

 

I was getting ready to shed a few tears while reading the exquisite excerpt from her memoir, Slow Love, when I decided to dig around a bit in the weedy garden that was supposedly Browning’s life following her layoff. What I dredged up made her story wilt right in my hands.

 

During the two and a half years after she was given the pink slip, Browning disposed of the first house and garden, moved into her other, second, house and garden, deftly shifted gears into the blog lane with an impressive online presence called Slow Love Life, A Conversation with Dominique Browning, and careened into the fast lane of publishing success with a book deal for Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas & Found Happiness.

 

Browning has a three-decade resume that writers like me would kill for. She is the author of three books, has written for O magazine, Food & Wine, The New York Times Book Review, and Departures. She has also been an editor at Esquire, Texas Monthly and Newsweek and she has a column, “Personal Nature”, that is her “distinctive take on all things environmental” for the Environmental Defense Fund website.  By her standards, I should be overloading on Prozac and, simultaneously, getting sloshed on Guinness Stout with a hint of lime. May be there is something seriously wrong with me for deflecting rejection like a woman? “The folding of the magazine was ruthless,” Browning writes, recalling the shock of the closure of the magazine. “Without warning, our world collapsed.”

 

I couldn’t help reflecting, meanly, on that boomerang called karma. Did Browning ever think of how the freelance writers she assigned stories to at House & Garden might have felt when the stories they bled over were slashed without warning by executive editors like her?  The paltry kill fees aren’t even enough to cover a sandwich and a drink at a Manhattan deli. Almost daily, I see freelance writers (many of them single women) on my writers’ forum handle rejection with a proud face, uncertain where the next assignment is going to come from. They lumber on in the petering market, taking any writing project–whether it’s a ghostwriting project, a newsletter creation assignment, a copywriting job–to inch towards the monthly income they need.

 

 Did Browning care to ponder over how her sob story would hardly resonate with the stable of many thousand writers who are now out of a job, thanks to the slow demise of print journalism? Most of all, did she realize how her very brief season in her vegetable bed of rejection couldn’t even compare to the perennial tossing into the compost slush pile that freelance writers like me endure–over and over and over–from editors like her?

 

When I went back to the essay after reading Browning’s bio, I was rotting with fury. For a reason that’s wedged somewhere between a woman’s homing instinct to play mother hen to her family and her primordial need to uphold the domestic fortress, I could simply not swallow Browning’s tying her umbilical cord to her cubicle. 

“Without work, who was I?” she wonders. When she discusses unemployment and her mental state, my brain is on rototill mode. “Being unemployed is a lot like being depressed,” she writes.  

I happen to be in touch with many talented mothers who, for reasons of their own, are unemployed, yet, passionately involved in school-related and community-related activities. They are making the public school system in the United States a much better place to be, while women like Dominique Browning have been showing America how to make the home and garden pretty and nice.

 

I couldn’t glean much about her life as a mother upon reading the essay. But I do hope Browning took days off to be with her two boys, baked brownies with them, played an active part in the parent committee at their school, fretted about how they fared at school and asked them how they dealt with a mother who was intensely committed to her work at a national magazine. I bow to her ego and her rabid need to support herself all her life. But I do wonder how many employed women, especially given Browning’s legacy, will turn soggy and limp in that brief, uprooted state of unemployment.

 

Behold a topflight editor like Dominique Browning with a rolodex of topnotch contacts–which would ultimately put her transparent memoir in the pages of nothing less than the NYTimes magazine so that Atlas, her publisher, can be guaranteed whopping sales–spiral into a “whiplashing tailspin” of despair and depression? 

 

Spare me the pain. And hold that Kleenex, please.

 

 

 

ANOTHER GOOD GODMAN GONE BAD

 

 

The weekend after Godman Paramahamsa Nithyananda was caught on camera, reaching for actress Ranjitha even as he was preaching the Bhagvad Gita, my friends in the Bay Area couldn’t stop cackling.

 

At a party last Saturday, an old friend walked up to me, a puzzled look on her face. “Do you know to whom this belongs?” she asked, pointing to a beaded chain curled snugly in her palm. Seconds later her face crumbled into raucous laughter. According to her, the chain had fallen off during her private dalliance with none other than the Swamiji himself the previous week. My wild gang of friends had presently found something and someone to make fun of and so the jokes sputtered and sparkled late into the night until it was decided that someone among us would get his or her hands on the original video and hold a party to discuss the lurid details.  Along with the puns and jabs came dissections of the creativity of tweets on the subject and, naturally, more serious discussions on matters of religion and faith.

 

“I’m sorry, I’m a skeptic,” said one man, a self-realized agnostic. “I really cannot believe that another human being can take me to whoever is up there.” Then there were those like my husband who do believe in the tenets of Hinduism but prefer to visit temples to admire temple architecture and socialize with temple staff and visitors.  The recent agony and ecstasy of yet another saffron-attired guru only served to cement his cynicism over godmen.

 

“Every Godman gets into some trouble or other. And that’s why I’d rather not trust anyone wearing orange!” he claimed. He had just found scientific evidence to prove his theory that most swamijis (other than the one that his parents owed loyalty to, of course) would rather choose frequent flier miles on Earth over a gnarly one-way trek on foot to the gates of Heaven.

 

Hours after the news broke, my son and daughter  (who pray to their favorite elephant-headed Ganesha twice a year at the end of their respective semesters) chimed in with profound theories constructed on years of study and contemplation.

 

“Mom, and this is why I say what I say,” my newly minted 16-year-old son turned philosopher observed. “I don’t trust guys who say they’re vehicles to god.”  My son’s current god is Vladimir Nabokov whose book, Lolita, has transported him, unfortunately, to bad karmic places where good boys don’t go.

 

My daughter’s reaction to the Swami files was tepid because, when you’re turning twenty in a few weeks, you know everything about life and nothing, absolutely nothing, has the power to shock anymore. “Cool!” she said perfunctorily and then proceeded to tell me why composer A. R. Rahman and tuft-sporting singer Hariharan were her gods of choice, at least for now.

 

I wonder if my husband and my kids are wiser for their skepticism. I don’t have a spiritual guru of my own but if someone introduces me to theirs, I’ve been happy to meet them, listen to their lectures and find out what they have to say. I’m always in awe of people who have the power to mesmerize a million others and, in the process, feed the poor, build hospitals, raise money for disaster relief and, in little ways, make the world a better place.  From what I can see, Swami Nithyananda has, through his many centers, conducted eye-camps, medical camps, staved off the hunger of many poor people and educated countless children who, otherwise, may not have seen the inside of a school. And that’s why, whenever I see another saffron-robed Indian Godman fall from his gold-plated perch, my heart goes out to him and to all the million disciples scattered around the world. The devotees must feel betrayed; a part of them must hate to come to terms with that worm of doubt now crawling through their hearts.

 

One of my friends is a follower of the fallen Swami Nithyananda. A relative of mine is also a follower, one who wears a Nithyananda bangle to show her allegiance to him. She is still a staunch supporter of her guru and believes, of course, that the tape making the rounds is the work of some scheming conman whose technical expertise is in splicing images on video. I’m sorry to see these hapless devotees suffer the ignominy of wagging tongues and tagging twitterers. The Internet has turned into a loud, garish lounge for gossip: scandal today is feasted upon, judged, and archived for instant recall.

 

On another, lighter note, however, when I watched the video of Nithyananda, several questions kept burrowing into me. The man sported a Calvin Klein-lookalike underwear instead of a meager, tattered loincloth. He was lounging in bed watching television. Do modern Swamijis watch television? And why do they need pedestal fans? Do they feel heat? Weren’t they beyond day-to-day cares? Didn’t they live the life of mendicants, eating thin porridge, sleeping on cold stone floors, sporting slippers made of wood, fanning themselves with fans made of coconut fibre? Instead the holy man in this video had a pedestal fan, a vast bed with a headboard doubling up as a shelf on which a number of things were kept within reach, an air purifier (I found out later that the lying camera was attached to it), creams, medications and what have you. If this man had really given up the worldly life, the first thing to go should have been fancy underwear, don’t you think? 

 

Recalling those Brooke Shields advertisements of the eighties, what came between him and his Calvin Klein should, really, have been “nothing.” Instead, what purportedly came–pun never ever intended, my faithful readers–between him and his Calvin was a shapely woman named Ranjitha. No wonder my female friends are breathless as events unfold in a scandal involving the next famous Indian man of god. Little wonder they’re screaming in anticipation: “Yes! Oh Yes! We want more!”