Broken Bangles: Travel, Stories, Thoughts

This is a memory of a woman and a tribute to all the women whose struggles go undocumented in history. A Powerful Name and a Powerless Existence Her name was Karthyayani, a synonym of the goddess of power in Hindu mythology. Yet, she was one of the most powerless and vulnerable human beings who lived in our village half a decade ago. Karthyayani was our maid when we were children. She was dark with curly hair and a stout and short body, and the villagers did not consider her attractive or good-looking. Yet, even as a kid, I remember seeing a rare beauty in the smooth blackness of her skin, her sparkling eyes, and the way she talked with a hint of cheerful sarcasm. She was married to a man who just disappeared when she was in the prime of her youth leaving her with three small kids to take care of. Though she belonged to an upper caste community that was generally landlords, her family was poor. As the husband, the breadwinner, unceremoniously left, she had no other option to survive th...

  (The folk violin of Pulluvas; image source:  Kannanshanmugam,shanmugamstudio, Kollam , Wikipedia) The Village Visitors  Those were times when things were less complex than they now are. We lived in a bucolic countryside where everyone knew everyone else. The only outsiders who frequented the place were visiting relatives, a bunch of regularly appearing street vendors, the postman, the Gurkha (a man from Nepal who would be paid Rs 10 per month by each family for keeping vigil in the village during nights*), and our very own exclusive beggars. We knew them as they made rounds on almost expected dates and times. Paraman’s Song Paraman, the street violinist, had positioned himself between an artist and a beggar. In our culture, the members of the Pulluva community, who made exquisite music using two delightful musical instruments- a single-string local fiddle and a round mud pot with a tight wire wound across it- were the official local musicians. They would come to sing in...

  (image source: wondermondo.com) Surviving For Centuries And Demolished In One Day Images of some ruins get imprinted in our minds as children. The most prominent among them could be the half-destroyed dome of Hiroshima. For me, this monument embodied the cruellest of all deaths, that is, by the fire mushroom that we see in a nuclear explosion.  This building- skeleton also reminded me of the defeat of Hitler and the fall of Nazism. Strangely enough, this interplay of politics, history, and human emotions crafts one’s mental geography of this building.  As I grew up, this image also evolved to symbolise war, nuclear threat, and human tragedy. My mind had learned to make the topic broader and abstract. The French philosopher Guiles Deleuze has theorised how the visual imagery of post-World War  I I   was impacted by the ruins of war - demolished and abandoned buildings and the scars on the civilisation. From the colossal library in Alexandria of ancient times to...

FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is one true feeling the information world leaves us with daily when we sleep. And we often wake up every morning with the same emotion. Don’t we need to take one step back and think whether we need all the information we are trying to process? Is it good or bad for your brain? Information media challenges our brains with information overload e very moment we are awake . Studies say that we process 75 GB of data inside our brains daily, which is equal to watching 16 movies. Authors Anne Francoise Rutkowski and Carol S. Saunders call it the dark side of information technology. Former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris observed that smartphones are like cigarettes, but we ignore the harm because of the benefits (unlike cigarettes). He also reminded everyone that smartphones are eroding human thought.  Studies show that the use of social media increases our chances of falling into depression and social isolation. But what exactly is this information over...

  Earth Has No Boundaries Earth has no borders except natural barriers, mountains and seas. There are no barriers at all, given the travel technologies we possess.  Surreal the concept of borders is, yet, borders are quite concrete too; they can start wars, prompt mass exodus, and provoke all kinds of tricky emotions like national pride, a sense of belonging, unjustified hostilities, and fear of the other. Many national borders have no physical properties. No one can tell where one country ends and another begins by merely looking at them. For that, one needs maps and soldiers, fences and fear.  They are mostly barren land, rivers and deserts, these national borders that we hold on to at huge prices, costing human lives, diplomacy, weapons, and real money. They deceive you if you look at them for long- so normal, one could even feel tempted to step across. The invisibility of such borders evokes many sociological and philosophical questions. Were There Borders Always? At ...