Broken Bangles: Travel, Stories, Thoughts

  Reminiscences of a Morning A shadow of a man floats into my mind occasionally, a mere apparition and a few vivid glimpses accompanying it. He was my grandfather. He reminds me of how people fade from the world without leaving any visible mark, no matter how much interesting a life they have led.  He was a middle-income land-owning farmer in South India, in the early 1900s, having about five acres of land where he cultivated rice, coconut, Areca nut, bananas, and cashews. He was 72 when he died in 1977 and I was just a three and a half years old child.  I never got to know him except through his diaries, in which he journaled his income and expenses, and through his curious collection of porcupine spines, sands of different colours, red and white sandalwood pieces, conches of many sizes, a deer horn, and a pouch of ‘ponpanam’, the half gram gold coins in circulation when he was young. In this collection, he also had British coins from when India was a British colony....

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: cihrs.org) War trauma is not limited to the places where a war is raging. It permeates globally, especially through media outlets, and it has dangerous physical and psychological consequences for all of us.  S tudies say that w e do not need to live in a conflict zone to experience war trauma. War news travels at high speed and scale and reaches us within moments of the real happenings. We all experience war in real time.  The sights and sounds of war, recorded and telecast in high quality, strike the viewer with unprecedented severity. Every listener or viewer of mass media becomes an indirect victim of war.  The people in the Middle East or the neighbouring countries of Ukraine and Russia live under the constant fear of the war spilling over to their localities. However, a television viewer in the US, India, or Japan might feel a surge of high anxiety just by continuously watching the news about these distant wars.     Som...

  This war torments and wears out all of us. Hope seems to have disappeared completely. When there is no dawn on the horizon, we must talk about the darkness but also search for light beyond.  In this blinding darkness, the remote glimmer of Iranian poetry gives you a momentary escape. These lines, these words, remind us of the grandeur of us as one civilisation. The divisions disappear. These poems are like muted steps and whispers of rescue coming closer to the corner we have huddled together in fear of losing our souls.    This is the nectar from Persia, kept alive as deep in history as before the Middle Ages. Hakim Sanai, Ferdowsi, Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Hafez Shiraz… A confluence of Persian and Islamic cultures condensed into not only heavenly drops, whispering chimes, and birdsongs but life’s ultimate answers.   Hakim Sanai sang, “The road your self must journey on lies in polishing the heart It is not by rebellion and discord that the heart’s mirro...