On the need for good scotch

Tonight I miss my father most, and his collection of scotch.

You're lucky if you live far away from home and on the night before one of your many transatlantic journeys, you get to speak to your father and say--"I'd like to keep that bottle of Caol Ila." You're luckier still if he looks at you, nods, and helps you roll it into two scarves and one college sweatshirt.

No more is said, but there's a lifetime of words communicated in that simple act of a bottle being passed from father to daughter.

One glass baton filled with pale gold. Always poured into lead crystal, over two cubes of ice. It's my father saying- here, take. Your next few years will be some fantastic mixed with guttural lows. You will embarrass yourself. You will say the wrong thing and miss opportunities. You will get robbed. You will choose the wrong people, the wrong situation, the wrong underwear for the wrong job interview. There is no fairy godmother, no charm to place under your pillow at night. Your mother will be upset, and there will a birthday, maybe several, when she will not call.

He never had what I have now. Never had, at the age of twenty-six, the luxury of sitting on a quiet summer night out on a dark balcony, sipping his parent's twelve year old single malt out of a scotch glass cut in Czechoslovakia.

My father is a great man, and a self-made one. Everything he is now, he chose to be-- Picking and choosing from observations and conversations. His longest running teachings are as follows: King makers are more important than kings. Sometimes you have to push, sometimes you have to pull. Carry people with you. Sip your scotch. Respect is earned the longer you make a bottle last.

My father never had the patience to type luxury of typing out his thoughts either. Has a lovely block script he uses in all official letters and forms though. But he depends on oral tradition when it comes to my brother and I, and though I've stopped faking exams to get out of these phone conversations with my father, they still play a poor second fiddle to actually sitting and talking with him.

I delete forwards from him everyday. He's in the smallest of G+ circles, and used to leave comments on my facebook pictures when I was still on there, but I miss experiencing conversation with him so goddamn much. I imagine the talks we'd have in person now, him a little more mellow, me just a little older. I recall all his ticks, all his mannerisms: the way he starts to cough if he gets into a really hearty, good laugh. The way he closes his eyes if he's listening to Floyd, Elvis or Zeppelin. The way I can always tell when he's too busy planning a response to listen to me. The way he reads my sins without hearing a single confession, and humbles me with his companionable silence instead of calling me out.

He's no saint, my father. He picked up cheap luggage from a relative who bought them at Moore Market in Madras for my first flight into the US post 9/11, despite my protests. He reacted badly to every boyfriend I've ever told them about. He insists women cannot have successful families and careers, and once advised me to become a dentist because it meant good money. But he's my old man. The one who taught me how to hustle. Close to seven years have passed since I last lived at home, and time seems to be passing faster than ever before.

It's incredibly presumptuous, and maybe a little conceited to speak of mortality where I am right now. I've been relatively lucky in death. The ones I have lost have come back to me some other way. I've no debilitating drug habit, or illness. I don't drive. I'm on the wrong end of my mid-twenties, and I have yet to do my Big Thing. My parents are getting older, but then again whose aren't?

I miss him everyday. A two year whimsical study scholarship has turned into too long. I miss his smell, that father smell, Old Spice and sweat and on some evenings, good whiskey. I miss the sound his chappals make. The way he ties his lungi effortlessly. The way he cools his tea.

I miss my mother too, but my mother does not drink. This changes things, slightly.

These things this scotch brings up.

Two doubles are enough.

Salt doesn't hurt an Islay whiskey. The current distillery, built between 1972 and 1974 in the same location as the original, overlooks the sea.

I'll need a new bottle by the year's end, at which time
I think I'll go home.

This piece was the prototype of *this* piece, which was published by Bluestem Magazine for their September 2011 Quarterly. It's much, much better. Trust me.

'Outsourced': this currycature aint funny no more, mama.

An edited version of this piece appeared in Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 47, Dated November 27, 2010. Please visit that link for the stripped-down version of this ramble.

As sitcom viewers, we hold some truths to be self-evident. For instance: a majority of American sitcoms are made for easy caricature, with the rare exception focused on social commentary—Salutations, Larry Gelbart, Gene Reynolds and Alan Alda: M*A*S*H changed the lives of everyone who plugged into the Star TV episode re-runs in the early 1990s, then rediscovered it online a few years later. Corollary to this truth: American sitcoms made for easy caricature either provide a generation with popular catch-phrases, or catches flack from a key demographic of the same generation for hackneyed writing.

Image courtesy mamapop.com

American television channel NBC’s Outsourced, which premiered on September 23, 2010 and was picked up for a full season a few weeks ago, has been rousing mixed reactions from just such a key demographic: 20-30 something American viewers, including Indian Americans and Indians currently residing in the United States. Most viewers have sounded off on their dislike of the show’s lack of timeliness, and some of its casting decisions. Others have commented on the refreshing presence of Indians and Indian themes, however dated, playing a main role in an American prime time show.

The movie this series is based on was a perfect little fairytale. Much like Mississippi Masala did in its own time, 2006’s Outsourced captured a certain piece of the Indian/American reality in our recent history with sweet detail. An eventful year, 2006 contained the death of Syd Barrett, Bismillah Khan and Pramod Mahajan. Several members of the Viriginia Tech campus were killed in a tragic homicidal shooting incident. Movie releases included Borat, Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest, Rang De Basanti, Krrish and Lage Raho Munnabhai. The July Mumbai train bombings happened, as did Hurricane Katrina, and the hanging of Saddam Hussein. The one thread that strung 2006 through in the United States was talk of American jobs being shipped abroad. And call centers was as far as American pop culture got in 2006 with Indian references, apart from quaint films like the Guru (2002).

2010 is a very different time. The past few years have brought us Big Bang Theory’s Raj Koothrappali and his non-Orientalist, Indian-grad-at-Caltech set of Indian cultural references. The entire cast eats Indian take-out once a week except for him (he detests Indian food), and throughout the series the viewer is aware that the other characters are well educated about Koothrappali’s manners and mores as well as a range of realties regarding India and the US-Indian diaspora. Russell Peters is now very old hat, except for those of us whose parents are just discovering Facebook. There is or was, the guy from Lost. Sanjaya, his hair and their combined appearance on American Idol. Slumdog Millionnaire. Bollywood Dance work-out classes. Bikram Yoga. MetroPCS’s Tech and Talk ad campaign. Harvard’s professional Bhangra team. Adiga and Lahiri are only some of the more recent additions to a plethora of Indian authors making a name for themselves internationally. And most importantly, no self-respecting pop culture pulse checker has mentioned call centers in about three years.

Quick overview of the Outsourced series plot: An American Novelties Company fires all their American staff, and then outsources the sales over to an artistic postcard representation of “Mumbai”, together with a young, snotty white American manager named Todd Dempsey (Ben Rappaport). Cue the Mumbai employee list: Rajiv, the Machiavellian manager, one beautiful young thing in love with her traditions (Rebecca Hazlewood’s complicated British accent attempting an Indian accent attempting an American accent), one sexually repressed bumpkin (Anisha Nagarajan, one of the happy surprises of the show), one Romeo with a heart of gold (Sacha Dhawan), one socially inept outcast (Parvesh Cheena, who plays his part brilliantly and together with Nagarajan, is responsible for some of the only nuanced characterization in this series.) Todd is quick to realize he needs to pick up on Indian cultural realities: from navigating personal space to understanding gender roles to realising that there is no such holiday as ‘Jolly Vindaloo Day’.

Still awake? The high yawn quotient of this tired, done to death plot is to an extent because Todd Dempsey is unlikeable from the get-go, portrayed as he is, as a close-minded white boy who’s terrified of losing his job security. But the show’s major flaws lie less in racism and more in lazy writing. Outsourced’s pilot took hesitant, baby steps, as if the cast and crew were constantly looking over their shoulders to make sure they hadn’t stepped on several million brown toes across the world. Can this be put down to all the backlash that followed Joel Stein’s unintentionally incendiary piece for TIME? Or do we place the script in the context of some of the reactions Mr. Boyle’s Oscar winning production garnered for itself?

After the deadly dull pilot, things did mildly improve with the first few episodes. The writers didn’t descend to easy tropes like spontaneous Bollywood dance/item number inclusions, even when it may have spiked their ratings. Arranged marriage references only began in episode three. But Outsourced’s Todd Dempsey continued to interact with a Mumbai that only exists in his imagination: there are no “decent burgers” to be had, no one has ever heard of Halloween (yet everyone seems to take to Halloween costuming in episode six like kitty party aunties to an Avon demonstration) and Rajiv is terrified of a tiger in episode four. As Madhuri Shekar, MFA student of Dramatic Writing, freelance writer & blogger for Reality Rocks and a Marketing and Communications Assistant at the University of Southern California said “… it’s set in an India that is unrecognizable… The thing that most offends me is the fact that they're trying so hard not to offend. It's just not funny most of the time, and there's nothing edgy, raw, or chaotic about a sitcom that's set in India. You'd have to really work hard to sanitize India”

Do we blame the inability of an American creative team to engage with the at times sordid and wholly hilarious realities in India, and a contemporary juxtaposition of American and Indian socio-cultural realities? Or do we blame ourselves, for having portrayed to the world that as one entire nation, Indians cannot take jokes made at our expense well? Can we laugh at ourselves as we are now, or can we only laugh at the happy two dimensional clichés of ourselves that we agreed to endorse over a decade ago? Or is it that we are so out of touch with what it truly takes to live in urban India today that we have to wait for a book like Adiga’s ‘White Tiger’ or any movie that Anurag Kashyap is behind to feel comfortable commenting on all that is real and “gritty” about us? Where are the jokes about recreational drug use, alcohol binges, relationship hypocrisy, urban angst, adult boredom, economic woes and general twisted humor, or do we pretend that none of this exists at home? India, us who are privileged enough to spend time having this conversation, are we so uptight that we cannot even reckon with these realities?

Let it be said there is some fun in the Outsourced scripts. Some winning touches include the A-team call center workers who return to India after gaining US degrees to work BPO gigs for Apple and Microsoft, who have mastered various American dialects and cult slang phrases and use them against the American manager’s loyal tribe of plastic vomit pushers. Dempsey and a fellow expatriate Charlie Davis (Diedrich Bader) dancing in an Indian disco for the first time, Davis discussing access to Yankee doodle American food like Smuckers Jam and Jiffy Peanut Butter, and the Indian manager Rajiv’s desperately passive aggressive comebacks are all LOL-worthy. The writers are beginning to push the envelope, using the same Sunny treatment that Lee and Walsh have perfected in other scripts: characters that don’t excuse or explain themselves, their awkward situations or their dystopian behavior. One only hopes that the writers continue to push the limit so as to explore ideas of Indian comedy that go beyond spoofs, stereotypes and slapstick.

What is particularly upsetting about Outsourced is that it could have been brilliant. It could have been a moment for keen social commentary on all us everyday people, both in the US and in India—us still living with our parents people, us saving money on rent by living with strangers people, us refusing to get into the family business people, us still repaying student loans people, us still single “because seriously, are you kidding?” people. Outsourced could have been a moment for writers and audience to have the gumption and the guts to look at Indians for the first time not through the lens of stereotypes but to be honest with Indian idiosyncrasies, whether they be Indians in the United States or in India. It could have finally been that big cross-over moment, where we all acknowledge that with torrents, travel between the two countries, cable TV and the internet in general, the supposed distance between America and India has moved on beyond Delhi belly and tech support. Outsourced could have been a place on TV we could finally go for gritty, realistic commentary on what it takes to earn and keep a job, pay bills and stay relevant to our peers in an urban Indian social circle. Perhaps authentic storytelling can only happen when writers in India participate in the production and scripting of such shows. Perhaps it is finally the time for stories about contemporary India that are told internationally to be crafted, produced and invested in locally. There is a market—We are all already here.

S.K when he's frunk and no one's listening.

Don't give them a name. Don't associate a song with them, especially the classics- Not The Who, not that one Mother Love Bone song, not Joplin. Don't leave them voicemail. Don't take souvenirs. Do not dream. Do not dream. Do not dream. And if you must write at all, write words filled with bone shards, so they'll be looking over their shoulder forever.

Trick-or-treatise: Transcendence and Il Matto

It was just another internet thing this July. In fact, it was in keeping with the perfect Internet Thing Trope:

• American TV personality notices a youtube video.
• Puts it on twitter, calls it "funny"
• Major American media network picks up on the story, tries to paint it as a good example of how internet memes work.

Curious, because I think it's a meme #fail.

Unlike Rick Rolling, Lolcats or Sad Keanu Reeves, this video evoked various reactions instead of one universal emotion/message. Many thought the guy was acting the fool-- and yes, there's a double rainbow song, and even an error 404 page. But about as many folk found it inspiring. I started receiving it in my email as the day's happy thought from my parents' friends.

The guy himself, Paul Vasquez AKA Yosemite Bear, wrote about it all on his site. Reading that post is what got me writing this one. Bits like these:

On July 3rd I woke, checked my email and noticed I had some strange comments on one of my You Tube videos. I thought that's weird, I just deleted them without another thought, sometimes it happens. I went back to recheck my email and more weird comments on the same video, I thought this is strange, what's going on so I went to You Tube and started investigating. I quickly found the comment that started the beginning of my life taking on a much larger perspective. "Jimmy Kimmel Tweeted your video, you're so lucky." It hit me, my life was going to change, I always knew it was coming and here it was. I had done all the steps, I had followed a path I had laid out for creativity. I had always followed my passion, I had never cared about money, I always focused on art, Spirit, family, love, enjoying life, documenting what I thought was important and getting ready for when society breaks down and now one of my videos is going viral. I called my girlfriend Sage who was on her way over (a three hour drive to tell her that my life is going to change. I told her I had something like 18,000 hits in just a few hours and she said "big deal" I'll be impressed when you have a million views. Fast forward four days and I'm at a million views and she's impressed, I've been doing interviews all over the world MTV Canada ran my video and two others, things are going crazy, my phone is ringing non stop and my email is flooded with offers with people wanting to work with me and be connected to me. All of this is mind blowing, I am struggling to try and figure out what it all means but after two weeks I have had some time to contemplate stand back and think and remember that I have bee saying for years that this is what I have been saying was going to happen, it's not how I expected it to happen, I didn't expect fame, I didn't expect fortune to come this way but I have put all the pieces into place for this to happen so when it happened and a reporter asked me for the first time was this all a big surprise to you what I heard coming out of my mouth was a big surprise to both of use, "no I expected this all along". Then reporters tried to get me to say I faked the reaction I had when I saw the rainbow but nobody believes this, everybody believes I am a pure soul...

If you haven't watch the video, do. Most everyone starts out laughing: it's what every stoner TV comedy script from the past two decades has aimed for. Seth Rogen would sell his mother and his Dental plan to come up with that tone, language and timing. You start out thinking it's a joke, just like when you start out watching for instance, a video of Bill Hicks doing a routine and you think hey, snarky funny man here.

Nota bene: in *no* way am I comparing Hicks to Yosemite Bear. The only think they have in common is I look up to both of them. Work with me here!

Look-- Bear, in that video, is sincere about everything. Hicks, in the above-linked video, in all his routines is sincere about everything, especially when he is at his gosh-darned angriest. Especially then.

Yosemite Bear played from his fuckin heart. In his own way. He could've done what we would've all done. Taken a video, kept our reactions to polite noises, posted it on Fb with edited comments about what a lovely holiday it was. Instead, he went with the crazy wisdom of Il Matto.

And by doing so, Bear ended up channeling the very origins of Transcendentalism.

The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit than its own....

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Transcendentalist, 1842

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread

bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all

beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed

by our own seed & golden hairy naked

accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black

formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our

eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive

riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening

sitdown vision.

Dunno. Something to be said for being this unselfconscious. What joy such people must feel.

Scrutable Americans

The Americans are a mighty people, indefatigable, persistent, unflagging, sleepless and dreamless. If they hate someone, they kill him with indifference; if they love someone, they smother him with kindness. He who wishes to live in New York should keep a sharp sword by him, but in a sheath full of honey; a sword to punish those who like to kill time, and honey to gratify those who are hungry.

--Kahlil Gibran, Blue Flame ix

"What you wish were true"

So there I was jabbering at her about my new job as a serious newsman - about anything at all - but all I could think was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful and yet again, wonderful.

Watch this. Because I just did, after years and years.

I don't talk about it much on this blog, but here's a truth: if you are in love-- and it doesn't matter if it's legal or not. And it doesn't matter if it's practical. And it doesn't matter if it drives you insane, or drives silence between you and your spouse and your mother and your well-organized life. If you are in love, this is what it should feel like when you find each other that first time.

Your brain empty, and all you can think is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful and yet again, wonderful.

Notes from DC, take 3.

Rumba Café

I fell in love with this city because of D-, because it was he who showed me how to navigate it, who showed me his favourite places and people. Him and his bag filled with books and his papers filled with poetry, him and his quiet slow rising cigar smoke. He was the one who introduced me to the Café. The Argentinians who worked the bar when I visited that year weren't here anymore and I missed Gabriela. I missed how on just my second visit she knew what beer I wanted to follow the mojito. How angry she had been with that misplaced group of FOB Indians, the four guys all in horizontal stripes who walked into her Café and ordered Johnny Walker on one of the hottest days in May, in the Afternoon. Who grumbled amongst themselves when the bill came, who left small change as her tip. I remember how she jumped over the counter, yelling Hey! You forgot your change! and the look on their faces. How I wanted to apologize without knowing what to say, how she was still flushed mad as she laughed at my despairing face and said it's okay, jerks come by all the time.

I remember dancing all night here, along walls filled with fetishes, madonnas, orishas, votive candles and effigies, all stuffed with folded dollar bills as offerings. The autographed instruments gifted to the Café by respected musicians. That smell of fresh-muddled lime and lemon and mint. I pledged allegiance to the death a long time ago, which is why we came here next.

There’s a live band playing tonight. The big round bouncer smiles us through the door. He can tell that I know the code. I buy the first round, noticing all at once that we’re the only people in that night not of South American or Hispanic origin. Maybe we would see our server from the last place here too, maybe later in the night. Our guys are stuck behind a big group of people outside the Café, with everyone inside yelling at them while laughing, no space, man, no space! I go out and get them through the door because the bouncer remembers me. And at that exact instant I remember why I love this place, this street. I am remembered here, God only knows why, or maybe they fake it and pull this with everyone, but I don’t care. The band playing is the same one playing from the last time I was here, the mojito is muddled perfectly.

A big crowd of Argentinean kids move by our table, crowding right around where the men are playing. A few of us follow and dance. The one guy who never dances has the biggest grin in the world on his face, everything in his body saying Let’s Go! Let’s Go! Let’s GO! He asks us if it’s okay to stand this close to the band and we laugh and drink from his glass and give him ours, and then we dance with all the children. They know the words to every song, screaming along with the singer and we mouth with them, we don't know the words but we can’t help it, we aren’t faking knowledge but we must participate, as if we don’t have a choice. The guy who doesn’t dance goes, fuck man it’s like a reaction is expected, even necessary from us, like they want us to participate! And the guy I’m dancing with raises his arms in a benediction , I think. It couldn't have been ironic. Nothing was ironic that night.

And the children don’t mind us, they sing sad songs while hugging everyone and air-guitaring, one guy kneels down in front of the singer in a faux duet. We don’t understand a word they are singing but it sounds like regret and anger and pain and the sweetness of lost expectations, like that fucking nightingale with a thorn in its heart bleeding a white rose into red, like Icarus was a shadow against the sun, throwing everything they had left that night into singing the song. We stayed with them. We stayed out far later than any of us had in recent times. And all the time we were there, we sang, we danced, we spilled our drinks, we took photos with strangers, we stood guard over each other at the loo. We stayed till they turned on the lights, then rode in a single taxi, all six of us, back through empty streets, tucked into each others arms, over each others’ knees, some of us already asleep with the deep dreamless silence of children.

Notes from DC, take 2.

Tryst

We sat around as a group, fucked up from the heat, from the watching Argentina lose, from all the bad pop music that was playing downstairs. There had been a barbecue that had gone the way most barbecues go in July on the East Coast, too much to clean up after, even with all the disposables, too many bugs. At least four of us had wanted Argentina to win. I didn’t watch football. I respected it, sensing how much it meant to so many. But I had wanted Argentina to win. I had first wanted Mexico to win. Then Paraguay to win. Still some hope for Uruguay. But they were all chopped down and Argentina remained that day, the beautiful long-haired boys with the most European heritage out of all of South America. One of the girls says it’s the heat that makes me this racist. I want to talk about love for the underdog, but I don't. Instead I say it’s not fair that countries that control the means of production get to stay in the World Cup finals. Then we had an argument about Equal Opportunity Employment. Then we found some rum, while I tried to imagine what watching football in Argentina that day must have felt like.

We need to get out. I know this, but I need to sell the idea to the group. This is the most amount of time we’ve all spent together in a long while, and it’s beginning to tell. I can see it on their faces—a few want sleep, another wants a smoke, another misses her boyfriend, another is worried about not finding a job. Fuck that shit. We’re still young (I don't say this out loud) and it’s only 10PM on a Saturday night (this I say out loud). Don’t ask me how I did it, but I got everyone out the door; it helped that I knew this one neighborhood better than anyone else in the apartment, and there were two good places to get drinks, no dress code, no cover, nice atmosphere.

We get there. We walk into the coffeeshop first. It’s still filled with mismatched furniture and low light, coming mainly from purposefully dowdy lampshades placed around the room: numerous chairs and sofas, from yard sales, from dorm rooms, from someone’s grandmother’s living room. We corner a school desk, a couple of hard straight-back chairs and a chaise. Without anyone saying it, I know, I just know that I’m in charge of making this night work, since I dragged everyone out. The trick is to not look anxious. This place is notorious for bad service, mostly because they are used to serving kids who are high or drunk or backpackers and interns who are too tired to want their food and drink pronto. Eye contact, eye contact.
One of the guys suggests a round of shots. I want to bear hug his languid body, but I resist, concur and finally get the attention of one of the servers. Contact.

He looks messed up, man. Dark curls falling into his eyes, stained apron, this gone look as he smiles at us wanly, and tells us in heavily accented English that he’s had a real rough day, and what would we like?

I talk him down from suggesting Patron. I laugh, I lean in and say all the right things to let him know we’ve been here before, and we aren’t tourists. We get a cheap tequila, order drinks from the menu card and I know he’ll get them wrong. Remembering to not look anxious.
The tequila and lime wedges come, no salt. We spill some on the cracked wood, we grin, we mutter toasts no one hears and down our shots.

The music gets louder immediately, immediately more likeable. Wasn’t the heat of the liquor, I swear to you that they turn the music up at 11:00PM to convince people to stay longer, just one drink more. We all respond. The music takes the silence away and we are grateful. We make jokes at each other’s expense, recalling good times from the past. Our eyes are all lit up, our skins shine, we smile at each other, any outsider would say we love each other. Our drinks arrive, three of them wrong, we try them anyway but the bar tender comes this time with the right ones, shaking his Viking hair, tells us to keep the old drinks. Our server comes back, apologizing. His team lost today, please don’t say anything guys.

Shit man, we all wanted Argentina to win. Our hearts, filled with love, pour towards this server. Far from his home country, like us. One of us asks what the national drink of Argentina is. If I could’ve sucked up all his words and poured them down his throat I would have. Don’t know any Argentinians but I had a feeling symbols and standards of the country would be hard to discuss, especially at night, especially on a night like this. I know what it is like to come from a city and country with many fathers. There is some pride but also some shame in it, like how all mongrels and half-casts feel. Our server reeled but stood his ground. Said people drink a lot of wine, beer… like how all Europeans drink. Yerba Mate. And something made with gin. Or maybe ginger. The one who asked exchanged the words with the server like a chorus—
gin?
ginger?
gin!
ginger!
And they gave up laughing, and one who was trained in dance said something about the Argentinean tango, and the one who watched football passionately said fuck Germany, and he thanked us and asked us if we needed anything else, and of course we said no.

Then we passed around our drinks, giggling like teenagers, and took bad pictures of each other and the glasses on the table, which with all the water glasses and shot glasses and wrong drink glasses now looked like a glass harmonica. And everyone lets go. The girls squeeze my hands gratefully, and I must have blushed. Never look anxious or overwhelmed. Which is why I suggested moving on to the next door place, the best mojitos and caipirinhas in the city, probably on the East Coast, this far north anyway. I don’t give them time to falter: I leave the boys in charge of the bill, head off arm in arm with the girls to the Café.

Notes from DC, take 1.

the 4th of July


Like every capital city everywhere in the world, this one was mapped out for the day. A lawn here, a parking lot there, this monument’s special open hours: all for the purpose of free and equal access to the evening’s fireworks display.


Lost interest the night before, even. Fireworks reminded me of November 25th in Oman, where all that oil money went into exquisite, complicated sulphur and light formations in the sky. Who the fuck knew it was oil money then anyway? Not us expat kids, all we saw were the lights. We’d go to the houses of family friends who lived in the hills, and watch the national flag and the kanjar picked out in bursts of light in the sky. The fireworks in DC? Drugstore Americana, big umbrellas of blue, gold, white and red sparks opening and closing in turns.


We went out to eat a late lunch, then shopped discounted sales, landed at the pool finally. Went up the road from the apartment complex about half an hour before everything started. None of us seemed particularly eager to go, but there wasn’t anything else to do. The roads would be jammed, restaurant service would be bad, bars nearby would be dead. For some reason, everyone with babies had come out. Everyone! On some level, nationalist propaganda must tie into state-approved levels of procreation. Come celebrate the country’s birth with your new born!


Ungeneralizable unintentionally racist observation: in this part of the city, the white parents are getting older and older, all with SPF45 and wet-wipes and organic baby food. The Hispanic and Black parents are getting younger, as are their babies. Saw one that hadn’t even opened its eyes yet. The mother was tending to it on the grass by the sidewalk, kneeling as if to pick up a spilt handbag and this bigger guy—let’s call him Jorge, he looked like a Jorge—Jorge looks over to this skinny younger Hispanic couple. Thin and tough and young, so young, and Jorge says, don’t you want one of them? The girl tightens her lip, and the guy says, her? She calls them “it”. All the Asians who are here without a car are sitting down dutifully, no babies in tow at all. Eyes with that work visa look: they know it’s a pledge of allegiance, just showing up. Their kids eager eyed and waiting. I’m not sure if they’ve seen American fireworks before, because there’s an expectation on their face that makes me think they’re dreaming diwali. Or dussehra. Or Pongal.


Another kid with her baby harnessed across her chest. Maybe 15, 16? They’re doing all the right things though, at least this baby’s eyes are open. Teenagers are tough these days, there’s nothing you can tell them except that whatever they believe right now, they will be disappointed soon enough. We’re getting old, one of the girls I’m with laughs. Yeah we are. Shit. Look at us. The youngest 25, the oldest 31. But we could be our parents, the orderly way we’re behaving. I could be my grandfather.


What we see everywhere: folding chairs, picnic baskets, bug spray, torches, parched grass. One white family tries to keep everyone from sitting in front of them with a good-natured warning about a low hanging branch. “Ya don’t want to be wearin’ that thing on the 4th, now do ya?” Most move away, some laugh and thank them for the warning, all the ethnic folk laughing overloud and in a higher pitch than they intended, as if to wipe away that niggling doubt whether the family was just using the branch a slim excuse to get the better view. Three tough South Asian kids, all younger than 10 take a long look at the branch and sit underneath it. I want to applaud. I want to bang a fuckin’ drum and sing Dixie, because it’s a victory. You can’t teach kids to fear death. Mortality means nothing. Just start the damn fireworks. Let’s go. One kid gets up and starts swinging from a leaning lamppost in half circles. Let’s go. Let’s Go.


This far away from the Capitol we can’t hear any fanfare—there’s no voices or trumpets riding on the wind, but all the cars have stopped on road next to us, and people have gotten out with their cameras and phones on the bridge to take pictures. No one angry. You have to be stupid to think you can drive in any country during an independence day fireworks display.


I take stock. About five small groups of white Americans. The rest, all migrants, like us. Standing in a heat we wouldn’t be standing in if this was back home. Staring at heavy, hot twilight sky.And when it starts, it starts quiet, only one holler to welcome it. We stare at it like it’s a Keno machine, or the lady at the airline counter reading out stand-by seat numbers. Occasionally there’s a nice big bright one: a venn diagram of pink and blue pin pricks in the night sky. A plane flies right against one big BOOM! and that gets the crowd going.


The girl who spoke before, she and I start talking. About job prospects, about books, about that baby down on the grass, goddamn that baby is way too young to be outside like this. What are these people doing, having kids this young we say, and we shift uncomfortably, each of our shining eggs rattling around inside our purses. We are the right type of young. We go places without people asking us who we’re with. But we’re tormented by all the turgid, surging family presence all around us. I look around. The only other single people are also gathered tight together, facing outwards, wary and not knowing why. This much Americana and the heat is getting to us all. Another plane flies by. More whoops.


One of the five small groups starts a “USA! USA!” chant. Silence all around, a Ghanaian family next to us laughs quietly and one guy pleasant-voiced, yells out, but not too loud, “Go Ghana! Go Ghana!”. One of the parked car Asian families yells “Go Pakistan!” Score 2 for Dixie. Everyone within earshot grins or laughs. We’re in a new immigrant part of the city, it’s clean, upmarket and well-kept, the immigrants keep it this way and work hard to fit in with the larger crowds in the malls, on the subway. When the last wave of lights start, a black woman who had been offering free face painting to everyone turns to her young daughter and tells her it’s time to go home. The girl goes, why do we have to start leaving now? The woman goes, Baby girl, I know your mind is not developed enough to remember events from last year, but these fireworks always last only 20 minutes, and after that there’s a mad rush. We gotta leave now, girl.


I’m wondering whether we’ll remember anything at all, wondering what the past half hour meant to any of us. At this exact moment the crowd starts to rush away, pull away, suddenly stir-crazy, like that standing around was too much. There’s no music, no singing, and we all need a drink, even the ones standing there still staring at the sky, as if unsatisfied, as if there had to be more to this thing.


Next year we’ll try getting closer, one of the girls say.


I’m sad because I can’t remember the music or words of the Omani national anthem. All I remember is, you sing it as a group in Arabic, and it has that rising wave on wave feeling, till at the end of it you feel like your chest is being shot out of a cannon.


I throw the cigarette in the gutter. A shower of tiny sparks and then oblivion.

On the need for a Tandav list

I don't know about you, but my favourite movie/t.v. moments are when the surly and/or famous character feels compelled to dance.

It's always spontaneous. And the less pretty, the better. The characters never let on that they can or want to dance, but do anyway and it always either lightens a tense moment or builds a relationship, as happens in the Pulp Fiction dance scene or the "ABCs" sequence from Clerks II.

In several mythologies from around the world, dance plays an integral part in moral lessons and characterization. In Hans Christian Andersen's 'Red Shoes', dance is used as a form of punishment & purgatory. Shiva, in Hindu mythology, occasionally gives in to a creative/destructive tandav in his Nataraja avatar.

Hell, spontaneous dance is the only reason my mum watches Ellen. She loves it when celebrity guests bust a move. I still remember when she called right after watching Obama, still a senator then, groove his way onto the set.

I grew up on TCM movies, which meant Gene Kelley at least once every week. That scene from 'Singing in the Rain' is still iconic, not just because of Kelley's skill but because of how spontaneous he makes it look: it's the end of a long day, he's just kissed the girl. Stepping onto the platform, he takes a deep smiling breath, waves the cab away and begins one of the coolest sequences ever filmed.

And it's the let loose feature of these dance moments that get me. It's what happens to all of us: AM Radio clock in the bathroom when we wake up, the drive to work, whenever we have the house or conference room alone to ourselves. We've all had that air guitar-Mrs. Doubtfire-Dude looks like a lady moment. The problem is, those moments are getting rarer and rarer.

We're more social today than ever before: we know people on twitter, we meet them for coffee, there are pictures of us in their Facebook albums and every month, someone gets our number from a contact on LinkedIn and calls about the Next Big Start-Up Idea or a 10th class reunion. All well and good, but it means you and I get less me time.

Admit it: you've thought about getting to work early and dancing around the entire office like Mr. Pitt does in this commercial. If only because it means skipping the polite elevator rituals, the walk-to-desk drill and having to say hello to the co-worker who colour-coordinates his stationery.

We all need our Tandav moment. That sacred time when we shake off the weariness of repeatedly bad news and pet projects put off five years now. The time when we take our failures and successes and break it all down to the basics. No noise, just dance. Like Tom Cruise as Les Grossman does during the credits roll of Tropic Thunder, crumpin' to Ludacris' 'Get Back'.

Hell, yeah.

Incidentally, I have a playlist on my 'pod for this very purpose. Top 10 tracks?

Enur feat. Natasja- Calabria 2007
Khailash Kher- Babam bam
The Doors- Roadhouse Blues
Rage Against the Machine- Killing in the Name of
Clash- rock the casbah
CSNY- Carry On
Daft Punk- Technologic
DJ Unk- Walk it Out
Filter & the Crystal Method- Trip Like I do
Gogol Bordello- Wanderlust King

Who's on your Tandav list?

Fish

The Middle East, South Asia link

Part of my new job at AIDemocracy involves putting together awareness, advocacy and action events in the context of global peace & security.

Having grown up in Oman and India, I learned early that peace and security go hand in hand, chicken AND egg, both at the same time. I also learned that without development, peace and security measures often died still-born. According to Noeleen Heyzer,

"Peace is the absence of war, but beyond that peace is a commodity unlike any other. Peace is security. Peace is a mindset. Peace is a way of living. Peace is the capacity to transcend past hurts -- to break cycles of violence and forge new pathways that say, “I would like to make sure we live as a community where there is justice, security, and development for all members.” At the end of the day, peace is an investment; it is something you create by investing in a way of life and monitoring where your resources go."

An investment. Something tangible, even. Gandhi once said, "There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."

I believe the same holds true for human security: how can you worry about democratic processes, the global significance of the war in Iraq or climate change if you don't have access to clean running water, if your government changes every 8 months or if you have to bribe your way into a school or a job?

When it comes to Peace, Security and Development, I can't imagine the Middle East without thinking of South Asia. I think of the similarities in cultures, traditions, recipes, family structures and community values, both positive and negative. I think of shared histories and religions.

I think of how folk from ME/SA are always in shock the first time we get to the U.S. and find out there's no water spray attachment/lota available in loos, just toilet paper: I mean, how do you live with using just toilet paper? How? Why?

Over the past two months, I've spoken with people at all levels about my pet project at AIDemocracy viz. organizing a set of events/performances/discussions that underline moments, both depressing and heroic, that make up the many diverse, current realities in the Middle East and South Asia, the moments that don't necessarily get covered by CNN or Fox, the moments that are often at the heart of key issues of social change.

Many have been ecstatic about the idea. They love stories and situations brought into the limelight that go beyond Bollywood, hummus and ________ (insert your favourite stereotype here).

Some have asked me to reconsider. To "narrow down" my focus, make it "more realistic". The same folk tell me that talking about both the Middle East and South Asia will dilute my ask.

I understand that they are speaking from experience: most grant makers, for instance, ask for a proposal that is dedicated to one specific world region. Bureaucracies like universities, community organizations and yes, even most some non-profits will tell you that their target audience/funder is invested in one or the other region, that current events behooves concentrating on only one region.

I understand that these naysayers mean well. I understand how easy it is to try to do too much with too little resources, and fail. I understand the downside of throwing too much information around in an attention-deficient world. I've spent weeks trying to cut ideas, realign my program.

No dice.

Blame my pigheadedness on the Department of State folks. Yup, it's their fault: they put together funding for the PLUS program, a two year embedded education initiative that I was accepted into. They made me live with kids from all over the Middle East and South Asia. They ensured that for two years my head and heart was filled with information from various ME/SA home towns and life experiences, that we traveled around the U.S. together, sharing stories, battles, kitchens and dorm rooms.

Also, blame folk like those at UC Davis, for investing in Middle East/South Asia studies, setting up a whole separate department dedicated to the study of relationships between these two regions and their relevance to global peace, security and development today.

And don't forget the House of Representatives! It's their fault too! They support the Sub-committee on the Middle East and South Asia, a body of representatives who address issues of foreign assistance, development, security, fledgling democratic processes in the ME/SA.

What would these leaders in education, law and social initiatives know anyway.

Some folk turn around and say that there is sufficient economic growth, exposure to western culture and education levels in the ME/SA to enable people in these regions to deal with their own problems and fight their own battles without bringing in outsiders. After all, there are other countries and communities in far worse conditions.

But what about the minorities in ME/SA fighting for a voice, often silenced by a complacent or hesitant middle class?

What about the sexual and reproductive rights and health of folk in Malaysia and Indonesia who are being persecuted?
What about adivasis in India fighting for social justice and being met with criticism for being revolutionary?
What about farmers across Asia who are at the receiving end of the GMO stick?
What about young people in Nepal, concerned about the staying power of their fledgling government?
What about female education in Afghanistan and the North-Western provinces?
What about illegal settlement building in Gaza and the West Bank?
What about Tamil Refugee camps in Sri Lanka?
What about the lack of competitive employment opportunities in Morocco?
What about censorship and drought in Syria?

What about all these flip-sides, underdogs and undercurrents that don't fall neatly into the "Western world versus Islamic world" dichotomy that so many well-meaning folk urge us to "address" and "dialogue" about?

Till someone finds me an answer, here I go-- writing Middle East AND South Asia. Over, and over again.

The New Age of Non-Profits: a conversation with Ken Banks on development, knowledge sharing and FrontlineSMS

It had started off simple enough.

Two weeks ago as a relatively new employee of AIDemocracy, I spent a few hours trawling through Social Edge and twitter. With an eye on global development and security, my goal was to discover what was being done already in the non-profit world, who was doing it best and who among these folk were the most open to collaboration.

I made a number of new friends: the people at Acumen Fund, Water Charity (not to be confused with charity:water), Be Unreasonable, Sangam India, CORD and Open Society Institute were fantastic right off the bat-- They were engaging, interested and human. It was like a Utopian first day at school.

In the context of my new job and projects I had in mind, I needed to know what was being done in terms of technology support for non-profit outreach and education services. One name that came up regularly was Ken Banks, founder of Kiwanja.net

I had heard of Kiwanja in passing before, but didn't know much about it's main project FrontlineSMS, otherwise known as \o/(Which, btw, is a design based on this fantastic visual here).

I wasn't sure what to expect. Before this Saturday, I had no idea who Ken Banks is as a person, and was as wary as a product of post-post-colonialism can be of anybody who does "non-profit work" in "Africa". I was afraid I might run into yet another individual who's working to "save Africa" just because that's what Bono, the UN and everyone else is talking about right now.

[And if this is something that bothers you, Aid Watch has a great post on the issue here.]

I sent an email to Ken, one of those self-introduction/basic outline of project/can we chat sometime emails. You must remember that I moonlight as a writer: after all my experiences writing lit mag queries, I was prepared to face rejection or silence.

Imagine my shock then, when I checked mail the next day to find a reply from Ken. Yes, Ken Banks himself! Not an intern, volunteer, automated message or brush-off.

He said he'd love to talk further. Over a couple more emails I discovered he would be in Providence for the Better World By Design conference, and thanks to Barbara Grota, Assistant Dean of the Business School at my uni and a small set of practical miracles, this Saturday afternoon saw Ken, Barbara, two other students and I sit down together for an intimate conversation on change-making, mobile-for-development and non-profit developmental programs.

Ken is that guy you see in TED videos, the ones that go viral the moment they're uploaded on TED's site and Facebook page.

He showed up in a white cotton shirt and no jacket, laughing at how unprepared he was for New England weather, how he should've known better. Over coffee and a banana, he told us about how Kiwanja got started: his love for computers, how he had first traveled to the African continent in '93, how he spent 16 years living and working in countries that included Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Cameroon and Uganda. He spoke about his focus on using mobile tech for conservation and development, and mentioned he was a Liverpool fan.

He was alright.

As part of his presentation, he introduced us first to the role of mobile technology in the daily life of small business owners in African countries:

Ken told us that this picture is of a woman who started off a small business by providing a cell phone connection to her community, at a time when not everyone owned a handset of their own. She then built a small grocery store around this business, and when competition stepped in in terms of wider coverage and other small business owners who had the same idea, she secured her handset with a wire so clients could enjoy a private conversation while making sure no one would make off with her phone at the same time.


Ken pointed out that small, lean-to mobile charging stations and stores just like this one were common all over East and South Africa, making a case for mobile-enabled entrepreneurship among communities that are often labeled as being aid-dependent or in need of immediate charity.

These pictures immediately struck a chord with me-- these shots could have been taken anywhere in any rural or urban area, back home in India.


What Ken's presentation did was to focus our attention on ways in which ordinary people without much skill training or capital have adapted mobile phones and mobile technology to serve as both economic and service delivery solutions-- Not only are individuals across Africa and Asia making a business for themselves out of selling & repairing cell phone hardware and connections, they are also utilizing mobile technology to stay updated on medical services and market prices for agricultural produce. He then introduced us to how FrontlineSMS functions-- Take the tour and see for yourself here.

Ken built the original software and threw it out into the world "dirty", much like how Google first opened up Gmail Beta for public users. He's been generous with both its code and its core idea, a generosity that has enabled other entrepreneurial men and women around the world to up and run with it. One of the immensely successful ideas to come out this sharing is FrontlineSMS:Medic.

FrontlineSMS:Medic (or \+/ for short) has enabled regional hospitals that serve remote, isolated communities and villages to get the word out regarding updates in treatments, schedules for open clinics, and test results. And if that wasn't incredible enough--

Patient View, a module of \+/ enables a health worker to access a patient's records using FrontlineSMS and respond in real-time to complaints from patients many miles away.

CelloPhone, new technology being developed at UCLA that will be supported by \+/

"is a revolutionary diagnostic tool that will be able to perform basic diagnostics such as Complete Blood Count, diagnosis of Malaria and TB, and CD4 T Lymphocyte count on the back of a camera cell phone, for under $1 per test. The device itself is expected to cost as little as $10. The device utilizes a new imaging technique called LUCAS, which circumvents a lens for magnification, instead taking intracellular “holograph” images of cells directly via the CCD chip ubiquitous in most camera phones. A pattern matching algorithm then analyzes cell morphology to automatically produce a diagnostic result. The diagnostic results will be communicated from the device to a central location using FrontlineSMS, and viewed with our Patient View module and/or sent to OpenMRS with our medical records module. The Ozcan lab at UCLA is developing this device, and we aim to pioneer its use in the developing world (\+/, 2009)."

All I could think at this time was, why the hell isn't everyone talking about this? Why aren't the modules of \+/ being utilized all over South Asia, for instance , where we and all our gods know it would be of incredible service?

Maybe it's because of a lack of information. Maybe not enough people know about \0/, and the other activities of Kiwanja. Or maybe some global non-profits, government agencies and contractors are afraid of all the power they might lose once local community members and non-profits start empowering themselves with such technology. Who knows?

I can imagine multiple uses of FrontlineSMS in India alone:

• In disaster management response and activity coordination.
  
• In managing the agricultural crisis by getting out messages on weather patterns, market prices and setting up a communication network for suicide prevention.
• In responding to health care needs in remote villages up and down the east coast and in state interiors.

While I sat there, taking in how simple and yet beautiful FrontlineSMS' design is, and how accessible its use can be, Ken spoke quietly about some of the ideas that drove him to build \0/

"It's not about building cool-- it's about building appropriate."

FrontlineSMS began with one idea: to build on the existing, burgeoning mobile network in Africa instead of waiting either for some government to buy into fiber optic cables or on some non-profit or country's charity to set up a development-oriented program.

\0/ also builds on local awareness and local ownership, says Ken Banks, and I believe him: you can't read cases of health-workers in the Philippines and Malawi who downloaded \0/ all on their own and used it to improve the quality of care and then not believe in \0/, Kiwanja and Ken. And yet, none of this happened overnight. "Be Patient" is a core principle of this sort of work, according to Ken-- an idea that Acumen Fund founder Jacqueline Novogratz mirrored in her TED talk on Patient Capital.

Ken's dream is that FrontlineSMS will grow to be self-sufficient, that people all over the world will adapt it to solve problems specific to their communities without needing him to be its brand ambassador. Considering the Open Source nature of \0/, this dream may soon become a reality.

Ken Banks' energy, candour and intelligence will infect your brain with good ideas. The thought that timely, measurable change for the better can occur on the ground, on a one to one basis without needing to wait for a grant cycle or government vote to come through is refreshingly now.

I can't wait to speak with people in South Asia about \0/ and discovering whether some of the challenges they are facing in the field can be answered with this suit of mobile technology.

What about you? Know of a non-profit, community or person who can benefit from FrontlineSMS? Direct them here. I can attest to the fact they'll get a personal response almost immediately.

I did bring that up with Ken towards the end of our conversation. He didn't know me from Eve, and I obviously didn't have big money or contacts to throw at his work. Why would such a busy guy spend time on a non-lucrative email exchange and trip to a small liberal arts university?

According to Ken, nurturing conversation around the kind of work Kiwanja supports is what has brought FrontlineSMS and its associated avatars this far. He talks about the individuals who contacted him about \0/ and are responsible for developing \0/ to the level it's at now. He also points out that he knows what it's like to be a newbie in the non-profit field. Says he wouldn't have got where he is now if it wasn't for several key people giving him a break and believing in FrontlineSMS when they didn't have to. And then, he grins.

Ken Banks, myself and Ai Jing, a fellow international student at RWU

I nod in agreement. The sun broke through a gray cloud bank, shining into the conference room we sat in. A good omen: maybe the New Age of Non-Profits is truly upon us, one in which ordinary people everywhere are empowered by need-based technology, where volunteering at a non-profit means coming up with usable ideas, not just filing proposals and where sharing real-time knowledge and experience is rated higher than how many celebrity endorsements a non-profit gets.

Of Holidays, Serendipity & the Green Goddess

If you grew up in those parts of the world that still hold onto trappings of the British Raj, you grew up thinking that a sign of cultured success was the family holiday home up in the hills or by the beach.

Alternatively, if you grew up in said Imperial Angrezi shadow but did your best to moderately protest such faux-pucca behavior, you and your parents shied away from a holiday home and instead returned to your grandparent’s place: an ancestral, mosquito-infested location where huge stainless steel tins of paapad were passed around and your uncles all had stories about every room and every wall, stories that got progressively bawdier as summer evenings wore on till your elder brother kicked you out of the room while he stayed put in a corner, the surreptitious bastard.

However—None of this holds true any longer. Liberalized global economies, stricter leave policies and those nifty mid-week discounts from travel sites mean that Heraclitus (a chap who had an incredibly hard time at school, I suspect) is your daddy; all you can do is get in short bursts of vivid experience every time your two weeks come around (unless you’re a bureaucrat or are French in which case mille pardons, you lucky sot.)

Right now, it’s not how well you know a place, it’s how many places you’ve been to—A night in Belgrade, three days in San Diego with cousins, an afternoon in Cannes, one in Catania and if it’s Tuesday it might as well be Belgium. One is made to feel there's something almost provincial about eternally returning to a single favourite holiday spot nowadays, my friend. Provincial and limiting.

Well then, if to be counter-culture these days is to swim against this tide of short trips and frequent flyer miles, I am the veritable Abbie Hoffman of holiday-making, the Timothy Leary of trip-planning. I’ll even say it--

My name is Priyanka Joseph and I’m an addict. It’s been four years since I first visited New Orleans, and I have been skulking back every summer since.

No one understands it much, except those wasafiri who tumble from all over the globe into New Orleans and have stayed put ever since. Home-grown locals are even more big-hearted than they usually are when they realize you’re in town for more than a photo-op or “material” for your next “piece”. Mid-Westerners and kids on Spring Break anxiously look away when you shoot the Death Stare at their year-round Mardi Gras beads, their Made in China feather boas sold up and down the outer streets of the French Quarter by enterprising second-generation Bengalis and Gujaratis.

And no, that is not a stereotype. All the Indian vendors I’ve run into in New Orleans have proudly attested to their regional identities while discussing mine in the same breath, bless their little hearts. They sit there smiling, the aunties and Uncles, amid the plastic boob necklaces, imitation hash pipes and epithet-tinged T-shirts while they wish you a good day after surreptitiously giving you a 10% discount. Don’t count on it happening often though—An Indian businesswoman will get carried away by that special brand of southern voodoo once or twice, but you must be quick: it is accompanied only by one or two subtle signs. Blink twice and it vanishes.

Most surreal events and places in Nola are accompanied only by one or two subtle signs.

For instance, no good bar in the French Quarter, dive or posh, is well-lit.


If the bar-tender is dressed fancy and you see bright lights, you’re in a tourist spot and unless you wish to invite my Death Stare, get out! This of course, is true only of establishments in the French Quarter. The Garden District, St. Charles and the CBD are where the smart young things of New Orleans go, and where like most smart young things anywhere else in the world, they enjoy the fixings that go with these more refined neighborhoods.

I stick to the French Quarter because visiting it every year is like meeting only the most beloved members of your family at Christmas except it’s summer in June and they’re not your family-- they’re members of an intimate, energetic, human circus who you know all by name and the moment you enter Bourbon Street you’re in it, Second Lining along with everyone else. The French Quarter is the last bastion of the city’s variegated past, and in every crack and courtyard, along every open drain and broken tile-work half-restored, in every old wall and re-painted sign the well-worn familiarity of a grand-parent reaches out to you.

And it’s not some secret club. Like a finely-trained acrobat, courtesan, juggler and the world’s greatest storyteller rolled into one, the Quarter draws you in only as far as you will go. A big hearted city, the biggest hearted in the States.

There, I said it.

The only folk disapproved of are posers and those who don’t know how to have a good time, and even they are tolerated till they try to pay their bill using a library card. Despite all the touristy trappings, besides all the people who show up figuring they’re going to be blessed with boobs, beads, cheap booze and perhaps even a piece of humanity culled from the hunks of Katrina debris, usually made up of narrated memories, water-marks and faded X’s on front doors, little souvenirs they can pack away with their shot glasses to put up on their mantelpiece in Middle Class, Anywhere—Despite all these little clichés, the City and the Quarter still find ways of sneaking into my heart with their secrets, year after year, every year closer still till the imprints they leave are like the toe-marks inside your oldest and most favored pair of chappals.

This year, the most vivid imprint I carried away from the city was of a meal I had at a small, privately run establishment that had only recently opened at the time. A meal that would have never happened if it wasn’t for a little web 2.0 magic.

Late on the Sunday afternoon that was our last day in the city, we sat in a Rue St. Anne hotel room and reviewed our list of Nola restaurants yet-to-be-experienced. Yes, there still was the old guard, the ones we always walked past and nodded a salutation to, the historical origins of fine dining in the city: Arnaud’s, Olivier’s, Brennan’s, Antoine’s, Broussard’s, GW Fins, Galatoire’s, Commander’s Palace. Legends are still told in the street regarding secretly guarded recipes, privately owned smoke-houses and the sort of tidbit goodness of the kind that could redeem your soul with a first-taste and cast you into hell at the exact same time for the lust surging in every fiber of your being at the mere mention of the Crabes mous amandine (Antoine’s) or the Wood Grilled Mississippi Redfish (G.W Fins’). And yes, this particular alchemy is not brought on by food alone.

The Big Easy is a human city. One that’s been torn apart several times in its history, by moral policing, race-oriented government policies, corruption, industry shifts, climate change and hurricane seasons. There’s so much of feeling up and down streets here that the air, especially in the hot, still summer thrums against your skin and you might just find yourself bursting into tears at the sound the old jazz-men of the Preservation Hall band make when they get into When the Saints go Marching in or Swing low, Sweet Chariot , or the insistent notes of the calliope coming off the Steamboat Natchez, for no other reason than this, this particular moment brought everything treasured about your childhood back to you in a single rush of merry-go-round sound. Oh there’s some strong stuff floating about, but that last Sunday didn’t feel like a day for reflecting on the past.

The day before, we had met and struck up an instant friendship with two transplanted locals, one a photographer and the other, a guide for the Haunted History tours. Both fantastic people, and that long afternoon spent in Pirates Alley is one of my happiest memories of New Orleans till date. We wanted more of that: to meet the people who have made this city their home to live and work in because there is no other place like it on earth. I was just about to sign out of Gmail when an email popped up from a dear friend in Madras, who declared that Neil Gaiman had delivered (pardon) an easter egg via Twitter, stating that if one was in New Orleans, one should up and over to the Green Goddess and pronounce the words, ‘Mezze of Destruction’.

Hm.

Now one suspects that Mr. Gaiman is an honorable man, all things considered. Couldn’t help but wonder what spot that phrase could get me into though. A simple Google search brought up Chef DeBarr's livejournal and the restaurant's website. It didn't take long to realize we'd be dining at the table of chefs who did things with ingredients that Da Vinci did with set squares and a single argyle sock. Strangely, the place was a only street away. No one at the hotel had heard of it but we were far too hungry to be scared off. I put their lack of knowledge down to the fact the website said it had only opened a month previous to our arrival.

In a matter of minutes, there it was: a snug warm place opposite the Pelican Club. Dim lighting, check. No fancy outfits inside, check. In fact, since we were dining late on a Sunday night, no one else but us, either. Two apron-wearing men stood behind a counter, staring at us while we stared at them.

The first thing you notice is that you aren't treated as customers, cash cows or outsiders even, which are types of treatment you can receive elsewhere in the city, especially in the Quarter. And who can blame a body? Tourists truck in with their frozen daiquiris, their cargo shorts and their cranky toddlers and demand ketchup on a po-boy, jambalaya without rabbit and crawfish étouffée without crawfish.

But that hasn't bothered the proprietors of the Green Goddess. The moment we stepped in, we were treated as co-conspirators, as if there was a great game afoot that we could be a part of if we wanted to.

It was hard to whisper anything to a server, let alone a password, because there was Chef DeBarr, standing two feet away and asking what we were in the mood for. Also, there’s no polite way of vocalizing a password days. You can’t sit there with your knees politely together and murmur some rubbish in someone's ear. I laconically blurted out-- “By the way, I was told to say ‘Mezze of Destruction’!" before half-ducking under our table, ready for anything—an explosion, a dancing ferret, a talk-show host, a well-aimed wok. Instead, we were greeted by Chef DeBarr’s warm chuckle.

“Ah, so Neil sent you then? The Mezz! That's great-- Well, for today we have a variation on the Pimm's cup. Why don't you sit down, anywhere you want to.” He then proceeded to tell us that the easter egg was a little agreement Mr. Gaiman and he had going, a personal nod from his side to the Sandman book, Brief Lives. As he moved behind the bar with all the grace of a minuet dancer, he began throwing ingredient names at us, juggling them back and forth as he sliced fresh cucumbers fine, and mixed this most delicious summer concoction: according to Chef DeBarr, their Pimm's Cup is based on the British gin-based liqueur and is a wonderful summertime cocktail which always features a cucumber in the drink:

The Green Goddess at that time hadn’t a liquor license, a smallish hurdle only for the chefs at GG and one that has long since been removed. Chef DeBarr mixed us non-alcoholic cocktail juices the entire evening though, an intrepid taste-bud extravaganza that when savored felt like the best parts of Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss shaken together then served over ice.

From that moment on, we had Chef DeBarr’s undivided attention, which is the sort of exquisite pleasure that comes to you only thrice in your life, usually when you’re too young to understand the significance of what is happening. He brought out a salad to us, that in itself was an invocation to the little GG shrine up on the wall. In a vain attempt to partake of it in a civilized manner, we stared up at the intricate, beautiful patterns on the ceiling and examined the mystic, curly-ended cutlery, quickly realizing why Mr. Gaiman might like this place. Little did I know that this was only the beginning...



While poring over the menu-- rich with local produce and fresh ingredients-- we were told why this heirloom tomato was used, what that sausage tasted like and where it was made, and how the thai basil seed drink could just be the greatest invention, juice-wise, to ever come out of that lovely land.
The whole thing was a play, a musical in four acts from aperitif to dessert, and the wonderful staff at GG were star performers executing complex routines between kitchen, bar and our table, while stories were exchanged across the room: Chef’s admiration for Bengali five spice powder and his awareness of the merits of uthappam, our confused chorus of Indian dishes we love, Coop’s on Decatur and how on earth did you flavour gulf shrimp in this immortal fashion? What powers do you hide?

So we didn’t really say the last two, just mumbled our appreciation while wondering at our luck. Our next course consisted of a plate of beautiful duck and pork sausages served with sweet potatoes, a Southern-style bangers & mash entrée--


-- and a plump, stuffed pupusa:

During the beautiful meal he served us, Chef DeBarr told us in his quiet way about why he felt the city needed a place like GG, why he loved to cook, why he believed menus needed to change with the seasons as well as the current times: he mentioned a special Persian tasting menu he was putting together for July 4th in honor of the brave folk in Iran who were standing up for their basic freedoms and the right to a just political process. Our little way, he said, of standing with them. The man is intense the way only someone who enjoys what he does, where he does it and lives that passion everyday can be.

I wanted to bring him the cinnamon my aunt brought back for my mother from an ancestral tree in Kerala. I wanted to bring him Kalpana aunty’s maami’s sambhar podi. I wanted to say here, see these are all the tastes that have ever meant something to me: what can you make with them?

Came this close to making a blubbering fool of myself. Thankfully, the GG lassi saved the day, a sobering, cooling, cinnamon-salt rimmed reminder that the Green Goddess restaurant is something good that will last a long while, something we can return to again and again.

So don’t look at lists of what to do in New Orleans. If you’re a list person, go to Disney World. They’ll love you there. Once you step out of the shuttle bus or taxi onto cobbled or paved street, breathe in deep. That mix of smells, warm, turgid and inviting, part slow-cooking roux, part day-old underage puke, part unsolved murder, part sweat, part summer garbage, part heavy river, part dust, part dead, part Jazz trio playing till 3am, part Gulf Coast breeze over the Metairie Cemetery and all these people who come here for shelter, inspiration, comfort and carnival, year in and year out—This is what I call my spiritual home, while India’s an ocean away, chasing its tail in an attempt to catch up with the glitz and glamor of what is presumed to be the Good Life as per syndicated media reports, while a beautiful magic thrives in a city that even some natives of this continent will never have the pleasure of knowing as intimately as this mere provincial addict does.

Take it from a doubly Southern girl—Sometimes the best place to holiday in is the one you can come home to with just a single step off a plane.

On Writing

Being a writer terrifies me.

When the words come, they force their way out. Nothing clean about it. Projectile vomit after bad meat, with the sobbing afterward. Fingers chewed down to the bone. Bad digestion, an uncharged phone, unfilled time sheets. And then when the poem or story is written, it sits there like a self-content child, sleek and nourished and confident of its own precocity. You remain the withered host, nothing parental/familial/nutritional about it. You were used, your life blood and time sucked up into its creation.

What the fuck do you do with it now?

It sits there, points at your flab, your worn tooth brush, your cable tv package, your mother's concern and laughs. Chortles when you search the web for submission guidelines and deadlines. Falls over screaming with laughter as you send carefully worded emails to published folk, asking the kind ones if they would be even kinder, even more generous and be your readers. Waiting for months, waiting for months while denying all claims that you are in fact, waiting, that howling bastard laughter in your ear.

And the screaming tears when you take up a day job instead. Like a hungry orphan. Like a bayoneted baby. Like a man crushed under a fallen bridge. Like a pig being slaughtered.

You fall behind soon enough. No paycheck tops the high of getting out a perfectly balanced, well formed sentence. You return in fits. Surreptitious. An addict. The first three days of doing nothing but write are glory days, a paid vacation sur la plage somewhere in Sardinia. And then you run out. Of words, of patience, of time.

Slink back to the job. Whoever's depending on you breathes a sigh of relief. And then frowns. Because the best parts of you all went on those pages. The husk that's left is dry, useless for anything but a shallow container they use to roll around their small hard pebbled regrets in, rolling them around in your head till thoughts go TILT! TILT! TILT!

Silent and sterile and functional for the next few days. The boss even figures you've "found your feet".

Then some old beloved motherfucker shows up. Some dear friend from ages past. They find your vein, tap twice and shoot you full of reminders, of past glories imagined and real. They power up the synapses in your head till electric jumps between letters, phonemes, words, paragraphs turn your head into a giant plasma ball.

You spend the night pouring over a keyboard, typing sentence after sentence in that default Arial 10 never looking up to edit. This makes the page look like it's filled with two dimensional black millipedes copulating in a Madras monsoon, rows upon rows of them till dawn when you stop and drink insta-coffee and smoke and immediately fall asleep.

Bukowski was an ugly drunk, ornery and mad as hell, the kind that folk are uncomfortable around. But he is authentic as all get-out, the kind of authentic that people want to sell, if only they could get their fingers on it. But he is the main man because he figured out my main question, the one that can't be answered by pulling a nine of hearts from the old fortune teller's deck.

I don't mean contract writing. I don't mean the MFA professor who put you onto his agent writing. I don't mean the I have enough media interest in me to sell a book writing.

I mean being past the age of being considered a prodigy writing. I mean not too many friends who want to spend time with you writing. I mean being a failure writing, and then failing again. I mean being a paranoid lover writing, where you check your lines and syntax in the hall mirror even when you know they're watching. I mean questioning, doubting, being ungrateful and apologizing after they're dead writing. The empty room at the book reading, sitting there finishing the booze you brought with you in a pepsi bottle writing. I mean self sabotage writing.

How do you write like that and do anything else in the world? Day jobs? Bank accounts? Families? How do you pour your fucking mind and heart, what you believe into a page and then order lunch from a menu the next minute? How can you teach your kid about wrong and right when your words constantly get you into corners? How can you pray when all you think about when you close your eyes is a story's good ending? How can you love. How can you love.
How can you love?