Finding Soho

Pagoda Street, Chinatown I haven't updated my blog in a while, and so I thought I'd write about my recent transit week in Singapore. Singapore is a truly beautiful city, but its beauty can so easily be miscontrued as clinical modernity and organized perfection. The drive to the city from the airport is deliberately designed, unlike many other places, in such a way as to astound the visitor with its overabundance of greenery and sense of endless space. The moment you leave the airport, you're sold. But the city itself is so much more fascinating for its absolutely pragmatic and yet aesthetic conception of space and access. Chinatown, for example, is a thriving historical and artistic amalgam of European and Chinese architectural elements that commingle so effortlessly and yet in such a planned and deliberate manner. The lines of brightly coloured buildings are punctuated by temples and concrete complexes hou...

Stress can be quite tough to handle. A very few people have the capacity to endure difficulty without much mental agony, and most people suffer immensely. There's very little you can do when something terrible happens and it's completely out of your control. There's a lot of pressure that comes with feeling powerless to change things. In a system where you are not afforded protection against the effects of arbitrary events and occurences, you are bound to feel more stressed and pressured than if you had a sense that events beyond your control wouldn't impact you. Yet they do. There are many things that will damage or hurt you, directly or indirectly, and you will need to be strong to overcome them. Many times I have heard it said that one should remain calm in the face of difficulty. I have come to realize that I cannot be calm or at peace; that I am highly prone to pressurizing myself, and that's just who I am. It's least helpful but stress comes to me al...

Finally read Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother at one go till three in the morning last night. It is a simple yet stupendous work that inspires you at so many wonderful levels, your mind is left buzzing with infinite questions, perspectives, doubts and convictions. More than anything else, it is a tale of love, commitment and hardcore determination. It is a tale both of success and failure. It is a story that inspires an abundance of warmth, trepidation and courage all at once. Amazingly, it is also a book about music - the most important theme that pervades the novel. The way in which music flows through her memoir on parenting is fantastic. There is an incredible lot that one could say about the Tiger Mother, but one thing is for certain - she is brutally honest, forthright and brave. The book teaches you the value of discipline and the power of commitment. It demonstrates the arduousness of raising children, and it celebrates the triumph of solid foundational values. ...

My earliest memories of Bivar Road go so far back, they now belong to another world. I was there even before I was born. I've been told the story of the earthquake that shook Shillong at the time of my mom's pregnancy innumerable times. The house shook with trepidation then and I vicariously shared that moment with its inhabitants. From our earliest days, Arnav, Pilty and I spent every summer in the house. The long, tortuous and then painstaking drive from Guwahati (the roads weren't any good those days) involved hours of suffering through a miasma of diesel fumes and exhaust from factories (our cars didn't have air-conditioning then), but once the car drove past Mawlai, fresh, pine-filled bursts of Shillong air washed over our faces. Somewhere around the cantonment as you entered, a weeping willow hung sorrowfully on the side of the road, and Mom usually pointed it out, 'See that tree? It's called a Weeping Willow.' Nana moved to Bivar Road after his re...

Sampurna Chattarji's Absent Muses covers a wide swathe of experiences and sentiments. Reading her collection is a journey through the poetic consciousness as it encounters, contends with and finally captures the many different experiences of the writing subject. It is, as it were, a collection of collections, a collage of the different images we map onto the world. The recognizable characters that crowd her everyday reality are the muses that inspire poetry through their absences. Their conversations are like "alms" clutched tightly in the hand. She says she must read them later in open palms, even as sometimes they are swept clean by time, memory and, as it becomes acutely evident, geography. Chattarji's poems are strongly embedded in the dynamics of human friendship and relationships. Some of her poems directly speak to or about friendship and relationships but many are about their absence, or the shadow of their overwhelming former presence. In 'Translations...

The journey around London and the West End is a long one. There are so many epithets for the West End: big, wide, polyglot, mixed-up, far-off. There are so many things one can say. Each place has its own metaphor. The word that comes to mind when thinking about the West End is compositeness. Many of the places are Classical or Gothic or Corinthian, many of the people “multi-exit”, many of the buildings new glass monsters. Yet all of them speak of a certain present and former glory. One only has to look hard enough. It is said that in this mixed-up, often mad, world of ours, each thing that exists gives up and forsakes something of what it is, to let the rest become something that is bigger. Each thing halves in attrition, for the big things to become bigger. So, in places like the West End, one just has to find that something that has been given up and that something that has become bigger (and better?). There is always something to see and something to learn, from the smallest of plac...