These Mountains I Call Home

Home sweet home. As I get older I find cliches to be increasingly unerringly true. It was an indescribable feeling the night I woke up in my own bed after a couple of weeks away. Half asleep as I was, I had this unshakeable feeling that this was the loveliest, most wonderful bed I'd ever slept in, the most beautiful room I'd ever been in, the most blessed sleep I'd ever slept. Ever.

And it is always a beautiful time of year up here in these mountains. The rain and sticky heat is gone, and in its place comes stealing in what I call the sad soft feel of a year preparing to depart. A precious ambience I've come to associate over the years with oranges, dust, woollen clothes, cold nights, warming your back in the morning sun and ah, Christmas. And all the connotations of the year with its problems and difficulties doing a fast fade, and an anxious excitement for the new year to come in as if all the old year's problems will dissolve away with the last sunset. On the flip side, there's also the implicit realisation that all the year's good times and treasured memories will slide further away in time. Another year gone, another time was.

Time comes, time goes. Seasons change. People come and go. But these mountains are eternal.

Photo: Jonathan Ralte

Ear we go again

Here's a new one - a micro blogpost via cellphone. Back at the CMCH Vellore. Had repair ear surgery on my right ear on Friday. The one I had in late April had been a great success but in mid September I blew it quite literally. I just woke up one morning with my ear off and when it remained stubbornly off the second day I did the unthinkable - pinched my nose and blew my ear open. And out.

My earlier visit here had been at the scorching height of a sizzling summer. This time our first day was rainlashed, grey and sunless. The handwork of cyclone Jal as it turned out. We had to dig out the woollies we'd packed for the home journey through the much cooler north east. Apart from that unexpected one day weather hitch, everything has been smooth-sailing. We even got in a day's sightseeing of the rather arid Vellore Fort which suprisingly holds not much else apart from a sumptuously elaborate 16th century Vijayanagar Hindu temple.

My surgery went well, thanks to the prayers of loved ones and wellwishers, and I'm looking forward to a gentle journey home, again by train to avoid air pressure damaging my new auditory structure. This time I'm planning to max out the home route by taking a two day rest and shop till we drop break in Cal. Whoopee de doo.

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And I Have You

I've always loved the poetry of Nikki Giovanni since I was introduced to her by Manorama, a roommate at a month-long refresher course in Burdwan who was then attempting a doctoral thesis on Ms. Giovanni's works. I never knew if my roomie ever got that thesis done but I'm eternally in her debt for helping me discover Nikki's fresh, readable, entirely identifiable, yet faultlessly classy poetry. Her love poems especially so get it right on the button.

Show me how you look and I'll tell you who you are

Conceded, that at birth, none of us were consulted on the way we might want to look. Nose, lips, hair, body parts, general body structure, nada nada nada. But it struck me this evening as I was on my way home from work, could the way we were born looks-wise have influenced the way we act and behave? Do our looks typecast us into certain behavioural patterns?

In the traffic jam at a busy junction this evening, there was this vai guy driving one of those chirpy little new cars, I forget which, besides not being really able to identify any car other than the ubiquitous Maruti 800. Anyway this guy reminded me of someone I had seen recently somewhere though I couldn't immediately place who or where. So he wasn't to blame for how he looked but that being the way he was, I mentally typecast him as one of those vai men in their 30s or 40s, averagely well-off but not too affluent, conventional but a bit of a lech when opportunity presented itself, reasonably well-educated and bright but not overly so, fairly widely-travelled, a paunch held in by a tight belt (he was sitting and I couldn't actually see anything other than his face), a bit of a fatty chest, probably smelling of aftershave or some sweetish body spray such men seem to favour.

Ok so I was probably stereotyping him but it did bring me to reflect on the question I brought up earlier: do our looks typecast us into certain behavioural patterns? I think it does. And about 5 minutes after I sighted the guy, I realised who he had reminded me of - Principal Figgins from Glee.

A Mindset Reflective

Came across the Mindset List a few days ago and among other things, it forcibly brought home just how quickly time flies and how rapidly things change and get as outdated as fads doing a fastfade into oblivion.

It's an unsettling thought that socio-cultural milestones can disappear so completely from generational memory or morph into something quite unrecognisable. Kind of disorienting. Like goalposts bobbing around like bouys instead of staying fixed in position. It also gives me a niggling sense of disquiet as to what touchstones do we have left that won't shift or drift with time and new developments. Is nothing constant anymore?

A couple of weeks ago I was watching a fellow Sunday School teacher earnestly telling the kids about life choices and how they could shape their own futures by the proper use of those choices. Now I've heard so much negative reports about kids these days, especially school-going kids, I have to confess that I was cynically wondering how much any of the lesson was going down. As usual the kids were sitting quietly and seemingly listening politely but I couldn't shake off the feeling they weren't all there. With all the transformations in attitudes and outlooks that have come with cultural meltdowns and fast changing lifestyles, aided and abetted by technology and the media, kids today have such radically different views and look-outs, and parents and adults seem to be left behind in the dark, fumbling their way through all the dizzying shifts and turns of societal changes.

Change is good most times, and technology is amazing. But nothing comes without a price, and I suspect that's where our age-old constants will eventually be robbed. In Mizoram where the community is still close-knit, society classless and religion respected, I don't look forward to the time when the Mizo mindset might reduce all these to nothing. Or morph them into unrecognisable shapes and patterns.

Of Love and Rain

For my baby. With apologies to Thomas Lowell Beddoes for slight changes to his Song, and credit to John Walford for his breathtaking Raindrop Rhapsody.

Patience on a Leash

Since I got home from work Thursday evening, a neighbour has been treating us all to loud sessions of uninhibited, frenzied drumming. Not sure if he bought himself a new kit or borrowed the gear but the first couple of days, at any time the mood took him, he'd play a snatch of Winds of Change, Always Somewhere or some other 80s rock classic and enthusiastically launch into the drum parts. Drums, cymbals, et al, all smashed with the greatest gusto. The first night, he struck up after 9 which is on the sedate side of the evening in these parts, and the next morning, I could hear him banging away around 5. Mercifully, he hasn't been so inconsiderate with his timings since then, only slapping his trap set in broad daylight when everyone's presumably wide awake already.

Mind you, he's not one of those drug/alchohol-ics. Edging close to 40, he's always been a really nice, helpful fellow, very involved with church activities etc, though when I think back, he always did like cranking up his music system a notch too high on occasion. What's probably set him off the deep end is that his wife died of brain cancer a year ago. It was one of those fast-acting cancers and after a few weeks in hospital, she just gave up, leaving three kids and a young husband. The kids ranging in age from 14 to 7 are schooling in Shillong where his parents live, which means he lives here alone with nothing but memories. Reason enough to go more than a little berserk, I know, and the neighbours are humouring him by sympathetically putting up with the racket. But when the crash boom bang gets a little too much, I wish social niceties and etiquette could just be shoved aside and someone would pipe up in capital letters S-H-A-D-D-U-P!

The way it is

Busy times these. Humid, hectic. The hearing in my right ear is still overly sensitive so I've been avoiding attending church services with the obligatory drums pounding deep into the recesses of my ear bones and making me miserable. It's almost 3 months after the surgery but I have no idea when my ear will acclimatise itself. Also most sounds are still higher on the bass register and I can't wait to be able to hear treble notes again.

I've also put on a lot of weight. Not sure how much precisely since I don't make a habit of stepping on the scales but definitely enough for all my clothes to feel tight and stretched. And that's if I can still get into them at all. I feel heavy, slow and sluggish, and the monsoonal weather isn't helping any. Oh, and did I mention my arthritis? I inherited it from my maternal grandmother who couldn't get up from a herhsawp (a low circular stool made of cane or bamboo) without clutching her knees and yelping "Aaih, aaih, aaih!"

The World Cup was great. The last two passed by with me not really registering much of it because it takes a lot to wean me off the computor and the internet. This time Facebook provided great company. A page called Ban the Annoying Vuvuzela etc gave me daily laughs as people (as in regular, eloquent, adult folks and not silly, incoherent teens) threw in wit, sarcasm, indignation, annoyance, and a generous dose of plain stupidity to make for a very lively discussion group. Unfortunately, the page sank under the weight of its own popularity, and disappeared halfway through the competition.

At work, I've been assigned something new that I'm not sure I can do justice to. Rhetoric and prosody is something that I never formally studied so it's going to be a tremendous challenge mastering all the intricacies involved enough to be able to teach it all in turn. I know I'm going to benefit a lot from it once I sort out what's what but for the moment, argh, my workload weighs heavy. Wish me luck.