lost girl

Sunday morning

The parents called from London, mid-morning walk near didi’s apartment. I can summon the mental image so easily, the neat, wide pavements and the cool breeze. “Maybe I will see snow this time!” said mum happily before cutting the line, which was after she reminded me to take my medicines and buy potatoes.
Last night I was in a club, oh dear. M’s girlfriend’s birthday, who has shrunk alarmingly. She looked foldable, all angles and straight lines.
Is there an unspoken rule that girl’s can’t wear pants in clubs? I was the only one in baggy jeans in a sea of little black dresses. One of M’s friends did change into jeans halfway through, in the backseat of a car - taking her boyfriend with her and thus taking longer than expected to come back. “You gave me the courage to do it,” she shouted over a Rihanna song, looking tipsy and flushed.
There were only couples it seemed, and no place to move, as I swayed uncomfortably for forty minutes on the dance floor before escaping, my backpack concussing girls in dresses as I elbowed my way out.

comparatively little things

Things I am very excited about:

1. Earlier, when mum was visiting me in the hospital, she had gone to the apartment to pick up some things for me before we retreated to Delhi. When she came back, she looked at me sternly, and said: “No sugar, no tea, no food — but an almost-empty bottle of whisky in the kitchen!” It all made sense to her in that moment I think, why I was lying there, looking sick and guilty. Now, the situation is reversed. There is food, excessive amounts of it, spilling out of the tiny, magnet-plastered fridge. I pack a neat little blue box every day with a hot lunch as the cook yells at me to have milk. I’m kind of loving it, honestly, this domestication. Anda bhurji for breakfast and rajma for lunch, I am a happy little piglet, alone at home, gorging on fresh food, only occasionally thinking wistfully of maggi.

2. Netlon!! Another innovation of my visiting mother (wow, there really does seem to be a trend emerging. I’m quite incompetent). I live in a lovely society, full of friendly Catholic aunties and cats sunning themselves on ledges. But the only downside is the mosquitoes. Opening the window in the bedroom, would let in some fresh air but also let in a swarm of hungry mosquitoes. But Neetlon has come to the rescue! Netlon is a net (duh) which you can take on or off; it attaches to the corners of the window with velcro, and doesn’t let in any mosquitoes, at all, ever! So now I sleep happily in a non-stuffy room, and the mosquitoes throw themselves against the Netlon, but IN VAIN.

3. The approaching Hannukah and Christmas and New Year times. My Housing society has a Christmas dance planned, and I’ll be damned if I’m not there socialising my bum off and dancing inappropriately. Hannukah cooking is something I’ve gotten into my brain as well, so I will be making potato pancakes (levivot or latkes) and jelly doughnuts (sufganiot) and brisket and appropriating a tradition that has nothing to do with me with a vengeance. And New Year’s — well — G did call and say that we must do something “fabulous!” but our definitions of fabulous have been drifting apart for a while now. So I don’t really know what I’ll do. Last year V and I spent the whole night running from one party to another, ultimately finding ourselves alone on an empty road at midnight. And I have a bunch of stuff I’ve been feeling inadequate about lately, so I’m sure there will be New Year resolutions a-plenty.

it’s quiet company

Have been sick and hospitalised, and am now home. Back to Delhi, with its cold sunlight and bad drivers. Back home with punctured arms, where there is hot pulses and ‘winter vegetables’ and a worrying/pampering mother. There is a new acquisition, a frail tangle of wires set in the living room which extends into a globe of flame and birds. I want to set it alight before I leave. I forgot how pretty home is. 

My days are punctuated my morning-night visits to the hospital where a soft-faced nurse puts an IV drip in my arm and talks about being Manipuri. I thought an IV would be a pleasant, somewhat exotic experience, but much to my dismay it hurts like a bitch. 

I am spending most of my time watching Grey’s Anatomy and worrying about missing work for two weeks. Two weeks. Have left behind a world in Bombay where electricity bills are not getting paid and bumblebee cabs are going empty, because I am not there to hail them on the road at noon, late and wet-haired. 

Am going to read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and feel better very soon.

Something rummy about gin

Ladies night brings to mind pretty ladies in vacuum-sealed dresses and mascara falling off their eyelashes like ash from a cigarette. It is the urbane activity we see in Sex and the City, symbolising the Indian woman’s legitimate plea that I too, can be foolish and happy, objectified and desired, and you can’t stop me. It is heady independence.

It is also, unfortunately, the act of clueless schoolgirls. I was 14 when I had my first drink with my then-best friend, Urvashi. We were bunking school. Cackling nervously with our own bravado, we trotted off to the Priya cinema shopping complex. Freedom beckoned. We were delinquents, vagabonds hopelessly off the well-heeled paths of conformity! Troubled youths without a cause; it was of course only a matter of time before we purchased our leather jackets and motorbikes and roared off into the unknown.

Within seven minutes, we had exhausted all known avenues of rebellion and were hopelessly bored. Our shirts had been pulled out of our waistbands and our sleeves had been turned up; we’d gone to the McDonald’s loo and applied kajal messily, and we’d slipped our sky-blue socks off and stuffed them into our backpacks. We purchased a cigarette but couldn’t figure out how to light it. The wide open spaces seemed just a little too bare now.

“What now?” I asked Urvashi miserably. I was always a step behind her; she was a wee bit cooler and knew it. She scanned the shopping complex, and her eyes stopped at a doorway with faint whoomp-whoomp noises vibrating out of it.

“Let’s go get a drink”, Urvashi said, grinning happily at the doorway. Behind that door lay what I would come to know as one of the slimier parts of a not-exactly-saintly Delhi landscape. RPM club is host — even ten years later — to a bouquet of uncles: short, fat, balding, bewigged, rich, poor; different in a variety of ways but coming together in their shared desire to leer threateningly at women. RPM is almost never frequented by women. Of course, we didn’t know that. When we pulled the door open, the boisterous song Ishq Kameena from the movie Shakti hit us like the parental slap I was sure I’d get if I was discovered. When they saw us, the uncles were too shocked to to do anything except goggle disbelievingly, and so we slid into a booth lit by a flickering candle.

Two menus were slid in front of us and we opened them and scanned thoughtfully. After a few minutes of meditation, I said wisely, “Alcohol is not cheap.” “Don’t be so geeky,” snapped Urvashi. “How much money do you have?” we pooled our meager resources together to find that we had in total Rs206. Factoring that into our calculations, we went back to the menus with a studiousness that would have been better applied elsewhere. When the waiter came back with a smirk, we had made our decision.

“Two small gins, please,” Urvashi said with authority. “Tonic?” he asked. “No, no, neat,” I said in a deep voice. When he came back with our drinks, we yowled in a refrain that we would unfortunately, never grow out of. “This much for so much money?” I yelped. We shouldn’t have cared because we never got past that first sip. Gin is not a pleasant drink, and traumatised by that first experience, I have never repeated it. In my memory, it seemed to burn a course of acidic flame down my throat, exploding with nuclear force as it hit my tummy. “Oh my god, why do people drink this?” I moaned as we staggered out of the club, all coolness dissipated. We didn’t drink again for five years.

I am still friends with Urvashi. Our ladies nights continue till today, and we still shudder when we look at gin, right before we ask for some Old Monk.

The Kung Fu nuns of Ladakh

The early-morning peace of Ladakh, says Tenzin, a local shopkeeper, is broken every morning by them. I follow the wave of his arm. You would expect perhaps a noisy neighbourhood, a boisterous bunch of hoodlums, or a gaggle of over-enthusiastic tourists. Tenzin is, in fact, waving towards the Buddhist nunnery of His Holiness the Gyalwang Drukpa, a majestic array of buildings with thousands of prayer flags fluttering around it. The culprit?

“The nuns,” he says vehemently.

Every day at 4am in the Drukpa nunnery, the thin, tinny silence of Ladakh is shattered by the shrill haee-yas and huuus of the nuns practicing their kung fu. Over a hundred under-25 Buddhist nuns, far from the fabled birthplaces of kung fu, spring kick and punch into the thin mountain air. They are taught by Jigmet Gendum, a surly Vietnamese monk who barks orders and walks amongst the ranks, straightening legs and correcting postures along the way.

The fact that they are Buddhist nuns — a religion known less for its acceptance of violence and physical combat, and rather more for its relentless misogyny in limiting women to only a certain level of enlightenment, makes these nuns an unusual sight: like something Hollywood might dream up. But the kung fu nuns — as they are known throughout the world — are only the most public manifestation of the Drukpa leader’s attempts at female emancipation.

‘I wanted to be like Jackie Chan’
Migyur Palmo, 20, has been at the Drukpa nunnery for four years. She loves kung fu, Jackie Chan movies, has her own email id, but doesn’t understand the appeal of Facebook. “It’s a waste of time,” she says, crinkling her forehead disapprovingly.

It has taken me an hour to get her to open up: for the first forty minutes, she answered questions with the rehearsed ease of a beauty contestant. Migyur is attractive, well-spoken, and unfailingly devoted to the life she has chosen. No, she never wanted to be anything other than a nun. No, she was never persuaded to become a nun. No, she doesn’t miss her old life. All she wants is enlightenment. So does she want to become a Buddhist guru herself one day? No, no, she corrects me quickly. She means in the next life. In this life, serving the Drukpa and helping people are her goals.

It is when I ask her about kung fu that she opens up. “I saw Jackie Chan movies when I was younger,” she giggles. “I wanted to fight like him, and do all the fancy moves. I love that the most. Of course,” she adds quickly, “Kung fu for us is just exercise, not for fighting. It makes us healthy and we even meditate better.”

She occasionally misses her family, Migyur finally admits. “I can’t leave the nunnery for longer than a week per year. But they had also felt that it was important for every family to have a nun, as a sort of representative.”

Ayee Wangmo, a good friend of Migyur’s, is an 18-year-old nun who ran away from home to the nunnery after the Drukpa gave a speech at her Ladakhi village. “I had never heard anyone talk about such things,” she says wonderingly. “It changed me, from the inside, you know?” Ayee says that in her first year, she was desperately homesick. “I missed my sisters. I would get distracted and my mind would wander. I was too talkative. But the other nuns mentored me.” Ayee concludes, “Coming here was the best decision I ever made.”

‘My father didn’t understand’
Carrie Lee, the president of Live to Love NGO, which works with the Drukpa in the Ladakh region, believes that the Drukpa is not exactly progressive, but in fact, returning Buddhist women to the stature that was given to them many centuries ago. “I call the Drukpa lineage the ‘get-off-your-ass-and-do-something lineage,’” she laughs. “Most Buddhist nuns are treated as servants. At the Drukpa’s nunnery, they consider themselves to be mentally and physically stronger than the men. I remember one occasion when the nuns and monks were on a trek together, and the nuns complained the monks would slow them down as they don’t work as much as the nuns do!”

The Drukpa nunnery might be the only instance in the world where there is a waiting list to get in. Kanchok Wangmo, 19, had to fight her family to come to the nunnery. “I wanted to help people. They told me to stay at home and become a teacher. But anyone can become a teacher, only a few can study under guruji’s tutelage,” she explains. Kanchok, who is from a small Himachal village, is more forthcoming about her transition from layperson to nun. “I was a little disappointed when I came here, because I expected there to be a college,” she says sadly. “But it’s basic education, which I’ve already had.” She talks freely about how her father, a rice farmer, was unable to accept her as a nun and cut off ties with her for two years. “Oh, he just missed me,” she says affectionately. “He didn’t understand.”

Despite the time I had spent with these nuns, I too, didn’t understand. From a city-bred atheist’s point of view, I questioned them persistently: but why? Why, when you could help people as a doctor, a teacher, or as a good mother does? Kanchok answered patiently. “I wanted to be a doctor once, like my elder sister is now. But why fix the body, which only manifests symptoms of the sickness, when you can fix the source of the problem — a fault with the soul?” But you must miss something? Kanchok hesitates, and it is clear she has thought of something, or someone, before she answers: “In this life, we have no money or power. By becoming a nun, I hope to achieve a better spiritual status in my next life [that is, be reborn as a man] and help more people.”

Feminist Buddhism
“Seeing nuns doing kung fu is a beautiful thing,” says His Holiness the Gyalwang Drukpa. “I want to help women, and my own nunnery is the best place to start. I also make sure that I teach texts to the nuns directly. Then, if the monks want to know these teachings, they have to learn from the nuns.” The Drukpa explains that these women have faced a lot of oppression. “They suffered with their families and a backward lifestyle. Now, after centuries, they are being trusted with ancient secrets and texts.”

Many of the nuns who come to the nunnery are orphaned or homeless. But many others have chosen this life, despite having all the opportunities the ‘other’ world had to offer. “One nun used to be a J&K counter-terrorism agent. Another one was a week from leaving for Canada for a marketing job when she joined the Drukpa nunnery,” points out Mary Dorea, a volunteer with Live to Love. “An increasingly self-empowered branch of feminist Buddhism is emerging.”

Chandramouli Basu is the director of the BBC documentary Kung Fu Nuns, and he was in Ladakh to show the film to the Drukpa nunnery on the occasion of the Annual Drukpa Council 2011, a meeting of religious leaders and followers from across the globe. The movie tells the story of Kunzang, a 29-year-old nun, as she and her fellow nuns prepare to perform the ritual of the Dragon Dance, which was previously only meant for monks to perform.

Anxious to prove themselves, the nuns sweat it out in preparation.

“The rapid transformation at the nunnery is inspiring,” says Basu. “Especially seeing it happen against the setting of religion, which is perceived as being the last pillar of conservatism,is a source of hope.”

The film was screened in the same courtyard at the nunnery where the nuns practice their kung fu every morning. Thousands of nuns sat on the stone floor, cross-legged, cheering wildly under the clear, starlit Ladakhi sky, whooping when they recognised a nun on the screen, oohing sympathetically as one broke her ankle during rehearsals. Kanchok, sitting next to me, squeezed my hand happily as the movie ended with the successful performance of the Dragon Dance. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Originally appeared in the October 2 issue of DNA newspaper, or here

Bigg Boss of reality

Reality TV bears as much resemblance to reality as Lays chips do to potatoes. It’s the equivalent of watching a badly scripted, slow-moving TV show with amateur actors. It’s therefore hard to imagine why such humiliating, pseudo-realistic drivel would continue to be a mainstream success.

But it is, and is growing exponentially. The interesting question, really, is why we love it so much. Is there really nothing ‘good on the TV’? The easy and obvious answer is that people are dumb. But that answer is condescending, reductionist, elitist and wrong. Unfortunately, the real answer is even more depressing.

As fake as it gets
I am in a position of authority in this matter, for I, along with 13 other journalists, got to live together in the Bigg Boss house for 24 hours. A brief taste of the reality of reality TV. We had no phones, books, music, paper, pens, money or credit cards. We did tasks, we were punished, we ate and slept only when we were allowed to, and we saw no one else except each other. Of course, we were watched by 55 cameras, over a 100 crew members and camera people, by a creative director, and lights and sound technicians. The key factor — being watched by the entire country — was missing, but it was enough of an audience.

We were blindfolded and taken up and down stairs, sideways, backwards, over gravel and cobblestone pathways, at the end of which we were successfully disoriented.

The House is unnervingly colourful and synthetic, done up in lurid shades of pink, green and blue. I tugged at the grass around the shallow swimming pool, only to have it rise and fall like a sigh. Fake grass. We peered into the mirrors (which constituted 95 per cent of the ‘walls’ around the house) only to see startled cameramen jumping back: fake mirrors(the one-way mirrors hadn’t yet received their final coating, and cameramen had strict directions to not be heard or seen. This, of course, led to hours of mirth for us as we peered back at unsuspecting cameramen, making them scamper away).

The stove had no gas connection, the bedroom walls were glass, there were microphones in the bathrooms, and cameras that obediently trailed after us as we shuffled from room to room. The only thing real was how we reacted to all the fakeness.

Bigg Boss depicts a disparate — and occasionally famous — group of strangers living in an oasis of fakeness while trying to get along (or not) with each other. It is static: each season is a variation of the last; the contestants are more famous or more psychotic, the house is bigger or smaller, or the tasks are more humiliating or more elaborate. All of the cast members in the new season will be — regardless of who they actually are — variations of previous House members. There will be a new Dolly Bindra, or another Rahul Mahajan. They will fit their archetypes of the shrill woman, the aggressive man, the demure dark horse.

As the hours passed in the house, we got more and more restless and annoyed. Bigg Boss hadn’t given us any task, and now we were getting hungry. We didn’t know it yet, but weren’t going to be fed till one am. One of us was locked up in the mosquito-infested ‘jail’ for two hours for no reason whatsoever. The bitching began in earnest: how the house was mediocre, small, dilapidated, how the show had lost its initial sparkle, how many mosquitoes there were, how small and ugly the bedrooms were.

We simmered in jealousy about how the house had been so much larger last year, how one of the journalists was hogging the best chair, how the TV media was getting more attention than the print. We were sitting pretty in a bungalow with all the attention on us, but we were still dissatisfied.

Why does Bigg Boss do as well, or even better, than other shows with an actual storyline and character development? It’s because Bigg Boss is powered — as are most other reality TV shows — by the overwhelming centrality of jealousy in normal lives. We will find something and someone to complain about, to bicker with, and be envious of, no matter how good we have it.

This is why Bigg Boss feels sort of real to people, though they know it isn’t. This is an advantage that the best scripted show in the world can never hope to have.

Dragging down the ‘greats’
We were made to dance, to serenade each other with blowup toys, court each other to the tune of Switty-Switty, and generally make complete fools of ourselves. No one was allowed to sleep till 4am, and deafening alarms went off if someone dared to nod off. We danced, swayed and mouthed lyrics, as cameramen undoubtedly stifled their giggles.
Most TV shows are based on ideal versions of ourselves: the actors are prettier, funnier and have much more successful love lives.But this also reminds people that TV is fake, and it will rarely show them glimpses of what their own lives are like. Meanwhile, the semi-constructed world of Bigg Boss and other shows are able to mirror, though in a perverse way, life as it actually is: repetitive, humiliating and the mediocre majority rise to the top while the worthier — the smarter, nicer people — are pushed aside.

In the morning, we were woken up after three hours of sleep to yet more tasks. We did laughter yoga, ate clumsily with handcuffs, and finally: we eliminated an innocent. It was strange how what had previously been all fun and games suddenly turned watchful, even ominous. A couple of people laughed uncomfortably, everyone denounced the idea of nominating someone when we barely knew eachother. “No hard feelings, okay guys?” said one woman earnestly, nodding around at the group assembled in the living room.

Every nomination, every name picked ‘at random’ was followed by accusing looks and why-me expressions. Despite us barely knowing each other, we had been sucked into the game. No one was laughing or joking anymore. Getting kicked out of the house 30 minutes before everyone else was suddenly a matter of grave concern. Finally, one girl was chosen. Picked out for the offense of having disturbed everyone’s measly hours of sleep, she was expelled.

You would think that having known each other only for a night, we would be able to laugh it off. But the air crackled with tension, and the cries of ‘no hard feelings’ got weaker and weaker. She left, and we — guilty but secretly triumphant — went back into the house. Our fake surroundings had generated real, negative emotions.

Reality TV is real in a way that ‘non-reality’ or ‘fiction’ shows are not. It also allows us the pleasure of watching famous people — mythical creatures of perfection — make complete asses of themselves, reveal petty emotions, and generally de-glamorise themselves till they’re shadows of their former starry selves. There are no ‘great’ people on Bigg Boss. It will drag the societal ‘greats’ — starlets, ageing actors, and miscellaneous celebrities — to the middle. They will be just like us. Reality TV shows work because they are real in a way we don’t want to admit. They also work because people are secretly cruel, and will watch debasement, emotional torture, humiliation with a glee more befitting of crowds milling in front of a beheading in the 14th century.

Originally appeared in the October 2 issue of DNA newspaper, or here

right now

My right arm is covered with scrapes and bruises, the flat plateau of my right hand grazed and blue, injuries inflicted by tires that went flying over my head as I Go-Karted. After the first few mishaps – one which culminated in my tiny vehicle spluttering and dying, leaving me glowering under the helmet as an assistant had to come switch me back on again) – I managed to finish.

Having given up some Very Bad Things, I am supplementing this painful transition period with:

• · Romantic Comedies
• ·Morning Walks
• ·Old Monk
• ·Dressing Up
• Duran Duran

I am going to go live in the Bigg Boss house for 24 hours, to see, as the press release said, “What the contestants feel like and what they go through”.  I can’t carry books, a laptop, my phone, my friends, a boyfriend, or an internet connection. My editor has instructed me:

• Cause Chaos
• Find the Cameras and Kick Them
• Try to Escape

After doing all this, I expect to be bored, and since the cameras are watching me, and we all know what I do when I get bored, I will be known to the Bigg Boss team as That Girl Who Ate All The Food.

When I tell him that I spent some time today contemplating the finiteness of my life and the void beyond and he tries to say I genuinely believe in reincarnation, maybe you will come back as a cat. I am very grateful. (But just for him. I don’t buy the cat theory.)