we come home from a long, tiring trip back from columbus, ohio. we get home and he's sitting on he carpet, kneeling. i flop down on his little lap and say, "would you comb my hair? i am so tired." he's never enthusiastic about this, but today he somehow thinks it s a good idea. so he starts playing with my hair, messing it up, but its sweet. i enjoy my little boy fussing over me. then he offers to 'rub my back;' because he knows i have back trouble. so he makes me stretch out and proceeds to 'massage' me! i am a little embarrassed; i ask myself if its ok to make a little kid massage me, but when i look at his eager face i know he really wants to help me. "why do you massage me?" i ask him and he says, "because my hands are soft. so they can help you by rubbing out your lines. see, feel my hands, are'nt they soft" and he puts his palm on my cheek. and when he's done, he tells me, "amma, when i massaged you i was sending you my feelings." he adds, after a little thought, " we exchanged our feelings, you sent me yours and i sent you mine. and i take your feelings and make them new and give them back to you. i make them golden, umm, with a little silver mixed in, and give them to you."
what could i say? "you're my little darling," to which he replies, "you're my big darling". when he's full of love, hes a butter-ball, constantly melting. i made a mental note, to remember his little offering of love, of making my feelings golden the next time i am fuming and exhausted. for example when he decides that i am the root and the reason for all his problems--thats when i am usually about to lose it. but let me not sully this moment.
and nirali--shes a madcap! she runs into the playroom where the birdie-dance in playing on the music system, turns up the volume and waves her arms above her head...its her way of dancing! jayanth and i are in splits watching her. she just wont stop!!
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
jayanth diary
to a guest about appa's contrarian habits - "my grandad wants the opposite of everything"
overhearing me complain to the folks at the neighboring table--this is a high blood pressure meal--at a dinner outing with the kids in a restaurant, he asks me with great concern - "is the food not good for you, amma?"
nirali - screaming in the car. in spite of kidsongs, my songs, FM...until i turned on some classical piano - really beautiful intricate playing on the radio, and she quietened, immediately!
overhearing me complain to the folks at the neighboring table--this is a high blood pressure meal--at a dinner outing with the kids in a restaurant, he asks me with great concern - "is the food not good for you, amma?"
nirali - screaming in the car. in spite of kidsongs, my songs, FM...until i turned on some classical piano - really beautiful intricate playing on the radio, and she quietened, immediately!
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
W., the movie—after Barack, why watch it?
W., the movie—after Barack, why watch it?
The Nov 4th election that delivered the American presidency to Barack Obama speaks volumes. For one, it signaled the American people’s readiness for the end of the Bush era, an era that has been chronicled in tell-all books by ex- White house staffers, mock-news shows, media exposes and a hundred varieties of anti-Bush bumper stickers.
In ‘W’, Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser’s cinematic chronicle of George W. Bush, the president’s character has been explored well enough, but through the narrow lens of his relationship with his father. Bush Sr.’s disapproval of Bush Jr.’s poor grades, drinking and general instability plays a disproportionately large role in defining his son’s motivations. What follows--his conversion to a born again Christian, for example--are all in one way or the other a reaction to Bush Sr.’s disappointment in him. Bush struggles with a deep sense of inadequacy. As president though, surrounded by a team of advisors that is smarter and better informed, he is lost and hardly aware of it. When in doubt, he looks to religion and the grand picture of American freedom and power.
The movie begins with Bush (played by Josh Brolin) alone in a baseball stadium, hailing rows of empty seats to the soundtrack of a roaring crowd. Symbolic as it is of Bush’s failing popularity, this motif is overused. A two term American president apparently derives his confidence from an empty baseball field full of imagined cheering. If that is not patronizing, nothing is.
The film’s most rewarding, satirical moments are the several meetings President Bush holds with his core team of advisors in the run up to the Iraq war. Each character is a caricature but Cheney and Karl Rove take the cake. Rove brings to mind Gollum from the Lord of the Rings film trilogy--small, round and devious. Cheney patiently presents agendas to a bemused president, his cynical smirk so pronounced, you could spot it in his baby pictures. Condi Rice, lifeless at the conference table, occasionally grows lips and a mouth, only to murmur, ‘Yes Mr,President.’ Though ‘W’ is packed with satire, even sympathy, it lacks punch. But it establishes (like others before) that the American presidency has been tainted.
Flash forward to November 4th and the American public arrived at the same resounding conclusion. W., the movie does promise its liberal audiences some luxuriant wound-licking, but at around seven dollars a ticket in a recession, many Americans would hesitate. Instead of hitting theatres, they went to vote. And how they have voted. In droves, braving downpours and huge delays, they have made their choice.
The town I live in, Bloomington, Indiana, is a small college town, but a democrat bastion in a historically republican state. Though the polls favored Obama, everyone remembered the past two presidential elections. The election process had been subject to such shrewd politicking, it was difficult to retain faith in its ability this time around to actually deliver victory to the real winner. On Nov 4th, election day, I simply could not sit at home anymore watching reports of voters lining up for hours, of poll booths not opening on time, news that reminded me of the possibility that 2004 would repeat itself and the election could be stolen or worse, lost for all the wrong reasons. I drove to the local Obama for America headquarters. The office was crawling with volunteers, almost all students. I could not park in the back of the building because I arrived a little before noon and SUVs were pulling in driven by women bringing lunch for the volunteers. There were home made cakes, fruit platters--entire trunks full of food. I parked on the street and went indoors to offer my time.
I was asked to canvas students, reminding them to vote. “Did you vote?” I asked as I strolled around Indiana University with flyers and stickers, craning my neck out to students rushing from building to building. ‘Yes, ‘ I heard almost every single time. Wonderful I thought, but I did not believe it. Yet on that day, after 44 years of voting republican presidential candidates into office, Barack Obama became the first democrat to win Indiana by a lead of only 26,163 votes, less than 1 percent of the votes cast, according to the New York Times. College students are often apathetic when it comes to elections; but Obama’s campaign has fired an entire demographic. Bloomington’s enrolled college students alone showed a 287 percent increase in turnout from 2004, as reported in the university newspaper. Perhaps all those students who nodded their heads to me were indeed being honest.
As I stood in my living room, watching Obama greet a euphoric 220,000 plus crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park, late on Tuesday night, I believed. Indeed, this is a land where all things are possible. Unable to contain my excitement, I got back into my car, leaving my husband with our sleeping children, and drove around the city. It was a cool night and the first revelers were out, cheering. I remembered arriving in America when the skies were blue, jobs aplenty, the information technology revolution beginning and the Lewinsky scandal lacing the air-waves with laughter. Three years later came 9/11 and the beginning of the Bush era—a time of suspicion and aggression that culminated this September in the markets crumbling to sheer penury. Has there ever in recent memory, been a longer nadir in the American ethos? The United States was sinking and we non-citizens and citizens alike, could find no salve. No hope that change was possible. With this election that despair has begun to be erased. No doubt Obama was the more viable candidate than McCain, given his youth and his selection of a wise and experienced running mate. No doubt he was a better candidate if only as a democrat with an ascending political star after eight years of republican arch-conservatism. But it is what Obama the individual embodies, that makes his election to president so enormously meaningful. Black, biracial, of modest means, with no legacy but that of his own hard work and ambition—this is the hope I latched onto.
Driving around alone that night, I realized that for the first time in my eleven years in America, I felt like I would not mind being called an American. Visiting India, I flinch when friends and family teasingly call me ‘American’. At this moment though, the word sits pretty well with me. My husband and I have long postponed our plans to apply for citizenship, if only because our children were born here. The prospect of a McCain win made us draw our breaths. Now it might not be such a bad idea after all. I could call this my land, maybe even my country at some point. After all, my son or daughter could be president, someday.
As for Oliver Stone’s story of W, it has faded inevitably against the fairy tale of Obama’s victory. Once upon a time…that time is now.
-- Shaleena Koruth
The Nov 4th election that delivered the American presidency to Barack Obama speaks volumes. For one, it signaled the American people’s readiness for the end of the Bush era, an era that has been chronicled in tell-all books by ex- White house staffers, mock-news shows, media exposes and a hundred varieties of anti-Bush bumper stickers.
In ‘W’, Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser’s cinematic chronicle of George W. Bush, the president’s character has been explored well enough, but through the narrow lens of his relationship with his father. Bush Sr.’s disapproval of Bush Jr.’s poor grades, drinking and general instability plays a disproportionately large role in defining his son’s motivations. What follows--his conversion to a born again Christian, for example--are all in one way or the other a reaction to Bush Sr.’s disappointment in him. Bush struggles with a deep sense of inadequacy. As president though, surrounded by a team of advisors that is smarter and better informed, he is lost and hardly aware of it. When in doubt, he looks to religion and the grand picture of American freedom and power.
The movie begins with Bush (played by Josh Brolin) alone in a baseball stadium, hailing rows of empty seats to the soundtrack of a roaring crowd. Symbolic as it is of Bush’s failing popularity, this motif is overused. A two term American president apparently derives his confidence from an empty baseball field full of imagined cheering. If that is not patronizing, nothing is.
The film’s most rewarding, satirical moments are the several meetings President Bush holds with his core team of advisors in the run up to the Iraq war. Each character is a caricature but Cheney and Karl Rove take the cake. Rove brings to mind Gollum from the Lord of the Rings film trilogy--small, round and devious. Cheney patiently presents agendas to a bemused president, his cynical smirk so pronounced, you could spot it in his baby pictures. Condi Rice, lifeless at the conference table, occasionally grows lips and a mouth, only to murmur, ‘Yes Mr,President.’ Though ‘W’ is packed with satire, even sympathy, it lacks punch. But it establishes (like others before) that the American presidency has been tainted.
Flash forward to November 4th and the American public arrived at the same resounding conclusion. W., the movie does promise its liberal audiences some luxuriant wound-licking, but at around seven dollars a ticket in a recession, many Americans would hesitate. Instead of hitting theatres, they went to vote. And how they have voted. In droves, braving downpours and huge delays, they have made their choice.
The town I live in, Bloomington, Indiana, is a small college town, but a democrat bastion in a historically republican state. Though the polls favored Obama, everyone remembered the past two presidential elections. The election process had been subject to such shrewd politicking, it was difficult to retain faith in its ability this time around to actually deliver victory to the real winner. On Nov 4th, election day, I simply could not sit at home anymore watching reports of voters lining up for hours, of poll booths not opening on time, news that reminded me of the possibility that 2004 would repeat itself and the election could be stolen or worse, lost for all the wrong reasons. I drove to the local Obama for America headquarters. The office was crawling with volunteers, almost all students. I could not park in the back of the building because I arrived a little before noon and SUVs were pulling in driven by women bringing lunch for the volunteers. There were home made cakes, fruit platters--entire trunks full of food. I parked on the street and went indoors to offer my time.
I was asked to canvas students, reminding them to vote. “Did you vote?” I asked as I strolled around Indiana University with flyers and stickers, craning my neck out to students rushing from building to building. ‘Yes, ‘ I heard almost every single time. Wonderful I thought, but I did not believe it. Yet on that day, after 44 years of voting republican presidential candidates into office, Barack Obama became the first democrat to win Indiana by a lead of only 26,163 votes, less than 1 percent of the votes cast, according to the New York Times. College students are often apathetic when it comes to elections; but Obama’s campaign has fired an entire demographic. Bloomington’s enrolled college students alone showed a 287 percent increase in turnout from 2004, as reported in the university newspaper. Perhaps all those students who nodded their heads to me were indeed being honest.
As I stood in my living room, watching Obama greet a euphoric 220,000 plus crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park, late on Tuesday night, I believed. Indeed, this is a land where all things are possible. Unable to contain my excitement, I got back into my car, leaving my husband with our sleeping children, and drove around the city. It was a cool night and the first revelers were out, cheering. I remembered arriving in America when the skies were blue, jobs aplenty, the information technology revolution beginning and the Lewinsky scandal lacing the air-waves with laughter. Three years later came 9/11 and the beginning of the Bush era—a time of suspicion and aggression that culminated this September in the markets crumbling to sheer penury. Has there ever in recent memory, been a longer nadir in the American ethos? The United States was sinking and we non-citizens and citizens alike, could find no salve. No hope that change was possible. With this election that despair has begun to be erased. No doubt Obama was the more viable candidate than McCain, given his youth and his selection of a wise and experienced running mate. No doubt he was a better candidate if only as a democrat with an ascending political star after eight years of republican arch-conservatism. But it is what Obama the individual embodies, that makes his election to president so enormously meaningful. Black, biracial, of modest means, with no legacy but that of his own hard work and ambition—this is the hope I latched onto.
Driving around alone that night, I realized that for the first time in my eleven years in America, I felt like I would not mind being called an American. Visiting India, I flinch when friends and family teasingly call me ‘American’. At this moment though, the word sits pretty well with me. My husband and I have long postponed our plans to apply for citizenship, if only because our children were born here. The prospect of a McCain win made us draw our breaths. Now it might not be such a bad idea after all. I could call this my land, maybe even my country at some point. After all, my son or daughter could be president, someday.
As for Oliver Stone’s story of W, it has faded inevitably against the fairy tale of Obama’s victory. Once upon a time…that time is now.
-- Shaleena Koruth
Saturday, May 31, 2008
the night jayanth (and me and appacha) all lost our rocker
the prayer meeting by itself was a foreign prospect, i should have been wary of smooth sailing at the start. but which of us is that wise? we went, father's tension rising like mercury in a hot tub. then we were at the prayer which went on and on and jayanth got hungry.i ask the hostess if i can give him something to eat off the well laid table that i too contributed to, and she says wait. for what? the priest she mumbles. the priest? i mumble back. oh and spoons, she mumbles again. so i, overcome by my sons hunger and a little confused/irked, give him a cutlet. i think she did not like that move. but, who will deny a 4 year old his meal for the sake of blessed propriety? the priest is 70+ for all you know and is a good man who would not care if jayanth ate before him. so why her fuss?
and then, J began tumbling, running from wall to wall. i was ready to pop. then he opens the deck door and joins the old men and the priest himself, at their table? i can see these mallu octogenarians furrow their brows and peer at him. god knows what he said to them. i mean really, the way my dabbu goes on sometimes, only god can know what he means. but to save their AC bill, which BTW they did not turn on until a grand old lady began fanning herself, they started getting after J to close the Deck door. he kept forgetting, or did not understand, or did not care, being a preschooler. i saw the host beginning to frown. then father began to get upset. i could see the anxiety build. then my little rivkah began to get upset. and to top it all, jayanth started performing for a crowd of women who were laughing so much he thought it was cool to hop onto the hostess' sofa. that was it. with father literally smoking through his ears and a son who looked like he had drunk two Red Bulls, i was ready to scream and run. Fleeee the AC saving, priest fawning, close mouthed Gorges. FLeeee. but society (a minor detail)....sigh! gracefully i packed up and left the scene, smiling goodbyes, my only solace, a hug from the grand old lady and the thought that i was on my way home.
whoa what a day. but dad apologized (upon whcih i did too), i gave J a very hard time (part deserved, part not at all) and rivkah cried and cried. so i prepared my sunday school lesson over a glass of wine that did little for me except in a symbolic manner.
whew~~~!!!
my crazy family, where would i be without you? WHO would i be?
and then, J began tumbling, running from wall to wall. i was ready to pop. then he opens the deck door and joins the old men and the priest himself, at their table? i can see these mallu octogenarians furrow their brows and peer at him. god knows what he said to them. i mean really, the way my dabbu goes on sometimes, only god can know what he means. but to save their AC bill, which BTW they did not turn on until a grand old lady began fanning herself, they started getting after J to close the Deck door. he kept forgetting, or did not understand, or did not care, being a preschooler. i saw the host beginning to frown. then father began to get upset. i could see the anxiety build. then my little rivkah began to get upset. and to top it all, jayanth started performing for a crowd of women who were laughing so much he thought it was cool to hop onto the hostess' sofa. that was it. with father literally smoking through his ears and a son who looked like he had drunk two Red Bulls, i was ready to scream and run. Fleeee the AC saving, priest fawning, close mouthed Gorges. FLeeee. but society (a minor detail)....sigh! gracefully i packed up and left the scene, smiling goodbyes, my only solace, a hug from the grand old lady and the thought that i was on my way home.
whoa what a day. but dad apologized (upon whcih i did too), i gave J a very hard time (part deserved, part not at all) and rivkah cried and cried. so i prepared my sunday school lesson over a glass of wine that did little for me except in a symbolic manner.
whew~~~!!!
my crazy family, where would i be without you? WHO would i be?
Friday, May 23, 2008
had such a lovely time last night. went and saw the goldberg variations played by a musician who held himself quite beautifully and played beautifully. and then, best of all, i went out for drinks with my friend, i had all the drinks, she had none, but we both had a good time. why do i love bach. first off -- i know only him. then, he makes such lovely inversions - he 's always who he is whether he tries to or not to. he brings his signature back into all his pieces, something about the way he moves musically tells you its bach. only bach. undisputably so.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
MYIndia
i dream of an indian cultural center. its mission statement would be:
-to foster in young children, a sense of pride in the national heritage--in indian history, culture, and all of its artifacts.
-to create a strong sense of identity among indian children of their indian-ness, to help children of indian parents identify positively and embrace the cultural, religious, historical and social construct that informs attachment with India.
-to be secular in approach, not removing religion from the curriculum but incorporating all religions that exist in india
-to not confuse this sense of pride and this identity with nationalistic machismo.
-to foster in young children, a sense of pride in the national heritage--in indian history, culture, and all of its artifacts.
-to create a strong sense of identity among indian children of their indian-ness, to help children of indian parents identify positively and embrace the cultural, religious, historical and social construct that informs attachment with India.
-to be secular in approach, not removing religion from the curriculum but incorporating all religions that exist in india
-to not confuse this sense of pride and this identity with nationalistic machismo.
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