The pathos of Mirza Ghalib

I have been an avid fan of Jagjit Singh and thru his gazals have come to know about the literary prowess of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib... (quite a reverse route I must say...)
I have been a great fan of all the gazals from the T.V serial 'Mirza Ghalib' .... The one in particular which appealed to me was ' yeh na thi hamari kismat...'
Rcently I happened to read the transaltion of the entire sher which goes something like this...

Yeh na thi hamari kismat ke visaley yaar hota,
(It was not in my fate that I should meet my lover)
Agar aur jeetey rehte, yahi intezaar hota
(If I had continued living, the same anticipation would have existed)

Tere vade pe jiye hum, toh yeh jaan, jhoot jana,
(That I am living because of your promise, then know this to be untrue)
Ke khushi se mar na jaatey, agar aitbaar hota
(Would I not die out of happiness, if I had any faith in you)

Koie mere dil se poochchey tere teere neemkash ko,
(If somebody asks my heart about your half drawn arrow)
Yeh khalish kahaan se hoti, jo jigar ke paar hota
(Where would this prick (or sting) come from, if it (the arrow) had crossed my heart)

Yeh kahaan ki dosti hain ke baney hain dost, naseh,
(What kind of friendship is this that my friends have become strangers)
Koi chaarasaaz hota, koie ghamgusaar hota
(How I wish someone would have been healers, someone would have been confidantes)
Huey markey hum jo rusva, huey kyoon na gharke dariya,
(Why have I died so notorious, why did I not drown in the river)
Na kabhi janaaza utatha, na kahin mazaar hota
(Never would my funeral (coffin) have been lifted, never would there have been a tomb )

I was moved literally to tears seeing the deep pathos and sorrow in the entire poetry... In this poetry Ghalib talks about the never ending wait for his beloved and the treachery meted out by her to him for the overtures made...
The disillusionment of Ghalib emanating from his failed love leads him to also doubt the sincerity of his friends and a longing for friends who would heal his bleeding heart.
The poem ends with a sorrowful note in which Ghalib evn predicts his death and the ultimate neglect to him even after his death (Na kabhi janaaza utatha, na kahin mazaar hota )...
In real life , Ghalib's journey has been marked with poverty, lack of recognition and neglect...

History has been witness to the lives of great poets who have left behind golden letters to hold on to and express yourself with... but on a personal front most of them went through turbulence in their relationship, financially and also in terms of getting recognition from the contemporary society.. Most of the great wriers and poets died a pauper and it is only after their death that the society recognised their great work and honoured them... (O' Henry, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Rousseau, Paul Gauguin, Johannes Vermeer etc etc)

I sometimes wonder if as a society we are so insensitive to work of creativity of such great man, that they have to spend their entire life in poverty and misery only to die for us to recognsie their work...
Even today art as a full time profession is looked down upon as a 'non paying' job and not able to sustain one thru the rough and tumble of life.

Recently I had a chance to meet such a veteran who had done soem beautiful oil paint art which he showed to us. This gentleman had worked as makeshift artist in various magazines and newspapers. He was narrating of the difficult time that he always passes through in order to make both ends meet. Talking to him I saw the fire in hsi eye... the sort of creative energy which is desperately looking for an avenue to express itself... but then I also saw it being temepred by the harsh reality of our times which has somehow subdued the fire within....

The reverie of Baliyatra

Yesterday when I was channel surfing, I tuned in to the Oriya channels of Doordarshan and E TV on which they were showing the formal inauguration of the ancient Baliyatra- an ancient festival of Orissa celebrated with much pomp and show all across Orissa and beyond.
Every Oriya has fond memories of the baliyatra which used to be held over a span on a week or more with fair and fun all the way....
Doing a bit of searching for the ancient history of Baliyatra, I came across the following facts- some of which I knew and some which I did not..

"Baliyatra literally means a 'Voyage to Bali'.
Brave and adventurous Kalinga sailors were making daring voyages to different far-off lands of the world and had maritime contacts with Roman Empire, Africa, Persian coast, Arabian countries in the West and China, Japan, Siam, Champa, Burma, Ceylon etc in the East. Besides, the countries with whom the people of Kalinga maintained enduring commercial and cultural relationship were the islands of Java, Sumatra, Bali and Borneo collectively known as Suvarnadvipa or modern Indonesia. Orissa's glorious maritime past has been proved from the excavated materials like Roman coins, Kushan coins, Chinese ceramic shreds found from different parts of Orissa in the recent past.

Some socio-religious festivals prevalent in coastal Orissa also provide vital information about Kalinga's glorious maritime heritage. Festival of Baliyatra on Kartika Purnima (full-moon day of the month Kartika ie. Oct-Nov) is one of them on which 'Boita Bandana' (ceremonial send off to the merchants sailing in boats) festival is observed throughout Orissa. Even now toy boats lit up with candles are floated ceremonially by the women-folk of Orissa on all available water courses in the same fashion in which the ladies of yore used to send their men on voyages wishing
them well.
Large number of men, women and children attired in colourful costumes throng all water bodies carrying tiny boats made up of banana peels or paper or solapitha with lighted lamps inside to launch them on the gentle waves accompanied by blowing of conch, ululations by women and occasional burst of
crackers. Oriya women perform the rite of 'Boita Bandana' to evoke the memories of the voyages
of adventurous Kalingans of yore and create a truly romantic mood.

Apart from other places of Orissa, Baliyatra is celebrated with much pomp and grandeur in the historic city of Cuttack for seven days from Kartika Purnima. Some opine, Oriya Sadhabas (sea traders) were sailing off to Bali on this auspicious day at the end of the turbulent monsoon season for which it is named as such.
Others say, Sri Chaitanya, the great Vaishnavite Bengali Saint, first landed in the soil of Cuttack after crossing the sand-bed (Bali) of Mahanadi river on his way to Puri on this auspicious day.
Lakhs of people congregate in the famous Baliyatra festival of Cuttack city where innumerable varieties of goods are bought and sold. People also enjoy boating on the river Mahanadi with friends and relatives in the moonlit night during this festival." (Baliyatra : Reminiscence of Orissa's Maritime Glory by Prabhukalyan Mohapatra)

My earliest childhood memory of Baliyatra in Cuttack used to be that of accompanying my family along with cousins et al and visiting the Baliyatra ground (opposite the barabati stadium). In those days the fair was only limited to the 2 large field opposite the stadium. It used to be filed with all kinds of vendors - from daily utility items to decorative pieces, books, stationaries, cloth, automobiles etc etc...
The part which I used to love the most was the 'thunka puri' (popularly known as chhole bhature in the north).. besides the ladies used to love the 'alu dum and dahi bara' (a specialty of cuttack, alu dum is a chtapata mix of potato curry with curd and 'bara'.... do nt know the exact translation of bara though) along with 'gupchup' (pani puri)...
it has been nearly 5 years since i last saw baliyatra... i now hear that it has grown larger in scale.. it now occupies about 5 times its own space as compared to what it used to occupy during during my childhood.... it has got even more colourful with MNCs putting up stall in it too with all techno gizmos....
even then I will closely cherish the sweet memories that I carry from a an era old gone by... the thought of baliyartra, dussehera and other festivities make me nostalgic even today... reading the proud history of my state makes me want to go back and do something worthwhile to ensure that my state makes up for the lost years in development..
whenever i call up some of my cousin now a days, i find them inevitably in Baliyartra.. while i heave a long sigh of regret I wish them a very happy baliyatra 2009....

The solacing experience: Quantum of Solace

Was really looking forward to the new James Bond flick - Quantum of Solace. I can proudly say that I am a die hard James Bond fan and have never missed any of its releases since my school days...
The reason for my all out liking for the guy with a licence to kill has been many fold- the suave look, the way he has with his enemy and his witting way... the main reason which will stand forth is the fast racy plot which has been a hallmark of all James Bond movies...
with Casino Royale we saw Daniel Craig donning the Mantle of Bond and did a commendable job....but somewhere one missed Sean Connery and the smooth silky touch of pierce Brosnan to the entire plot.....
but quantum of solace was in a different league altogether....in which our heart did not race when it came to Bond handling his enemy... in which there are infact moments of lull where you wondered if it was a bond movie you were seeing... I in fact dozed off for quite some time in between...
I really do nt know... is it the coming of age of the British secret service agent post cold war or is it a serious attempt to put it in the genre of 'Bourne' movies... whatever it is, somewhere I missed the Bond i knew since childhood.... is it time to move on.. well i do nt know... may be i will continue holding on to the loyalty card with me for some more time...
till then lets enjoy the 'solace' of the latest flick.....

Community participation and the politics of development

My new project in the new job has given me a lot of insight in to the nuts and bolts of carrying out community work and the politics behind it.... I have started to work on a primary health model with community partnership and ownership where we try to bring down the disease load through early detection and referral... the model also looks at integrating other care providers to ensure comprehensive care to the community...

we first went to the community and we started off with a Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) exercise where we map the basic data on demographics and health. it is also a method of bringing the community together and getting them to start on the projcet for full community ownership....
though i had read in theory that we should include the excluded community like women, scheduled caste and other marginalised section in the exercise, but practically i saw that this is somehow difficult coz there are dominant forces in the community which tries to take a from seat in all the exercise... then it takes a very honest and genuine effort for the practitioner to actually rope in this people in the exercise... i ca not say how much of it we achieved but we ensured their representation somehow in the exercise....

we are lucky to have a village where the youth are organised in to a youth club and very enthusiastic to carry out the project...

despite my feeling that that the volunteer to carry out the project would be prferebly women, most of the people who have volunteered are men and young men at that....
though we had a good meeting with the district medical officer we did not see much enthusiasm from the Private practitioners...
these private practitioners are mostly government doctors who practice in the evening analmost to the mid of day in their hospital and if there is any time left they go to the govt. hospital for official duty...
everybody wonders: when India has so much medical resources (and of excellent quality at that) then why do we as a nation trail so much behind in terms of health...

the answer lies in the resources themselves and how they are allocated...

medical profession has cease to be the noble life saving profession it used to be and has become a money spinning factory... the nexus and mafia involving the doctors, pharmaceuticals and bureaucrat along with a lack of political willingness is what is killing the state of healthcare in India...
Govt. to be populistic doles out goodies like health insurance for all and other services... but does it ever monitor how these schemes are actually faring.... millions of rupees is spent in paying premium for the poor without knowing whether the beneficiaries have the i.d card or not. ..nobody ever tries to find out where this patient lands up in the name of free health insurance... coz of non payment to hospitals by the insurers, good hospitals are turning out the patients to smaller doubtful setups ... are we in our effort to become populist making the healthcare more complex and dagerous...

nobody knows and nobody cares.... everybody is busy defending his/her model... in the mean while the poor does the best it can : it avails healthcare from quacks and unqualified people thereby endangering their lives....

This can be summed up in an interaction which i had with one local politician whom we met to get some grants for the project... he said clearly 'do nt do it in the village (belonging to other political affiliation) chosen by you but do it in my village and i will ensure all cooperation'...

dats d way we are heading today....

may we have better senses and minmise our rhetoric, our intellectual discursions... its high time we turned our attention to the real man on the street and understand what damage such steps from our end has done to them...

Let better sense prevail!

Long live VVians!

Yesterday had a hearty chat with one of my dear friend Anant on g talk. Anant goes back to my golden days of flat in Chennai. When I met Anant , I had joined IFMR and was undergoing my intial training with SIG at Mumbai. Anant had joined the MF team at SIG. Both of us joined our base at Chennai and went house hunting... that was the time when we met dada... the quintessential charmer....the happy go lucky guy... our lovable dada... with him we went house hunting and finally zeroed down on a 3 bhk flat in Egmore in Chennai... initially we were 4 of us but Somnath left for hyd in between... the real heroes of the story came a few months later... we were joined by vermaji from Patna... how i met vermaji and how he was treated the 1st day in our house is part of folk legend now.... later were joined by puru (who was a old friend of mine) who later ascended the status of babahood in the long run...

the fun, camaraderie and the blast we had in Vijay Villa (our buiding's name) was simply mind blowing comapred to all the experinec we had till now.... I have heard people call a posting in chennai as 'saza ye chennaipaani' and try their utmost to leave for a more 'suitable' location...but i guess given a option today all of us will want to go back to vijay villa and start staying together like old days....

all of us now in different cities still miss those golden days where we will have Saturday night party with sound box blaring music from a laptop... where we took long walks on the beach.... or where we suddenly got up arranged for bikes and went off to pondicherry at the dead of the night.. these are all things which all of us will trade our right arm to get back...

the whole gang was such support to each other.. and we all did it with such selfless approach and whats more.. we never had an argument nor a fight in the entire 1 and half years that we stayed there....

though we used to have topics of 'general' interest on juicy topic called paricharcha or goshthi in which people were only supposed to address each other and argue in shoodh hindi - courtesy Vermaji....

those late night flat parties where everybody will crib abt their boss and where we will finish off all tikli jokes....
of the Sundays when we will all get up late and will have a very late lunch (sometimes close to dinner infact)....
of the divide in our brotherhood on sunday on issues of 'sakahari' and 'mansahari' debate.. which will inevitably end with a roar of laughter.....

we all still miss those days....

we miss the pakau jokes of dada sent at teh dead of the night and the action thereafter.....
we miss the babavani of BLONDER BABA who will pull off any bluff only thru the magic of sheer arguments and words....
we miss the goshthi and paricharcha of Vernmaji and our constant request to dada of 'dada pyar karado'...
we miss the intellectual depth of anant and suyash (each fighting to prove a point in their discssion so deep that it used to be a journey to the bottom of the earth...
of guddu's hllariou jokes and sarthak's romantic guitar or the shero shayari by baba....

VVian guyz ... if you are reading this blog it is my tribute to all of you.... and to your contribution of keeping the VVian spirit goin....

Long live VVians!!!

P.S: Now I hear that our flat is taken up by 6 hot chick who are all airhostess... we are not complaining though.... are we guyz....

Movie experience: Shaurya

Saw Shaurya during the Diwali vacation. Well people must be thinking that watching movie in Diwali from the comforts of home... wow... but hold your guns a sec ladies and gentleman.... I saw this movie in sheer desperation coz during that time I was in my field at Adilabad staying at our guest house all alone as most of the staff has left for Diwali vacation....
I was told by my field staff that all will come to a halt during the evening and that there will not be any shop left open, I decided to have some movie dvd which will keep me busy during the evening... Fortunately for me there was a dvd shop open in the market but they were doing puja of the shop for the festival. However, the prudent among them thought that its best to allow goddess lakshmi in on the auspicious occasion of diwali. They had some good collection of dvd all from moser baer and for throw away price ( Rs. 50 for a dvd of 3 movies).
One of the movie in the dvd was shaurya which I wanted to see from a long day...
It was basically a take off of the Hollywood flick 'a few good men'. However, I am not complaining coz of the adpatation.... it was done really well... with Rahul bose and K.K around, you would expect nothing else... the customisation to the Indian context was what made the movie more appealing....
was really moved by the fair nature of the trial and the secular nature of the army in the movie... these are some of the occasion which makes me proud to be an Indian where all religion and races are treated with equality and dignity... I guess the 60 years of our experiment with democracy has given us the strength to stand up boldly and question our biases and that of the society which few culture actually permits... I admit we had our large failures and stumbling block on the way...but nevertheless it has only helped us grow as a nation with strong secular and Democratic values.... this given the scenario in south east Asia and other places where countries have adopted religion over secularism as a state policy only to be proven sorely wrong at the end...
India being the great melting pot it is, has over the years embraced all races, religion, ethnic group... it sometimes amazes one to see that a country so much ravaged by foreign invaders can so beautifully take all of of what is good in them and develop this great country with all shades and hues of people and group.... I think that has been the singular most briliant achievement of this country... may we tread the same path in face of adversaries and may we find our nation among the most successful nation on the face of the earth......

Oriya expertise in cullinary skills

It has been a long time since I blogged last... seems like ages when I did so. Well here is to inform everybody that I am back!
For sometime I have been fascinated by a common trend that I ahve seen in almost all cities that I have visited. I have found the Oriya people ruling the roost in preparing mouth watering delicacies and cuisines. In the begining I blamed it on my Oriya bias and leaning for anything Oriya. But things got quite overwhelming when I saw small restaurants in not so big towns like Adilabad, Bhimavaram etc in the state of A.P. showing a similar trend. Besides most of the restaurants in Hyderabad also has majority of its cooking and other staffs who hail from Orissa.
I was quite taken up by surprise in Adilabad where I had gone for starting of my new project. For dinner we went to a decent loking restaurant and were ushered in by the head waiter. Once we were made to sit then i heard the magical word... ' arrey aeithi pani aani ki dey''... (arrey bring water here..). I was completely taken aback. I never expected to hear Oriya in this far flung remote area of Adilabad... Upon interaction with the staff, I came to know that all the hotel staff hailed from different part of Orissa. What was more surprising that all the subsequent day when we had our meals in fifferent parts of the town, the staff invariably turned out to be Oriya.
Back during my childhood, I would hear stories from my grandama how people used to travel from Orissa on bullock cart and on foot to Kolkata and Patna in search of a livelihood and how an Oriya cook (famously called as 'Nana') was famous in rich households of the bengalis.
Although I donot know of any study or documented evidence of the given trend, but I ma sure it will yield a rich trasure for sociologist and anthropologist to study and find out the reason behind it. It would be inetresting to know such aetiology and also its broad imapct on the state of Orissa and its people.