Fighting to fit in

Khaleej Times OPINION

Asha Iyer Kumar (LIFE)
11 February 2012, 6:15 PM

I have been on an eating binge lately. Okay, not lately. Since October last year. It was something I had promised to shrug off once the festive season was past and the guests had left.

I mean, this kind of thing can’t last. You can’t keep wolfing forever. That’s what I had thought. But it is so easy and convenient to slip into that eternal state of self denial, isn’t it, extending the days of self defence and pretexts beyond a season? So you keep saying — I am in check. This one benign piece of paneer or an occasional dip into the cloying gulab jamun isn’t going to add inches to my waist (for a vegetarian, the sweetmeat is the most evil of all foods, an absolute hazard to the midriff, and the paneer or cheese, its close lieutenant). Now come on, if you won’t summon the courage to eat the dessert you’ve made, who else would?

And weekends? They are for eating out, without question. One must be a dunce to not eat out on the weekend while living in Karama. How many times have I seen people’s face go bling bling at the mention of this gem of a locality! Blame it on all those folks who are ruining my diet with their culinary enterprises out there. A flier everyday outside the door calling out names of goodies of all shapes, sizes, contents and tastes. This is absolutely blasphemous to my sense of well being and good eating. But then, if people like me don’t patronise them in these downturn years, who would? They need to make a living too. Staunch believer of the “live and help live” theory, you see.

I hate my conscience in times like these.

You had promised to stop this soon after the festive season, remember, you glutton? Look at your friends, sweating to get down to size. From a generously sized pair of jeans in which they walked clumsily, they have whittled themselves down to wearing a modest 32, if not a petite 26. Going by their reports and the speed at which they are shedding fat, they would soon be there too.

Ah, it is the soup and salad routine. Is that some kind of food, actually? It is torture. Gosh, imagine me doing all that just so I can wear the kind of clothes I saw on the mannequin at the mall! Petite sizes and flat stomachs are for mannequins and models, for heaven’s sake.

But your friends are doing it. They are getting smaller sizes, trendier fittings, chic costumes. Why don’t you at least pull out from your kitchen shelf the equals that you so ardently purchased a while ago?

Oh, that was on an impulse. Just curious to know what these girls were adding to sweeten their once-in-a- blue-moon coffee. But tell you what? It is an awful tasting thing, though the girls swear by its merits. I am planning to wrap it in g(u)ilt and gift off to one of them on her birthday. And let me add (as an aside), all these girls have health issues that force them to cut their cravings.

Gloating over your fitness, eh? When was the last time you checked your vital signs?

Two years ago. And got a clean chit, after all. The doctor was not serious when he said that I needed to watch my fat. What he meant, for sure, was I must not flab up. A genuine advice to a lady in good shape!

You are a lost cause, I tell you!

Yes, I am. The last thing I want is to look like a million bucks neck downwards and a ghostly shadow of myself in the face – concave cheeks.. withered lips.. popping eyes..zero spice. No thanks. Sell your counsel and regimen to someone else, while I tuck in the weekend chowmein merrily.

In a realm of blissful oblivion

Khaleej Times OPINION

Asha Iyer Kumar (LIFE)
27 January 2012, 7:43 PM

The young gentleman standing across from me in the metro seemed like just another eager, home bound employee - a jolly good fellow who was smiling and whispering, perhaps telling his wife on phone that he was almost there.

And then I saw — he wasn’t on hands free; there was no one next to him, yet he was in conversation with someone, now complete with gesticulation and frequent contortion. Soon, others noticed it too, some openly gawking, some more discreet. Even as the man struck me as odd for his apparent behaviour and I verged on labelling him slightly demented, I felt a hard, phantom thump inside my head. Whackk!!

So, what’s strange about him?

He is talking to himself. Isn’t that weird?

Oh, yeah? But you too do it all the time, buddy. Ever realised it?

Me? No way. I have a saner top storey, heh..heh.

Really? So who on earth do you think you are in a chat with right now, and every time that you are by yourself?

I..er..um..

It was an instant of sudden awareness and awakening. I gulped emptily as I became alive to a cabin full of people engaged in animated conversations with themselves. The air at once was filled with a muted cacophony of conflicts and debates, fears and ecstasies, anxieties and emotions, all wrapped in individual cloaks of vainglorious entities. I looked again at the young man in the corner, still caught in his quixotic inner world. The difference between him and the rest of us around, now I saw, was, what he articulated for the whole world to see, we camouflaged with aplomb. The difference, I realised, was merely in the posturing. And the world stamped him a weirdo!

Thoughts, thoughts and more thoughts, some wired, some wilted. About yesterdays and tomorrows, men and matters, life and death. The seamless weft that allowed no empty space or time for me to rest and rejuvenate. How many times have I vented them, at the cost of being branded vocal, vociferous or belligerent! And how many times have I swilled them into my heart indignantly and smiled and pretended that “all is well’! Silent or spoken, they have been around, these mental eddies, tossing me up and down, freaking me out. Yet no one thinks I am a weirdo!

The madness in the mind has never ceased, it feeds on the external world like a ravenous beast, asking for more, even as the agony aggravates and makes me want to retch. You need to think, think sane, they say. Thought and sanity, what an absurd, mutually exclusive twosome! Yet I strive to put them on the same page and get them to work together, day after day.

Is there someone who can stop this frenzy and place fetters on this cognitive riot? Someone who can build us a log house by the sea of insanity, into which we can escape when witless thought waves run amok? Don’t we long for a private space, separate from the world, from where we would merely witness and not partake? A realm of blissful oblivion that we can enter for a while everyday and just BE – watching the waves rise and fall, wash the shore and back away - in the depths of the silence where we have only our cadenced breath for company?

Here is an anecdote to end the piece with. A little moth strayed in and landed on our window glass last week. A chirpy sparrow outside spotted the insect through the glass and pecked at it greedily. I watched with interest as the birdie spun away in despair, only to return and peck at the glass again and again, unaware that its prize catch was not on the outside, but inside. Bliss inside, pursuit outside! It was a moment of instant Zen, inspired by a moth and a sparrow.

We are like that only

Khaleej Times OPINION

Asha Iyer Kumar (PERSPECTIVE)

15 January 2012, 7:13 PM

When my parents from India and sister from the US recently came on their maiden visit to Dubai, they couldn’t help marvelling at the phenomenal strides the UAE had made in the 40 years of its inception.

They drew frequent comparisons between Dubai and their countries of residence respectively, the folks from the West raving about how contemporary, yet traditional and classic the city of Dubai and the rest of its territorial partners were, and the old folks from the subcontinent awed by just how well the country was run in comparison to the mayhem that prevailed in all walks of life back in India. “Such immaculate governance is unimaginable in India,” said they at every step.

What struck me about their comments chiefly was the despondency they felt over the way affairs were conducted back in India, a banal subject that we nevertheless discussed at length in the aftermath of the failed Lokpal bill and the parliamentary theatrics that preceded it.

The newspapers here gave my father a comprehensive view of the attitude and approach that people had towards life and living in a country where law is supreme, where work is worship, where administrative integrity is uncompromising and where the mind is by and large without fear of violence and crime. The questions that he threw up were not new, but they were compelling in the light of what he had seen, experienced and encountered here during his month long sojourn. Why don’t people respect and fear the law in India? Why doesn’t crime get detected there like it does here? Why don’t trials happen faster there? Why do passengers have to invariably haggle with ranting rickshaw drivers? Why are the roads pot hole ridden and our rides back breaking there? And the most significant of all – why do the same people who strike work or shun labour in the home country embrace hard work here under all conditions?

I had no conclusive answer to his questions. His frustration was genuine and tangible. It is true that while young, able bodied men here worked up to 16 hours a day here and scrimped to send home the money, those back home resorted to blatant apathy. Violence and high handedness have become second nature to our youth back home. According to my father, it was getting increasingly difficult to get labour for common household work like plumbing, masonry or even plucking coconuts from the trees in our yard. The maid in the house found it demeaning to scrub the bathrooms in the house (something my parents are finding tough to do with each passing year) and the unemployed youth preferred to loaf than do menial jobs. Safety of women and senior citizens was becoming a major concern among a people that when transported to another country follows the local justice system unfailingly. So where exactly was our country going wrong and what was it that made our people so civilised and law abiding when in a country like the UAE, he wanted to know.

Perhaps, it is the political system that makes things so difficult there, I suggested, cautiously. Scores of parties with fractious issues and frequent bickering between them is a perfect recipe for misgovernance and administrative malfunction, especially in a country of a billion plus people. Add to it, a “we are like that only” and “nothing will ever change” attitude that we seem to employ more as a ruse to cover our failings.

A graffito I recently saw on a kid t-shirt sums it up. “When daddy says ‘No’, ask mummy. When the law comes in the way, circumvent or break it. This happens amply in India and rarely here. Is it then a surprise that we love being here so much?

For the love of our shoes

Khaleej Times - Opinion (LIFE)

Asha Iyer Kumar
30 November 2011, 6:28 PM

It’s official. At long last, the relationship has now been acknowledged and accorded its due status. There is a deep, psychological intimacy between women and their shoes and the phenomenon cannot be dismissed as a flippant obsession anymore.

Thanks to the new documentary film ‘God save my shoes’, people will soon start taking this innocuous, humble fixation that made icons out of Imelda, Jayalalitha and Mayawati more seriously. Aha! We women can now openly brandish our elaborate, stuffed-to-the-shutters shoe rack. We can now ignore the bewilderment on our men’s face when we drool over a matchless pair in scarlet red in the store window and if berated for our love, blame it on our chromosomes. Dear women of our times, we owe a salute to the team that has purportedly striven to comprehend and legitimise this bond between us and our footwear, and the creative men who thought of putting the movie together, please take a bow. We are gratified and vindicated.

We have endured years of chastisement and it is time for redemption. Do you think we don’t notice you watching us derisively as we gingerly pick our way through the crowds in our pencil heels? Agreed, we sometimes make the mistake of donning the wrong pair for the occasion, like how one of us once wore tight, tall boots on an airplane. It was a blunder. Now, how are we to know that the new age travel rules stipulate us to take off our shoes for security checks?

Yes, we do have our issues, but which relationship doesn’t? What happened on the New Year’s Eve last year was an aberration. We were out there at the Dubai Mall in our platforms and pencils, stilettos and chunky heals. After the celebrations we had to walk all the way back home. How we missed our flip-flops then!

You may wonder why many of us prefer style to comfort when it comes to our shoes. To my mind, it has got something to do with our definition of self esteem and a unique predilection. We dote on our feet and pamper them no end. We treat them like we treat our pet puppy. Now, if that beats logic, go and watch the new movie on our shoes, while I carry my specially made, orthopedic sandals to the cobbler for repair, for without them, my fussy, flat feet will get hopping mad. Despite their down to heel condition, I love my pair, for on them rest my soles in lasting peace.

The faults of over efficiency

Khaleej Times OPINION

Asha Iyer Kumar
21 November 2011, 7:49 PM

The fire alarm system in our building has the habit of going off on a whim, ringing at the most indiscreet moments and with such annoying regularity that I am forced to think that either the contraption is innately defective or is downright neurotic. I even suspect that it has been uniquely wired to keep a tab on the emotional quotient of families in the building, detecting the minutest spark or fume that materialises between the residents here in.

The first time it struck after we moved into this building some months ago, I was in the shower scrubbing an obstinate layer of henna off my hair. Although one is expected to run to safety on instinct, the circumstance is such that it would take at least a good five minutes to steer clear of the situation. First, you don’t walk out of the bathroom in a full suit; second, you spend moments gauging the genuineness of the alarm and debating the need to run because such devices by nature love to scream and scare, and their integrity is always in question; third, you need time to find and grab at least the phone before you scoot.

All done, as I step out hoping that it is only a bogey out to hassle us, the earsplitting ring stops. The silence that falls in the corridor is more deafening than the eerie screech of the alarm itself. Looking around, I realise that not a soul has stirred out, no hint of panic, no fire. I go back to the shower and the henna, glad that I didn’t make an odd spectacle in front of my new neighbours. So much for vanity and its fake formats!

Although the regularity with which the alarm knocks me out of my skull these days has made me more skeptical than scared, I am yet cautious. So much so that my husband thinks I am a jerk to keep a bag containing my passport, some money and a few other items ready to pick up and run whenever summoned by the alarm.

“Preparedness never hurts, honey,” I tell him. What I don’t mention is the lurking fear of an eventuality where we find ourselves in front of a scorched structure, like dispossessed people after an earthquake as shown on television. Sinister thought, yet one that is as real (or weird) as a passing contemplation of life after a temblor or a tsunami. Some weeks ago, the alarm struck again. This time, it lasted for more than the prescribed period of waiting set by our security person.

“Get out only if it lasts for more than 5 minutes,” he has advised.

Clutching my emergency kit and cell phone, I waited, getting restive as minutes passed by. The warning lasted long enough to shake people out off languor and open their doors. It was a convention of sorts, throwing open an opportunity for us to know who lived next doors.

“I can smell something burning,” a gentleman shuffling across in a frenzy remarked. I sniffed. It was only the smell of the brinjals I was sautéing a while ago. Men sometimes can’t tell the smell of burning objects from 
fried vegetables!

As some of us huddled inside the elevator, he called out, “Take the stairs. The lift can be dangerrr.…”Elevator shut, we were on our way down. The descent seemed to last an eternity. Outside, the firemen, the cops and the ambulance had arrived and we scurried into a sea of 
curious onlookers.

“What happened madam?” a young lady inquired from behind.

“A fire alarm.”

“You living here?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, so scary.” She shuddered.

“Ah, yes, scary.”

Minutes passed by and nothing untoward happened. The policemen gave an all clear and as we sauntered back wondering what it was all about, someone remarked, rather derisively, “Smart system up there. Won’t let our women leave a simmering stew on the stove and get on the phone or Facebook!”

I gasped. Did he say stove? The brinjals! Had I turned it off before leaving? God!

I rushed to the elevator dreading the return of the rattle.

I tell you, an over efficient, faultless system that allows no margin of error or scope for deviation can be as frustrating as a system in disrepair.

Not in the driver's seat

Khaleej Times - Opinion (LIFE)
Asha Iyer Kumar

1 November 2011, 7:07 PM

There are some things in life that I really don’t miss doing. Driving around Dubai, for instance. Of course, I am eligible to hit the road, what with a license that I pocketed after my maiden traffic test.

It is a different matter that roads in Fujairah, where I accomplished this feat, are sparsely loaded and have modest speed limits. But that cannot take away from the achievement, for I must have certainly passed muster before being awarded the coveted ticket to ride.

Yet, when we moved to Dubai, one thing that I left behind in the quaint lanes of Fujairah was the zeal to sit behind the wheel and cruise across this throbbing city. There was something that held me from taking the car out and careening the highways of Dubai; something about the manner in which people went about the task of commuting on the roads. For long, I avoided putting a name to that which made me stay off roads, even as I strove to explain to people about my non driver status despite being a bonafide licensee.

Absence of a second car in the family, I said dismissively. For someone who works from home, has no youngsters to be ferried between classes, doesn’t party during the day nor has membership in social groups and ladies’ forums, a car is a needless accessory. I proclaimed that I didn’t intend shelling out money on such excesses, not when the world was on the brink of a double dip. Ahem.

Sometimes, I sounded off lofty phrases like carbon foot print and energy conservation, and threw in a heap of blah blah for effect — rising oil prices, global food crisis et al. I have no clue if my mindless babble made any sense to them, but it effectively stopped people from quizzing me further on the issue. And on occasions when we were in robust company and the audience was chirpy, I stole an impish glance at my husband and said, “I have a long running affair with my chauffeur,” all the while wondering if we were obliged to answer people’s queries about our choices in life! It wasn’t until much later that I could bring myself to openly admit that I had developed a severe driving phobia (it surely must have a scientific name?), courtesy of the insanity and insensitivity that is prevailing on our roads today. It is not easy to own up to your failings and then expect empathy, especially when it has got to do with something as commonplace as driving a car. From surprise to ridicule, from suggestions to counsel, from sniggers to open guffaws — I took them all, while staunchly maintaining that I did not intend to become a statistic in the road casualty records of the country.

“Just venture out,” some suggested. “It is fun. The freedom it gives you is unsurpassed. Just do it.” Kidding, are they? Do they know that I freeze in my seat when I see a wannabe Formula One racer flashing from half a kilometer behind me, that my limbs become dysfunctional when a thoughtless bloke cuts across under my nose without as much as a signal, that the veins in my head squeeze and throb when I hear a haughty, impatient honk behind, that I become utterly disoriented when I see vehicles ahead weave a tapestry on the highways, that I nearly suffer a panic attack every time I imagine driving on our roads?

This, by no means, is fun or freedom to me. There is a metro station at five minutes’ walking distance from my residence, a bus stop equally close by, I live in a locality that has everything one can ask for — from groceries to restaurants to salons to lending libraries to shopping malls, and when I need to go out and about, gallivanting, I let my husband be in the driver’s seat. Sometimes, I am genuinely happy not doing some things.

Back to the future of childhood

Khaleej TImes - Opinion
Asha Iyer Kumar (LIFE)
13 October 2011, 6:29 PM

Last night in my sleep I saw my childhood digitally enhanced. I dreamed that I had shrunk to the size of a ten-year-old in pigtails and pinafore! No, not exactly.

The pigtails and pinafore were in the sepia frames, the modified version flaunted trendier stuff-fringe cut and noodle straps.

Oh, what joy it is to be a little thing in an age of Barbie bags and princess pillows! To grow up celebrating birthdays at McDonalds. To carry noodles and cheese sandwich in the lunch box. To get haircuts done in the salon where mamma gets her feet and face scrubbed. To be seen in Reeboks and denims. In bolero jackets and tank tops. To wear platform heels and strut around like Katrina and Kareena!

Oh, what fun to watch 3D in theatres and frolic in water parks! To brag in school that papa has just upgraded his vehicle status to a 4WD and that there are plans of a trip to Europe in summer. To feel important and pricey when the teacher reads out your essay and exclaims, “Brilliant! Class, learn from her.”

So in the dream, I am just back from school and mamma says, “I want the food finished in fifteen minutes.”

I ask for the Cartoon Network so that I wouldn’t know what’s on the plate. It suits her too and she agrees, but adds, rolling her eyes, “Fifteen minutes and not a minute more.” The rice is a pain to eat. I wish I had French fries on the platter! I despise the man who made eating meals compulsory.

“Are you done?” mamma hollers, “You have to practice abacus for half an hour after your food.” I scratch my head with the tail of the spoon and nod. Abacus at three, karate at four thirty and homework on return - I remind myself dourly.

Mamma rummages through my bag and fishes out the exam circular and wheezes her lungs out.

“All these lessons for the exams? And you are wasting time on the food and cartoon? Here, let me feed you fast.” She shoves a spoonful of rice into my mouth and just as I begin to gulp it, I choke. Mayhem ensues. Some water, some more mouthfuls, and lunch time is over in well under fifteen minutes.

“Mamma, did you go to abacus classes?” I ask as she begins the practice.

“No. We didn’t need to.”

“Then why do I need to?” She merely throws a glare and says, “What do I hear from your karate master? That you are very sluggish in your movements. You will wake up earlier from now on and practice all the katas before going to school.”

I want to ask her if not knowing karate made her life difficult. But I don’t. I can plainly see that not knowing music, abacus or karate didn’t make any difference to her life. I hate her for making me plough thorough fields she herself didn’t and still lived happily.

“I am stopping your art and music till you finish the exams. I don’t want any excuse for not scoring a high A-plus this time. Do you understand? A high A-plus in all, including English and Hindi.”

That meant close to centum. I want to ask what happens if I don’t, but I don’t dare. I have some idea of what she would say. “No more TV, no birthday parties, no outings. No fancy accessories, no presents, no night-over....”

I dread losing the perks in my life and fix my mind on high A plus.

Papa looks pitifully at me slogging till midnight and asks mamma if it is necessary to push me this hard. “She is just ten,” he implores.

“Come on, you know it…”

Papa doesn’t dispute. He knows it, indeed. And I know it too. I ought to be the best. Nothing less will do. The nightmare breaks and I awake, thankful (and more relieved) to have been a child of a

bygone era. Oh what joy! No extra classes to attend. No rat race to run. Just a childhood that schooled out of tailored cotton satchels and delighted in small pleasures and simple amusements.

Retiring, returning - willingly

Khaleej Times OPINION

Asha Iyer Kumar 2 October 2011, 7:49 PM

An acquaintance of ours is hanging his boots up and heading home after working in Dubai for eighteen years. I do not know his age, but I can say from his looks and his sprightliness that he has more working years left in him.

He was a picture of complete contentment as he announced his decision to call it a day some days ago. If there was one emotion that swept over me in that moment, it was unadulterated envy at the man and his wife’s immense capacity to say, “Enough. We are satiated.” It was almost as if their hearts were letting out a happy burp for all of us to hear. Been there, done that.

As expat workers, we are all faced with the certainty of beating a retreat home sooner or later. But it is a prospect that a majority of us hate to think of or confront when the moment presents itself either in the form of a pink slip or a personal compulsion. We shun the thought, like we do with death and disease. For all the emotional outpourings about home and all the nostalgia about rains and relations, we still have a fascination for living abroad and it is one that we cannot wish away easily.

Blame it on the comforts that the mind and body has got habituated to in this land of plenty or to the tedium of adapting back to a lackluster, disorderly existence in comparison, a majority of us would want to extend our lease in a foreign country, fill our insatiable personal coffers and talk of retirement as if it existed light years away. And should such a discussion crop up among the fifty somethings sometime, one is quick to exclaim, “I would love to. But one has to keep doing something, hasn’t he? Or one would rust to death.”

Having something to do is such a compulsion to us that despite a healthy corpus stashed away for a comfortable retirement, one chooses to plod, revising retirement plans an umpteen number of times. Pray tell, is it a genuine fear of inactivity that keeps us in the grind or is it the uneasiness of letting go the pay cheque and the vain trappings of a working life that makes us report for work and endure the stress, even after the sons have graduated and daughters have married? It must be a little of all, I reckon.

Drawing a line to one’s wants is a tough task. So is deciding what comprises a healthy bank statement for the future. When ‘saving enough to beat the inflation’ becomes the objective, when the prospect of an intransigent, lonely old age looms, then no amount in the bank seems enough. The labouring limbs strive to gather might to serve some more years and the will refuses to wilt.

To be able to arrive at a decision to call it quits and recede from the active shoreline in spite of the above mentioned concerns calls for immense maturity and wisdom. It is a rare quality that comes with years of equanimous living and modest thinking. If one only has to keep doing something, there are options even after going home. One could globe trot if one has the wherewithal and health. One could join an NGO or teach children in the neighbourhood if one has the qualifications. One could read, paint or indulge in interests he previously couldn’t. If nothing, one could reflect on his past, take stock and perhaps, write an autobiography, if not to publish, at least for his grand children to read. Every human being gathers lessons on life which he can pass on.

Knowing one’s options and taking refuge in them is a challenging task. That our friend could arrive at that point of resolve is what makes me jealous. There is a joy in having your desires fulfilled, but there is a greater joy in being desire-less. Deciding to return home giving up the perks of a life here is nothing less than that state. In some ways, it marks the beginning of one’s journey to freedom and peace.

The much desired break

Khaleej Times OPINION

The much-desired break…

Asha Iyer Kumar (Issues)20 September 2011, 6:57 PM

So, had a good time? I instinctively pop this question these days when I meet people who are just back from their summer vacation.

“Good… but very hectic. It is tough to relax while on a vacation,” drawled an acquaintance a week ago. His whirring words and contorted face spoke volumes about the actual quality of his one-month escape from work and routine here. As I nodded understandingly, he continued, “Life becomes normal only when I am back here. All said and done, home is where your heart is and your heart is where your routine is.”

“Of course, of course.”

“Imagine, a host of relations to visit, pilgrimages and promises to keep, calling on the banks’ relationship managers for pending services, parents’ and in laws’ health check up, children’s cough and cold, my own fight with a Delhi belly…add to it calls from the work place here. What do you expect in such a scenario?”

I smiled as if to say I understood, I could empathise with him. Vacations home are no longer those get-aways that they used to be. Life has come a long way from those days of a month long retreat one looked forward to and delighted in.

Not just a vacation back home, but most time-offs these days end up being frantic and tiresome, if not tedious. A relative and his family had been on a tour of the Swiss Alps and Paris last month. On their return we expected to see an ecstatic, over whelmed pack eager to take us on a vocal tour of the exotic sites, but what do we hear? Stories of a tour in which they spent all their time scuttling between places to cover the maximum, added to which were incidents of wallet picking in Geneva and their son lost and found in Euro Disney. Phew!

I have heard similar tales from several people who have been on various guided tours. I haven’t been on one, so I can’t vouch for them, but I have never been able to fathom what degree of amusement and fun one derives from a ten day all-Europe jaunt except the fact that they would return bleary eyed, with a list of places to talk about and scores of pictures to circulate. Herded from place to place, with the aim to pack in the maximum, I wonder if it is an opportunity to put their feet up and unwind, which is what a vacation should essentially be.

“Imagine a week like this every year,” I said to a friend two days ago. “Somewhere in the mountains or by the sea. No mobile phone, no laptop. No thoughts about people back home or the boss in the office, no fear of job loss, no worry about what the kids might grow up to be, or what we might do in our retired years, no anxiety about what our investments would reap, no dread of the future. In the lap of nature, in the presence of the divine, some books, music and no mind. Staring far into the sea by the day and the starry sky by the night, living in the present with no one but ourselves. Imagine a long interlude of tranquility, complete with our inner whispers, when nothing, nothing would 
really matter.

A total switch off from the mundane everyday madness. A week of letting go, a week of sheer bliss.”

“Sounds good. Poetic and romantic.” she said and returned to her mobile to type a text. She probably meant, good to hear, but hard to come by.

I wonder if it is such a difficult proposition – to drop the baggage of woes and worries and to retreat, to just exist with nothing to do, for a week. Imagine the renewed vigor it can infuse into one’s life, the calmness it can add and the new quality it can give to a demented urban existence!

Going the new way

Khaleej Times OPINION
Going the new way… Asha Iyer Kumar (Life)
7 September 2011, 6:47 PM

It is a little over two months since we moved to Dubai from the quaint village of Masafi, and I have yet to get over the queasiness of a relocation that hurtled me from a laid back existence amidst mountain clusters to a heaving metro. People who learned about our transfer said it was a great move, for I would have more things to do now, more acquaintances to make, more places to go. They made it sound as if my life would go into over drive and I had better gear up for the hip and happening city. What they did not say (deliberately, I suspect) was that it also opened up more avenues for me to spill the dirhams, so much so that I wonder if the salary has suddenly shrunk or the month has extended beyond 60 days. Life in a city is distinct, not owing just to its many choices, but also because of its seemingly gross attitude that realigns human nature. I must admit that I am not much of a social network being. With no twitter account on my name and with an almost defunct Facebook venture, I am not the greatest of techno creatures. I still believe in the primordial methods of touching base, which by its natural logic should see me making personal acquaintances faster and thicker than a tweeting teenager. But a metro, apparently, has its own rules. In the two months that I have been here, the nearest that I have come to making a social contact is with the Indian beautician in the salon down the street. It is not that I have not made attempts at forging new acquaintances. The few times I have shared the elevator in our building with a lady, I have smiled with the hope that this would be the start of a new association in the city. I don’t know if it looked too eager and loud, but every time my smile hit the elevator door and fell flat, only to be trampled by an exiting co-traveller. Once I held the elevator door open and waited for an approaching fellow resident and ushered her in with a welcoming nod. But I soon realised that my gesture was no key to her heart. Nor was the friendly pat on her five-year-old’s cheek a good trick. Worse, it made the youngster cringe, with the mother throwing a protective arm around him and pulling him closer. Her eyes strived not to meet mine. Did I look the kidnapping kind, I asked my husband later that evening. “You have to go that extra yard and make friends in your building”, an old relative living in another part of the city advised. Taking her counsel to heart, and taking advantage of a neighbour’s door ajar, I rang the bell a few days ago. The lady of the house, a compatriot, walked up, gathered the door in a hurry leaving enough opening for her to present her head and half a torso. I smiled, and said I was her new neighbour. “Okay.” “We moved in two months ago.” “Okay.” “Just thought of saying ‘hello’ so that we will know when we meet in the elevator next.” “Okay.” “I am Asha.” “Okay.” “And your name?” She muttered something. I was pleasantly surprised when she asked, “You are from…?” “Kerala.” “Okay.” End of conversation. I sauntered back to my flat wondering if she had just read the day’s newspaper that carried a report about women posing as beggars and robbing people and homes. You never can tell a mugger from a decent homemaker these days!P.S: Following recent incidents of crime, people have been advised not to take the elevator with strangers. Now that puts paid to my attempts to make new friends in the building. It makes me wonder, from being wary—a trait we picked up post 9/11 – are we on the brink of becoming a paranoid lot, happy to stay indoors and watch the world through the TV, Facebook and twitter windows?

Can a law obliterate corruption - Khaleej Times

Can a law obliterate corruption?

Asha Iyer Kumar 28 August 2011, 7:51 PM

India is now divided into two sets of people. Those who vociferously support Anna Hazare and those who staunchly believe that corruption is at it its hilt and needs stemming, but don’t see the introduction of a bill or its conversion to a law as the panacea. It is easy to distinguish the two sets of people—one, the common middle class Indian currently galvanised by Anna’s overtures and the other, the country’s intelligentsia that is not merely circumspect, but is openly pessimistic about the outcome of the recent waves of feverish public outcry. While the former is a direct manifestation of years of regular humiliation and persecution at the hands of greedy governmental institutions and its cellular agencies, the latter’s pessimism stems from the knowledge that mere law has not and cannot bring colossal changes in a system that now does not know any other way to exist.The ‘C’ word in India has now become a truth that the ordinary citizen has accepted with resignation, just as a victim of domestic violence accepts her fate stoically. However, one thing that neither the warring common man nor the high-browed sceptic can deny is the fact that the Lok pal bill and the icon it created in Anna Hazare has moved the nation into oneness. And that in some ways is a positive development. But will this tsunamical surge of oneness alone be sufficient to exorcise the obese monster that we have fed and fostered through complacency and common practice? The movement, undoubtedly, has given the populace an opportunity to openly vent its ire and frustration, but how far will the theatrics of fasting and mass movements will achieve the original objective of wiping out corruption in Indian civil society is only anybody’s guess.Pardon me if I sound hopeless and discouraging, but given that evil, envy and debauchery are endemic to human nature, the real solution to problems such as these lie primarily in human nature itself. I am not dishing out fancy rhetoric on how the corruption essentially lies in the human heart. It is easy or even fashionable to declare so and snuggle back into the old routine of debased existence. But when greed, stoked by limitless desire, gets the better of us, especially in a world order where there are no clear cut rights and wrongs, where survival is becoming a challenge with each day, where morality is only for the priests to preach, is there anything optimistic for one to see?Seeing the deep rooted sleaze in the Indian society, teens and youth taking to thievery than academics in a major world city, seeing totalitarian governments attack their own vulnerable citizens, global companies bamboozle their scrimping investors, soldiers and militia men in an impoverished, famine-wrought continent assault their women and children to instill fear, one suspects if the Machiavellian tendencies are characteristic of only a particular nation, culture or population.In the Indian context, one fails to see how blaming and targeting the political community alone can help us restore the health of an ethically sick civil society. It is one thing to get bills passed in parliament to make laws, it is quite another to get the law established in the country’s psyche. When law itself fails to instill fear, when law itself succumbs to pressure, when law itself stands mute witness to gross and inhuman violations, when the loopholes are bigger than the noose, of what consequence will any new legal regulation be?In a country where there is a Rights to Information Act in place, yet activists exercising the right get brutally murdered, where whistle blowers are inhumanly torched alive, where rapists and rogue elements live on interminable periods of bail and parole, is it a lack of law that one is genuinely concerned about?If a few extra sections in the law book will fill a potentially erring human with fear of legal retribution, if it will send strong signals of unbending punitive action, if the recent waves of protests make the dishonest bigwigs who pocket millions over a deal and the ubiquitous file pushers in government offices cringe with remorse, if corruption is viewed as a core individual flaw and not an easily dismissed weakness, then Anna Hazare and his millions of supporters’ efforts will meet with a positive outcome. If it will awaken a nation’s collective consciousness and summon a moral stance among its people across divides, if it will rectify basic human frailties, then the Lok Pal movement is on track. If not, all that we are currently seeing in India will end up being a wasted exercise against an enemy who is either all pervading or is within oneself, depending on one’s personal orientation and subjective perception.