I have a friend who works for a software firm in Pune. He is a mango aficionado. He salivates over the varieties that flood the stalls of Pune in summer. He, also, likes to drink and tell stories.

He comes from an area north of the Ganga in Bihar. This is a land famous for it’s mangoes, for it’s poets, for it’s profligate royalty. In the olden days, Amrapali lived here – the famous courtesan of the eponymous movie. Even before that, this is where the world saw, perhaps for the first time, a republican form of government.

It is a fertile land, and agriculture is the primary occupation. I have heard that Akbar planted mango trees in Darbhanga – maybe it’s just a story. It’s so difficult to separate myth from history in India. Maybe it doesn’t really matter. History is a set of facts that have come down to us, through different narrations. The narration will occasionally subsume the facts, sometimes just colour them subtly, but the act and the entity of narration will always bring their own personal history. So, you see, history is perhaps not very different from myth. Myth is richer, of course, since it carries a cultural intent; it abstracts things out of the universe of thoughts and leave them for posterity to discover.

Aah, but we’ve neglected the mangoes. Mango trees are grown from grafts. You take a stock tree, graft in a cutting with the right qualities, and you have your mango tree. These stock trees are, by themselves, very tall, and though their fruits are not distinguished, the trees have a great sense of dignity and, a very obvious, massiveness. Apparently, these trees are grown in this area for a very peculiar reason. The wood from these trees is used for stocking funeral pyres. My friend talked about an old relative who, as he moved from active life, into that period of discontented contemplation, awaiting death, planted a set of stock mango trees in front of his house. He was preparing his funeral pyre.

Stories, myths, luscious fruits... what a heady combo this thing called India is.

An evening of odd love

We waded on the shores of intimacy
Looking for channels in the sands
That would take my unspoken words to you
And the channels we made in the sands
Rolled over in the wave

The evening still leans against us
Unrequited, its deed is not done
The evening is still ours.
Shall we bid the evening on its way
To other shores and better fortune

My hair gleams in the last efforts of a helpless day
My hair that that will
In strands of desperation, cling to refreshing towels
Its deed is done, the evenings of love
Are over

We were never lovers in the meaning of word
We were never lovers in the twilight
We were never lovers
Until the stars twinkled
With mirth, at our niggardly ways
Unspeaking, while the dark night rolled us in
Its sleepy clasp
That pardons the futility of our lives and our love

I could never see the easiness of age
Blinded in mine that was over,
And we let things of the world strew our sands
With approximate equalities
What indecencies will pass the guardians
While we watch the waves wipe out our shores.

An interlude of reality

When the evening pales on my skin,
On it’s wrinkles, and on it’s sag
And the wind blows down
Fancies and dreams like dry leaves,
That will scuttle through parking lots of city malls,
They had their day.

While moments of achievement have scraped away layers
Of my carefully preserved realness
While we played boyhood truants in late office jousts
While we gave to the Books, in their statutory avariciousness,
Little pieces of our soul
Proudly

i missed the point during the circumlocution of my last post. i really wanted to talk about the homegeneity of modern day culture and how all life turns into practising-to-be-like-TV. TV so dominates your senses, you really find it difficult to do anything else. indeed, TV, more than anything else, teaches modern humans how to socialize, and is probably the biggest reason why democracy will last foreever.

For some time I have been thinking about the purpose of my life. I work for a mid-tier software company in India. I have spent almost all of my professional life in this firm. I saw it grow from a small group of enthusiastic collegians writing code for fun, to a serious consultancy oriented company geared to improve the lives of it’s customer, and to make their wallets lighter, through careful calibration of human productive capacity, it’s organization by means of carefully tuned processes, and it’s delivery by means of structures aimed at capturing the hearts of customers. I see myself as an improved version of the merchants of the hoary past – indeed this improvement is not a choice but a necessity arising out of competitive global markets.

Permit me to launch into a large leap of thought – indeed, to touch upon the event which stimulated me to write today. I visited my daughter’s school today. We were invited to a function called the school’s annual day. It comprised mainly of students performing plays, songs, dances, and so on. In the midst of this was a beauty contest of sorts, except it was cultural talent, rather than beauty being judged. As is common amongst public contests of such nature these days, the public were also asked to rate the best student.

The students themselves showed up all that they possibly had. Some sang, some recited poems they had written – very poor stuff, mind you. There was a student who delivered Antony’s speech on Caesar’s death – I doubt if he realized that this was a meant to rouse the audience. But anyway, my judgment of the quality of the event is not the point. The point was massive participation in public demonstration of talent, its evaluation, and possible recognition.

Indeed, if we sit up a bit and look around, this is a major theme of modern Indian life. Reality shows, song and dance contests of every possible form dominate the TV scene. The entire educational system is dominated by competition to qualify for the jobs that pay the most money, or else, substitute power for pelf. News is dominated on one had by the inane resurgence of democratic judiciary, and on the other by reports on the heroics of our business lords – Ratan Tata, Laxmi Mittal, Sunil Bharti, and others. Indeed, India as an economic state is looking at itself with awe, confidence and vigour.

Folks of my generation never had it so good. I remember mocking Americans because they wiped their tables with paper with retro-Marxist glee – now I do the same. It’s a bit of an irony. We never anticipated this rush of well-being when we were young. During school, I remember reading numerous newspaper essays on the pernicious effects of population. Today we live, and indeed thrive, in a global economy, where our multitudinous hordes, give us a rare advantage.

I don’t think it’s just the numbers. I think early civilizational progress set the tone. We’ve been wondering about stuff since before it became fashionable. That wondering is really what pushes civilization. (I’ve been reading a translation of Siva Purana by someone. I highly recommend it.)