Room of one's own

Room of one's own : Virginia Woolf

I remember reading her in narrow lanes of an old library. It was an old book; tattered pieces. I was aware of the scepticism I felt regarding feminists books. Woolf was ready to argue for women and her rights. But I was feeling dejected with life and I wanted to read some fierce article seeking my place, my thoughts and my views. Woolf did not disappoint me at all.

By the end I was convinced I needed a room of my own.

This was three years ago, when I had read her work. Three years later I still never got the room, I remember coming back and staring at my parents room. I went and stared at the kitchen and stared at it for good 10 minutes. The kitchen, where the most important work was done : cooking. I would be there one day , trying to hold on to some thought.

But now I needed a room. A room not just devoid of disturbance, a room devoid of responsibilities, a room devoid of cynicism. In short I was aware of the fact that I was demanding a room of thoughts.

I am still romanticising this room, but am sure this room exists somewhere.

Why do I need a room, for the fact that I am not a painter, I do pretend to be one sometimes in my mind and sometimes in my life, but no where near being chaotic and messy. I do try my hand at writings sometimes, I write for 10 minutes and then I see my words and my mind travelling to an another zone, yes I have a small attention span, so there goes the art of writing. But I still sometimes  crave for this so called room where I could just lie down and stare at wall and think of these great great great thoughts.

There have been time when I think of thoughts, and then by the time I finish all my work and come back to write it, it melts away. As someone rightly said there is something about a great idea, one needs to write it down as soon as it is planted. Or it will be lost in the valley of thoughts.

“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

So I take care of myself, I take care of home, I take care of food, I take care of family. No, no; this is not a Victorian set up . This is what happens in everyday life.

The idea keeps floating. And one keeps holding on to this great thought which floats around. I am not the first one who is going through this, Kamala Das had to wait for night to set in to write, Jane Austin had to hide her manuscripts.I am way better than these women, I am allowed to think and I am allowed to write also. Just that I am not able to find the time to write it. Excuses, petty excuses.

I am not stating anything which is out of the ordinary, these things happen all the time, but what does not happen is repetition of these problems in the 21^st century . Nothing has changed with time. Women are still playing the roles of home-makers; With time, we have become even more super-human.We are playing double and triple roles. I don’t think so we ever inherited any room. We inherited multiple rooms with multiple complexities. Our roles and duties increased.

Woolf when she was debating for a room of her own, I repeat she was not seeking for space, she was seeking for an idea where women were the producers of thoughts. Where women instead of being the care-takers, were the Einstein of their times. Women were not responsible for a man's success, woman themselves were success.

I still have not found the room.  

Quotations from some lovely novels .

I learned this art from Akira Kurosawa. He used to take down notes of novels he read. Mostly Dostoevsky .i used to read , read a lot and then I used to yearn for some lines. Writing down these lines helped. As though one preserves these lines for sometime with oneself. It freezes the time. 

these are some of my favourite lines from the following novels 

 Sugar Street : Naguib Mahfouz

• My Dear Coffee-house, you are part of me. I have dreamt a lot and thought a lot inside you. What value does nostalgia have?Perhaps the past is the opiate of the romantic . It is most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a sceptical mind.
• When we are in love, we may resent it, but we certainly miss love once its gone.
• he had been his drinking partner.
• The most wretched thing that could happen in this world, would be having to ask in one step-hour one day, "where am I"?
• a woman does not need to read or write unless she is exchanging letters with a lover.
• I don’t care for sick romanticism
• independence is not the ultimate goal. It is a way to obtain people's constitutional, economic and human rights.
• Artists too must learn their share of science. It is no longer just for scientists.
• I am a tourist in a museum where nothing belongs to me, I am merely a historian. I don’t know where I stand. You observe and ponder everything with total freedom acting like a tourist
• I am certain that I am miserable , despite having created a life that assures me both intellectual pleasures and bodily delights.
• You have liberated your mind from every fetter, but your body is bound with chains. Your body, at-least your body was created to be a teacher.

Notes from Heart of darkness : Conrad.

• No, I don’t like work . I had rather laze about and think of all fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does but I like what is in the work, the chance to find yourself. Your own reality- for yourself. Not for others, what no other man ever knows.
• There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself, but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, water and silence.
• Intimacy grows quickly out there,I knew him as well as it is possible for any man to know another
• he had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.
• The last words were : the horror! The horror!
• Pull of the primitive upon the men
• what white civilization is doing in a black Africa, sine in effect,its veneer soon vanishes in situations, where colonialists are far from their own European environment.

Mediations : Rene Decarte

• usefulness and greater appearance of truth, which shows us man naked. Empty aware of his natural weakness. Fit to accept outside help from high.
• Our senses frequently deceive us
• what do we know ( que sais je) ? The implied answer is very little.
• Favours conservatism due to ,imitation in our native intelligence : faith over reason
• anyone who regards themselves more intelligent from others take refuge in scepticism. When they find nothing in the commonly accepted philosophy to satisfy them and cant see any alternative which is more true.
• Waldeinsamkeit : the feeling of being alone in the woods

Notes from Norwegian woods: Murakami

• I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend.
• But if I do have the time, I will come to understand you, better than anyone else in the world
• I want you to always remember me. Will you remember that I existed and that I stood next to you here like this ?
• A map that shows too much can sometimes be useless
• have you ever be in love? Never
• that has not had the baptism of time
• when you are surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up
• we had completed one full cycle of the seasons, only dead stay 17 forever
• I think you got me all wrong
• the true enemy of this bunch was not state power, but lack of imagination
• way more than I need. I wish I could give you some to help you sleep
• you have to find those 'episodes'
• I have got pretty good intuition, I am hopeless as a logical thinker, though
• you should not trust anyone who calls himself an ordinary man
• because we would have to pay the world back what we owed it
• it was an awfully long day
• that can be told by the rubbing together of two imperfect lumps of flesh
• I sucked the music right out of it
• what does sine and cosine mean \?
• Peace. Peace.
• Polaroid camera.
• Its good when food tastes good, its kind of like proof that you are alive.
• Did you ever run away from home, wanatbe . Never. Why not ? Lack of imagination. It never occurred to me to run away.
  Notes from Little Prince
• They always need explanations
• I have seen them at very close quarters which I am afraid has not greatly enhanced my opinion of them
• I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously
• straight ahead of oneself, one can not go very far
• grown ups love figures
• it is sad to forget a friend, not everyone has had a friend.

Notes from Wedding Song: Naguib Mahfouz.

• No one is crueler than an idealist. Who is responsible for all the carnage in this world ? Idealists.
• Why don't we keep track of the happy moments, so that afterwards we will believe them?
• And the people are clapping, they are clapping!
• So when does one become a whore?
  After getting raped.
  After sleeping with someone
  after developing a desire. When ?
• If these walls could speak they would tell you the most fantastic tales
• the dramas of the stage, with their heroes and victims, had moved into our house.
• I used to make lengthy speeches about these things to myself in my solitariness
• A playwright must learn about everything, the good and the bad. The theatre had its fountain-head in wickedness
• It is unfortunate that life of the soul can not do without money
• Abu-al-Ala-al-Ma'arry ( 973-1057) born near Aleppo was a blind poet-philosopher who is said to have been a sceptic, free thinking and materialist.
• What is life? It is the struggle of soul against materialism.
• The battle in mind between the erotics of Omar Khayyam and epic romance of Magnun Leila.
• He is going to be the author of tragedy, how beautiful, that anyone could be virtuous these days, his eyes are weak, so he cant see what is going around him .
• Could there be a playwright without love?
• Failure in art is death itself- that is the way we are made and art, in my case, was made not just art but the surrogate for action that an idealist like me is unable to take.
• A world where a man could travel lightly, immersed in art alone.   

Cairo dairy..

Walk like an Egyptian!!!

For starters, Egypt is called as Misr in Arabic. Remember this! You would see Egypt some places, but most of the places use Misr. And it helps knowing this basic fact. The other two important words : La ( no) and Aiywa ( yes). And you will survive, if you want to live, learn how to read numbers from 1 to 10. They look different but very easy to learn. Once you grappled these words, you are ready for Misr ;)

some of us might have heard this song, some might have even tried walking like an Egyptian,

but very few would have walked like an Egyptian in Egypt. and here comes the first first myth breaking :you can not walk like them, you have to run, you have to get petrified, you need to handle the cars, the two-wheelers,the loads of people trying to cross the road and in between all of this, the smart salesman :)

Welcome to one day in Cairo, I would not say Egypt, cos I have been told Cairo is plain crazy, the

rest of the county is better :) but somehow, after 2 weeks, the craziness is catching on me and I am able to handle this madness around :)

So where should I start ? Let me start by breaking the Myths about Cairo:

1) you will not find mummies everywhere, you will not see Pharaohs walking around, all those great stories about mummies are better in Hollywood, here life has other things to unfold...Mummies are there, but in the museums, in the pyramids, they have their respective places. Like any other country, its hidden away in its past. Its more intriguing for the foreigners, the locals smile about them. Ask an Egyptian about pyramids and they would say , yes wonderful rocks, and most of them have not seen it yet :)

2) Egyptians talk , and when I say I mean they TALK ABOUT POLITICS. Life starts and ends on this note. They love their politics and with the post -revolution scenario everyone talks about it.

And I am not talking about people sitting in the parliament , or the news channels or the academics. These people who come from different walks of life. Some are selling vegetables on the street,

some are passengers in a bus, somewhere are the bus-conductors, some are 14 year old boys and some are 68 year old women. they all have opinions and they all are vocal about it.

3) Egyptians are lazy. One of the first things I was told, when I landed on this part of the world. their days start at 1pm, ( yes they do not know hats getting up at 6 am:))

and they go on till 3 in the morning. If you look at the weather here, I think this is the most sensible thing to do. The mornings are hot and evenings are cool. Its great to work in the evenings. The heat

can sap your life out even though the temperature might say 16 degrees as forecast. They are just laid back, who love going at their own pace. You cant make them move fast, their sense of race comes only and I repeat only when they are driving..

4)You can die, while crossing a road in Cairo and I say this with a straight-face. There have been moments where I have stood half-an hour trying to figure out how to cross a particular street. Be it major roads, narrow lanes basically anything which has vehicles plying on it. You would see cars, dozens of them coming, you would not see red-,lights. I am yet to see some operational red-lights. There are police officers who just decide when to stop the on-going traffic. You have to depend on the whims of these officers. I get very happy on seeing them. They are the only ones who can stop the traffic. I have , had random strangers holding my hands and helping me cross the road. random guys stopping vehicles for me to cross the road. Sometimes cars have come dangerously close. I have seen old people crossing roads like its empty. I have seen young boys running across the major lanes. The way cars are parked is one more fascinating feature. They are just parked in the middle of the road. The roads are not so broad and yet you have cars parked on both the sides, so vehicles have to drive through these narrow roads. And forget about pedestrians.. I have met fellow pedestrians who walk with me. I might have walked miles by now. So I do consider myself an expert on this issue. You just need to navigate between the active vehicles, the parked vehicles, the running cats, the other pedestrians and the boys :)

5) travelling in a public transport : One of the cutest, craziest coolest experiences of my life. Buses here are 3 types : the big ones, the micro ones and the notorious mini vans. All of them

are dirt cheap, so don’t expect anything great. They would take you to your destination and they would entertain you. In between all of this, you would see different stories unfolding in front of your eyes. I once acted like the conductor of one of the mini vans. I was seated right next to the driver as I could not speak Arabic and I was entrusted with the duty of charging everyone for the tickets. I spent the whole journey collecting change and passing tickets to passengers. I genuinely thought he should share his earning for the day with me :) I have caught singing Arabic songs unconsciously, very loudly.. These journeys are long and sometimes taxing, but its a great way to see the city.

6)The weekends here are Friday and Saturday. Yes, they do not observe Sunday as a holiday. something different for me, and something I am still learning. the Fridays here are spent in prayers and Imam would preach for some hours. Having a Masjid, right outside my window did give me free access to some of his Arabic lectures. Not knowing the language, did not stop me from me listening to him.

7) The Cats: I can not believe this : but yes they love cats. A country of cats. I have never seen these many cats in my whole life. Maybe there is history, I know they were worshiped , but the number of cats on the roads is just unbearable ( I do not like cats, so yes I am biased), but they are there. The young ones, the fat ones, the long ones, the small ones. Even the kittens know they belong or I must say they own the territory. Cats should be declared as the national animal here. Maybe it is the national animal.

8) The Food : Egyptian food is basically meat. Bring the meat out, and you would not see anyone even touching the vegetables. As the famous saying goes, vegetables are meant for small animals :) The first word I learned in Arabic was ahamadullah ( which basically means god is great, and also signifies I am FULL!). Cos Egyptians do not understand the meaning of getting full. and they eat, and eat and eat and hog :) and eat again. Yes they love their shai ( tea), be it scorching heat,any weather, they would drink shai. Egyptians are family people, they flock around in numbers, in communities, together. They always are welcoming to guests.

so there some of the things .. i can go on... kullu Misr magnoon :)

A Search for Oasis

ISLAMIC AND COPTIC CAIRO

The Gift

He would have liked a daughter. Someone he could play with, someone he could kiss, someone he could cuddle with. He wanted someone to love. I was not the one. No one could be the one. It had to be a part of him.

It was raining again in Hanley and it was as usual settling the scores with the city. The buildings were soaking in the sadness of the city. It was sharing the grief of the people. This city had seen a lot of pain, but over the years even the buildings had become immune to it. The buildings could not be blamed, they were brown in colour. There was nothing to be cheerful about, so they tried level reducing the pain by soaking in the dullness. It rained, the city wiped the silence, it rained again and city wiped the hints again. It was a constant battle the two were fighting for. Shikha liked this battle. She always felt she was part of this great epic, a mere silent spectator for whom this battle meant something.

And this time Shikha was not alone, she was going to deliver a child, and she really wanted it to be a girl. He would have liked it. The girl and Shikha had clearly understood each other. This was an act of love , a gift from someone who loved someone, a gift for someone who wanted to love someone and a gift which was to be loved. It was supposed to be a surprise. He hated surprises. He hated losing control of his life.

He had taught her to cry in the rain, it was the only way to share your life with nature. He used to believe that rain was a message from heaven. Rain had to pour, there was no way out, and we had to be part of this ceremony. Shikha wanted him to be romantic in the rain. To hold her, and tell her how much he loved her. She wanted him to speak, talk , say things, share. And this was all possible in the rain, after all rain wanted us to share.

But nothing. He had never once said he loved her. For that matter, loved anthing. He knew what love was. But he was not ready to trade it off with anything in the world. He wanted that for himself. He wanted that deseparetly. He never cried either in the rain.

Shikha never wanted a family, never wanted attachments. She was well verse with idea of love and was blindly in love with love. She never wanted to have children but had  dreamt of being pregnant. Even when she was with him, she would always have his hand on her stomach.She loved the glow she had on her cheeks, the idea of a bulging stomach, the idea of being loved, the idea of having a life within oneself, everything gave her a tingle. She had given a lot of thought to it. She had sorted out this well written script where she would get to play the lead. She loved the idea of it.

Shikha still remembered the first time she met him. He was in the library and she was scribbling down notes. He came over and took her for coffee. It was as simple as that. And within one hour of being with him, she was sure that she would carry his child one day. She wanted to. She wanted to have that bulge around her stomach. She had fixations about her body. She had always thought she would look good with her stomach out. After the first night, he had complemented her tummy and he told her one day that she would make a wonderful old lady.

Shikha had wonderful dreams that night.

And then he asked her to marry her and walked away from her life with the negatives of their lives. Shikha could not hold him back, he was looking for love and she was not the one. It was raining that day. She wanted to cry, but there were no memories to etch in her tears. She was unable to remember any romantic moments with him.She only remembered his touch and only craved for his body. She knew that she had to gift him. She had to give him the parting gift.

Dance like a Man

I remember reading the play: Dance like a Man, by Mahesh Dattani, about a man who wants to perform the dance Bharatnatyam . He is met with scorns and rebukes and he ends up mocking his partner, a female dancer saying that “men love watching her body and not the dance itself”.

I have often thought about this line.

In Indian context, most of the recent forms of formal dance are performed by female dancers, They do have male dancers but they are insignificant in numbers. However, if one counts the various non-formal dance forms, which includes the tribal as well other forms of dances like kathakali( masked dance) which have existed in Indian subcontinent for centuries one would find that most of these dance forms were male-dominated. These were more in the terms of theatre which were either used as story-telling or for crowd gathering.

On this note I would like to bring the readers to Cairo and Egyptian dance forms. I am yet to see a belly dance live. I have heard so much about it and have seen it in so many TV shows that I am dying to see it. But there is a disdain for women who perform these dances, these are considered to be women of desert and they are still seen as nomads. Belly dancing is still considered to a low class profession and is restricted to women from lower classes. This was in sharp contrast to the popular dance form Tanoura, which was performed by men. These are also people from lower class but they are considered as artists.

I was sitting in Cairo watching Tanoura dance and its similarity to Turkish Mevlana struck me. No doubt they were similar, other than the fact that one was fast and other slow, there was not much of a difference. And I got into my thinking mode... all these dance forms have similar notions, similar dance steps, even similar backgrounds. Both were performed by men. Note : I use similar and not same, because there was a BIG difference. Mevlana was meant to be prayer whereas Tanoura dance was more in the form of entertainment.

If one goes back into history of these dance forms, they were both formed along the lines of Sufi tradition. It is more in a devotional form, where the soul is considered to connected with spiritual world. Sufism is an offshoot of Islam which restricts dance and music, basically any sort of entertainment. The very fact that women are not seen as part of this tradition further signifies the male-dominating approach of this dance forms. There is an imposition of protection of women from the male gaze. It was fine for a man to be gazed and awed but women had to be protected.

However there are feminine aspects to it, one more factor which intrigued me. There were men who took the lead as female figures, and who pretended to dance like females. The dance tries to emulate the different aspects of life, and thus includes the feminine virtues of the dance forms. But why not women , why not just have women perform these dances ?

Was the protagonist in Mahesh dattani's play right in saying, “they just want to see your body, and not the dance” ?

When I was looking at the men performing this dance form, I did think women would have done better. These men were definitely graceful and some were very handsome , maybe it was my subconscious mind that wanted to see a women performing it. I love Kathak ( a dance form which involves a lot of twirling and dance steps) and I love watching women perform it. And I prefer women because they are beautiful and graceful. Maybe this is subconscious, maybe I was taught to appreciate and view women like that, and see men as strong and ungraceful.

I am well aware of the fact that I am leading on to the discourse of dance itself, maybe there is a history of dance, history of entertainment, but this is just a blog and no more a thesis.

The more regional dances I witness the more I fall in love with our past. We had such wonderful beautiful dance forms. Today, they are all restricted to some corners of tourist attraction. No one is interested in them any-more. These artists are dying a slow death. Their profession is dying. No one realizes  this is a culture-cide of a whole generation of work-ethics. Not everyone was meant to be doing 9-5 jobs. Not everyone was supposed to live a scheduled life. There were souls, who had transcended these boundaries. There are still souls who love art for the sake of art.

Maybe they do stare at her body, but what if she dances for herself.

Maybe we all should dance like a man, unaware of the stares and gaze.

Dance ,dance . Dance like a man.