Tag: memories

  • Watermark

    Sometime back, while trying recollect the name of a Chinese restaurant in Koramangala which existed circa 2003, I got stuck. Despite different mashups of the various terms used typically for Chinese restaurant names, nothing sounded right. It was a small mom-and-pop joint and since the net didn’t then feature all the resources it has now, I was well and truly stumped. It was quite disappointing since we’d had many a meal there. It didn’t help that I have this ‘thing’ about remembering such places, events and people. I feel as though I have betrayed them in some way. Yes, weird, thank you. :p  The book, for once, couldn’t help either. I finally got the answer by checking with a friend who’d been in Koramangala long enough. Once I got the name, I even managed to get an image on the net – Szechuan Garden. 🙂

    A few days later, I watched Pakal Nakshatrangal, a movie about a script writer – director played by Mohanlal. The narrative is from the perspective of his son, an author, who writes his father’s biography, and in the process tries to solve the mystery of his death. The movie begins with the demolition of ‘Daffodils’, the cultural hub of the previous era’s intellectuals and the scene of Mohanlal’s many exploits. There is a sequence in which a television newsreader reports this and we can see different people viewing it from different places reminiscing about their experiences there. A group of people connected by a place.

    A place or an event in that place – that means something to a set of people – something only they share. And when they cease to exist, the memory disappears. Its as though whatever they shared never existed. A bit like the Garden State quote that I often end up using “Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.”

    It reminded me of another Malayalam movie I’d seen a while back. Kerala Cafe, an anthology of ten short movies, with the place – Kerala Cafe, a coffee shop in a railway station, serving as the connection. But more than that entire movie, I remembered my favourite – Island Express, written and directed by Shankar Ramakrishnan. (Part 1, 2, seems unedited, and has incomplete subtitle help!!) [Spoiler] The story is about several people who were in some way affected by the Perumon tragedy in 1988, and their meeting at the fateful place a couple of decades later. Its narrated by Leon, who  lost a lot himself, but makes a photo-book of it after seven years of efforts. I realise that Leon’s phrase, that remained with me long after the movie, is what this thought is all about.

    As time passes, and life moves on, some of us are left holding the memories of these places, sometimes by choice, sometimes because we have no other choice, and sometimes by chance. But there’s no doubt about the transience of it all. Its after all, a matter of time. Perhaps the entire idea of a lifestream – the things I share here, and everywhere else is all about the phrase that Leon uses – ‘a memory with a watermark’.

    until next time, memories without shelf-lives

  • Ok, its alright with me…..

    As I walked towards the parking space to get the vehicle, the lion and the clown beckoned to me. While their masks sported plastic smiles, i could sense the beseeching look their eyes would have. It was almost the end of the day, and when I peeped inside as I walked past, I could find rows and rows of empty counters and mannequins and sales people with equally blank expressions. It wasn’t the first time I had seen this  shop and wondered how they managed to stay afloat. I see it whenever traffic gets held up in the junction. At the heart of the central business district, I am sure it must have seen better times, maybe a time before the malls and the big brands… what plans they must’ve made about sales and revenues and good times…wonder if it really matters now…

    As i rode home, I got stuck in one of those endless traffic snarls that is as characteristic of this city now as a by-two coffee in darshinis. As the honks became louder and tempers got frayed, I thought the ordeal would never end. But  suddenly, the traffic began to move slowly. As I turned a corner, literally and figuratively, I could see a little distance way, a civilian directing traffic. I would’ve thanked him, but by the time I got there, the traffic was moving briskly, and he had crossed the road and disappeared into a lane. I’m sure he wasn’t getting paid, and he didn’t have any plans other than to undo a few knots…

    I make plans… and you make plans.. some plans are better than others… sometimes I have to do what I have to do.. and sometimes, like the Joker, I’m a dog chasing cars, I wouldn’t know what to do if i caught one… but yet, more often than not, Krishna’s words in the Bhagvad Gita make sense. But one is attached – for fame, money, love, combinations of the above and a myriad other reasons.. it is never easy to be detached. I feel sorry for the shop even if they were greedy, and I am envious of the man who walked away after he did what he had to do..

    Plans.. there were things I thought I couldn’t do without, a few years back, a lifestyle which I didn’t want to alter,  I thought a way of living could be kept constant across time, but things change, for a few days I may have mourned, and then I moved on.. they make good nostalgia frames – time,  places, things, people.. they all have a role to play..if you told me then that I would be living without them at a later date, I’d have smiled at you, a knowing smile acknowledging your silliness. But yet, here I am, with a new set that I don’t think I can live without…

    Ok it’s alright with me some things are just meant to be
    it never comes easily and when it does i’m already gone
    i’m practically never still more likely to move until i end up alone at will
    my life continues inching along

    [Eric Hutchinson – Ok it’s alright with me]

    So i move along, and I reach a place and I wonder how it all started… And I realise that even the attachment I claim is such a flimsy piece of string, it unravels for a while, and then at some point, the memory gets cut off, and then perhaps I make up the rest in the image of how it should have started…

    I promise you, I have not changed the beginning of this post, this was an experiment of a thought stream, of giving up control, of not being a hostage to plans, but I  have to wonder, if I knew this was the way it would end, would I have started differently?

    until next time, post….life

    Note: I’d written this post a while back, and it was almost forgotten in ‘drafts’. Chanced upon it, and realised it made sense to publish it on the day before I leave this workplace. 8 years after i started working, I’m finally going to work… for me 🙂

  • Fantasia

    And while I did not have any imaginary friends, at least not any I can remember, the other day, when I was discussing Calvin and my penchant for quoting from the series, with a friend, who is an even better fan, since she can quote exact lines, while I sometimes tend to paraphrase, I suddenly seemed to be overwhelmed by a few memories from my childhood. Its like they were always there – the memories, and were just waiting for a context – in this case, Calvin’s super identities, to take me back to a fantasy world, utterly devoid of logic, but probably more fun than anything that followed.

    Now we’re back to the beginning
    It’s just a feeling and no one knows yet

    You might remember the Rambo fixation that I’d written about sometime back, the ‘superheroes’ who’re about to be revealed existed around the same time. The Rambo gear wasted away in batches, and so spawned a couple of mutant characters, which were war heroes too, but equipped with a different set of weapons. There was this Leo Mattel gun, that produced a roaring noise, until certain experiments with new, freely available ammunition (sand) silenced it forever. The second generation weaponry consisted of water guns which turned out to be very trigger happy by themselves.It didn’t help that they were usually loaded and since they used the loops of trousers as holsters, they tended to throw aspersions on the hero’s character – that he was still wetting his pants at that age!!

    I know some of you would remember the animated Spiderman series that was sponsored by Rasna. At one point, Rasna gave away free spiderman masks and my tale is eerily similar to Calvin gulping down chocolate frosted sugar bombs to get the beanie. Only in my case, it was kept safely until I finished that Rasna box. Since my love for superheroes wasn’t shared by the rest of the family, i couldn’t coax them into buying me the entire costume, which I remember seeing on a mannequin in Parthas, cochin. 🙂 So I made by own er, costume. There had to be a spider logo on the chest, but since I couldn’t get myself or anyone else to kill a spider, I used a small rubber octopus from an earlier era, tied to the chest with a string. Since I found my costume woefully inadequate, I made myself wrist and ankle guards with bajaj bulb covers, and completed the ensemble with my mom’s stitching thread, bunches of which disappeared regularly and reappeared on window sills, like those ‘mannat’ threads in temple trees. A super hero never cries, even if he gets thrashed. Since the real world identity was that of a photographer, this one was the only superhero to be snapped. No, its not going to be shared :p

    But just because they can’t feel it too
    Doesn’t mean that you have to forget

    He Man was the next to be created, I wonder if any of you remember the tiny comics that used to come in batches of four. Anyway, this costume was made with the liberal use of notebook paper and tape, with Dad’s permanent markers used to make the bold cross at the centre of the chest guard and a carved coconut branch for the sword. The neighbourhood cat was usually scared out its peaceful afternoon snooze by a branch wielding kid, poking at it with the branch/sword and willing it to become Battle Cat. It was soon discovered that attacks against He Man were considerably lesser if old newspapers were used instead of new notebook pages. The Masters in He Man’s universe tended to be evil and soon, even the newspaper supply stopped.

    ‘Film Man’ had to be the only original one in the series. One fine day, the drawer containing old film reels was discovered. It was also discovered that they tended to loop back when thrown onto say a window rod. They also made excellent wrist gear and even a goggle, though it did mean the superhero had to have a permanently upraised chin in order to be able to view his surroundings. Unlike films in general, this one didn’t have a happy ending, since many of those reels were important!!

    I’m sure may of you would have stories like these. Those were times of innocence, when super heroes seemed real, and life was an adventure waiting to happen. In spite of the thrashings that the super hero got, he was also comfortable in the knowledge that his parents were real super heroes who could solve every one of his problems, however large they seemed to him. And then he grew up…. reality happened, and suddenly, all he seemed to have were memories…

    Let your memories grow stronger and stronger
    ‘Til they’re before your eyes
    You’ll come back
    When they call you
    No need to say goodbye

    until next time, origins and sequels 🙂

    The song is one of my favourites. The Call,  by Regina Spektor from the soundtrack of “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian”

  • The Onam tag

    Today is Onam. I’ll get wished – “Happy Onam”, and I’ll mutter a thanks/flash a smile, hopefully not weary/ type a ‘thanks’ with a smiley that will not reflect the emotions within. That’s perhaps apt, because there aren’t many emotions within. I concluded a Kerala visit last weekend, and felt compelled to figure out what I was feeling. – for Cochin, as always, and for Onam, because it was the season.

    I sit in the fancy store, as D and another M swan around trying to find appropriate things to hang from their neck/ears/hair. They aren’t alone, there is an assortment of folks of their gender, all there for the same purpose. Sometime during their existence, the store owners figured out that those of the other gender would really be lost souls in such a place, so they made sure there was a corner where they could be lost souls without impinging on the ecstasy of the real shoppers. A nice goodwill gesture. And so there I sit, with my companion, which never fails to respond to my touch, and type a few words, which are then saved in the messages drafts folder. Alternately gawking and typing, and realising that the shoppers would be here again very soon, in search of the latest trends in accessories. Fashions change quickly, after all.

    I move around the city that once used to be undisputed home, and familiar feelings bob up. Things have changed, and it is perhaps no longer undisputed. An old breakfast joint, which has many memories attached to it, has changed its name. I look up at an old building, hoping to catch a glimpse of the old lending library that set the tone for many current reading habits. It no longer exists. It is strange how, these days, when I go back to Cochin, I have mixed feelings. Where once there was only a sense of belonging, the changes have ensured that there is now also a sense of un-belonging. Earlier, I couldn’t fully grasp this feeling, could one be homesick at home? But then I remember a comment that Cyn had made on an old post – “An Idea called Home“, where she described it as being ‘homesick for a life stage’. There’s an image of Cochin that exists only in my mind, with many tags, its from an age long ago.

    I watch a movie – ‘Rithu‘ (Seasons), in a theatre complex that had 3 screens from the time I knew it, back in the 80’s. Music composed by an old school pal. (that deserves a post too…soon) Its a lovely story about childhood friends, about how their relationship(s) change when they grow up, and how they themselves have changed. I realise that its not just places, we also ‘tag’ people at different stages of our lives and we often don’t bother to update the tag, a kind of self-conditioning. Parents, siblings, friends, relatives, they have all been tagged at some point and not updated after some point, the tags define how we behave with them at every point later in life.  Over time, each believe they have different priorities/viewpoints/interests and so on,  maybe that’s why sometimes when we are ready for a relationship, they aren’t, and vice versa. There’s a chance that we will miss the opportunity to form a bond. We fail each other, without even realising it. We change, we move on, but the tags, in many ways, remain constant.

    I also realise that we do it to ourselves too – tags. We make images of ourselves which define what we say and do. We tag ourselves. We rarely acknowledge that and proceed to make up our own justifications, which suit us/others. They make sense at a particular point in time, they may or may not later. Yet, we live by them. Do we revisit the tags…objectively?

    One of the reasons, I store thoughts and feelings here is because I want to look back. Who was I in that September of 2009, what was i feeling, what was i thinking, can i understand me at a later point? It is amazing how some earlier posts give perspectives about the self, that had been forgotten. Time has a way of distorting, hopefully these tags will aid me in objectivity at a later point.

    Meanwhile, almost every shop has the ‘Onam Discount’ board put up. There are restaurants that have already announced their ‘sadya‘ rates. What is Onam to me? At a very young age, I had thought it was someone’s wedding since that was the other time we used to have a sadya on banana leaves. Memories – ten days of school holidays, a trip – most likely to Palakkad, meeting up with the vast set of paternal relatives and a few days of fun, collecting flowers for making pookkalams, dressing up in the traditional mundu, visits to temples, and so on. These are childhood memories and it is interesting how the memories dwindle as I look back to the later years of my life. The recent memories are somehow more indistinct, not separated much from the days before or after, except for the special (new) movies that get shown on television. I wonder whether I should stay back for a few more days and script a few new tags. I don’t. So, ironically, Onam survives, on its early tags. For now, I think that’s best. And as the line in that movie goes, I eagerly await the next Rithubhedam (change of seasons) of my mind.

    until next time, thanks for tagging along on a mind ride 🙂

    PS. For a more light hearted approach to Onam, you could check out my version of the myth, my Ram Gopal Varma version and the 55 word view.

  • The foreign object

    A search for a sticker – part of the memorabilia of a concert from about 4 years back – ended up taking me over a couple of decades back. I wonder if this is a coincidence – a lot of writing about memories these days, or am i consciously watching out for these trips so i can chronicle them?

    The sticker turned up many interesting things, some of which I knew existed, and some whose existence I had forgotten – my old carnatic music books, letters and cards from almost a decade back, an autograph of Nonie – a favourite VJ from a long time back, some of you oldies might remember her :p , a few old board games – Scrabble, Monopoly, stickers used to label video cassettes!! And journals 1.0 – the stuff i used to pen down regularly, fun to read the stuff from half a lifetime away – seems more like a lifetime!! Each of these have several stories around themselves, and then some that I perhaps have forgotten.

    It sits in the corner of a room in Bangalore housing these nostalgis triggers – a 25 year old massive veteran, not even Indian in origin – a Samsonite.

    It came from the US in 1985, when my dad came back after a year long trip. We became friends immediately – no, not my dad, that would take more time – because in it were Lego – the soldier set I had specifically asked for after seeing a catalog, the View-master – with Superman disks, little robots that turned into cars, chocolates, remote controlled cars – one with a  wire which was chucked only years later for a wirefree one, and assorted things that mean so much in childhood – pencils and rubbers (yes, we were innocent enough to call them that then) and fluorescent colored marker pens with the ‘Made in USA’ inscriptions, battery operated pencil sharpeners – all you had to do was dip the pencil and it came out sharpened. As Arthur C Clarke has rightly said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and magic is anyway an acceptable commodity for seven year olds. The friendship came to an abrupt end, as soon as the above items were taken out.

    We then got separated – mostly thanks to the distances – at home, it was kept on the top of a large almirah. Several attempts were made to reconnect – primarily because it was suspected of housing more booty. These suspicions arose from the fact that a lot of ‘Made in USA’ gifts were given to self and others on special occasions long after Dad came back. But we were kept apart, scraped knees, beseeching innocent expressions and bruised ego notwithstanding.

    It took a decade for the ownership to be transferred, albeit without any words being exchanged. There were only a few remains of the treasure by then, and i wondered aloud who would be interested in such junk now!! I think it started coming down in the world from then on.

    It moved to the less homely, and usually less cleaner habitats – the engineering college hostels, and played host to everything from the T Scale and other engineering drawing set paraphernalia to my favourite sliced green chillies pickle that was stocked and used with bread to survive the toxic waste that was regularly served in the hostel canteen. College mates used to eye it lustily because it was also suspected of containing quite a few literary works that kids at that age read for erm, pleasure.

    Conditions seemed to be improving as it hopped on to a train and reached that paradise – Goa and spent two years there. However, its contents were nothing more interesting than sets of clothes, sometimes unwashed at that. To be noted that the lusty looks continued, as the literature was suspected to be growing in quantity and quality, and even to be technologically updated – floppy disks!!

    It might have been happy to be home, but that was to be only for a year, and it soon traveled with me to Bangalore. And that’s where I stare at it now, a proud, dignified brown giant of a travel case, with the scars and keepsakes of its old journeys – the ancient tag of its first flight, Lufthansa, the light discoloration that happened when it served as a dining table, the scratch marks courtesy Indian Railways, and inside, the books, the board games and the posters that I used to stick on the walls of my college room……

    I look at it and think absurdly how wonderful it would be if i could have  a conversation with it. It has seen how I have changed, and not changed. We could sit and laugh at the suspected literature and sigh wistfully at the loneliness of places away from home. We share memories. I realise that in many ways, it is like the room, but in many ways, its different – it has changed too, with me, as only a traveling companion in the journey of life can.

    until next time, traveling baggage, literally 🙂