Everyday Musings > Happy Birthday

I was born on 21st October, 1976. It's been 32 years, but I still celebrate that day, every year. Why are birthdays so special to us? Even after so many years of being born, why do we look forward to it? Not just us, what makes everyone revel in it, wish, call and bring gifts.

Early man didn't celebrate birthdays. Simply because there was no concept of time. They saw the sun rising and setting, saw people being born, growing older, seeds start as saplings then becoming trees. But had no way of marking milestones of the past. That happened when moon cycles were discovered, changing seasons were noticed and finally, when the first Calendar was drawn up. That made birthdays possible.

But was everyone's birthday important? There are only a few documented in early history. Kings and Queens had birthdays. As did prophets and saints. And Gods in most religions – Christmas, Buddha Jayanti, Janmashatami. (Though I do wonder how human beings found out their birthday)

So there seems to be an economic reality to it. Big celebrations, launch of big projects, grants to citizens – all related to the importance associated to the individual whose birthday it was. Be it king, saint or nobility. That's till Germans, the ones considered so severe and unemotional by most, celebrated their children's birthdays. These celebrations were called "kinderfeste", meaning children's party. And that spread to adults as well. A European theory states that evil spirits were particularly attracted to people on their birthdays. To protect them from harm, friends and family would come to be with the birthday person and bring good thoughts and wishes. Giving gifts brought even more good cheer to ward off evil spirits. This is how birthday parties began.

Birthdays come with plenty of traditions. Cakes, buying new clothes, surprise parties, blowing candles, horoscopes, having Kheer, singing Happy Birthday (originally written by two sisters, Mildred and Patty, as Good Morning to you). In India, it's a visit to the temple, in Denmark, a flag is flown outside a window to designate that someone who lives in that house is having a birthday. In England they bake Fortune telling cakes. The object that you find in your piece predicts your future. If it's a coin, you'll be rich. If a strand of hair, probably that the cook will be fired. Grin.

My friend Suzanna and I are born on the same day. As a birthday tradition, we make a wish list and give it to each other. Things that we like, could be simple things like colorful paper clips, a temple tree sapling, movie tickets, a foot massage, we'd mix up with lots of trinkets and gift them to each other.

A friend of mine is turning 40 next week. And was making up a list for his party. A grand celebration. Where he planned to call everyone he knows and have a great bash. Five minutes ago, he dropped the idea. And decided to spend the day with underprivileged children and give the party money to contribute to their lives. Something that I have seen many do, in the past and now.

Makes me rethink of birthdays and how perhaps this is the social catalyst for the future. Maybe the way to transform the world lies in the way all its inhabitants celebrate the day they were born into it.

Everyday Musings > Sneakers Day Out

Yesterday, on my way back home (walked, thanks to the auto strike), I found a delightful park. It had high walls, was gated, guarded and had a five-rupee entrance fee. The little I could see from outside looked serene and lush. It was decided. Tomorrow, that's today, would be the day to start the exercise routine that I'd been putting away for so long.

I'd made a few resolutions. To write 500 words, to cook every meal, to sleep well, to lose 5kgs by December. Now, thanks to the frequent cooking, the 5 kgs looks like it's adding on rather than disappearing, and the guilt trip to join a gym has gotten stronger. I keep telling myself I like dancing, kickboxing, but not the gym. Actually I like anything that tells me 'hey you're not exercising, you're having fun.' Grin.

So, I mused, on exercising and gyms. Which genius mathematician came up with 36-24-36? Who was the great philosopher who said 'forget the donut, hit the gym'? We're all reaping the fruits of the revelations of these unnamed few. Let's hope they attain Nirvana and never reincarnate. But pushing all those evading exercise thoughts aside, I decided to be firm this time. I will walk.

This morning, I fished out my sneakers. They hadn't seen daylight for months. And lay stiff, squeezed in their laces. I gave them a stretch and fit my foot in. The white laces felt odd. Make two bunny ears and tie them together. Gosh, had it been so long. Stepped out and a short walk later I was at the entrance of the walled park, paying five rupees.

The park was surprising. Amidst the dusty, treeless Filmcity Road, this was a burst of beautiful pale green Bismarck Palms, a barrage of sparrows, a spattering of Umbrella Palms by a water body, dragon flies whizzing along the walking path, Heliconias and pagoda trees in bloom, ferns sticking out from everywhere and trees that covered the paths such that the sun peeked but never stared at you. A secret garden. The generous bloom of green was cut in by angular Grey stone structures. A vacant amphitheatre, a reading room with newspapers and magazines, an unfinished central hall, out of bounds for now. The walking track was paved with square stones and wide so that many could walk without bumping into one another or forced to march to the stride of the one ahead of you. I walked for twenty minutes. They had set up a Herbal Juice corner where you could buy concoctions of Tulsi, Neem, Karela, Doodhi, and Carrot for just ten rupees. Sipped a glass of Tulsi-Pudina juice and sat on a bench by a bunch of ferns and shut my eyes. Five minutes of just observing my breathing and I was filled with life.

It's rare in Mumbai to find a space that leaves your peaceful, where it's not about shopping and movies and work. I wonder why it was gated. And not open to everyone. Walked out thanking the chaps who had made this place. I assumed it was the Oberoi Builders who were doing a considerable amount of construction in the area. My eyes were drawn to a plaque outside. It said Public Park by the Municipal Corporation of Mumbai. I was surprised. It said, this is a space for peace. Not recreation. Somebody out there knew the difference.

Everyday Musings > Chip off the old Block.

I have a blank page staring at me. I've been tapping my keys for a while, wondering what to write on. Bees or why airline seats are arranged the way they are, or on the auto-taxi strike today or on the sky and how that's actually Outer Space we stare at every day.

Am I suffering from Writer's Block? Is there anything called Writer's Block, or is that also a figment of a writer's fertile imagination? As neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg states in his book, The Executive Brain: "The distinction between the 'diseases of the brain' and 'diseases of the soul' is becoming increasingly blurred."

First, to identify, when does Writer's Block happen? Many explanations. It happens when you try to do everything at once, when you don't know enough to begin, when you've exhausted all the good or original ideas and feel your creativity flagging, due to physical stress, lack of sleep, depression, and bad health, due to mental blocks: fear of failure, fear of success, overbearing inner critic and due to psychological disturbances ranging from neurosis to something scary.

While there are plenty of authors with an excess of words on how to get out of a writer's block, there are hardly any scientific studies around it. But there is clearly no one answer for all. Unlike acidity or fever or malaria, there isn't a way to confirm if a person really has Writer's Block. So writers facing a block attribute it to symptoms, often a struggle to start or finish a project, but of course, the duration of the struggle varies vastly.

The struggle makes for good storytelling though. There are many movies made around this subject. The wikipedia list states some of them - Fellini's 8 and a half (on director's block actually), Adaptation (writer struggling to adapt a book into a film), Barton Fink, Deconstructing Harry, Finding Forrestor, Quills, Secret Window, Shakespeare in Love (the most famous author to have had a block), The Golden Notebook, The Shining (the horrifying aspect of the Block), Leaving Las Vegas and closer home, Shabd, Kaiyoppu (Malayalam) and Meenaxi: the tale of two cities.

A friend gifted me a beautifully ruled notebook from the Metropoiltan Museum of Modern Art. It's called Writer's Block Journal. And has quotes from various writers to help egg you to write. Some of the quotes are lovely.

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma...In the afternoon-well, I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde

"It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing." Gertrude Stein

"I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction." Katherine Anne Porter

"At painful times, when composition is impossible, and reading not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction." Elizabeth Barett Browning

So the next time you have a Writer's Block, remember, you're in illustrious company. Hmm...maybe there's an idea there.

Everyday Musings > Zzzzzzz

I yawn. Throughout the day. It’s not that I’m bored and sometimes, not even that I’m tired. Yet it’s always there.

As is widely known, a yawn is the reflex opening of the mouth that ensures deep inhalation and slow exhalation of oxygen. Andrew Gallup and Gordon Gallup at the State University of New York at Albany further add that yawning is a mechanism that helps increase blood flow to cool the brain; since the brain works better when cooler.

That makes me see yawning in a completely different light, since it means that I don’t yawn because I feel tired, I yawn so I can become more alert. The Gallup’s say that a good yawn actually offsets the wish to sleep. So when yawning spreads to the whole group in a meeting, it’s actually an attempt of the group to keep everyone alert and vigilant. A ha.

So much talk on yawning begs some talk on sleep. Apart from 500 words a day, I also resolved to get enough sleep. But I’ve been struggling to define what ‘enough’ means. Alexander the Great and Margaret Thatcher got by on four hours a day. Giraffes can do without it for weeks. Edison claimed it was a waste of time. Even the sheep I summon at night snoozes for about three hours. Just how much sleep do we really require?

Research says there is no ‘right’ number, but as is said, 8 hours is an average. But it’s how deep we sleep rather than how long.

The Sleep Foundation in America states that two factors affect sleep. A person’s basal sleep need – the amount of sleep our bodies need on a regular basis for optimal performance – and sleep debt, the accumulated sleep that is lost to poor sleep habits, sickness, awakenings due to environmental factors or other causes.
Two studies, they say, suggest that healthy adults have a basal sleep need of seven to eight hours every night, but where things get complicated is the interaction between the basal need and sleep debt.

For instance, we might meet your basal sleep need on any single night or a few nights in a row, but still have an unresolved sleep debt that may make us feel more sleepy and less alert at times, particularly in conjunction with circadian dips, those times in the 24-hour cycle when we are biologically programmed to be more sleepy and less alert, such as overnight hours and mid-afternoon. We may feel overwhelmingly sleepy quite suddenly at these times, shortly before bedtime or feel sleepy upon awakening. The good news is that some research suggests that the accumulated sleep debt can be worked down or "paid off." Whew. It’d be ironic to have sleepless nights worrying about sleep debt.

But that said, sleeping too less or sleeping too long has its effects. Too less and you could trigger obesity, heart problems, diabetes even. Too much and you could turn morbid and die faster.

The internet is crowded with tips on smart sleep. But I just heard this one. Before hitting the pillow, tell yourself, ‘I’ll sleep well”. And miraculously, it works. Try it tonight.

Everyday Musings > A snail's life

I've never thought much about snails. In fact, I don't know anything about them. Except that they're slow, slimy and carry their homes on their back. Not a fantastic impression to have of anyone. And then I saw Slinkachu's Inner City Snail. He calls it his slow moving art project. And I had to know more.

Snails cannot hear. Not just that, they have poor eyesight too. So they depend on their sense of touch and smell to find food. They are more active at night, mostly to avoid the deluge of predators in the day and to escape from the sun so it wouldn't sap all the slime. Why would anyone willingly want slime? The thick slime ensures that their soft mass can crawl across anything, even the edge of a razor, and not get hurt. Respect.

We call postman delivered messages snail mail. We say that traffic's moving at a snail's pace. I checked just how slow that really is. Research says, they move up to 23 inches in one hour. That's slower than slow motion. But before you judge them for being slow pokes, how fast do you reckon we'd go if we were carrying our homes on our back.

Snails can mate with themselves and thus even one can reproduce in an aquarium or pond. Most snails lay eggs but some, like the trapdoor snail, give birth. Some snails have been known to live up to 15 years. And the biggest any of them have ever got is about 15 inches. And the thing on menu cards called Escargot is actually a garden snail. Such a delicacy that they even have a day named after it. May 24th, National Escargot Day.

Now that you know so much about the little slimy chap, here' a bit on what Inner City Snail is all about. Will Self, known as Slinkachu, a London street artist, uses the snail shell as a medium of 'art'. His says, 'No snails were harmed, they just had their homes vandalized'. So you'll find a bunch of graffiti snails crawling around London. He paints their shells (non toxic paint for those who're about to hit send on a 'save the snail' mail) and leaves them be wherever he found them. He even combines some with his Little People Project, where he paints miniature plastic people and lets the two interact. One snail was given a graffiti-style urban revamp with a new name – John – spelt out across its shell. Another had the Tube logo painted on as well as acquiring a couple of little passengers. And one had an illegal occupancy notice stuck on its shell. The snail shell graffiti is eye catching and makes one see the streets from their point of view.

Slinkachu does make them quite lovable and watchable. So if any of you are tempted to keep one as a pet, all you'll need an aquarium or large jar with a mesh wire lid or a plastic lid with holes in it, dirt, plants, rocks, a few snails. And of course, a lettuce that it can munch on for a week. Did I hear someone mutter slowpoke?

Everyday Musings > The Tokyo Report

It was January 2007. Cold. And the transition between winter and spring, so everything was on sale. It’s been a year and a half since I visited Tokyo. Had jotted down what stayed with me a while ago. Revisited. Its memories surfacing, like flashes of clarity in a thunderstorm.

What I saw and did and figured there. Ogilvy Office, where on a clear day you can see Mt Fuji. Basement Japanese Restaurant Oto Oto where I grated my own pungent as hell Wasabi on a shark skin grater. Got the intonation of and said Arigato (thank you) and Sumimase (excuse me) to whoever I met. Drank lots and lots of Sake and Shoju. Visited the Tsukiji Fish Market. Sushi lunch. Watched gardeners on ladders, manicuring those perfect looking trees at the Imperial Palace. Met an old soldier at Asakusa Temple. Bought stationary at Ginza. Discovered UniQlo. Watched two hours of splendid Kabuki performed by the Nakamura family. Tasted delicious raw horse meat. Sat in Vajrasana (as your feet as not supposed to face them) and from 2 ft away, watched early morning Sumo practice at a Sumo stable. Walked around Akihabara – the geek zone, bought some Manga, went to a Maid Café, had a traditional Ramen lunch. Attended a noisy, happy beer and snacks party at a Dagashi – a traditional children’s snack shop.

I saw coins for 100 bucks; commuters sleeping while standing, without support, in speeding trains; roads teeming with people but not noise; change returned on a tray and no one counts it to be extra sure; masks to protect others from catching their cold; clean and warm toilet seats no matter where you go; GPS trackers on children’s school bags; cycles and vending machines everywhere; more non-cola products from coca-cola than cola ones; everyone reading Japanese novels; books read backwards and top to down at the same time; English being treated as a foreign language; rap being as popular as Manga and Hermes; older women dressed as schoolgirls; everyone brushing after every meal; no one worrying about leaving their bags around; large buildings, small houses; brands like Diesel, Prada and Levis marketing exclusive lines for Japanese girls; more stores for women’s clothing than men; tiny dogs with backpacks for food; No public display of affection.

The older Japanese dress like the British, the working girls dress French and the school girls have high hair and love Beyonce; The government, not Ogilvy, is the hottest job in town; In a Sushi place, when a customer walks in, the whole staff shouts ‘welcome’; A fish market is the best place to eat fish; Refilling your own drink is considered an insult to your host; Chopsticks have etiquette too, if you keep them stuck in your bowl, it signifies death; The Japanese and the Koreans argue every year when the Japanese Prime Minister pays his respects at the Yasukuni war shrine; Only two families perform Kabuki in Japan and men play every role; Regular Japanese packaging is far superior to their regular advertising work; The right way to eat Ramen is to slurp it; Japanese are more uncomfortable with drunken behavior at Roppongi than with crazy tattoos and Goth make up in Harajuku; Japanese women straighten and curl their hair; The Japanese are very explicit in their directions but not in their emotions.

Flashes. And a yearning to go back and see more of this place where everything was new but nothing seemed unfamiliar. Arigato Goziamas.