Earthquakes in the 1960s

My earliest memories of living in Delhi (I was born in 1957, in Delhi, in  old colonial Victoria Zenana hospital) are people running out when there was an earthquake. There would be a shout in the neighbourhood, Thompson Road, now sacrificed to the metro, and tiny children would be picked up by their parents, and we would all run out into the open. They were not frequent, as threats of crises go, but the drill was always the same, stand under the open sky, and presumably look upto the open sky and say a prayer.
Yesterday I got a circular letter from the painter George Oommen, (website for his lovely paintings  on South Indian, are against his name) which was about what to do during earthquakes, "do not sit under a table, do not use the lift, do not use the stairs.".all very terrifying, but good advice, specially the injunction to curl in foetal position next to a bed or a large chair, should there be an earthquake or a series of them.
As the protagonist in A Visiting Moon which was a novel I wrote in 2000, and published by Indiaink in 2002, says, "The odd thing about survival is that one does it anyhow." (150)
I suppose my epitaph would be "Why me worry?"  The day begins, and routine chores will appear without are inviting them, maybe in new forms.

Monuments and Maidens, Marina Warner, 1996 or The Street (Paris)

Marina Warner is one of  my favourite writers, and in this book, "Monuments and Maidens", she has an interesting chapter on The Street (Paris). She is basically concerned with architecture, philosophy, facades and invisibility. I wish I had read it earlier, or having read it, remembered it! What she communicates so clearly is that Paris is fashioned, and therefore the text is inscribed,  and yet, following Robert Musil, she says that monuments are meant to be ignored. The preoccupation with the female form is now replaced by the structures of engineering that displace the body, as in the glass additions to the Louvre or the Pompidou Centre. Yet she says, "The city carries a story, the city presents a lure into its own version of the past; you could say it tells tales; that it lies." (pg 21)

The odd thing about maps and other people's versions is that they are merely guides no more,  or inscriptions for each pedestrian creates, memorises, retells, and finally in my mind everything is fantastic, because of the momentary quality of that experience. What fiction does is place an emphases on both narratives simultaneously, without believing that one is more important than the other.

Wasted Lives, by Zygmunt Bauman,2004

Zygmunt Bauman writes a fascinating book which anyone working on narratives of misfortune must read.What is excess, and how do human beings cope with it? Does postmodernism create consumer cultures where waste becomes the icon of the perpetually indestructible? How do we treat those who handle waste? And are they themselves treated as redundant and obsolete? As stratification theory, Bauman's work draws us to the significance of  reading and telling stories. Stories are selective in themselves, highlighting one aspect rather than another.
"Asked how he obtained the beautiful harmony of his sculptures, Michaelangelo reputedly answered:"Simple. You just take a slab of marble and cut out all the superfluous bits." In the heyday of the Renaissance, Michelangelo proclaimed the precept that was to guide modern creation. Separation and destruction of waste was to be the trade secret of modern creation:through cutting out and throwing away the superfluous, the needless and the useless, the beautiful, the harmonious, the pleasing and the gratifying was to be divined." (pg 21) Bauman refers to the opposition that Lewis Mumford makes, of creating the new: Agriculture and Mining.Farming creates, recreates, reduplicates, multiplies, a legacy which looks at birth and renewal. "Mining on the other hand is an epitome of rupture and discontinuity. The new cannot be born unless something is discarded, thrown away or destroyed. The new is created in the course of meticulous and merciless dissociation between the target product and everything else that stands in the way of its arrival." (21)

Glass cities and nuclear energy,  however, stand apart from both.

Cherry Blossom

I saw a photograph of cherry blossoms in the newspapers today in an obituary for Sendai, and thought that tea and cherry blossoms are what I imagine are archetypes for Japan. While the world crumbles, and tomorrow seems an abstraction, there will be some images which remain in our memory even as we atrophy with age, waiting for our turn. I saw cherry blossom in Belfast,  in 1997, early spring flowers, which lined the avenues. Northern Ireland had chosen it as their favourite flower for pedestrians, and for those who glimpse it from fast driven cars. The colour remain in one's mind for ages, because the flowers are fragile and lovely. Two months later, I saw a keepsake of a cherry tree,  for it was in a public garden in London, near King's Cross, where there was a monument to Mahatma Gandhi, and people left bouquets of flowers there, out of love and respect. There was a cherry tree in the corner of that garden, which was dedicated to the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the breeze, the petals of the cherry blossoms would fly this way and that, as summer crept in.

Versailles, Port Dauphin and Many other things not reported

Versailles was startling for it's grandeur, never imagined anything so wierd...Yet, in the wonderful changing light of a Spring sky, sometimes dark, sometimes dazzling, the palace stood out like a filigree dream in wastrel's gold. Inside, the stories were in themselves tragic, the king's room looking out to the gates, so that he could see who was coming in and leaving. Marie Antoinette's room with it's gold and blue settings and the one large bed, and the footstools for attendants and the small door from which she ran out  to the king's bedchamber,when the crowds burst in.  The king's room with it's sombre stuffy colours, haunted by the memories of his love for a former wife, the picture of his mother in law and father in law by  on either side of his bedside, portrait of his first wife on the wall, and the call to prayers insistent, in the glamorous chapel on the groundfloor, where everyone collectively spent three hours every morning, praying with him. I can imagine Marie Antoinette bored to bits, never left on her own, and shrugging away any concern with the real. And then ofcourse downstairs, the rooms of Madame Pompadour who held court and patronised the writers and the artists officially for  the court, displaced in time by another. Outside the large estate, described as Marie Antoinette's estate, and the cold frozen waters of a small lake visible from the glass room, where the chandeliers and the mirrors compete with one another.
In the above room, the light was so dazzling, that a woman had a stroke, the emergency squad arrived, she was wrapped in a gold sheet, and wore a glass mask, and struggled to speak with the medical team, who held her up, four men with anxious eyes. We watched, and then moved on to take pictures of marble sculptures ofApollo and Demeter and others who too  looked on with the eyes of time, innocent of death. The photo below was taken  by me before I saw the team of men in dark blue just behind with a red medical box attending to the sick tourist.
These children are smiling at their father and are part of a large family visiting Paris on vacation and  I am  the academic tourist on my own, photographing generalities in the blaze of an eccentric extravagant background. How were we to know that as we left this niche we would meet such a grave situation of life and death?

Port Dauphin, where I went to lecture on "Fiction, Biography and Memory" to students at the University, was interesting in stark contrast. Corridors into corridors, embellished only by students' posters and teachers' notices. The students in the class that Tirthankar took, in which I was a guest,  ranged from ages 20 to 50 years, the subject of thier study:"Indian writers writing in English" and the view from the window was all that was modern and utilitarian. It is these contrasts that interest me. On the way to the lecture, I dropped in to see my  friend Joelle, who gives me fragrant tea, and we chat about Ramanasramam and mutual friends who have helped us with the questions of work and survival, the landscapes of Tiruvannamalai where we have found a common sense of homecoming, which is so central to the concept of well being. She  is a dancer, who has finished teaching for a month in Milan, and will now be leaving for China to teach ballet to students there. A lot of the questions that Sociologists raise about globalisation is really centred around multiculturalism, art as profession and as therapy, and the ways in which age and professionalism enter into new vocabularies of learning to live in the new age.

Just before I leave Paris, I meet another friend Gilles, this time with his wife and child, and a colleague from London, Alex outside the Notre Dame. We meet outside the statue of Charlemagne, with both Alex and Gilles saying independently, "Is there a statue of Constantinople?" since  I had made a mistake when fixing the place to meet at.  I had got confused, because there was to be an exhibit in the Notre Dame of the "Crown of Thorns", which according to the veteran tourist guide, John Kite, had been sold to the French by Constantinople.   Gilles teases me, saying "Well, you probably know the cafes in Paris equally well by now." So Alex and I drink tea in thick white cups, and Gilles  and his wife  have hot cocoa, while their son eats (drawing all the while!) the famous crepe Suzette, folded neatly as only the French can do. The cafe is called Esmeralda in tribute to Victor Hugo.

John Kite had also shown us graffiti on the walls of Notre Dame, a beautiful cross carved into a pillar by a 14th century workman, so simple in it's design, it leaves you breathless. The Notre Dame he says was built by the contributions of the people, and not by the will of the King alone, so it remains a people's place.

Berlin In MinusTwo Degree Centegrade with some exhibits loaned from Osaka Museum before the March 2011Tsunami