Old Skool

, originally uploaded by SkEye Travel.

I suppose primary school is a fascinating place in retrospect. At the risk of romanticising that time, I think that it was a possibly a space of the sharpest intuitions and the most mindless unselfconscious fun. The place I remember was fairly sheltered (of course there were gangs and rivalry, crushing defeats and defeating crushes), particularly now as I observe kids outside my window commuting through clogged traffic from school to tuition classes (What on earth for? To memorise the capitals of Fiji and Vanuatu? Or to ensure that ten years from now you get into IIT?) to home to school to.... Perhaps this is the charm of small town, university-town life. And some of us were quite lucky to have this. The wide open spaces. Hide and seek on bicycles. Hills to climb. Cadavers in the Anatomy Lab to scare the bejeesus out of you (all this is on a medical college campus by the way). If you havent spent your childhood in a crazy frantic city then its probably difficult to understand how anyone ever could. I find myself shuddering and castigating "the system" when I see kids travelling back from school crammed into an autorickshaw or on the Tube.
I've been thinking back to that time because a part of the school most of my childhood friends and I spent some of our sweetest, strangest, simplest and most complex times has been demolished. They're making way of a new double story science block. It is a bit strange to walk past it now and see nothing there. For years many of us have grown up passing that little school and it was always just there, reassuring, but not particularly important.
There was a mass of rocks that served as play-area, staging area, house-house area, theatre of war, or pit-stop for imaginary monster trucks driven by seven year old boys. I remember learning about different kinds of rocks and my teacher saying that our precious rocks were perhaps igneous. I can remember feeling a sense of awe after that. There were not just play rocks, they were once red hot lava, googillions of years ago. They cooled down, they took on strange shapes, they had been there before even the oldest person I knew. They were incredible.
There was the big quadrangular playground around which the classrooms were built (actually, it isnt that big, we were just smaller then). It was a classic 'high noon at the playground' sort of location, very public and with few reliable exits, so it could be quite terrifying at times (like when you lost horribly at hopscotch after showing off and challenging everyone in the school). Perhaps a perfect setting for a Western featuring laconic nine year olds, their mongrel steeds and their molls.
It didnt matter much when it was all there, you didnt really think about your primary school that much; it became a piece of personal history to share with your lover (who was not a childhood friend): this is where I went to school; this is where X and I fought bitterly; this is where my dress flew up and all the boys saw my pink panties; this is where I vomited out of fear; this is where my bestest friend betrayed me.
It was a point where the road forked.
Last Sunday my sister and I stolled across to take these pictures. There was something interesting in it all. Interesting because it was all far away enough, the buildings were only a physical repository of memory, and the sepia of childhood has receded into the background (and into our deepest fears and most annoying interpersonal habits, perhaps). It was like watching a movie. No, actually, it was like watching TV. There is something emptying and hollow in looking at destroyed symbols of childhood: broken desks and chairs, torn and tattered posters and school projects, a grubby blue pencil box bent out of shape.
(Like I said, you've probably seen it on TV)
But lest I let myself descend further into mawkishness.
This is for my Vidyalayam friends. You know who you are.

, originally uploaded by SkEye Travel.

Where we spent our sunsets.
It was incredibly hot in the day and parents who would have liked to practice their t'ai chi here in the mornings could not bear the raw 6am sun. I had forgotten how hot it gets in this part of the country.

Summer Holiday

Morning, originally uploaded by SkEye Travel.

Its been a long time since I had a summer holiday.
Summer holidays were what you had between school terms. You spent time with family.My mother turns 60 in a few weeks and retires from the job she has loved and lived for over 35 years in a place she has made home since she was 17.
So celebrate all this, and coupled with my desperate need for some downtime, we all piled into the car, packed the scrabble board, my father's stash of fine wines and some mangoes my mother didnt want to leave behind. And off we went
Not too far however. My sister found this nice new little hotel between Madras and Pondicherry www.thedune.in that served us just fine on this trip. Eco friendly. Funky unique 'houses' each one designed by a different Indian or European artist/designer. No TV and a respectable list of DVDs. Hypotoxic food (and some regular toxic stuff as well). A serene pool. A quiet beach. Long-stay artists residences. Ayurvedic massage and yoga. A hotel that didnt just set itself up and destroy the local ecology, instead trained and employed some locals and supported the fishing communities in the region. An ecosystem of tsunami relief/re-employment that suited everyone's politics just right.
The only thing wrong with such idyllic holidays is that they are far too short. Before we knew it we were back in the car again.
My holiday hasnt ended however, I'm now happily ensconced in the very slow pace of a small town, moving between swimming pool, computer, stash of books and kitchen. Its nice and quiet and after a very long time its just the four of us living together again. The only strange thing is having my mother home in the day. Having two parents who work is the perfect set piece for all sorts of teenage shenanigans. Now, however, there is no desire to furtively raid the alcohol cabinet or whatever. Now one merely calls up one;s dad and asks him to bring home some more beers after work.

A taste of the past

, originally uploaded by SkEye Travel.

This used to be a favourite side thing to meals in childhood, every mouthful presenting different flavours and textures. Chewy slightly bitter green skin. Sinewy tarty mango. Gritty intense mustard. Chili. Surprising sugar. How you do it: you need to find a mango thats somewhere between rawness and ripeness: tart and sweet and firm. Dice and mix with pinches of salt and chili powder and set aside. Toast some mustard seeds and pound coarsely, still warm, with a teaspoon of sugar. Add to the diced mango. You can vary the taste a bit by popping mustard seeds in a teaspoon of hot oil (which is what I did here). Is a good accompaniment to any Indian meal. Roasted peanuts and fried curry leaves could be other possible add-ins.

I never thought I'd ever post anything about cricket

Its sometimes strange being an Indian who does not care about cricket. I suppose it helps that I am a woman. I sometimes think that one of the many many uses of sport is intra-gender bonding and communication particularly in vague, awkward relationships: whatever would sons-in-law and fathers-in-law talk about if not for sport? So I think in a nice distant intellectual tradition I enjoy watching people watch televised sports, or how they dedicate their lives to it. Personally, I prefer watching sports I've played, like basketball or volleyball.

We were heading into south Bombay last week when we spotted the Twenty20 victory bus ("vijay rath") infront of us. I thought it would be cool to have a picture of it, not for any love of cricket, but for entertainment/historical value. I remember that the T20 win happened in late September last year almost exactly when I was flying back from London after a year away at University. It was also the last day of Ganesh Chaturthi, the monsoon petering out, the boys in blue victorious after (I think) some ignominous defeats. I reached Bombay at 5am in the driving rain, passed the crazy mindboggling immersions at Powai Lake and reached home a little dazed. I slept briefly and then awoke to find that the only thing on TV (practically every channel) was the T20 win. The BIB had been picked up in this victory bus from the airport at 8am (thank god they hadnt arrived earlier, the security would have been....viscous.. and so too the crowds... and I never would have gotten out or home) and it took them roughly six hours to get to South Bombay, thronged as the roads were by millions of people pissing themselves in crazed excitement. Frankly this did nothing for me and I would have preferred the usual post-Ganesh Chaturthi reports of how the idols clog up the waterways, pollute the seas and how many people were maimed or injured in the course of frenzied religious partying. Most people I met or spoke to either wanted to babble stupidly (or post FB status updates about) about the cricket, or decry the media for creating unnecessary hoopla around cricket (or Bollywood; insert either/or depending on mood and general direction of ire).

Its now generally agreed that Bollywood and Cricket are the only two real religions, and possibly the only real sources of social mobility this country has to offer the marginalized and the misbegotten. The others are shams, (or a set of funny habits practised en masse and far too publicly), methods of divide and rule and divide again, leading to needless animosity, summoning our base-st instincts and resulting in horrific bloodshed. And so in that spirit, heres to the Boys in Blue I suppose....