Tujuh. The word for seven is Bahasa Indonesia. 7 is my favorite number. Simply because my birth date is 25 and 2+5 =7. Lame. I know. But well.
I realise that I mostly speak about very personal stuff on this blog. Very rarely will I comment on politics or world affairs or the state of our planet or humanity in general. I do not know why that is, maybe because I do not want to put those opinions out there or that they are usually so macabre in general there's no positivity I can by writing about it and also i write about the things I mostly do not speak about it, so it's an outlet to express what I feel about some of the more beautiful topics surrounding us. I get ample and more opportunities to speak about the state of the world or the planet with friends and family. And those discussion often leaves me enraged. Like when someone talks about the current prime minister of India (Narendra Modi) or the violent Hindutva that is on the rise in India or many long wars that are happening as I type these words and yet do not seem to elicit a response from most of us or how Delhi is soon going to be very unliveable because of the pollution or how humans murder many of Indonesia's orangutans every year when they burn down forests to plan Palm trees for palm oil, which is found in almost every product we use in our daily modern lives or how the lady who won the Nobel price for peace, Aung San Suu Kyi, was eventually defeated by the worst violence that happened under her leadership. These are all important topics, and there's many great people who write about them - I maybe will too one day. For now, I write about as mundane a topic as how my twenties made me who i am.
What i really want to write about today is friendship and how my perception of who a friend is has changed over the years, but that requires a huge pot of coffee or chai and three hours. It's 11 pm here, I don't want to do a half-assed job at that topic, so I won't write about Friendship today. I literally just stopped and thought for 5 mins, because it's 11:05pm now and somehow my thoughts kept coming back to India. Which too is a large topic, so maybe I will write a bit about India today.
I know if one were to read my posts where I bash India and Indians a lot, they'd think that i have no sense of pride or love for my country and my country-men. I think the opposite is true to be frank. Because I have so much love for the country and i am thankful to be India (except when I want to be Italian), I take liberties with what I am saying about India. Don't they say, you are harshest with the people you love the most, maybe I feel that way towards India. I expect so much from the country and the people that when they sell themselves short (like by electing the BJP into power), I have no option but to distance myself from them. And my top complaint about Indian and Indians is the way we treat our woman. That on July 7, 2018, I am still having to talk about the safety of the girl child or women in one of the world's largest and fastest growing democracies, i should hide my head in shame as a citizen of this country. That really is the part that I hate most about India. Because it snatches away from me the freedom to live life fully. I have to think twice before I wear what I wear because I need to careful of who I am going out with, where I am going to, what time of the day it is etc. The immense liberation I felt when I moved to Singapore was just absolutely unparalleled. I could suddenly be wearing only a yoga bra and a think cover up and tight yoga pants and be completely ok to step out. This would never happen in India. Ever. The only place I have felt unsafe in Singapore is in the company of many other Indians in Little India - and even then i knew I was perfectly safe because no one would dare to do anything. It literally just blew my mind. When I share this with folks back home, they get defensive and say "oh but chewing gum is a crime there, so yea" - and I stare at them and shake my head to un-hear what I just heard. What a lame comeback.
I would usually scoff at NRIs who couldn't adjust to life in India after having lived abroad for a few years. I always wondered what the big deal was - in spite of spending 20-25 years of their lives in India - every time they came back they suddenly couldn't stand the heat or dust or pointed at cows on the road and laughed. Now, thankfully I didn't become them, but I became a version of them. I could only find faults with India - i spoke about the larger women's issues, the corruption, the utter lack for environmental degradation, the general narrow-minded attitude of people etc. Now that I had a way out, I never wanted to go back to that country. Even my visits home to meet mom and dad were best if kept to 2 weeks - which also was too much at times. I would vow never to go back to the country and I have many a time said "I hate India". A close friend of mine from the company moved from Hyderabad to Singapore and over chai one day we were discussing something about India and criticizing the government's move and I said out aloud " I hate India, I never want to go back ever". I was later told that this friend of mine was very shocked at my words and wondered how anyone can say such things about their country, least of all one as beautiful as India.
Before I let Singapore, in March I had chai with him and we got talking about the country. And he told me he was shocked that I had said those words. To which I told him everything about the country that irks me. Now he is from Kolkata, and he described to me how the only place he would ever feel at home was Kolkata. And there irrespective of where he is and in what situation, his heart yearns for that city and he knew with complete certainty that he would eventually go back one day and settle there. Now, for those of you who don't know much about Kolkata, need to know that there is nothing to do in the city. This was told to me by other friends who also grew up there - everyone, all the young people that is, leaves to find a living elsewhere in the country or in the world. Kolkata is also one of those places that is stuck in time. When you go there, you go back to the 1980s if not further back. I frankly fell in love with the city when I was there, it just seemed my kind of pace and the food is just spectacular. But anyhow, most people are not me. And most people move out of Kolkata in search of jobs. So for this friend of mine to say - I will eventually go back to settle in Kolkata, was quite something. He then went on to describe how the minute his flight lands at Kolkata he feels at peace and the next morning he wakes up and post breakfast changes into his kurta pajama and rushes to the "club". This club is not a night club or a club you go to eat and drink, these are more community centers, where the young and old gather and meet each other and share news and play a sport or discuss politics, basically chill. And the love with which he spoke about this club and the light in his eyes when he spoke about the life there was just something I have never experienced in India.
I attribute this to my nomadic childhood, I do not have a sense of home. Or a sense of one home. I have many homes, and as cliched as it sounds, my most permanent home is me myself. But sometimes, even that is not enough, like Singapore for me - I was completely content with myself, but something about the city made me feel like I didn't belong there. When I started actually considering leaving my job, I realised I will need to go back to India if I wanted to give up my work pass in Singapore. Which, I kid you not, has left me sleepless on certain nights. The sheet inability to understand or accept that truth kept me awake. And then I went away for a 3 week trip to India for weddings and work as well. In a span of ten days, i attended three weddings each 2 days long. the first one was in Chandigarh, the second in Ludhiana - both of these were in Punjab and the third in Udaipur, in Rajasthan. And in between attending these weddings I spent 4 days in Goa and 4 days in Delhi. It was maybe the longest i had spent in India after 6 years. And it was magical. I flew to Delhi from Singapore and then took a train to Chandigarh. I love train journeys, it reminds me fo my childhood, it also has the best snacks and chai. I then took another train from Chandigarh to Ludhiana and then drove back with friends to Delhi - which was so so gorgeous as well. If you haven't been to a wedding in Punjab you haven't experienced pure madness. The energy, the people, the food, the music, the clothes, the flowers, the colours, the love, the laughter, the tears. It is the stuff Bollywood films are made of. Except it's real life! This was in the month of November 2017 and I felt alive. I needed the country to energise me and it did. Maybe i relived in some ways, my childhood, of shuffling between states, meeting many many people who welcomed you as their own and the food and the many cups of chai. Then Goa happened, I had never been to goa before that and two friends of mine from Delhi (the ones I attended the wedding in Ludhiana with) convinced me to go on a short holiday with them, which was rejuvenating as well. We went from Punjabi madness to the serenity of Goa and the ocean. And then after a brief stay in Delhi for work, I was off to a pretty kick-ass luxury wedding in Udaipur and the beauty of that city just filled me with colour. The wedding was spectacular of course, but Udaipur completed what the trip to India had started for me. It's almost like landing in Delhi wiped me clean, the weddings in Punjab started redrawing my being and Udaipur filled it with colour. I went back to Singapore knowing exactly what I needed to do to be happy again.
I also fell in love with India again. When I share this with friends, they say attending weddings are fun nevertheless so it's not surprising that I had a good time, but I know i fell in love with the country again - which is maybe why in March 2018, when my friend spoke to me about Kolkata I could feel his joy and see that in his eyes. The old me would have most probably felt pity for him and not appreciated the depth of his connection with his roots. In spite of having travelled so much within the country, I still think I need to do more of it as an adult - even maybe re-visit the places I have lived in to see them in a new perspective. India is many countries in one, and now that I am beginning to journey into the cuisines of the country, I am beginning to see why it's special. This is not to say I do not still hate the aspects I did, but it just means that I do not only see the black and the white. I see India in black, white, grey and all shades of the rainbow.My twenties took me a full circle from being indifferent to being in India to moving out and hating the country and the idea of ever going back to recognising the aspect of it and beginning to fall in love. Maybe again or maybe for the first time.
I was watching a movie on Kashmir and saw how beautifully the cinematographer had captured the Dal Lake and the mountains and the cloud floating so close to chimney tops, the people of Kashmir clad in their woolens and phirens, the deliciousness wazwan and the ever-flowing cups of Kahwa. And in spite of all the gory things the movie showed and spoke about, I saw the sheer beauty of the people and of the land. And for such a pure land to now be in the state it is in, is what heartbreak looks like. To go from beauty and a space of energy and love thriving to being bereft of all that and more. I started with saying I don't write about politics and ended with a statement on Kashmir. Sigh. Here is a quote about Kashmir which says "if there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this..."
agar firdaus bar roo-e-zameen ast
hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast
~ amir khusrau
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