Gladly Beyond Any Distance

A few years ago, I found that some of my emails were going to another Anasuya, one who had a similar email address, but on hotmail, while mine was on yahoo. We ended up corresponding over the mistaken emails, and interestingly enough, found enough in common to be in touch through all these years… We narrowly missed meeting each other in person at a conference in Bangkok, but that didn’t stop us. In fact, we’re even connected on Facebook, which, as you all know, is now the only competent measure for any kind of social relationship whatsoever. I mean, I’m seriously thinking of disowning my parents because neither of them has an FB account; what legitimacy can someone have who isn’t updating their online status every two hours?

However, that familial crisis aside, an interesting article in today’s New York Times on Googlegängers was what brought on this post. And if you tell me you’ve never done any vanity googling for your name and checked out whose extraordinary life (or lives) you’re competing against for page views, you’re integrity-challenged. I, for one, can tell you that the Facebook public listing of Anasuya Sengupta ain’t me; I’m the paranoid about privacy kind (yeah yeah, I can’t do anything about this blog now, can I? It has a peculiar life of its own and it terrifies me). Go ahead, my vain friends, tell me your googlegänger stories; I’m waiting with baited (sic) breath.

I’m sure to get ragged by TR about my comment in my post below, saying ‘dissent and debate welcome, hatred unacceptable’. But he certainly knows I’m following a rich and illustrious tradition.

Tom Lehrer, in his introduction to National Brotherhood Week:

I’m sure we all agree that we ought to love one another and I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that.

So, in the continuing spirit of celebrating my feminist family - their shrieks of protest are but faintly heard - I wanted to come in, very late, on a matter of great joy for Ashwin. He was on the engineering team for ColdFusion 8, the Adobe server, which won the Jolt Awards 2008 (he assures me that these are the tech Oscars, only much more fun). Damon Cooper, Director of Engineering, has a blog post that lists everyone on the team - which Ashwin said was the best he had ever worked with. One of my fondest memories of the team is when we all went to watch Casino Royale together; it was quite a thrill to be sitting with a gang of Adobe while James Bond’s sidekick talked of photoshopping. sigh. These little pleasures of being a geek’s wife get to me.

And the funniest YouTube video yet is of Borat (aka Adam Lehman) extolling the virtues of ColdFusion. Ashwin and I marked the news of the Jolt Awards - sadly far away from the team - by laughing hysterically at the video. It’s a sobering thought, however, that I actually understood the techie references. These little pleasures of being a geek’s wife *really* get to me!

So Black Mamba tagged me the other day:

Post 5 links to 5 of your previously written posts. The posts have to relate to the 5 key words given (family, friend, yourself, your love, anything you like). Tag 5 other friends to do this meme. Try to tag at least 2 new acquaintances (if not, your current blog buddies will do) so that you get to know them each a little bit better.

I was determined to do this, not only because I like Black Mamba (and I do), but because I had to prove Tabula Rasa wrong; he said BM wouldn’t get a cheep out of me (this childish tit-a-tat has, in fact, gone on since we were about ten. I love it.).

Result: near failure. Not because of my lack of output - though it certainly could be a lot more consistent than it is now - but because I rarely seem to write about anything other than politics and the big bad world outside. Of course, there’s a lot of me in there - the personal is political and vice-versa - but not in ways that are necessarily familiar or familial. sigh. Looking back, I think it was because I was determined, when I started out, not to make this a blog of the kind that led the blog-o-boom: the vicarious exploration of other people’s private lives and lesions. Frankly, I found that sort of blogging both terrifying and self-indulgent. I also felt I had nothing to offer of value online, that could remotely interest a set of unknown readers. Ashwin persuaded me otherwise; a lot of his argument had to do with the description of the blogging community he comes from: the techies. Clearly there was a space for blogging about one’s interests, one’s passions, rather than about oneself.

I realise now that I have - somewhere along the way - gone to the other extreme of the pendulum and am dangling hopelessly from an oblique position of self-denial. I find that many of the blogsters I read, write about themselves and theirs with humour and insight. I kid you not: I *like* reading them! If I don’t see these blogs as self-indulgent, is there possibly space for me to sneak back in a bit of me and mine into this blog? Black Mamba, you didn’t think you’d lead to an orgy of reflexivity now, did ya??

With this long preamble, here’s my meagre offering for the tag.

Family: A bit of a stretch, but to my extended family in Raichur. Also a cheeky aside to my pun-tashtic family (not really a post at all, but wothehell, I love xkcd).

Friend: about a friend in Gujarat, and her struggles with fundamentalisms.

Yourself: a post about ‘being an action hero‘. Also my previous stab at being tagged.

Your love: music and poetry. Unsurprisingly, a post about Gangubai Hangal that conveys both my awe-struck admiration and her comments on caste. And a tribute to Kaifi Azmi.

Anything you like: a whimsical post on Durga Puja and JK Rowling. And a diatribe against the news in India today.

…and I tag those I haven’t tagged before: Anindita (in the spirit of disclosure and familial-ity, my gorgeous sis-in-law who normally tags _me_), Mangs, Lalit and (relatively new) blog buddies: Pranav and Suzanna (whose blog I promised some time ago I would explore, and this is a great way to begin!).

Dumbledore is gay.

Hey, so I’m back from a really interesting Multi-Generational Feminist Dialogue, held by CWGL, CREA and Youth Coalition at Rutgers University. Followed by a hysterical performance of Fat, Feminist and Free by Pramada Menon (of CREA) in Noo Yaark.

I certainly will blog about the dialogue over the next few days, but in the meantime, I found that Anindita had ‘awarded’ me with the ‘rockin girl blogger’ title… hmm… what it means to be appreciated by your peers (especially your gorgeous sis-in-law). sniff. :)

So I am proudly - and puckishly - passing it on to:

Bint Battuta (who writes a fascinating blog based in Bahrain, but she’s originally from Bengaluru)

Black Mamba (who’s already had things to say about pink, and this will clearly add to her collection)

DYSfunctional Wisdom (my crazy cousin Divya)

Kauntext {}  (a complex look into identity politics in Gujarat and what that means for Raahi herself; again another Bangalorean friend) and

Refraction (Mangs; co-founder of Blank Noise [update: lowly coordinator, says she!] always with a unique perspective on liff, the universe and everything)

This photograph is a week old, but I can’t get it out of my head. Torrential rain, and Bangaloreans have to find innovative ways of staying afloat. sigh.

Btw, this is a photograph of Hosur Road, taken by S Eashwar, Deccan Herald, 15 September 2007.

From xkcd, once more…

Well, we did it. Unbelievably, amazingly so. We moved. Right now, I’m sitting in our ‘cozy’ (Bay area euphemism for tiny) apartment somewhere in Bezerkly, Caaalifornia. We moved from the city that was home for so many years, home both real and imagined, home both bliss and bane. Bengaluru.

We moved for so many reasons, all practical, well-thought out, but it doesn’t help the goodbyes. Bangalore was getting really rough on my asthma (wait, the increasing pollution was actually one of the *causes* for my asthma), and the craziness of the chaos, the traffic, the change in lifestyles, in attitudes, in the Bangalore spirit, was moving beyond we-can-manage-this-because-we-love-the-city to we-might-love-it-but-we-can’t-cope-anymore. Even our time with the Koramangala Initiative (a citizen’s forum in Koramangala) made us feel that without sustained political will, well-intentioned citizens’ efforts can feel frustrating rather than empowering.

Also, it’s been ten years of working for both Ashwin and me, and we felt the need to reflect on those ten years, and to challenge ourselves in different ways for the next ten. So Ashwin chose to go back to university (’school’ as they call it here in the usofa), and I chose to finish that darn, never-ending doctoral thesis of mine.

All good reasons. Still hard to say goodbye. So I’m going to resort to what I know to be true: misquoting Bob Dylan always works. Goodbye’s too sad a word, babe, so I’ll just say fare thee well.

Besides, as the Governor of our newly inhabited state (Arnold Shivajinagar) is fond of saying, I Will Be Back. And he’s just following namma Bharatiya samskruti, where you never say ‘I’m leaving’, you always wave tata and say, ‘Bartheevi’, ‘Aashbo’, ‘Varen’, ‘Aathe hai’. We’ll be back. Bartheevi, Bengaluru.