Kalinga Narthanam

I am starting a new series in my blog to feature a selection of my recent artwork. The idea is to present the finished product along with some context through my thoughts, sources of inspiration, mistakes, etc. 

Kalinga Narthanam

Kalinga Narthanam is easily my favorite imagery from Hindu mythology. Just imagine a five-year old child dancing on the heads of a vast, demonic serpent on an overflowing Yamuna as dark rains lash all around. This scene strongly resonates with my very core. Perhaps as a result, I have tried to capture this image through my sketches on several occasions. Here is a hasty attempt from 2014 on a TODO list! 

Over the years I have discovered that drawing this scene helps me to get back into sketching after long layoffs. The powerful imagery moves me to grabbing my pencil. Below is my latest attempt at this scene. It was sketched on an iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil on the stock Notes app. 

Things I like about this image:

• The flowing motion of Krishna: I was trying to convey a sense of careless elegance by capturing a "mid-frame" moment. If I was a better artist I would have been able to make the image hazier without losing legibility. 
• The heads of the snake: I tried to give each head a distinct personality. The head being trampled by Krishna is the most arrogant one, a few nearby are staring menacingly at Krishna, undoubtedly the targets of his future steps; whereas there are some heads that seem reconciled with subordination -- one even appears pleased. 
• The flower ornaments: I think the flowers have a 3D effect going on which pleases me to no end. I can't quite remember how I managed this; subsequent efforts at duplication haven't been quite as successful. I think sketching over multiple times with pencils of different darkness settings is responsible. It gave me pause whether flower ornaments will appear so prominent in a torrential downpour, however the scene is brimming with theophany that I reasoned divine grace could explain the freshness of the flowers. 

Dhan Vapasi: "mo money no problems"

When I first heard the phrase "Dhan Vapasi" it seemed like a war-cry for the repatriation of funds, affectionately dubbed as black money, stashed by rich Indians in overseas bank accounts in the shady watering holes of the financial world such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. In contrast, Dhan Vapasi called for the repatriation of money – Indian money – from a much closer proximity: from India's governments. 

Dhan Vapasi is the brain child of serial tech-entrepreneur Rajesh Jain, one of the masterminds behind the BJP's election campaign during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. He is a man of big ideas – one of his other goals is to rewrite the Indian Constitution along of the lines of the American Constitution – and Dhan Vapasi is certainly a very big idea. 

Dhan Vapasi is centered around the idea of Public Wealth and the right of every Indian citizen to derive income from it. Public wealth is defined as everything not owned by private parties such as public lands, mineral deposits, forests, public sector undertakings, government guest houses, ambassadors with red sirens, etc. 

The argument for Dhan Vapasi rests on the following equation:

When public wealth is suitably and effectively utilized it can create sustainable income for its owners, the Indian public. Due to a combination of historical and political reasons, most of India's public wealth is legally owned and controlled by the Government of India and state governments. Starting from the Chanakya's Arthashastra the ruling classes have tried to usurp and control natural wealth, particularly land, in the name of public welfare. This process was accelerated by the British and hasn't slowed a beat since Independence in 1947. Dhan Vapasi conservatively estimates public wealth in India as Rs. 15 lakh crores (15 followed by 14 zeros!), or roughly Rs. 50 lakh per family. 

Governments (states and center) are sitting on this incredible stockpile of public wealth. And yet, instead of effectively utilizing this wealth to generate prosperity for all Indians, Dhan Vapasi claims that governments across all political stripes have done the opposite. They have willfully mismanaged this wealth to enrich their own pockets. Dhan Vapasi claims that such mismanagement and corruption is unavoidable given the improper incentives baked into our political system. To come to power politicians have to spend obscene sums of money and grease multitudes of palms. Once in power, they have a very limited timeframe to recoup this vast investment. This incentivizes public loot for personal enrichment. Public wealth is treated as a cash-cow and on those occasions publicly-run enterprises go belly-up thanks to incompetent administration, the government bails them out using more public money. A case in point is the recent Air India bail-out. There is no reason for the Indian government to run an airlines and yet it continues to prop up a shambolically-run organization. 

Convinced that governments cannot be trusted to effectively utilize public wealth for public welfare, Dhan Vapasi calls for the liquidation of most of India's public wealth. It argues for the immediate auctioning of public lands, mineral deposits, privatization of public undertakings, etc. and distributing the generated income to every Indian as an annual payment of Rs. 1 lakh per family. Dhan Vapasi asserts that this income will have transformational benefits to India, including eliminating extreme poverty, generating millions of jobs, reducing the avenues for public corruption, and rendering unnecessary most public assistance schemes.  

Dhan Vapasi's website includes a booklet and a deeply informative wiki on India's public wealth. The booklet is rambling, repetitive, long on moral justifications and short on implementation details. It is also self-contradictory in places. For instance, to the question of whether the people can be trusted to responsibly spend the income from Dhan Vapasi, the booklet retorts, "If the people are capable enough to assume the responsibility of choosing their political leaders — that’s democracy — why are they incapable of deciding what they should do with their own wealth?". Dhan Vapasi's invectives against the political system would suggest that the people are clearly incapable of selecting the right political leaders; wouldn't it follow that they cannot be trusted to spend their wealth responsibly? 

I see Dhan Vapasi are an interesting garb for a Limited Government manifesto. The movement calls for the complete disentanglement of most of the Government's powers, leaving behind just three – the  Army, domestic law & order, and the courts. A Dhan Vapasi Bill has been crafted and the organization appeals to politicians across the political spectrum to rally around this singular objective. Instead of organizing around abstract ideals such as Libertarianism or Classical Liberalism, Dhan Vapasi is a call to organize around an end-product – Rs. 50 lakh per family – and sees Limited Government as a natural fallout of this desirable end-goal. 

Though the scheme may seem too simplistic, its true power rests in its simplicity and potential 'to go viral'. Like the war against black money, Dhan Vapasi could become a powerful rallying cry in the public imagination. It is ripe for adoption by anti-establishment movements. Even if the idea of Dhan Vapasi is impractical at a pan-national level, it could be applied to every level of public governance  – panchayat, municipal, state, and federal. Could we devolve lands and resources owned ineffectively by city municipal boards? Could we offload government interests in at least a few PSUs? Are there more such low-hanging fruits for Dhan Vapasi? 

It is self-evident that the Indian state is too big and too powerful. The remedy cannot be a call to cut it down to the size of a post-card. The government has to do more than just manage the army, the police, and the courts. It has to protect the environment, regulate responsible business practices, promote welfare-schemes for the historically downtrodden, provide basic education and healthcare for the neediest, and more. It remains my hope that by offloading the government of things it need not do, it can better focus on the things it should do. 

Further reading:

• An excellent conversation between Amit Varma and Rajesh Jain on The Seen and the Unseen podcast. 
• The Dhan Vapasi booklet and wiki. 

A Reading Challenge ramble

Goodreads is not for everyone. The website isn't the most responsive, the reviews are mostly unorganized, and the iOS app can be clunky... and yet, I have stuck with it for five years now, despite not logging in for several months at a stretch. The reason is that Goodreads has become a place to chronicle my personal reading habits and preferences. On Goodreads I reflect upon my past readings and discover new things to read. My social interactions on the social network begin and end, for the most part, through additions to the 'Want to Read' and 'Currently Reading' shelves.

One aspect of Goodreads that has enriched my reading over the years is its annual Reading Challenge. The idea is simple: at the beginning of the year you set a personal goal of reading some number of books during that calendar year. The rest of the year, through a combination of personal drive and fear of public shame, you try to read enough to meet the goal. Nobody wants to be the person who aims to read 60 books in a year and yet stands at 3 books read by the beginning of December. 

Despite reading being a mostly private affair, a reading habit is often flaunted in very public ways. When I first signed up for the challenge in 2014, driven partly by this desire to flaunt, I set myself a target of reading 50 books – a ridiculous reach considering I was to join grad school midway through the year. Unsurprisingly I failed to hit my target, but I didn't fail too badly. I managed to read thirty five books that year – the most I have ever read in a calendar year. The quality of my reading was fairly high as well. From Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose to Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; from Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence to Hamid Kureishi's The Black Album, I was exposed to a wide breadth of ideas and writing styles that year. By the end of 2014, I was inspired to write this about my reading that year. 

2015 was a regression to the mean. I could read just seven books, albeit books of remarkable note such as Fahrenheit 451 and Donna Tartt's The Secret History. This was also the year I truly discovered Salman Rushdie, despite having read some of his works back in India. You see, to realize the magic of his words one must have experienced the life of a cultural transplant, lost between two cultures, forever in known places and yet never at home. Shame, his book on Pakistan, ranks in my all-time top five. To me, Rushdie and Arundhati Roy are in a league of their own. They are like glass-blowers with words, they make language weave and twist in mesmerizing ways that one can't fully understand but still recognize as beyond one's abilities to mimic. 

The poor showing in 2015 lowered my expectations for 2016. A book a month was all I asked of myself. The score at the end of the year was a very healthy 15. One book that stands out, in hindsight, from that year is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. I have always fancied melancholy in literature, especially when it is tied to a good plot and relatable characters. 2016 was also the year I was introduced to graphic novels, thanks to my friend Clint. 

If 2014 was my Steven Spielberg year – voluminous – then 2017 would be my Daniel Day Lewis year. I read half as many books, but each one was a hit out of the park. Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses will rank as one of the most involved reading experiences. The North Water was chilling and brutal. Zadie Smith's On Beauty was wise and cool. I was breezing through incredibly complex works and my writing improved, including my technical writing at work! At one point I was reading over two hours a day. 

Sadly 2018 was another regression. I was still spending time with the occasional gold nugget, such as Salman Rushdie's Two Years Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights, but the bulk of my reading during the year consisted of Tintin on my iPad. For most of the latter half of the year, I didn't touch a physical book. This continued into the early months of 2019. Eventually in March, I logged into Goodreads and saw Reading Challenge progress updates from many of my friends. I was very disappointed with myself and set myself the lowest bar yet. I challenged myself to read merely six books in the remaining nine months of the year. 

When you are coming back to reading after a long layover, it doesn't bode well to start with an award-winning literary work. My incipient attempts at reading The Narrow Road to the Deep North or the Moor's Last Sigh quickly failed. The books were too deep and the language was too convoluted. I needed an easier read that could keep me engaged. Around this time, I ran into my school friend Radhika who highly recommended The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh. She gifted me her own personal copy, rife with her underlinings. The gift became my motivation and I plowed my way through the book. It was a work of non-fiction that ruminated the lack of climate change as an actor in contemporary literature. While Ghosh's searing insights into the depredations of the western model of economic growth was enjoyable, the bits I loved the most were his anecdotal passages that bore resemblance to his works on fiction. Fiction will always remain my first love. I followed it up with Sing, Unburied, Sing. It was a weird book; a mishmash of the scars of racism in the deep south and the unquenched thirsts of spirits roaming in the afterlife. It was marvelous, dull, and terrifying in parts. Next came When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. As expected it was a tearjerker. Paul's life reaffirmed something I have long believed in – it is through the confluence of disparate ideas and interests that the greatest writing is born. Paul's deep interests in literature, philosophy, medicine, and morality was evident and inspiring. 

My rapid progress encouraged me to rise my target for the year to ten books. Let's see if I can achieve it. I am currently reading Shrilal Shukla's Raag Darbaari, and John Le Carre's The Honorable Schoolboy. I will be tweeting about my reading this year on Twitter chain. 

You can find my Reading Challenge scorecards here:

2014 Reading Challenge

2015 Reading Challenge

2016 Reading Challenge

2017 Reading Challenge

2018 Reading Challenge

2019 Reading Challenge

The girl across my table

Originally written in May 2013 but wasn’t published then for unknown reasons.

A few months back I needed a new set of passport photos for work. My office insisted on a particular photo-studio miles away from where I lived. So at 10 am on that Saturday morning, off I left donning a freshly laundered shirt and freshly washed hair whipped all the way back. An alien stared back at me from the mirror. But isn’t that the whole point of a passport photo?

It started raining as I hailed the auto. Not a thunder-storm but not a drizzle either. It was a quiet, steady rain, soothing when you are inside with a cup of tea, depressing when you are outside & trying to salvage your files. The air turned cold. My straight-jacketed arms were a tenuous shield against the flat fisted fury of the wind as my auto whipped past puddles of rain water.

After my lack of photogenicity was duly reaffirmed in a velvety room that reeked of falsehood and claustrophobia, I left the photo studio with an hour to burn before the photographs were due. The rain had slowed by then and I fancied a walk.

It was a nicer part of town. Despite the rain the roads were teeming with life. Restaurants were filled with happy people brunching with fruity cocktails. Exhausted shoppers lugging their bags and slurping colorful beverages. People shouting into cell-phones, couples in a scène d’amour under an umbrella, beggars huddling against the cold, a senior citizen with an irrepressible dog — urban India. I dropped a fiver to an old lady sitting under the metro line, hugging a cold pillar for imagined warmth.

My morning cereal long digested, my tummy grumbled for attention. The rains had picked up again and luckily I found a place that claimed to be inspired by the road-side dhabas of Amritsar. It was a good selling pitch on that inclement day. The insides didn’t resemble a lorry-joint; everything was sterile yellow with a yellow washing machine by the cashier. Probably a post-modern art thing I will never get. It was self-service and I joined the lengthy queue, full of wet umbrellas and dirty shoes. A few places ahead of me was a girl. Fully covered in a black shawl and huge sunglasses, she had very short hair and was as tall as me.

The service was excruciatingly slow, but eventually I faced the (distinctly non-Amritsari) cashier and ordered a vegetarian combo meal. Armed with a beeper I sought out an empty table, reluctant to intrude upon couples occupying tables meant for six — the blindness of love I suppose. I had to settle for an empty one by the window. Occasionally the rain would sweep inside, garnishing the food with acidic rain-water but at least it afforded a great view of the street below.

As I was aimlessly scrolling my Twitter feed, I saw the same girl sitting at the table across me. She had exchanged her shawl & sunglasses for a fat book. She was not uncommonly pretty, inured as we are to the constant bombardment of celebrities in every screen. But she was striking — a sense of surity, uncommon among people constantly thirsting for attention. She had a long, tapering nose; a thin lock of hair would occasionally escape her ear. She would draw it back only for it to break free again — waves crashing against the dike. She was out of this world! Such was her utter concentration in the book. I am no stranger to the time-warping powers of a good book, and as badly as I wanted her to look up and see me, I was loath to take her away from her state of enrapture.

A green sleeveless kurta and blue denims. A blue scarf was tied around her neck, a little bit of a pirate. Occasionally, she would glance at her watch, shiny black metal against burnished skin. Around her neck was a most unusual necklace, jagged jade (?) rocks strung together with gold nuggets in between. In that yellow hive pretending to be a dhaba, she was a carnival of colors.

Suddenly the siren on her table came to life, wailing for attention. Her spell broken, she was flustered, lost for a moment. I imagine the slightest tinge of color flooded into her face as she moved lazily to the service desk. A few minutes later, it was my beeper’s turn to blare — no doubt an authentic Dhaba tradition.

The food was mediocre. The rice was cold and straw-like. The parathas were tasteless, dripping with ghee. The rajma was at least hot but too salty. The potatoes were good, a little too dry. With mouthfuls, I surreptitiously looked up. She delicately balanced a spoon in one hand and the fat book in another. Occasionally she would scoop in a distracted mouthful.

I was fascinated by this scene. Every so often, I would grow conscious and hastily return to my food, but eventually my attention would go back to the girl and her book. The rains picked up as did the honking of scooters on the road. The sun slipped behind the inky clouds and a shroud of darkness fell upon the restaurant. Her lighting disrupted she looked up with annoyance. She glanced at me. I hurriedly looked down at my food, pretending it the most interesting food ever made . I furtively looked up to she her beckoning an employee to turn on the lights. Suddenly swivelled her face towards me and once again, I dived into my food. I did not look up again. I scooped up the last bit of rice and left the restaurant.

Do I wish I had made a move on her? Sure. Did I have the guts to do it? Nope. If she had approached me, would I have been able to string together a sentence or two? I hope so. At least I am left with a unique memory and a burning question, what book was she reading?

The Man in the middle seat

As soon as I sat down at my seat, I knew the man next to me had to die. Probably 6'4'' or 6'5'', he was a giant of a man, undoubtedly used to towering over the rest of us mortals all his life. 

I could hear the Viking blood coursing through veins that irrationally popped out of layers of old tattooed ink. Red serpents and black vines writhed passionately with one another in a bloodless conflict, coming closer at one moment and pulling back the next when the man would move his arms or flex his biceps. His white tee shirt, a little too tight for my comfort, declared in a bold font Make Beer, Not War, and yet despite its pacifist message it appeared to be a perennial state of Total Warfare with the layers of rippling muscles on his chest and back. If I sat back and edged to the side, I could feel his heat and it made me quiver a little. He was completely bald; despite the air-conditioning a thin layer of sweat was lodged on his scalp and made it shine and glisten. I had to focus intensely to curb the urge to stand up and kiss it clean. I pushed the pin harder into my thigh to push back these unclean thoughts, reciting my mantra over and over again. I am Pure. I am Pure. A small drop of blood appeared on my new khaki trousers. He was a Lion among men, belonging on tourney grounds battling for glory – not in the cramped middle seat of row 19 in Basic Economy. I am arrested by an image of him giving the winning rose to me. I am dressed in the finest red velvet gown and I can feel the jealousy of all the other girls on me. The jealousy brings me back to the present and I push harder on the pin to keep away the dirty thoughts. I am Pure. I am Pure. 

Around us was unfolding the packaged and rehearsed dance that is performed thousands of times every day all over the world. An intricate performance of the same dull people, the same crowded seating, the same stale air, the same duels between pudgy fingers and minuscule overhead air vents, the same stewardesses peddling tiny plastic cups of water and shoveling giant heaps of disgust, and the same captain's mumbled reassurances. One stewardess caught my eye, her beauty a gravitational pull that yanked my attention away. Her Asian heritage overflowed like a river past Monsoon and she carried herself like a prized fighter. She was helping a pitiful old man stow away his luggage. She lightly bent down and swung the box into the air, neatly placing it in an empty bin. At that moment the bag left the floor, a tiniest grunt escaped her prim self and rattled its way onto me. I was struck mute by it. I wanted to wash her feet and rest my tired head on them. Even if she spat on me, I wouldn't let go.  She walked over and asked me, "Would you like some water, sir?" I shake my head, sweat gently pouring down my upper lip. She too should die, she shouldn't need to suffer the impudence of my presence, but I know I cannot kill both at the same time. I would have to choose. 

To the man's right sat a pre-teen boy swinging his bony leg back-and-forth in the aisle. All his attention was reserved for the iPhone in his hands that chirped and beeped with the sound of a game. His eyes betrayed a tiredness reserved for the youngest. The kid was clearly the man's spawn. He was still young but I could see the same broad-shoulders, the same regal bearing, the same lean muscle that sinewed under his shirt. Like our flight, his hormones would soon lift off too, transporting him to that reserved club of the beautiful. I wanted to hate him as I hated his father, but not now, not yet. His father tried grabbing his iPhone which the kid resisted with great gusto. They soon began wrestling, throwing small jabs and shoves at each other in between peals of laugher. It was clearly an old game. The people around us seemed mildly alarmed at this unexpected violence, but soon cooed softly at this display of familial affections. Only I felt the bruises of every misplaced shove and jab, a slap of pleasure every time. 

The flight was in the air now. Meals had been provided and dispensed. Sleepy heads started nodding off around us. I couldn't risk sleep lest the dirty thoughts encircle me in my sleep as they so often do – there are no pins in sleep and no amount of flagellation when awake could wash off the sins of the asleep. The man and child began talking about their layover in Beijing for the next flight. Anticipation began growing in me. I had a layover in Beijing too, two hours would be more than enough for the deed itself the trick was in delaying the body's discovery until I was out of the scene. It would have to be the bathroom – I wasn't keen on repeating myself, but the wet blood in my pants would testify that these were desperate circumstances. Yes, it would have to be the bathroom. I had the syringes and the prescription vial of insulin. The act began unfolding calmly in my mind's eye. It was only during the planning that I didn't need to be vigilant with the pin. A crowded Saturday in the airport. Crowds swarming at every terminal. I will follow the man into the bathroom which too is buzzing with passengers. I will stand next to him resisting the urge to peek. I pee a little into my left hand. When he turns around, I too will turn and clumsily attempt to overtake him, only to stumble on him. The left hand smearing urine all over his arm while the right swiftly jabs the syringe into his hip. As he rushes to wash off the ignominy of another man's urine all over him, I apologize profusely and walk out. In ten minutes, the man collapses in his boarding area. I wish I could witness the collapse but I know not to ask too much of life. Unlike my younger days, I no longer deny the violence of my being but neither do I ask too much of it. Only when the act is complete can I let go of the pin – the pain is the only thing keeping me Pure. 

The planning calmed me a bit. Thankfully the beautiful stewardess too has retired to her hidden seat and I feel my discomfort waning. The man and his kid get up to visit the loo, I grab the opportunity to retrieve my backpack from the overhead bin. I probe inside for my travel-sized copy of The Invisible Man. My fingers land on the smooth surface of my compass – a gift from the Master Felipe. How wonderful is the compass? It claims to point to the North, but it really points to the Past. It is a scratched and handled hunk of metal, every cut a past journey. The dial claimed we were traveling West. That was odd. Were we being re-routed due to a storm? The skies didn't seem rough. I flung the compass back inside and sighted my book finally. I settled in under the blanket as the man returned. Focussing intensely on the book, I managed to read a few pages before drowsiness took over. I snuck my boarding pass into the book as a marker and placed it into the flight pocket. As sleep finally washed over me, through closing eyes one end of my boarding pass came into brief focus – the flight number printed in large black bettering that said MH370.