tools to listen into...

I had bought iMic during the last visit to Australia. My PowerBook G4 does not come with an inbuilt microphone and for recording purposes I had to get this little gadget. Since then I have used it extensively for recordings, skype, etc. However, it was only yesterday that I optimized its full potential.

In 2001, from my first savings, I bought an Enbee music system. It consisted of a second hand amplifier (1977 model), a modest tape player, and brilliant speakers. The speakers were the most expensive of the lot. All three of these contraptions have their own lives, characters, and personalities. Since the very beginning, I just loved the fact that music wasn't a button away. The system is such that is requires constant engagement, to think about the wiring, the balance, the modulation. Also, because it was essentially a tape player (CD could be attached seperately), we (my flatmate and I) when we initially got the system and had no other social life would ponder over which tapes to play, in what order, what sides. We would have long discussions to and fro from work about which tape to pick out when and in what sequence. We sometimes even made long calls from our respective offices about the music we would play when we got back.

I am not sure it was since then or I had always been like that but I just love the old tapes. Don't get me wrong, I have a decent CD collection and a more than decent mp3 collection populated through years of begging, borrowing, and stealing. However, I still like to think about which music to play when. I like the whole process of going through tapes or CD's for that matter, reading the listings, the biographies, connecting with the memories that particular tape/cd evokes in me. It is for this reason, I will never buy a iPod or similar mass music storing and playing devieces. I can never listen to music casually, while on the plane, driving, reading, etc. I need to have the right seat, right book, right frame of mind, cigrattes on the right, ash tray in the flicking distance, a drink.

However. The point about iMic and Enbee (I haven't been able to find any relevant links for Enbee) is that yesterday I used my iMic to add stereo input to my computer. The brilliant thing is that through their software, Final Vinyl, I could record my old tapes in digital formats. These are the tapes/collection which are difficult to come by these days. If you get them, they are in the collection of thousands of mp3 all hurdled together.

It's nothing dramatic but I am just so kicked anyway for those small moments when I can sit with my enbee, plug in something, and breath new life into old songs!!

snippets

I had long, tensed conversation with my mother. She was trying to drill into my head that I need to comply to systems, be polite to people whom I detest with all my being, or worse still people who don't even exist for me. She was vehement about it almost as if she was on the edge. On asking why I should do all of these things, she could only muster a fake rhetoric of 'living in the society, living for others, doing all these things that when you need help, when you are old and dying these strangers can come up to you and help you'. I shouted back, rather impulsively, I don't owe any obligation to anyone, no one, I am going to lead my life to please me, to make myself happy. If I am not happy, how the hell is anyone else going to be happy around me.

I do believe in these things but later on thinking over the conversation, I realized, it wasn't as much about me that my mother was talking about. It was her. She is getting to that stage when old age, loneliness, desperation are real. When children do no hesitate to walk away unable to forgive you for the follies of their childhood. When partners cling to each other only because they have nowhere else to go. Worse still, they don't have the courage. The whole system of checks and balances which expects one to pay obligations, make appearances, be polite is to shatter anything vaguely resembling that courage to carry on without any appendages and without any support. It's not only my mother, I see people like that everyone around me. The situation just gets accentuated to the point of disgust in older people. I was like that for a while. I have been in relationships which suffocated me only because I dreaded being alone. Why is being alone so scary?

Why should one have to manage relations, people who mean nothing in the present so that in the future they might be of help? I am never going to go to these people anyway. Why are we required to wear skins and skins of pretensions only for a distant hope that when we are lonely and old they will provide a kind shoulder? This logic seems too hollow to me. I don't think I have been able to manage the most stable relationships but they have been courageous (I no longer use the word honesty, it is very easily contrived to suit ones own needs) to deal with the issues. I have been and so have been the others involved. I make a conscious decision, conscious effort to not base these relationships or sustain them so that they can yield some long term dividends for me when I am lonely and old.

For me, me and my relationships, my coordinates are going to be defined by the moment and not what lies beyond them.

the love within

These days I worry about the act of writing, I agonize over the form and the format, I want to learn more about writing, the art, I am no longer caught up in the self sown skins of never reaching out and living with the conviction that whatever of worth is there in me, is there. I don’t have to look for anything around, outside of me. A classic situation of inflated arrogance deflated confidence and minimal practice.

Whenever I read works, great or otherwise, with whom I can relate to, about whose authors and their lives I spend many hours contemplating about, I don’t give the author or their works a chance to live in me beyond that moment. What I mean is, it is easier for me to think that the author wrote the entire book, poem, etc in one sitting not allowing for moments of casual, mundane existence in between. I find it difficult to give the authors a chance at their lives. For me, when I am reading their works, that is all I have, that is all I think about, that is what I live for. I turn off to the entire world and to think that the same author spilled wine on carpet or tried to score with one of the hot chicks at a party is nothing else than repulsive for me. How can they do it? I give so much of myself and all they can go and do is lead a ‘normal’ life?

At least I used to think like that. I sometimes still do but I am beginning to relax and give the author credit beyond the book. In doing so, I have been able to understand the whole process of writing better. Writing is a creative act. It requires intensity, emotional courage, physical perseverance, and just simple consistency. There are writings, poems, prose, and ideas, essays, which can be thought of in the moment and written in that moment. However, with most of the writing, one needs to re-visit. I understand it now. Writing is also an activity, like any other creative practice, which needs patience. And more than that, the ability to go back to one’s work and tear it apart to mend the gaps. I did not have that faculty. If I wrote something, it would always be in an intense moment (if there wasn’t any, I would force the moment to its crisis), and I would never have the courage to go back to it. In doing so, I think I was exposing, by vehemently holding on it, my under-developed self-confidence. I could not believe that I could go and engage with my work, my writings, outside of the emotional peril I had to situate myself in to write. I did not have the confidence to write what I wanted to without being in an intensely emotionally cathartic situation. This sort of explains why I was not ready to give any other author that space as well.

These days I think about writing, I read what other authors have to say about writing, I hear people who have something to say about writing. I am not involving myself with these issues to learn the perfect format, perfect syntax, perfect tense to write the perfect book but there is an intense desire to understand the process of writing as it is stands for others. In reading, listening to these accounts, it brings about a more humane view of writing. I always used to think writing is something which should take you away from the world but now I am convinced that my vision was very narrow, writing should take you closer to the world, the world you live in, the world you imagine, the world you love.

Emerging from all these is the realization that it is not anti-creative to be calm, comfortable and relaxed. Before this year, I was unable to write if I was not pulling out my emotions from the depths of depression or melancholia. If I was comfortable and relaxed, I just wouldn’t be able to write. I felt empty and drained. I felt as I my entire existence was defined by the fluctuating modes of depression, agony, anxiety, melancholy, and loss. In doing so, I carefully cut down the borders of my own world. I could not see, feel the beauty within and that made it impossible for me to embrace it outside of me. In the three decades of my existence, I realize now, I have harbored only pain. I allowed only pain to reside in me. Love, I showed it the other way.

Now, I have embraced it.

I am allowing for the beauty in me to blossom, I am allowing myself to love with a conviction that I am safe, I am allowing myself to let the beauty around me undress me.

And in return, the myself in me is allowing me to write, think, live, without any prejudices and pretensions.

delhi by driving

I have formally initiated my fieldwork for my PhD. However, this is not a post about my fieldwork. It is about the processes, journeys and engagements from my first attempt at ethnographic research to the moment now where I am much better acquainted with the practice, theoretically, intellectually, and at the ground level of actually conducting research. It helps that I am a much more relaxed person as well. Age does have its benefits.

I have been in Delhi for long enough to know enough about it and feel lost in other cities and contexts outside of the comfort of the familiar. I came to Delhi from a small town where a visit to market implied that most of the people knew what you went shopping about. It had its charm, especially, when the gossip was about others. Personally, the Big Brother gaze made me nervous and irritable. I was just on the verge when literature is no longer about bed time stories but becomes a part of your life, defines your part of life, directs it. It was that stage when literature, poetries, commentaries gave the much needed solace from reality. I needed the intensity of passion, the spectacle of drama, the driving need to believe in something, anything. In short, I needed my space. The picturesque small town where I grew up did not give me that. It was around this time that after completing my school my family shifted to Delhi. One of the main reasons to do so was for me to undertake my higher studies, graduation. This itself was a major point of contention between my parents and me. The issue was what to study, what to specialize in, which subject will ensure I have a flawless career, substantial savings. Career, savings, bank balance, these things because I didn't have, didn't mean anything to me. They still don't. I am not suggesting that I don't care about money. I want to make enough money to never have to ask anyone for it. At that point, it didn't matter at all. My parents wanted me to pursue one of the science subjects. I, on the other hand, wanted to study either history or literature. After many discussions, my parents gave into History; studying literature, story books, as a graduate course was not acceptable. So, I set about settling in Delhi with a lot of histories to learn.

From the first sight of it, I loved Delhi. The anonymity, the vastness, the traffic; everything allowed you to loose yourself. I smoked my first cigarette in public without having to constantly looking over my shoulder or drowning myself in cheap perfume to hide the smell. I went on long bike rides with no so well known boys not dreading the relatives and not-so-good-friends. In the initial years of my association with Delhi, I was self-indulgent. I was exploring myself in the city. Not the city in myself or even the city in the city. At that time, I reckon, I had not even settled the city in myself. I was still exploring the corners and conversations. Every time I would go to a new area, a new connection with the city would be formed. At that time, I relied on public transportation to navigate my way across the city. So it were bus numbers carefully noted down on crumbled notes. Any secret rendezvous was designed around these connections; the bus timetables, the frequencies. In the initial years, I loved traveling in buses. The idea that hundreds of lives were bundled together in this steel, engine, fuel, and human concoction to approach different realities, different destinations, different loves without having to bother even the courteous glance was nothing less than liberating for me. A lot of my friends would plug in earphones while traveling on the bus. Not me. I wanted to hear the city conversations. I wanted to hear what the lovers were quarrelling about, whom the friends were gossiping about, where people were going, and the moments of exhilaration, the deepest fears and secret affairs. I guess without begin aware of it, I was indulging in the ethnographic voyeurism. Only that at that moment, I was the one who was researching myself. I wanted to know about my life through the million, different lives lived. I was slowly settling in. The city was slowly settling in me. Little did I know then that this was the love affair which would last a lifetime.

Once I got settled, I guess at some moment, I stopped being in so much in awe of the city. The surface was being scratched and I was getting a sneak peak into other politics, policies, and practices that make the city. With the anonymity came the dread and fear of being murdered, raped, or cornered. With the increasing traffic came the realization of the increased fuel prices and jams, the student life was not all about ha-ha-he-he it threw at my face, Marx and Hegel, Right and Left wing. I had to make my own choices, decisions. I was compelled to have an opinion. A lot of things, which I had taken, for granted, never had to engage with, were being carefully dissected. Class, caste, gender, and religion which if not a very important element of my everyday life but nevertheless omnipresent almost 'neutral' categories were now sites of theoretical, intellectual, and personal examination. A new prism and perspective, which was mine, in which I selected and rejected ideas and notion was forming. This was a very volatile period of my life. Everything I had taken for granted was being challenged by myself. I felt lost. I found myself feeling things, which I had never articulated earlier. It wasn't a metamorphosis of any sorts. I think I was just, finally, getting into my own skins. In my new skins, I found a new city in the city. This was the city were the connections between lives wasn't a romantic ambition but a reality. The corners were not secluded but were connected through many, many visible and invisible maps. One bang somewhere had a resonance elsewhere. However, my involvement with this city was as platonic as with the earlier city, which was settled in me now. These were also the days when I was experimenting with smokable stuff other than tobacco, lots of cheap alcohol, Salinger, burgess, Kerouac, Neruda. I was also on Prozac for a while, a fact, which I advertised, more than keeping it under wraps. Why should it be under wraps, anyway? So, evidently, reality was a bit blurred for me and so was the city in me, outside of me. I was living in a world where I did not bother to take the public transport anymore, I was much more at home wandering in the dark bushes and cold stones with strangers, where I wanted to cry out with Floyd instead of indulging in strange conversations, I was losing out on the city, in me, outside of me. I was living in insulated, isolated realities where the only thing mattered was my skewed emotions over others. I did gain something out of that phase in my life, I guess. Probably I indulged so much in myself during those three years that for the next few I was prepared to face the reality.

As of now, I seem to be the protagonist of this narrative. I am not. The city I have discovered in all these years. The city which I has settle in me and the city in which I have squatted.

My romantic, platonic association with the city came to an end with a sudden jolt. One day I had the security of a family, house, siblings, dogs, a future charted out. The next day I was living in boy's hostel. I was still studying. I had never worked before. I have never thought I ever would work. Even when I had thought of doing something, it went as far as heading a cult. So, in short, I had no idea with the real world, real city. Looking back now, I am glad that my relationship with the city, which now I am settled in and which is settled in me, was based on this jolt. At that moment, this incident of leaving the security of my parents home to fend for myself was the most significant thing that ever happened to me. However, I wasn't devastated. I felt liberated of moving beyond having to answer for everything, to be told, to confront, to cry. It was with this sense of liberation that I approached the city as well. Everything about it was enchanting for me. Now beyond my romantic and platonic prism, the city offered possibilities for someone like me who had no specialized knowledge, no skills, no substantial degree. In that initial period, the city epitomized the democratic spirit. I was excited. All the ideas of breaking the boundaries and creating one owns fluid zones seemed like a reality. But only till the time I started to look for a job and then for a place to stay. All kinds of prejudices and biases were thrown at my face. The fact that I could not give my parents reference as a social security to vouch for my character worked against me when I tried to get jobs. The fact that I was a single, young woman made a lot people not rent out their spaces to me. I represented the corrupting, moral influence of the day. I soon realized the territories in which I would feel safe. It was not only the matter of traveling alone at night or even at day time but the invisible security system which made me feel safe had been untimely terminated. I constantly felt alone and under threat. My careless romantic indulgence of trusting strangers was giving way to treating everyone with suspicion. I clung to my bag with no possessions a bit too tightly. I always tried to get the corner, window seats on the buses not so much because I wanted to look outside but because I didn't want anything to do with the insides of it. The overheard everyday conversations of family, friends, normal quarrels, regular lunches began to irritate me. I was beginning to get very agitated with the city. This was not the city, which I had allowed to grow in me, within me. It didn't embrace me with both arms; it didn't provide me with the corners where I could feel safe. Instead it constantly challenged everything I did. My being young, single, woman was used by many of the cities in the city. It was around this time that I first starting fantasizing about settling along the beach, walking on moon lit nights with flowers in my hair: a classic romantic get away situation. I knew I could not. I knew I would not. Though I wasn't settling very well in the city, the city had settled in me. There were still some auto rides, which made me feel light. There were still many bus drives, which didn't ask my name and didn't care where I went. There was a kindness, which would come to me from people, places at the most unwarranted hours and moments.

I would still find poetry in places. So I stayed and glad I am that I did.

Sometime in this phase, where my association with the city was based on caution and control, I started working in a research centre. A new media urban research centre. God only knows how I got that job. I had no idea about new media forget media at all, urban was a lived reality for me it wasn't a theoretical, intellectualized category for me. However, I got the job. I learnt a lot from working in this space. But still the reality of this space was far more distant than reality itself. The urban was there but it was a hyperbolic, displaced category. The new-media jargon had little with the everyday reality of what I saw. Maybe I didn't not see enough. Working in this space was like being on acid. It was a bubble suspended with no connections and contexts. Everything happened in its own context, when I wandered out, which I rarely did, I could not relate to it. People could not relate to me. Till date I don't know what was wrong, with me, with my reality, with this place. However, it was this place where I started engaging with spaces in the city within research agenda. It wasn't voyeuristic, romantic, highly personalized journeys but visits undertaken to understand something.

That was my first ‘ethnographic’ experience without even actually knowing what it entailed. At that time, I was working in a market place, which specializes in second hand hardware (computers) and pirated software. I was beginning to understand and marvel at the wonders of the digital technologies. I was fascinated by what bits of chips, bytes of codes could do. I sought and found poetry in it. I fell in love with these poets. So, Nehru Place, where these digital technologies had a canvas outside of the poetry and poets, an everyday reality to it completely enchanted me. The fact that this ‘ethnographic’ research wasn’t directed by specific research agendas and questions gave me the liberty and the freedom to explore many trends, trajectories. Not always the best approach but for a novice like me it was the almost the best self-taught ethnographic experience I could gather. As I progressed, the categories of field site, field visits, respondents, data collection, interviews, interpretation started gaining weight. I love and still loved the experience of Nehru Place. I still visit that space on a regular interval and every time I go, I see a new melody and hear a new story.

It was the experience of this space which instutionalized and internalized my voyeurism into a respected profession to follow through. However, it was not until I started working on an independent research project that I actually began to understand the nuances of ethnographic research. While conducting this research, which involved intense and intimate association with the everyday of people instead of technologies I had to learn to unlearn a lot of things. I was forced to investigate my own standing, background, prejudices, and perceptions. Through carefully following this trajectory of researching myself while conducting the research brought to fore front the politics of ethnographic research. I realized that as an ethnographer I need to pay particular heed to the methodology and practice of ethnography as it is in this very practice that the construction of categories is embedded.

With this understanding, I undertake yet another journey to explore yet another aspect of my city!

Property, representation, and serial killings

The connections are weak at the moment. They may seem like they will snap but please bear with me.

The last week of Indian media was dominated by the images of scurrying out skulls from a drain, a bearded man who had killed more than a few children and women, and a servant who took his job a bit too seriously and abducted, kidnapped, and killed on his employers orders. Yes, also, hordes of aggrieved parents, relatives, brothers, sisters, friends. But they were just the hordes: angry, stone pelting, demanding justice. The regular crowds of regular people.

Usually when I see these things, when I happen to be passing through a news channel towards clever comedy or tacky music, I get increasingly disturbed and most of the times I don't know what disturbs me in that moment. I think the constant onslaught of images of similar kind has led to a situation, which I like to call, sensory deprivation in me. The characteristics feature of this situation manifests in me through my inability to relate to these 500 images per frame thrown at me, not in the moment, not in retrospection. It just leaves a dull taste and that's about it and that also only lasts till the time I manage to find my comedy or my music.

In my present situation (of sensory deprivation), the only time I remembering actually looking at an image or beyond it was when one channel (and I am just assuming it was all the channels as well) were airing this news clip about a rescued young girl from the wraths of her employer. The employer couple, I think even their children (though I would like to spare them), would beat her up with sticks, chains, whatever they could lay their hands on, burn her with hot rod, etc. There she sat, the rescued girl, with scars so deeply etched on her that she didn't need to lift her little frock to show where they hit. Her eyes were splattered, I am not trying to be poetic, but there is no other word that I can use to describe what I saw of her. Her breathing was slowing down by the tears that were clogging her and the incessant questions of the reporters she had to answer. The reporter, who I am sure is a very considerate person in real life, was pushing down the huge mike (for better sound quality through the sobbing?) and repeatedly asking, 'so, did they beat you' (I don't understand why they have to ask questions as such, doesn't the fact that the news-piece is about the child being beaten and yes rescued through the efforts of the conscientious channel enough to establish that?), 'so, haan beta, yes, child, where did they beat you' (okay, I would still give this question some journalistic liberty) but the last question, 'did it hurt, my child' completely threw me off my saddle. Whose intelligence is one challenging, the reporter's, the viewer's or the child’s.

All of this questioning about the program, I am able to do at the moment but while the news clip was playing (and I could not even get my remote to do what it does, shift my attention), I just broke down. Not heavily, not sobbing but without my wanting to, the situation of sensory deprivation still gripping me, the tears kept coming. I have been beaten (thankfully by family member, how that makes it better, I don't know but still...) when I was young and not so young and I knew what exactly the child wanted. She didn't want to be questioned or even held but just some respect. Respect, darn' it. When you are that young and are beaten, the sense of helplessness grips you. You loose all groundings, if they were ever established, of love, trust, respect, honor. Only and the only thing that restores a bit of these lost moments is Respect.

Anyway, in regards to the present situation, I did not think much about it. I did not want to think much about it. I don't have children and do not fear whether they will suffer the same fate. My childhood, most of it, has been taken care of. But still, as I mentioned it earlier, it left a dull taste.

In reading two texts, E.M.Forester's My Wood in 75 readings and Tim Crane's The Mechanical Mind (sorry, the links to the books suck but will give an idea) (the first chapter, The puzzle of representation) I was struck by the following, a bit about the texts first:

Forester, after acquiring the first property he ever owned, A wood, is writing about how the ownership of the property makes him feel heavy, makes him want it, the property to be larger, and lastly, makes him want to do something about it, to extend the boundaries, to claim the territories over and over again. Crane is dealing with questions of philosophy, asking basically how the mind works? Can it be explained through the naturalistic, everything has its place theory, or through the higly mechanized, everything moves because of the motions it is made of or follows, mechanistic theory? In doing so, he raises significant questions about representation. Through trying to understand representations, Crane, aims to raise a few more questions about the working of the mind than offering solutions. How do we understand what an image, word, music represents? What allows for us to make immediate and effective connections between these and the ideaS?

What I drew from one strand of his theoretical inquisitions is that (and the point of connections to this long rambling), that representations of things, ideas, words, music, images (images as representations) are understood because they have a certain resemblance to the thing they are representing or are represented by. However, this resemblance is not enough (as a theoritical consideration and as everyday matter of articulation) to establish or reinforce the representation or the represented (Crane also suggested the same). In between resemblance and representation, there is an important link of interpretation, contextual interpretation. How I understand this (especially vis-à-vis the relations between the powerful and the not so powerful) is that representations are established, understood, and sustained through re-assembling resemblances to that 'thing' in different contexts (or even in one established contexts). These re-assembling and resemblances are carefully selected by the select few. And once these re-assembled resemblances are reinforced as representations they themselves begin to assume the convention of what that thing, word, image stands for.

So much for Forester and Crane.

In the present situation of the serial killer, it is interesting to note that he is placed against the hordes (the crowds) through the property associations and ownerships. The bearded man in questions, Mr. mohinder, was the owner of the rather lavish bunglow in the 'posh' colony of Noida, a suburban city to Delhi while all the victims were from the nearby 'urban village'. Owning this coveted property at the prime location is the only connection I can draw to his sense of confidence to dispose off the bodies in the drain right next to his house. Considering none of his neighbours ever complained about anything (there must have been an occassional shriek, the shovel moving, the children walking in and never walking out, which I am not ready to concede that none of the neighbours ever noticed) also has its roots in the largeness of the property Mr. Mohinder owned. Like Forester, property gave a sense of heaviness, largeness, and an authoritative right to do something about it (which Forester wasn't too happy with) to Mr. Mohinder and his neighbours. No knows about him, everyone claims they had no idea what he did, in short, his property, his lavish bunglow, was his fortess. I cannot help thinking whether the residents of the same colony, same area would have maintained the policy of diginified indifference and non-interference if a resident from the neighbouring 'urban village' would have attempted to do something of this sort. So, this is how Mr. Mohinder continued and continued with his sprees.

What about the hordes, the crowds? Why were their complaints not registered or followed? Obviously, this points out the pitfalls in the judicial and law systems. However, not going into that area, I would still like to reverse the situation and imagine if Mr. Mohinder was complaining about his missing son/daughter. Would the policemen still advise him to 'take care of their wards', 'make sure his daughters do not loiter around' or say, 'accept that your daughter was a prostitute only then we will register the complain?'. I think not. The story about the man, whose persistence apparently led to the developments on the case, who has nothing left in his village was made to admit (and sign, i think) statements saying that his daughter was a prostitute. They even played the recorded statement in his village. The policemen, for what I can think of only cheap thrills, were dutiful enough to carry the recorded tape to the man's village, arrange for the suitable technology to play it, but not investigate the matter where it was reported.

How does being a prostitute take away your legal rights?

And this is where, when people are denied the basic rights because some think they are of a certain kind, I think the convenient re-assembling of resemblances in regards to the people from 'slums', 'urban villages' as 'criminals', 'vagabonds', 'whores' is represented and has been re-presented over and and over again so much so that these now define the conventions.

Unfortunately, I don't have any solutions but only hope that homogenized, re-assembled resemblances, are not sought to represent reality, realities, on TV or otherwise.

Some links:
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1072356
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1014784.cms
http://premendra.sulekha.com/blog/post/2006/12/brain-research-serial-killers-noida-gurgaon-gutter.htm
(The traffic on this site is worth noticing if not an outright concern for worry)