If you are poet, want to be a poet, or are not sure if you’re either but love poetry anyway and will be in Chennai anytime between August 18 and 24 2008, I want to hear from you. A friend and I are co-curating a major exhibit and reading series in conjunction with Madras Week, celebrating the official birth of the city 369 years ago.
Write to me at sharanya(dot)manivannan(at)gmail(dot)com. Introduce yourself and send me two poems, if you can. Or just write to me. We’ll take it from there.
A dear friend of mine resigned from her job today to be with her toddler – and see where life takes her next.
This is no small step for my freespirited friend, someone widely acknowledged as the blithely charming PR queen of her country, someone who has chased eclipses in Iran, honeymooned in Iceland and worn a dress of orange and blue to her wedding.
“I will honour my promise to you,” she said. “But I will be a humble stay-at-home mum from now on.” She had told me some time before that she was considering taking up an artform, an idea I had applauded. The truth is, other than her beautiful house décor and uncanny ability to pick the perfect present for anyone, I have no idea what her creative talents might be. But what I do know, and what I told her, is this: if she does art, she is an artist. No gallery, committee or critic needs to sanction her – or anyone – as such.
I wanted to be an author since I was seven years old. By my late teens, thanks to a series of serendipities catalyzing around my discovery of the magic of spoken word, I already had some semblance of a cult following. But I kept dreaming of having a book – a book would be evidence. A book would make my writing real.
I had the good sense, however, to not jump at the first fishes that bit. I rejected at least two offers to publish a collection because where they came from didn’t sit well with me: a print-on-demand run by a communist with a fetish for hijab-ed women in high heels, and a representative of a multinational that packages spirituality with pyramid schemes.
When I finally found the combination of people and promises that suited me best, I thought the rest would be quick and easy. Little did I know I had more to learn: three months ago, the funding for the book was abruptly withdrawn.
There was the brief, requisite shock at this bad fortune, but what alarmed me most was my surprising ambivalence. The ground had given away not because I’d lost my long-cherished dream, but because I was forced to acknowledge that it was no longer my dream. Other people wanted to see this book much more than I did – I was more infatuated with the process than the project. “You wanted to be a writer, right?” I asked myself. “Well, you already are. Book or no book.”
But this story doesn’t end with an excuse. When I finally, wholeheartedly, accepted that my book wasn’t going to happen (at least, not the way I wanted it to), the miraculous happened: a new investor showed up. Just like that. I hadn’t looked. I had asked only in the silence of my own heart. Most of all, I hadn’t expected.
And this is what I think holds me in good stead as I prepare to leave familiar waters. Whatever happens to this book, I am what I am. What I wanted in the first place was not fame or wealth. It was to write. I will do just that, and trust that all else will follow. I am humbled by this journey enough to see that I do not control it at all.
In Om Shanti Om, Shah Rukh Khan says that when you want something enough, the whole universe conspires to give it to you. What I’ve found to be truer still is that if you are something enough, if you own and inhabit that skin in a way that doesn’t fixate on its outcome, the universe aligns itself in equally serendipitous ways.
An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.
I’ve always liked Batman. Maybe that says something about me.
I have a friend who has a name so supremely cool that I’m concerned it cannot even be mentioned in this column without incurring royalties. It is Chandrachoodan, which despite meaning something as poetically wimpy as “the one with the moon matted into his hair” sounds like “the one who will have you eviscerated if you take his parking space”. I unfortunately, am a Sharanya. The prettiest name in South India – as all of about 20 million sets of parents seem to have realized, including mine.
However, as only people with access to my legal documents and hardcore stalkers may know, it’s not my real name, in a technical sense. My real first name, my spiffy business-like alter-ego who collects cheques, signs debit card bills and occasionally gets interrogated at immigration, is one that really does live up to my (entirely fictional, my also-fictional lawyer insists I add) reputation of eating men for breakfast. But what follows that secret sobriquet takes the cake: an alias sign. Also known as the @ in an email address. I bamboozle you not. I have a glyph in my legal name.
There are even more interesting reasons to be grateful for my monikers. I got to thinking about this topic because of the excitement over what the new Brangelina twins have been christened: the perfectly sensible names of Knox and Vivienne. Is normal the only remaining fetish in celebrity baby-naming? Not being called Apple or Audio Science might be the last taboo, a curse guaranteed to make you really unpopular in Hollywood playgrounds, and your parents total revolutionaries.
This, therefore, would make my parents incredibly ahead of their time and cool. Which doesn’t exactly compute with data already at available to me, but still.
The great disadvantage of a common name that can be pronounced two ways, however, is that mine inevitably gets pronounced in the way that I don’t like. Without the H. Ironically, one of the names I hate most contains only letter less than my own.
But there’s one specific advantage to so unexceptional an epithet: there’s already a planet that shares it, and I’m not even very famous yet! Minor asteroid 17092 Sharanya was named for an upcoming scientist from Coimbatore. Do you know who else has one of those named for them? Andy Warhol. That makes at least two things that put me in his league: incurable kitschiness and planet co-baptism.
If that doesn’t make me cosmically cool, I don’t know what will.
I could accessorize the planet with a star bought off the Internet, but that’s not extraordinary anymore. And a perfume or clothing range is just too boringly bourgeois, so the unimaginative can keep those options. I’d rather have the quirky stuff.
So among my dreams are to have two seemingly paradoxical things named after me: a cocktail and a hurricane. The second will be an act of god and the first will be simply divine.
In some folklore, such as in the story of Manawee and his twin brides (as retold by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With The Wolves), knowing the name of something indicates power over it. The truth is this: I considered reverting to my legal name even as recently as last year. And then things beyond my control pushed this name, the name you know me by, into a public sphere. There was little I could do but take possession.
Now I know both my names. And I am powerful in both. To the world at large, I have a common, frequently-mispronounced, everyone-has-a-relative-who’s-a… name. But I plan on owning it like none of the others ever have.
An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.
Mamihlapinatapai
Yahgun (Tierra del Fuego): a look shared by two people, each of whom wish the other would initiate that which they both desire, but which neither one wants to concede.
The saddest word in the world
has a piñata nestled
within it. You will never
know the richness of
your own heart until
you have held it high
above the totem
of your body and
blessed its
rupture.
From the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego.
Mamihlapinatapai
a look shared by two people, each of whom wish the other would initiate something that they both desire, but which neither one wants to concede.
(My phrasing. Originally shared by Anand).
Now I’m going to try to write a poem.
I love this song. Thought of it today. Lyrics here.
In preparation for the Olympics this year, the government of China has released a tourist-friendly 170-page book recommending new English names for some 2,000 delicacies – all of which till now go by some baffling monikers. What a pity this menu makeover is – it would be such fun to hang out in China and order, among other things, “chicken with no sexual life”, “husband and wife’s lung slice” and “fat man with straw up nose”.
Food and cheap thrills – what a deadly combo. The only reason I’ve ever asked for a Screaming Orgasm (that’s a drink, by the way) at snooty restaurants is because I love the expression on most waiters’ faces when I tell them what I want to have.
So now that the chicken who can’t score becomes the much less colourful “steamed pullet”, and “Chinese buttermilk” is all that’s left of the chubster snorting his drink, I think it’s time to come up with a few good replacements. What’s world cuisine without tact, political correctness, prudery and the taste-buds of the tame getting lost in translation?
First, let’s take the idli. Ah, the idli! Plump, perfect, pillowy and so very native – no? According to the 7th century writings of Xuang Zang, vessels for steaming came to India via the cooks who accompanied the Hindu kings of Indonesia back here. The idli, therefore, was born of the marriage between Java and the South. Ergo, we have the Chubby Marriage Pillow.
Chubby Marriage Pillows go best with sambar, which is made from toovar dal, also known as pigeon pea. I say we rechristen it Pigeon Pea Broth. As a committed carnivore who rolls many an eye at the prissiness of too many vegetarians I come across, I think the confusion can only mean more for me. Great! Pile on the ghee while you’re at it (also known as Distilled Cow Blood – don’t you good veggos know where dairy products come from?).
Before we move on the meaty stuff, let’s linger a moment on one more chaste item: the ubiquitous khichdi. There’s a story about the king Shivaji, who wandered lost and hungry in the forest one day. Coming upon the hut of an old woman, he asks to be fed, and she gives him some khichdi fresh off the fire. When he burns his fingers attacking the hot, hot dish, the old woman chides him for being like “that impatient king Shivaji”. Not recognizing him, she instructs him to approach the thin outer layers of the khichdi first, which are easier to handle. In learning how to eat this simple meal was how Shivaji was supposed to have learnt a valuable military strategy.
In the centuries since, the good king’s name has been taken in vain, in gain, and in disdain many times over. I don’t have to tell you where it most recently appeared. All I’m saying is, it’s not for nothing that khichdi will henceforth be called “Hot Hot Rajnikanth”.
All this food smut has made me really hungry, so before I absolutely have to go devour something, I’ll make one final recommendation. Like any funky Indian goddess, I’m usually very well-satiated by a good goat sacrifice. And to keep this new menu locally loyal, one of my favourite desi dishes is mutton rogan josh. Let’s be literal, for a change. Mutton is mutton, rogan also means mutton, and josh means mojo. The sum total of which we can take to mean Twin Mutton Mojo. Ooh. Two sets of horny things are always better than one. Bon appetit!
An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.
I had requested The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to review — and am so glad I didn’t get it, because I couldn’t possibly have savoured it properly if I had. The one and only thing I didn’t love about the book was that it was about half the length it should have been; it was that good. And now we’ll have to wait like a decade before the next. Sigh. Can someone please inject Junot Diaz with a serum that makes him uncontrollably prolific (look at me talking like Oscar)?
Please don’t bother reading this if you are irritated by mad self-indulgence. Actually, you shouldn’t be at this blog at all in that case, so goodbye!
When I was 19, someone I was furious at played me Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man”, and said, “This song is for you.” That was how it began, this blessed affair with the man who was born like that, he had no choice, he was the man who was born with the gift of that golden voice.
Years later, all I remember of that first listen is of being in a room lit in yellow, suddenly aware of something profound lighting up within myself. And then I heard the Cohen Live version of “Hallelujah”. The rest — the poems, the other songs — I didn’t need anyone to introduce to me. I was already initiated. I would find them myself.
I was supposed to have a book published by the end of this month. Like Cohen, I think now, it would have been my first book, released when I was 22.
Some of you know that a crisis that I described as one to do with funding affected this intention. Well, it was funding. But it hit deeper, too. To have the carpet pulled from beneath my feet by a person who seemed to have more vision than I did hit my own vision, hard. A multitude of questions emerged, everything from my ambivalence about the project to its fate. Questions difficult to answer, questions I tried to mollify with statements like “I am just more interested in the process than the project, I suppose.”
I spent some weeks wandering in an existential angst I had never, ever known — a lack of passion. I’m still there, still finding my way out as I try to ascertain how I found my way in in the first place. I began to wonder if I even deserve a book (deserve with all the dramatics). I watched Schnabel’s Basquiat and Before Night Falls back to back, films about extraordinary men, their eternal art, and their short lives. The second one devastated me so much I haven’t been able to watch anything else properly since. Would I, like Reinaldo Arenas, go to prison for my writing, go into exile for it, die for it, I asked myself? Before anyone pipes up and invokes any political scandals I’ve found myself in in the past, let me just say my answer was NO. Then I read this. And realised that also NO — I have no pig in my panties. Not anymore. And then, I heard from the editor of an anthology an essay of mine had been accepted to five years ago, but had never seen the light of day. A new publisher had expressed interest. I re-read that piece, and knew immediately that I had to withdraw it from the collection. I could no longer stand by it. Is that how I will feel about Witchcraft, later? I wondered. Already, I can’t look at some of the poems anymore. Already, I know they are in there because other people love them, because I have a career because of them. But I am a million miles away.
I was no longer on speaking terms with the most passionate person I had ever met — myself.
There’s something I didn’t tell you — I am a very lucky girl.
The funding got sorted out. With the exception of one person, everyone who was behind me has stayed behind me. I have more creative freedom than most people have. I can have a book. A book. Something I’ve wanted, worked toward, assumed would always be mine, since I was seven years old. But only If I want it.
So the only reasons there is no book are purely internal circumstances.
As I write this now, I wonder if I should publish this post at all. Or if I will publish it, then delete it. If I should just email confidantes instead. I am so uncertain about a blog post — can you imagine how much trepidation I feel about my book?
But back to Cohen.
Inspired by recent discussions, I went looking up his poems again. This one I had first heard as a recording, in his own voice, that was inexplicably tacked on to a Tori Amos song I was downloading. I share it only because it is beautiful.
I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.
If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips.
it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside the door.
I kept surfing links, looking over lyrics I already knew, reading anecdotes about the songs. Comparing two versions of “Hallelujah” made me realise, amazedly, that the writer behind the greatest English song in the world was never really happy with it.
If Leonard Cohen has second thoughts, I am perfectly, perfectly entitled to mine.
And then I read this. I’m sorry to look at this so materialistically, but if Leonard Cohen had an evil manager cheat him financially, well into the late stages of his universally-acclaimed career, then the fact that it had happened to me isn’t really that big a deal.
Thank you, Leo. You may not be God, but you are surely a member of the pantheon.
All this while I have been waiting for the voodoo, knowing very well by now that the voodoo is always there, it’s just that I’m not letting myself feel it. I’m not saying I own it yet. I’m just saying that, like the fog-basking Namibian beetle (look, I am not stoned, I’m just short on metaphors, and I had to edit something about this amazing creature at work recently), I’m going to start aligning to the wind.
We spent a beautiful late morning yesterday at the most gorgeous cemetery I have ever been in (prettier than any park in this city, I think). The Madras War Memorial is a small, impeccably maintained place, holding the remains and/or remembrances of Commonwealth citizens who died here during the first and second world wars.
The raven that showed up as Anand read from Edgar Allen Poe, the monarch butterfly that did the same when I read a persona poem as Frida Kahlo speaking to me, and the Cohen tombstone near where we were (Deesh read from Leonard C)… Someone told me recently that the signs are everywhere, even when one doesn’t look for them. But I love metaphor, and mythology. I’ll connect the dots.
On the phone the night before, working out lunch plans: “We’ll decide at the graveyard! *cackle*”. How cool to be able to say things like that and mean them. :)
Left to right — Anand, Anita, Harish, Deesh, Chandrachoodan, Arun, Raji, Anita’s daughter (sorry!), Sharanya. Photo by Dilip Muralidharan (link goes to clearer version of pic).
Posted this on a more private space this morning. Thought I’d share it here, just for fun.
Medusa-seduca, you declared,
and crossed your legs at tea.
Rapunzel-schmunzel, I shrugged.
You don’t mean little old lady me?
But don’t take me at my bashful blush,
I was only feigning surprise.
I think we already know: my hair is
a certifiable home-wrecking device.
I’m thrilled by the gay pride parades held earlier this week in Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore. I know it doesn’t matter that Chennai didn’t have one (far as I know, anyway) – legislatively speaking, any successful activism will affect us nationwide. I know there’ll probably be one here next year, if not sooner, and that we’re the stick-in-the-mud city, but we’ll catch up. I know all this, really I do. Still, I’m kind of, just a little, selfishly sad.
You see, I am a faghag. Ever since school, my closest friends have always been gay men. I find these relationships infinitely less complicated than those with women, which are ruined by the deeply-conditioned rivalry that is the cross we bear, and straight men, who get the wrong idea when you call them “honey”. There’s no social situation I adore more than one in which I’m surrounded by boys, all whom are prettier than me, and none of whom will take me home for anything more Broadway karaoke.
So you can imagine how I felt when I moved here. To sum up a rather horrifying realisation: I couldn’t find the gay men. I was a faghag in straight-acting city.
I knew they had to be around. Homosexuality is universal, no matter what conservatives claim. Our ridiculous sex laws and current brand of moralism are, after all, British imports: indigenously, our mores and mythologies are deliciously decadent. Chennai could not possibly be the boring strictly-hetero capital of the world – Tamil Nadu’s recognition of transgender rights was proof enough. But relying exclusively on Gtalk marathons with friends elsewhere to get my fix, sometimes it really did feel like it was.
A couple of months into the relocation, I met a flamboyant producer who had the stereotypes down pat: loud shirt, bitchy repartee, the works. I nearly fainted when he mentioned his wife and three kids.
At one point, I got so desperately perplexed that I went to a gay dating site, just to remind myself that it’s not that they don’t exist, my future friends, they were just in hiding. It was lots of fun for about two minutes, and then the chest area-only profile shots got a little repetitive. All I learned was that you can take the heterosexuality out of the Indian man, but not the Oedipus complex.
Over time, the nature of my conversations and enquiries took more serious tones. It didn’t take a genius to see that my problem was not a lack of gay men – even men who identified as straight divulged to me that they had enjoyed encounters with other men. The sexual aspect in itself was common.
What was not common, however, was the lifestyle I had come to associate with gay men. This was a sobering understanding. How ever these circles and communities came together, there was no room for the faghag. Not only was I out of depth among them, I was also completely superficial.
I am always intrigued by situations that challenge my liberalism, and this lonely experience was enlightening. What I knew of gay culture was homogenous, centred around the arts and pop culture – a fabulous culture, to use the iconic word. But that is not gay reality in Chennai, which is characterized by concealment and subterfuge, not concealer and showtunes.
So rest assured that when the pride parade finally hits the city, I’ll be there in full regalia. Only this time, I’ll keep in mind that the fight for acceptance of diversity can, reasonably enough, include my exclusion. I can’t wait to see what a more open Chennai will look like. Even if it looks like nothing I’ve ever known.
An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.
Sharanya Manivannan