Spam

COMMENTS are off for the moment -- and maybe forever -- on account of spam. There was TOO much building up. Also I've been slowly turning over in my mind, my response to the blogging experience in general. The other day, when some young journalist called up to ask questions about "celebrity blogging" these thoughts came to the fore. One of the questions she asked was, "What do you feel about exposing your personal information to the whole wide web?" Of course I had to laugh: my experience has shown me that there's about as much real exposure on a blog as standing naked alone in a desert.

On the few occasions when there IS high traffic, it is nearly always of low consequence. For instance, there was a surge of visits during the performance of my play in California last year. But the calibre of responses consisted almost entirely of emotional garbage that no-one really needed to either read or write. If I'd turned off comments then, the results would certainly have been cooler all around: maybe a few people would have e-mailed me with their furious remarks and I could have chosen which ones to present or not. But the high temperatures that suddenly flared up at the time would simply not have had the easy outlet that they did, and we'd all have had more time to spend on pleasanter pursuits.

Of course it's sad (now, in this commentless atmosphere) not to hear from the few regulars whose responses I welcome here (like Amro and gt, f'rinstance). But the irritants are in greater abundance. The only other time when it was really fun to have a blog was when the SUDOCRITTERS game was in progress. That was cool! And I can see from the traffic stats that SudoCritter continues to be a powerful magnet for one particular search engine in Europe. There is a continuous speckling of hits from France and Holland, every day. However that also means that the relentless spam-parasites (spamasites?) target those posts and fill 'em up with rubbish. I haven't been bothering to remove them, coz it's too much effort. I know about them only because they show up as e-mail.

So ... why do I blog at all? Because it continues to be worthwhile to put out a trickle of news about my patch of turf. It's a bit like sending out a newsletter -- without having to send it out. I know that friends and family visit here in order to confirm that I'm (a) still apparently alive (b) still have the use of my hands and am at least solvent enough to have access to the internet.

I also get to share my most recent amusements. For instance: this mindless-fun game, which I got from Dave Barry's Blog. And one more site, for those who are interested in serial killers ... (sent to me by e-mail by my ComputerVine buddy Chuck aka Slipshod).

Neem News

Last week my mother (who lives in Madras) had a close call with diabetes -- she went into a low-sugar coma just before lunch. She was shifted to the nearby hospital by ambulance and revived in the ICU the moment she was given a drip, and seemed in good cheer when I spoke to her on the phone that evening. The reason I'm sharing this news is that the substance that apparently triggered her brief coma was half a glass of neem-leaf infusion. She'd been told it was a well-known Ayurvedic method of reducing high-sugar levels in diabetics. Maybe her blood-sugar was already normal or perhaps unknown to her it had dipped lower than usual. But the point is: if neem leaves boiled in water can result in a coma-inducing drop of blood-sugar in my mother it sounds like something worth checking out as a low-cost alternative to the normal treatments and drugs that diabetics use. Of course, when you consider the night my mother spent in the ICU, that made it an unusually EXPENSIVE treatment ...

Meanwhile, a friend sent me the following link to an article about the opening up of a new frontier in outsourcing. Reminds me of a certain play I wrote ...

Snail Martyrs and Dragon Fruit

There are two bits of information that I have been meaning to share -- both totally amazing to me.

The first is about the curls on the Buddha's head -- some of you will know immediately what I mean -- you know, the small round bumps that are often shown covering the head of a statue of the Buddha in a seated meditation pose. I probably first saw an image of the Buddha (I mean in a conscious sense) when I was a child of maybe 10 and I remember asking about the bumps. I was told they were "curls". Not much later, my parents and I went to Thailand, and we spent three years there. All that time and ever since, I have believed that those bumps were "curls" -- even though it always bothered me that such curls were in direct contrast to the very smooth skinned, straight-haired type of person the Enlightened One was in every other sense (and in all other representations of him). The curls were an anomaly that were not explained by any other phenomena.

Well -- and now I know the true story: the "curls" are actually meant to represent 108 snails!! They are known formally as "Snail Martyrs" and they climbed up onto the Buddha's head when they saw that he was in deep meditation under the burning sun, to offer him the protection of their little bodies. Isn't that beautiful? My opinion of snails has shot up a thousand-fold! You can read more about it here.

The second astounding new fragment of general truth is that a fruit I was introduced to in Singapore some years ago, by my friend and host there Ela Ghose, turns out to belong to that amazing flower known as the Night Blooming Cereus. The fruit is called Dragon Fruit. The reason I find it so amazing is in part because I was introduced to the flower in my sister's home in Pennsylvania in the US -- it's a weirdly beautiful bloom that flowers only at night, producing one huge (like maybe 10 inches across) display in an astonishingly theatrical manner. I mean, you can practically see the thing opening up and people sometimes come over for Night Blooming Cereus evenings!

No-one speaks about the flower as being a fruit-producer. It is usually admired just for itself. So it was entirely by chance, while browsing the net for something else (that exotic spider lily I featured on this blog some posts ago), I suddenly chanced upon this item about the NBC and its Dragon Fruit.

The second reason it so amazes me that fruit and flower belong to the same plant (a cactus. Very likely, the one that produces the fruit is a different subspecies to the creature that lives in my sister's home -- hers has never shown the slightest sign of productivity. Of course, the poor thing is never exposed to any wasps/moths or whatever it is that pollinates it) is that the NBC is native to the US, while the fruit is best known in Southeast Asia. I saw a few in a wonderful farmers market near Irvine, CA, where I visited last year. But it's not well known.

Okay and that's my show-and-tell for the month!

Remembrance

On this day, 95 years ago, my dad was born in a tiny village in Kerala. He was the first child born to his parents, and would be followed by another ten -- five brothers and five sisters. His father was a Commissaire de Police for the French Government. He spoke Malayalam and French -- NOT English! -- and the only photograph I have seen of him shows him in a superb uniform, all glinting medals and French "kepi"! I never met this grandfather, but my father's mother, who was widowed when her youngest child was barely walking, is someone I remember clearly -- she was an extremely active and creative lady, who was a Sahitya Akademi award-winning author in her life-time and a social activist who enthusiastically joined Gandhi's freedom movement in those heady pre-Independence days. Even to this day, my uncles remember growing up around their mother who would write at the family dining table (perhaps by the light of a kerosene lamp), throwing down pages on the floor as she finished them, such was the energy of her literary flow!

My dad died in 1994, after a long struggle with Parkinson's. He put up a brave fight and was always, right till the end, glad to be alive, unwilling to give up or give in despite the terrible indignities wrought upon him by the disease. His journey was in many ways an extraordinary one, working his way from that small coastal village all the way up to the competitive exams in far away Delhi, earning the right to serve his country in the Foreign Service, reaching the rank of Ambassador in his final two postings, to Thailand and Iran.

In many ways, I was born a little too late to appreciate him and I do feel a sad regret about all the things unsaid and left undone. He was an exemplary Dad. In this day, when we hear endless horror stories about the vile behavior of men towards their wives and families, it is important to also record those men who are decent, kind, good-humoured and hard working. I rarely ever saw him ill-tempered and I never heard him raise his voice in anger to anyone. He was always mild-mannered and cautious, but he held his own, he fought for what he believed was right and I think he brought us up -- my two sisters and me -- to have a strong sense of what is decent and honourable in life.

He was also the source of my interest in puzzles and cartoons! He was an avid crossword puzzler and reader of cartoons. We still have in the family, the collected album of "Curly Wee" comics that were serialized in his local newspaper. He cut them out and stuck the strips neatly into a volume, when he was growing up and they are still enjoyably readable now. He had a warm sense of humour and loved nothing more than to read a good book. Towards the end of his life, when reading was a chore because his eyes were weak, he took to watching art movies on TV and knew more than most of us about the best new films on the art circuit.


So anyway. I thought I'd share that with those of you who read this blog -- and especially for those of you who still have dads. Go give him a hug, go tell him you love him and that he matters to you.

Family-Witness Account of HARVEST!

-- my niece D and partner drove down from Boston to NYC to see the play! I am hugely impressed at their enterprising spirit and very grateful too. Despite the other accounts, I needed to hear from someone who knows me well enough to report on the performance through (almost) my own eyes. Not entirely, of course, because she is very much her own person, but from what she says, and from the photographs I've seen, I have a much clearer impression of what the play was like. I think I would've liked it ...

Here's what she says:

On Sunday, Jan 29, 2006, we drove down to NYC to the East Village to
see the final performance of Harvest at La MaMa, a well-known venue on
the independent theatre circuit. Off the bustling 2nd Avenue, 4th
Street is a quieter stretch of brownstones peppered with little
restaurants and specialty shops featuring those eclectic items that
define New York chic when worn just so, or by today's It Girl. There,
nestled between the residential doorways and store fronts, is the
unassuming entrance to La MaMa. Opening the door, one first encounters
the heat barrier – strips of heavy plastic designed to keep the
bitterness of winter outside where it belongs. Then one enters the
cramped, no-frills box office space – featuring minimum seating along
a corner where photos of past performances serve as wall paper; a
closet bathroom; and two call windows to pick up tickets to one of the
two theatres housed in this narrow Manhattan space. Harvest is playing
in the ground floor theatre.

Ten minutes before the show, the staff opens the door and starts
ushering folks into the hardwood floored corridor that flanks the
stepped seating area. Again, one is struck by the narrowness of the
space – the stage seems barely wider than a large drawing room and the
set is not much deeper. This is perfect staging for a play that
transpires in a one-room flat in a tenement building in a bustling
Third World metropolis. The stage is set with a single bed on the
right with an end table featuring a picture of Ganesha. On the left is
the "kitchen" area. Along the back is a railing with clothes hanging
to dry in the supposed inner courtyard of the tenement. There is also
a door separating the balcony from the living area. Taking a seat on
the second tier of folding chairs, one notices the rustic style of the
theatre, the exposed brick of the walls only enhances the roughness
of the set.

The play begins with Ma and Jaya waiting, and bickering, for Om to
return from InterPlanta. Once Om comes home and breaks the news that
he got the job at InterPlanta, the guards come to disinfect and
reorganize the living space. The two male guards are dressed in button
down dress shirts with blue ties tuck efficiently away, below the
third button, dark blue pants, and rubber gloves. The one female guard
is wearing the same shirt and tie, with a short tight dark blue skirt
accentuating her petite frame which is made all the more delicate by
her hair being twisted into several little buns in a pixie-like style.
The guards work quickly to clear the living area and finish each
other's sentences as they briskly explain the Interplanta rules. All
the props are removed and white plastic sheets are placed over the
door and the balcony area, creating a not only hermetically sealed
living space, but also a flat screen for the series of InterPlanta
commercials that are projected throughout the play. The only thing
that the guards add to the living space is the contact module, an
interlocking paper pieced puzzle light fixture that Manjula herself
would have enjoyed assembling. This whirls to life and Ginny's larger
than life image is projected on the screen behind the characters. She
is blond, blue-eyed, and overly made up, speaking with a typical, but
not quite charming, Southern twang. The play progresses and we meet
Jetu who promptly demonstrates that he knows Jaya a little more
intimately than her own husband. As Interplanta woos the audience with
how they "Make Lives Worth Living," the living area is transformed
with sterile white furniture and stain steel accessories. Om is
sterile as well in a white cotton kurta pajama. Ma, in contrast, is
wearing a black velvet wrap around bath robe with a leopard skin
collar, and chunky slippers with little cow heads that smile back at
their wearer. Jaya is wearing a brocade silk sari and is the only one
questioning this new false reality created by Ginny – her very own
"human fish bowl"- a concept, which given that Harvest was written in
1996 and the current plethora of reality TV shows, is scarily
prophetic.

As the play progress, white InterPlanta boxes are piled up along the
back of the set in front of the balcony screens. The resulting effect
is that as the more and more absurd InterPlanta commercials are
broadcast, the images are splintered across the boxes and partially
blocked screen. The visual fragmentation of the InterPlanta advocates
only adds to the sense of body parts and life parts that are being
traded at the will and whim of the credit card endowed.

As the voyeurism continues, Jetu returns to the household the day the
guards come for Om . Om crumbles at the prospect of paying his debt to
his benefactor. Therefore, the unwitting guards take Jetu in his stead
with Ma's full support of her least beloved son. Upon his return, the
audience gets to meet the living, corporal form of Ginny which is now
being projected directly into Jetu's mind thanks to the first stage of
the transplant process. Enamored by her lily white form, Jetu greedily
agrees to continue the transplant process with the promise of having
more intimate knowledge of this fresh foreign flower, while carelessly
brushing off the reason and concern of the steadfast Jaya. Time passes
and the living space is in disarray, as is Jaya who is back in her
simple red cotton sari, but her hair is now out of its neat pony tail
and she splays herself across the arch of the sofa. The contact module
whirls to life and beckons to Jaya. She is thrown by the new voice,
and then the living space is invaded by the holographic image of Jetu
who now has the arrogance and seduction of the real recipient of the
InterPlanta services. He unveils the true nature and mission of the
transplant process which Jaya rejects unless it is on her terms. The
play ends with Jaya assuming control of her life and the situation and
proving that one voice can prevail over the monstrous machinery of
Manjula's eviscerated vision for the future of global consumerism.

In case it isn't clear - I loved the production and thought it did
much justice to the play and its harsh sentiments.

More Cows!

Yup. It's that time of life again -- those political cows and their ideological products ... A new set (well, new for me. I've read the earlier list dozens of times. This is the first new lot in a LONG while).

DEMOCRATIC

You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.


REPUBLICAN

You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?


SOCIALIST

You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your
neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage
his cow.


COMMUNIST

You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with
milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.


CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE

You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of
cows.


BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE

You have two cows.
Under the new farm program the government pays
you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pours
the milk down the drain.


AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do
an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of
four cows. You are surprised when one cow
drops dead. You spin an announcement to the
analysts stating you have downsized and are
reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.


FRENCH CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.


JAPANESE CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size
of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the
milk.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded
trains. Most are at the top of their class at cow
school.


GERMAN CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink
lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run
a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately, they also demand 13 weeks of
vacation per year.


ITALIAN CORPORATION

You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.


RUSSIAN CORPORATION

You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.

The Mafia shows up and takes over however many
cows you really have.


TALIBAN CORPORATION

You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are
two. You don't milk them because
you cannot touch any
creature's private parts.
You get a $40 million grant from the U.S.
government to find alternatives to milk production,
but use the money to buy weapons.


IRAQI CORPORATION

You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send out radio tapes of their mooing.


POLISH CORPORATION

You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed
attempting to milk them.

BELGIAN CORPORATION

You have one cow.
The cow is schizophrenic.
Sometimes the cow thinks she's French, other
times she thinks she's Flemish.
The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow.

The French cow wants control of the Flemish
cow's milk.
The cow asks permission to be cut in half.
The cow dies happy.


FLORIDA CORPORATION

You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who actually like the brown
one best accidentally vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.



Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell
you which one you think is the best-looking cow.


CALIFORNIA CORPORATION

You have millions of cows.
They make real California cheese.
Only five speak English.
Most are illegal cows.
Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.


VEGETARIAN CORPORATION

Has two cows
And they are pets.

... and finally:

MARGINALIEN CORPORATION

You wonder: What are "cows"?

An Ayurvedic Lunch & Another Review

Well this afternoon my sister, my mother and my aunt G went out together to a restaurant serving authentic "Ayurvedic" meals -- not merely vegetarian, but healthy in that Mystical Eternal India manner (cue sitar music in the background. And curling wisps of incense. And coconut oil. And a tiger or two).

Those of you who know me will realize that this is NOT my scene at all, but I survived, nevertheless. The main pleasures were: taking my Mum out, despite her difficulties walking and the trouble she has managing since she broke her wrist a couple of months ago (it's healing well, but of course is still a worry); taking my Auntie-G out, because she so enjoys the sacred food concept; being in a small restaurant that takes itself SOOOOO seriously, yet in an entirely different direction to the Michelin Guide-wallahs. After all, who can resist a restaurant which has a sales counter out front, at which one can buy small packets labelled "Simple Enema"?

The meal we had was a set menu. We were seated at a table to ourselves in a small air-conditioned room, whose walls had been decorated by a loose lattice-work of bamboo wands (not especially attractive). A fresh banana leaf was spread in front of each of us and of course there was no question of cutlery. We had a personal attendant (so does anyone who orders the set menu) who advised us about the procedure: we would get 28 items in all, small portions of each. We were to eat only in the particular order in which these items were served; we would not be offered water during the meal, and the rice course would come only towards the end.

It began with two slices of banana sprinkled with grated coconut. Immediately following this were five dainty little glasses with, in order: date juice, almond-cashew milk, beetroot-pumpkin juice, mint-buttermilk, red rice congee (gruel??) -- and the tastes ranged from sweet, less sweet, salty, sour and ... umm ... bland.

The next course comprised one portion each of four uncooked items -- salad-y type things of which the banana-stem item was undoubtedly the best -- then four semi-cooked, which I didn't much enjoy coz there was a white-pumpkin item and a beetroot item, but the mound of banana-flower [something] -- the texture of soft dark sand --was quite pleasant. Then four cooked items, plus red rice. Now this red rice wasn't merely sissy-pale red, it was more like MAROON rice, and had a muscular, nutty flavour. A neat touch: it was served with a spoonful of yellow daal, so softened that it looked EXACTLY like the ghee that would NORMALLY be served on rice. And sambar.

All the cooked items were just okay, in my opinion, not because they didn't taste okay but because they weren't my closest friends, veggie-wise (cauliflower's okay, but the various gourd-type things don't appeal). This was followed by another round of liquids, including rasam, a goo I didn't like, plain buttermilk and a sweet payasam (not rice, but the kind I used to call Brown Payasam as a child and that I didn't ever touch -- but I will admit it was quite nice here). And finally, to round it all off, a teaspoon of honey which was deposited into the palms of our hands (!!) -- which we were told quite sternly to lick up in one go, it was part of the whole procedure -- and a "beeda" -- a paan leaf with betel-nut components of unknown identity wrapped inside it, as a digestive.

The important features to note about the meal were that it was wholly grease-free, everything being pretty much steamed (I think) and that there were no "heaty" veggies, such as onion and garlic, and no spices of the cardamom, clove, turmeric brigade. I am pretty sure there were chillies lurking in the savoury green mango relish that was one of the four "uncooked" selections, because it was certainly chilli-hot -- but the rest was refreshingly low-spice, natural flavour -- but maybe I am wrong and it was only fresh pepper combining explosively with the mango (and maybe cilantro? I forget).

I don't think I'd go again -- mainly coz I don't like eating with my fingers and feel queasy about the raw veggies concept -- oh and I NEVER like to feel that I'm doing anything consciously sacred (does everyone notice how close the word "sacred" is to "scared"?) because ... well, this is my blog, and I don't have to justify anything. I don't like it, and that's all. But the little man who watched over us as we ate was very sweet and seemed genuinely concerned that we should follow the proper procedure in order to get the maximum benefit from our meal. His presence -- like that of the whole restaurant -- was a reminder of that entire world of otherness regarding food -- of food as medicine, as ritual, as tradition -- the supreme opposite of food as entertainment, as titillation, as indulgence.

It's not where I'm at (I mean, medicine/ritual/tradition), but I enjoyed entering that world anyway.

Right! And now ... back to theatre:

from BACKSTAGE
Harvest/January 30, 2006
By Gwen Orel

In answer to the comment that "no one goes abroad these days," Jaya (Diksha Basu) mutters, "Not whole people, anyway." It's true. In Manjula Padmanabhan's play Harvest, bits of impoverished Indians go to America through voluntary organ donation sponsored by the company InterPlanta. InterPlanta's mordant commercials (the video director is Matt Bockelman) punctuate the scenes and are one of the best elements in a solid show; the happy actors' sincerity, and InterPlanta's little jingle, "We make life worth living," are uncomfortably close to the euphoric promises of Viagra commercials.

Jaya, the wife of organ donor Om (Debargo Sanyal), is the play's moral center, although the action is driven by Om and by Jaya's brother-in-law and lover, Jeetu (Rupak Ginn), a street hustler who says, "I don't mind being bought, but I won't be owned." After Om signs with InterPlanta, guards (who farcically finish each other's sentences) come to the house and take all the family's possessions. They install a hanging white rosette called a "contact module," through which their sponsor, a blond Southern woman named Ginni (hilariously bossy Christianna Nelson), beams her image. She treats them like prospective livestock, and in return sends them a toilet, shower, couch, and television. Ma (Naheed Khan) purchases "video paradiso," which breathes and eats for her as she watches television inside her mind. Act II provides more exposition; though the material is dramatically successful, the play is less powerful when the circumstances are pinned down.

Thanks to Padmanabhan's lyrical language, director Benjamin Mosse's pacing and humor, and a solid cast, Harvest is a fascinating, funny, and frightening glimpse of what happens when we commodify human beings. Although it addresses globalization, the play's issues are universal. As Bruce Springsteen sings, "Everybody has a hungry heart." Keeping body and soul together in the face of images of plenty is a human challenge not limited to the Third World.

HARVEST NYC's Reviews

Here's a link to the online review at NYTheatre.com -- there's a photograph of the show there -- it looks great, and I am finally breathing easy. Congratulations to the cast and ECA ...

Martin Denton * January 20, 2006
In Harvest, Manjula Padmanabhan's fine play that is currently receiving its NYC premiere at La MaMa, a young man in India takes a job as a professional organ donor. The time is the near future, and a company called Interplanta is recruiting healthy Third World humans to become, essentially, health repositories for wealthy Westerners. Om's client is a woman named Ginni, who pays him and his family top dollar-at least in terms of India's per capita income-to stay fit and ready for the possible day when she will need something from him, say, a kidney, or his skin, or his eyes.

Om's wife, Jaya, is understandably distressed by this new job, not least because of the strain it puts on an already very dysfunctional relationship. For Jaya is in love with, and having an on-again / off-again affair with, Om's younger brother, Jeetu, who supports himself by working as a prostitute. The other member of the household is Ma, Om and Jeetu's mother, a meddlesome lady who thinks that her elder boy (Om) can do no wrong and that the others can do no right (Jaya, for example, is repeatedly referred to as a "slut").

As for the work itself-such as it is-well, that's a round-the-clock regimen controlled 100% by Interplanta, who deliver boxes of food and other necessities as dictated by Ginni (she orders, for example, that a working toilet and shower be installed in Om's one-room, fourth-floor apartment, because she doesn't want her employee mixing with the "disgusting" others who dwell in his building). Om and his family do get to enjoy the spoils of his new high-paying position-in one of the play's most effective scenes, their rise to consumerist luxury is depicted wittily in a series of sight gags-but their lack of freedom eventually gnaws away at them, as does Om's fear that the day is drawing near when some part of his body will be needed by his faraway benefactress-quite possibly a part that he can't do without.

I won't reveal the rest of Padmanabhan's intricately plotted tale, but I will say that Harvest compels from beginning to end, creating a not-so-fanciful futuristic world that's pretty darned scary. Om's occupation starts off as a stark and brilliant symbol of the most invasive kind of First World Colonialism, but the play shifts gears along the way and turns its attention to an even more insidious form of colonization, that of our very humanity by a cultural ethos besotted with technology and comfort. While Om's family's crisis spirals horrifyingly out of control, commercials for Interplanta's latest and greatest products and services are projected on a screen that coincides with the rear wall of their apartment, lulling us (and them, perhaps) into a sense of security that's as malignant as it is false. (These exceedingly well-crafted videos are directed by Matt Bockelman.) Padmanabhan essentially picks up where Orwell left off, crafting a 21st century cautionary tale of enormous resonance.

Benjamin Mosse's production at La MaMa's First Floor Theater is mostly terrific, anchored by a quartet of splendid performances (Debargo Sanyal as Om, Naheed Khan as Ma, Christianna Nelson as Ginni, and Rupak Ginn as Jeetu) and smartly paced and designed (the endlessly escalating "conveniences" delivered to the family by Interplanta take the form here of cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes, and as they stack up toward the ceiling they provide a visual allusion to Ionesco's The Chairs, a neat and relevant absurdist reference point). Diksha Basu is less effective as Jaya, unfortunately, failing to hold our attention or sympathy in Act One, which proves problematic as the play's focus shifts toward her in its second half.

But Harvest is by any measure a significant success, and La MaMa and East Coast Artists are to be congratulated for bringing it to the New York stage. Audiences in search of lively and challenging theatre that looks deeply and candidly at the relations between the world's "haves" and "have-nots" will be well stimulated by this thought-provoking, valuable work.

And the The New York Times review. It's more critical but I'm told the reviewer saw what amounted to a preview, and that the subsequent shows have tightened up considerably. Frankly? Knowing the kinds of things that can go wrong with the play, this sounds like a pretty good show, even on its first night, with barely six weeks of rehearsal (with the year-end in the middle)* and all the technical stuff the show demands. There's a photograph with the review.

*CORRECTION: Benjamin tells me that he and the cast had sixteen days of rehearsal, between six to ten in the evenings. That makes this performance near-miraculous, what with a live GINNI doing the video without feed-back from the stage, all the tech stuff ... that's just ... WOW. I'm impressed.

Harvest, NYC (contd.) and ...

Thanks to Amba, who posted her impressions of NYC's HARVEST at her blog I have an idea of what it was like, from someone unconnected to the production. I feel a mild regret, about not being there but not REALLY sorry coz I am still shuddering from the memory of The Unmentionable over on the West Coast. No doubt I'll get over it in time, but I wonder if perhaps the best way to survive being a playwright is never to see the staged results? I remember acting in a play once, and being told the playwright wouldn't attend the performance because he never sat through his own plays.

Apparently, the chances are dim that productions will appeal to their creators. I was talking to an English playwright in London this December, someone whose plays have been performed by big name actors (I mean, the type whose names even I was familiar with -- I'm not naming them for fear of libel suits) and he didn't have a single good word to say for anyone associated with stage productions. We agreed that the lot of a playwright is a SAAAAAD one. Anyway, this conversation made me feel whole lot better, since I was able to describe The West Coast HorrorShow in thrilling technicolour to him -- and HE UNDERSTOOD WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT!! That was so cool. Other people listen to these tales of woe and think that I'm exaggerating (well, not the friends who came to the west coast show with me; they thought I was exaggerating until they witnessed it for themselves), and smile in a "there, there -- it can't possibly have been THAT bad" way. Only the playwright knew from experience the total nastiness of having one's work messed about by others.

Anyway ... I am pleased to report that, according to Amba's report, it sounds like the NYC show was good. I am very grateful to her for bothering to put up that review.

Meanwhile, I am currently in Madras. Got here on Sunday. My niece D is here from Boss Town and we are in the thick of our annual season of struggles with my mom/her grandmom -- nothing we do can EVER match her expectations. So, even though I am 52 and my niece is 32, we STILL spend most of our lives here variously in the dog-house for being lazy/incompetent/poorly dressed/and much, much more besides. *sigh* It's not easy being born.

Oh -- and -- for a short while, I am hiding comments (I may turn em off altogether; haven't decided) and removing my e-address from view. I am pre-empting possible tedium in the form of unwanted mail in a week from now, because a Bombay tabloid is running a feature in which they're going to be excerpting from author-blogs and mine's going to be one of them.

HARVEST in NYC

It's time to post these links, I guess. The play is due to open in NYC this week. I won't be there, but I've got all my digits crossed. Here are links to: LaMaMa's site, the New York Times notice and an interview with me in nytheatre.com.

Incidentally ... it just occurred to me that crossing one's fingers is really only useful if one is a believing Christian. Ah well. I'll hope that 8 years in convent schools entitles me to request that a little luck be sanctioned in the direction of the play!

Oh -- and -- here's a link to a page in NYTheatre-Wire which features Suki from Penguin India's 2005 collection of my Bombay strip, DOUBLETALK (there's a link to it on the right). I always get a bit of thrill when I see Suki featured anywhere -- she had such a rough time in her early years, it's kind of sweet to find that she's still capable of holding her own even now, 20 years later. When she chooses, that is ...

Name This Flower, Please!

Many years ago, I came across a gorgeous multi-headed flower that looked to me like a variation on the theme of Spider Lily. However, the owner of the garden in which the plant was growing didn't know its name (when I asked, he said, "Oh ... it's just a big lily!"). Ever since then, I've been VERY keen to know what it is. I kept looking out for it, but didn't see any more. Then I noticed that Delhi's IIC had a few clumps growing there -- and have been meaning to get around to taking pix to post them here. It's been about ... ooo ... two years? Since I first noticed them there? Well, finally, today, the syzygy of lily, me and digital camera occurred. Here are two pictures of the flower (one bunch in bud, and the other in bloom) and if anyone knows the creature's botanical name, I'll be very grateful if they would share it. Of course, I could probably find out from the IIC gardeners too ... but it's more fun this way!

2006 -- Hello!

Well -- top o' the ladder to everyone!

It's just past nine in the morning of the new year. We had a peaceful and friendly last day. Went upstairs for lunch, which was (as always) beautifully presented, delicious and accompanied by interesting conversation. At night the nearby residents' association club had an ear-splittingly raucous party that lasted at least till 2 o'clock this new year. The music was so loud it was shaking the foundations of this house, which is practically one block away. I can't IMAGINE what it must have been like to actually be at the party! I guess some people enjoy being deaf.

I began 2006 with a choco-bar! And I was online, writing a message to a friend right till the final minutes of '05. So I suppose that's an augury of sorts -- perhaps the twelvemonth ahead will be cold, sweet and filled with chocolate covered e-mails?

Whatever. I've add a couple of pix from the old year, taken in Vermont. If Stone's Throw Farm looks as good here as it does in real life, please credit that to my little Nikon 2100 -- hardly the most advanced of today's digital cameras, but it does what I need of it and with very little sweat or effort on my part.

One of my resolutions for the year is to Take More Photographs. Not because I'm good at it, but because I always regret NOT having 'em when I look back and see ... no pictures. My idea is to take pictures of whatever's around me, the street, the traffic, the people -- of course, like many amateur photographers, one of the things I am most squeamish about is taking pictures of other people (like on a street) -- I always worry that they'll object and then I'll have to -- whatever -- swallow the camera, blush and move on, whatever. It certainly helps that with a digital camera, I can compose the picture on the view-screen at the back, and don't necessarily have to hold it up to my face.

So ... may there be more pix, pixars, pixels in the year ahead!

2005, Final Days

At the end of every year, I visualize myself reaching the final rungs of a long ladder, the ladder down which I have been climbing, day by day, ever since that year began. On the night of the 31st of December, however much I try to argue myself out of an improbable situation, I can sense my internal time-keeper gathering up her energy to make the leap up, up, UP -- right to the top of the next year's ladder, all in the course of that mystical no-moment as one year ends and the other begins! It would be so much more RESTFUL to imagine one ladder merging calmly into the next but -- no! I see the ladders laid out in a neat row, each one's top aligned against the tops of those that have gone before(I don't presume to guess how many there are ahead -- so I don't see 'em!).

It's been a peaceful and pleasant two weeks since we returned. I've spent the greater part of my time just gathering together my sense of being HERE, rather than en route to somewhere else.

Yesterday, for the first time since we've been back, we went for a long drive, to the bird sanctuary at Sultanpur. As with our expeditions at the beginning of 2005, our valiant charioteer was J, and the chariot was his supremely comfortable Pajero. This time, accompanying us were his son, Y, visiting from the US and our very dear friend and frequent visitor to this blog, A (I most often refer to him here as Amro). Aside from the horrific traffic all the way till just beyond Gurgaon, it was a pleasant outing. Inside the sanctuary, we saw quantities of dabchicks and egrets, painted storks, ibises and one splendid black-necked stork -- how elegant and courtly he was! The plumage for which he is named was not merely black but subtly irridescent, so that even at a distance (and through binocs) we could see a play of midnight colour along the long graceful extent of his neck. That, combined with the white of his body, the soot-black patches on his wings and his spindly crimson legs made him a very handsome sight.

There were quite a few Neelgai around -- we saw maybe 20? According to the ticket-wallahs at the gate, the resident herd numbers around 100 -- and we were close enough to them that my survival skills, normally in deep coma, stirred and raised a mild alarm. Today, of course, a whole day later and no longer within a hundred yards of a 300 lb antelope I can bemoan my weak nerves. Ah well. Next time I'll run up and cuddle 'em.

The bonus wild-life sighting occurred outside the sanctuary. We were in search of a suitable picnic spot at which to eat the main meal of the expedition -- stuffed parathas provided by Amro's parental establishment -- when eagle-eyed E spotted an unusual cat skulking about in the tall grass beside a mustard field. It was most obliging, I must say, because it didn't immediately vanish out of sight, but remained in view long enough for all of us to see the stripes on its back legs and the end of its tail and also the fine ridge of black at the very tips of its ears. It was about the size of a large domesticated tom, its body sandy-gold in colour. As if that weren't thrilling enough, we saw it (or its buddy) as we were leaving the area too. This second sighting was quite generous, because the creature actually sat by the side of the road and posed for a few moments, staring not quite at us, but past us, in that way felines have, as if humans and all our baggage are really too gross to be worth actually looking at.

It was ALMOST small enough to be mistaken for a domestic cat, but ... there an apartness about it, a reserve, that proclaimed its freedom and its independence from the yoke of human companionship.

When we got home and looked it up in "Indian Wildlife", its identity was confirmed: a Jungle Cat.

Oh -- and yes, of course the parathas were excellent -- mooli, cauliflower and potato. And yes, we even had a minor almost-loss: E left his fleece jacket behind in the mustard field he visited briefly (while attempting to escape the photographic attentions of Amro!) and realized it only after we had left the place. But we returned and the jacket was recovered before anyone else captured it. Then back we went, back through the forest of fly-over support-struts that have sprouted all across the access routes into Delhirium, and into the grey, dusty, chaos of the traffic.

Finally -- in case you missed 'em -- there're a couple of new links in the column on the right. I don't like to keep too many links going, so alas I have removed two blog-links that were there before. But I find I hardly ever visit any blogs aside from the two that that have been there from the start -- lazy, that's moi! -- so any disappointment is regreted.

And here's one last link for the year -- the site of the Swiss artist who dreamt up the triple-jawed beastie that froze our popcorn to our numbed fingers when we saw the first of the ALIEN movies -- a little something to curdle your blood at the end of the year: R. GIGER rrrROWRRR! Audio ON, please ...

A Recently Received Delight!

This graphic is a simplified version of a map that appears in a must-have book called THE ATLAS OF EXPERIENCE. It was given to me by our friends/hosts in Berkeley. They've given away dozens of copies to friends, they tell me. And no wonder: it's one of those books that you keep out in a place where many people can find it and smile over it.

It LOOKS like an atlas, but it READS like a witty, charming and thought-provoking deliberation upon life. The picture above is only a very general approximation of the complete map. Go check out the compleat version at World Of Experience. Enjoy!

Twelvth Bulletin -- Home Again!

.. that was ten days ago, actually, after a warm and friendly and very well-fed stay in London. I would have blogged about it while I was still there except for the shadow that fell over my clan-family: one of my elder cousins died, very suddenly, in his sleep, in his home in Budapest. He was just 54, so it was a dreadful shock for everyone, especially his two sisters, wife and two grown children. My uncle in London was as always wonderfully resilient and despite his own sense of deep bereavment(the cousin was my uncle's elder brother's son), organized the funeral. I wasn't there for it, having left the day before, but everyone says it was very moving and very fitting (I'm not mentioning names in order to keep this blog from popping up in the public tributes to my cousin who was a very well-regarded international banker and has been greatly mourned in banking circles).

So it was against this background that I had, despite it all, a very pleasant stay with my cousins, uncles and aunts in London. This visit was my first at the new home of K & S, the cousins with whom I always stay when I'm in -- why doesn't London have a pet-name, like New York? Something like the Big Apple? -- Old Londinium and it was absolutely fabulous. It's a renovated Georgian home, and S has out-done herself. She is an outstanding home-maker -- I should know, having stayed at FOUR of their houses -- and this one tops the lot. It's positively EDIBLE: I would say it has the flavour of heavy cream and raspberries; champagne and orchids; moussaka and hot french bread. Totally YUM.

The return to Delhirium was quite pleasant, all considered. Our flight got in at the very decent hour of just before 12 pm. The immigration queue was one hour long but really, aside from that, re-entry was wholly painless. Our outstanding domestic maitre d' was waiting for us with tea and toast and lunch -- and the house was clean and dusted. Later the same night, our friend Maude from Providence arrived (flying in from France, where she had spent a week or two), so it was all very convivial again. The speed of international really shrinks the globe, huh? It's hard to be aware of the vastness of the distance travelled when it takes a mere night to wake up on the other side of the world. Oh and -- Virgin Atlantic continues to get top marks from me. This time, instead of watching movies, I played their in-flight quiz games practically all the way from the UK. Very cool. But the flight was NOT packed, which is a bit worrying. I want the airline to do WELL! So that I don't have to choose the competition, the next time I fly.

Year-Ender Messages We Shall Never See

In reaction against the treacle-y Year Ender messages from friends and family around the world, I composed a small sampling of those we might like to see ... but WON'T:


OSAMA MESSAGE
Dear All --
Of course, we have had a wonderful year. Being True Believers, we ALWAYS have wonderful years, every year. The same is true of our entire Family -- which means all True Believers: a year of outstanding martyrdom and perfect joy. We are proud of every single one of you, both present and martyred. We expect the same of you next year and for all the years of glory ahead for all of us.

Isn't it wonderful to have no doubts, no fears, no tears? Glory! Glory! Forever! Forever! Your loving, O

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD MESSAGE

Dear All,
It's been a great year. I went out and got eaten by a wolf -- who had previously eaten up old Gra'mum. Amazingly, we BOTH SURVIVED, because a woodsman came and cut open the wolf. Fortunately for G'mum and me, the wolf's digestive system was so very sluggish, we didn't suffer the SLIGHTEST acid burn. Even our clothes came through unscathed.

The wolf of course was TOTALLED. And the woodsman was hauled away by several animal rights agencies at once for having destroyed a unique specimen of wolf, that was both able to swallow two humans whole AND speak in English too! It's all very sad.

However, that was all some time ago. G'mum and I are entirely recovered. On the strength of my trauma, which is being seen as a specialized case of Child Abuse, I've got scholarships to Radcliffe, Brown and Yale. I plan to major in Survival Strategies for the Modern Girl Child.

G'mum has her own hugely popular reality show on TV called Surviving Grandchildren and Their Wolves -- of course I probably don't need to tell you any of this, since you're all probably glued to your sets every weeknight, waiting to see which grandparent gets swallowed next.

Mum and Dad are okay -- though of course I don't get to see them much, what with all the press attention following the attack. Sad thing about old parents, huh? They never entirely enjoy their kids' success. Can you believe -- they want me to STOP wearing my red riding hood! Huh! Considering that I've stopped wearing any OTHER clothes, taking off the cape might be a little ... ummm ... REVEALING, if you get my
point!

Well that's it from me. Wishing y'all a similarly successful
twelvemonth! Your beloved Red.

GAIA's MESSAGE

Another dreadful year *sigh* Dunno what to do about THEM. Yuck. How I hate the pests. Yes, yes -- floods, droughts, plagues -- I'm trying! THEY just keep on reproducing, of course. I thought rabbits were prolific, but these simians? Ohhh gollygollygolly. NOTHING STOPS 'em.

But I've still got a few tricks up my sleeve. My virus programmers are a really creative bunch, for instance. And I can always pull off a well-positioned quake or two -- though I HATE to do it. So many of my beloved rocks and plants and beasts die too, in the chaos. THEY never seem to understand that if only there were fewer of them, there'd be fewer catastrophes too ...

Oh well. This is all very bad-tempered of me. I'll end this now. There are ever more nasty dams to worry about, and nuclear facilities and malls and motorways ... aaaarggh!

Whatever. Have a good one! Your ever-loving, G

Eleventh Bulletin -- London Calling

A final round of dinners and lunches in Berkeley, stacks of oreo cookies, gallons of tea and a rainy last two days and -- we were off. Flew to Boston overnight from SF, a bleary, uncomfortable flight, with only apple juice to nourish us. Of course there was a choice of other fluids, but what I'm pointing to here is the changed circumstances in the skies above America -- the new brusque and food-free atmosphere, with all services stripped down to the dead minimum. No little baggie of goodies -- no flimsy eye-mask, no unusable knock-down toofbrush with miniature tube of chalky toofpaste, no little booties for the feet, no seat-back screens for the movies. Nope, it was back to the Jurassic era of air-travel, with those small bright monitors hanging in a row from the spine of the aircraft and 2$ headphones and no escape from the movie all night long.

In another sense, though, it was a sort of relief not to have to feel grateful for the utterly insincere "hospitality" airlines typically dish out. We ate a giant toasted sandwich just before emplaning and that was quite enough to last us the six-hour flight to Beantown. Got in to my niece's pleasant and cheerful home by around ... oooh ... 8.30? She was still there, but about to leave for work,so we said our helloooos and g'byes before ripping open all our luggage for the final pack-down before the flight out of the US. We had a breezy, enjoyable two nights and one day in Boston -- with the inevitable faint panic in the final hours, trying to decide which combination of hand- and cabin-luggage was best -- keeping in mind the ten day halt in London, E's side-trip to Helsinki, two lap-tops and ... well, you get the idea. Four months of suitcase living and accumulated bric a brac compressed into two strollies, one suitcase, one duffle-bag like a giant frankfurter stuffed with pure lead, two backpacks and one computer bag. *sigh*

The security team at the airport scolded me for being so dumb as to take my laptop out of the case (--good--) but then placing it on top of the case itself rather than in a separate bin (--bad--) and then forgetting to separate two bins (--criminally bad--) ... my stuff finally went through in five separate bins, shoes in one, heavy coat and light jacket in another, backpack in a third, computer case in a fourth and computer in the fifth. Ah well. At least I got through without being strip-searched. Which reminds me --in San Francisco I got random-screened with their new sniffer machines. I went through a separate channel and stood in a small glass chamber and several jets of air suddenly PAFFED around me -- painless but a bit startling -- after which I was released. *shrug* Whatever.

LONDON! Ah, London -- but a pause here before I go on to sing the praises of VIRGIN ATLANTIC. All ye travellers out there, poised to buy your tickets for destinations diverse, hear this and make your adjustments: VA is the best. It all comes down to seating. Any airline can offer duplex apartments to their first class passengers -- but it's the quality of the economy seats that defines a classy flight. And VA delivers. We were comfortable and cramp-free, breathed easy and felt well-loved. The food was pleasant and the movies were inexhaustible -- I'd have gone blind if I'd watched them all. Of the two I saw, one was perfect airline fare -- light but well-acted -- Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins -- set against the backdrop of the London Blitz and with naked beauties in the foreground. MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS -- go see it if you can -- if nothing else, to enjoy the surprising and refreshing lack of prudery about bare flesh. I don't know how VA gets away with it, or whether there's been a sudden loosening of moral corsets in the air (perhaps to offset the repressions on earth?) but at least two movies on this flight featured full frontal nudity -- just brief glimpses, to be sure, no lingering, no close-ups -- male and female, with neither any twinkling pixellation nor any steam-of-porn. It was Just Bits o' Bare Skin. And rather nice bits too. Anyway, so you get the idea, FLY VIRGIN. And no, I've not been paid to say this. I really and truthfully had a good flight.

My stays in London are always pleasant on account of being warmly and lovingly enfolded in the bosom of my family. This time is no different. I am always indulged to the hilt and eat too much and feel nostalgic for England's gigantic coins -- "small change" indeed, huh! -- can't be sure why nostalgic, exactly -- there must be some reason, but I can't hunt it down right now. Too sleepy.

Before I pip off for the moment, two excellent movies to report. I saw both in the US, but feel they both need wider exposure. They're both documentaries and since I'm not entirely compos mentis at the moment, I'll just make a dab at the title of the first one: "THE REAL DIRT about Farmer John" (I'll come back laterand correct it, if I need to) -- and you can find out more about it at: The Real Dirt. The second one's called "RIVERS AND TIDES" and is about the British artist Andy Goldsworthy.

THE REAL DIRT is the true story of John Peterson, who grew up on a farm and loved the land and during the sixties allowed his farm to become a place where agriculture and rock music came together to make a moment of art and beauty and craziness, then almost had to give everything up until finally returning once more to the land, to collective agriculture, to organic crops and people and soil and growing plants and the land, the land, the glorious land. It is a marvellous, witty, cleverly made and strangely moving story with a powerful message: FOLLOW YOUR DREAM. Just do it. Even if it sometimes results in running around wearing bee-costumes and singing funny songs with your girlfriend, in a corn field ...

RIVERS AND TIDES is inspiring and beautiful in an entirely different way. You can google Andy Goldsworthy's name to see his work, but the film is powerful because you can see him PRODUCE his work -- out of random bits of icicle, out of shards of rock, out of simple dandelions, out of sunlight, water, time and his love for the materials he works with. His work is often ephemeral: he might scratch a pattern onto the surfaces of a line of fresh green leaves, place them on a rock in order so that the pattern links up and becomes a jagged line, then watch them as the wind ruffles through his art and blows it all away. He might build a structure out of twigs, big enough to be a nest for a man-sized bird, then watch with an expression of tolerant amusement as the incoming tide swirls it all away.

By making art which doesn't last, it seems to me that he cuts deep towards the heart of what makes a thing a piece of art -- it remains ultimately indescribable of course -- but the pleasure he gets, which becomes visible in the simplicity and beauty of his creations, is surely what it's all about. The sense of doing something because it MUST be done -- not because of deadlines or being immortalized in stone or earning a living or putting food on the table -- yet also involving all of that, since he has four small children, and as for deadlines, even if he didn't have commissions of work to fulfil (which he does, as one of Britain's highly acclaimed contemporary artists), he has the tides and seasons to contend with -- the sense of being caught in a tide of his own art as surely as the leaves he places so reverently on the water ... THAT is powerful and inspirational.

Ten-and-a-Halfth Bulletin--A Must-Share Item

My friend Anvar Alikhan sent me this by e-mail.

Stay hungry

The address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation
Studios, at the Stanford University Commencement, June 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the
finest Universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth
be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal.
Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed
around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So
why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed
college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She
felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so
eve

rything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his
wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that
they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list,
got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby
boy.

Do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later
found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my
father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final
adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents
promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college
that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class
parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months,
I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my
life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here
I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So
I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was
pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I
ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes
that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked
interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the
floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy
food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to
get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much
of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out
to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy
instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label
on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped
out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a
calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif
typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter
combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful,
historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and
I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.
But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer,
it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the
first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that
single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces
or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac,
it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never
dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class,
and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they
do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I
was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years
later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect
them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow
connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut,
destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and
it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started
Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10
years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion
company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest
creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then
I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple
grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company
with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our
visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling
out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was
out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult
life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let
the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the
baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob
Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public
failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But
something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn
of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected,
but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple
was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness
of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner
again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most
creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another
company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would
become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer
animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation
studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I
returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the
heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful
family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired
from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient
needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose
faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved
what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your
work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of
your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe
is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If
you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all
matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great
relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So
keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live
each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right."
It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have
looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the
last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"
And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know
I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever
encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost
everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment
or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what
is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I
know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are
already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in
the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even
know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a
type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer
than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my
affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to
try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10
years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything
is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means
to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy,
where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and
into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from
the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when
they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because
it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable
with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest
I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now
say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful
but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want
to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the
destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it
should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of
Life.

It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the
new.

Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will
gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic,
but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's
thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own
inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and
intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole
Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created
by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he
brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before
personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with
typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google
in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic,
and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog,
and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was
the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final
issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might
find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the
words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as
they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for
myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Tenth Bulletin -- Final Days in Berkeley

Yesterday (meaning November 22nd) ended on a giggly note: I spent the evening with four young staffers of the Centre for South Asian Studies, celebrating my brief stay in Berkeley, during which they hosted a show of my prints. I am not going to identify them in order to spare them undue exposure, but let's just say that three gourmet pizzas, one salad, one Scotch, four cocktails and two bottles of wine flowed. Oh and there were some rather smart snacks to go with the drinks, but I have almost forgotten what they were, because by the time they arrived, we had reached the Competitive Nose-Twitching stage of intimacy.

What IS Competitive Nose-Twitching some of you may ask? Well it's when two or more members of a group are able to control the movements of their nostrils to the extent that they can twitch them in one or more directions SEPARATELY. There are certain inevitable results of such competitions -- one is that other specialty movements of facial features are discovered -- Eye-Brow Raising for instance, and Ear-Lobe Flexing -- and the other is that I begin to giggle uncontrollably. A motor starts up inside me and it becomes progressively difficult for me to turn it off.

Actually, by earlier standards, last night's session was quite sedate. We didn't really go very far beyond the Nostril Competition -- in fact the only other real display was a rather splendid Trefoil Tongue-Fold during which I (a leading exponent) encountered another similarly skilled person for the first time in my life. I was hugely impressed. However I refrained from displaying my piece de resistance (sorry, no French accents -- don't know how to generate them in this window) -- the Tongue To Nose-Tip Flexion. Over the years I have come to realize that it really is rather gross in persons over the age of 10 years -- and I am 52(I realize, I should by now have got over the need to flaunt such talents. Alas, as must be clear, I have not).


I must admit, my interactions with CSAS have far exceeded normal expectations. The Art Show, which was inaugurated just over a week ago, has been a wholly pleasurable experience. From the effort of getting the prints matted in preparation for the show to getting them positioned on the walls of the CSAS office, it has been a smooth, happy and stress-free interaction -- no, I would go further: anyone seeking a break from the dreary routines of their lives, might consider approaching the CSAS to have a show of their artwork. Of course it probably helps if one has some art to show, and if the Powers That Be at the department are adequately happy with the work ... I am very glad that I was able to meet both these criteria. My prints look right at home on the walls of the cheery little office. Anyone wishing to see them or to find out more about the exhibition should stop by at: YES ("YES" being the name of the show). It will remain up through January 2006.

Meanwhile, back at the theatre department, sorrow reigns.

It didn't have to be that way. After all: six shows were sold out; three hundred-odd visitors per show were treated to a two-and-a-half-hour extravaganza of music, dance and comedy; many appear to have been well-satisfied with their exposure to what they believed was Authentic South-Asian Culture.

Normally, this would be enough to satisfy the average drama crew. But apparently it rankles that I, who happen to have written the play, was not properly grateful about the ways in which my work had been altered. The main source of displeasure seems to be that I blogged my opinions in a thoughtless and forthright fashion and that too, on the second night of the six-night run. But blogs are custom-built to be sites for venting steams of every sort! I would have to be a very peculiar person indeed if I said nothing at all about the distortion wrought upon my play -- and what would be the point of saying it AFTER it had ceased to be current? It is even possible that my unfeelingly blunt remarks were a source of publicity for the show. *sigh*

As to the distortions: it seems to me there's a rather odd misunderstanding about what a playwright can expect from a production. It's not true that once a play has been written and published it is automatically "out there" for the world to do with it what it likes -- which seems to be what some of the visitors to this blog believe. So long as the playwright is still alive, it is considered quite normal for him/her to exercise some control over how the work is performed.

If a production doesn't match the playwright's expectations and if his/her script is significantly altered, then he/she has a right to object and to insist that it be done differently. I didn't do that. It's not because I don't know what I want but because I have learnt to recognize the signs of a production that has set off down the wrong path. Once that has happened, short of shutting the production down altogether, one has just got to grit one's teeth and let the thing run. It isn't possible to enjoy the results -- but so far, I have believed that it's kinder to permit the show to go on, because so many people have already invested so much time and effort in it.

It comes down to this: some directors believe in allowing a play to breathe on its own, while others try to force their own breath into it. The first variety is wonderful to work with -- and I have no difficulty accepting the minor cuts and/or additions such directors might request. I've had four pleasant experiences -- the Greek stage production of HARVEST, the UK and Australian readings and the BBC World Service version (on radio). In each of these cases, I did almost nothing to affect the form of the finished version. The directors interpreted my script in a straightforward manner and didn't add any unexpected flourishes to the existing text. The result was cool, austere and true to my intention; a happy place for all concerned to be in.

[a pause here to mention the Swarthmore production: it had a lot going for it, but bad things had happened in the early days of its rehearsal process. The end result was that everyone left the show feeling wrung out and there were noticeable glitches during the performance -- Jeetu's head, for instance, didn't register on the video in the last scene. Of course, the cast and crew for that show were all professionals, so it isn't surprising that their performance was polished]

It is hard therefore, for me to understand the need for me to specify what I want from a production. I already know, from past experience, that some directors succeed in interpreting the script appropriately. It isn't unnatural for me to assume that all directors can succeed to the same extent. So ... why don't they?

I don't know. I believe it's because they don't allow the text to breathe. When they're performing familiar, classic plays, it doesn't matter because the audience already knows what the original is like. The problem arises when they approach new work. In such situations, what they produce can appear to be what the playwright intended. Only the handful of people who have read the script will know that what's happening onstage is not the way it was written and they may not remember the original accurately in any case. The result is deeply embarrassing/unpalatable to anyone who cares about his/her work. It doesn't matter who adores it and how many people appreciate it -- being praised for something you haven't done is the same as not being praised at all.

I feel very sad that the cast bore the brunt of my critique. I genuinely thought the actors were very gifted; it isn't their fault that they were encouraged to over-act recklessly. I realized from the time of the first rehearsal I attended that this interaction was going to end sadly because I knew that sometime or another I was going to have to be honest about my response to the production. I realize the cast cannot at this moment distance itself from its version of the play. I can only hope that sometime in the future, perhaps as soon as early next year, some glimmer will appear of what the performance COULD have been.

Ninth Bulletin -- Berkeley, Post-Show

It really is a shame that I don't manage to keep this blog up-dated more frequently. For instance: between this post and the last one, I've been to Irvine and back, having spent a wonderful weekend with a buddy from Bombay days -- but already the current of events has carried me far enough beyond that visit and into the next excitment, i.e., the Berkeley production of HARVEST.

Irvine was fun. I and my friend K have been planning to catch up with one another for ... ohhh ... maybe 10 years? 15 years? She's a molecular biologist and has been living in southern California for a longish while, but things took a dramatic turn in her life two years ago, when she had twins. I had never met any other members of her family before -- so this visit was a sudden immersion, a warm and very happy one, into all kinds of new dimensions: husband, mother-in-law, children, wow! And all extremely and unusually interesting, charming, great to be with. It turned out that the weekend that suited K best was the one on which the twins' second birthday was being celebrated. So the day after I got there we -- K and her mother-in-law A, visiting from India and me bringing up the rear -- got into gear for the party. It is SO astonishing to be in the presence of very small children -- the sense of so much potential packed into a small, mobile unit which can talk a certain amount and is recording everything and yet ... is not quite of this world, is still faintly mystical with newly-arrived otherness.

Before leaving me at the airport K, A and I went for a stroll along the sea-front, enjoyed a balmy sun-lit view of the great blue vastness of the Pacific. Then it was time for me to leave. John Wayne Airport with the great hero striding towards an impossible horizon, twice-life-size, in bronze. Peanut snacks and apple cider on board the flight. Arrival in Berkeley, where E collected me in the car we have rented for the remainder of our stay in California, during a sudden drizzling down-wash of rain.

Back in Berkeley -- just four days later, but so much change! The night before I flew out, we -- meaning E, our hosts Laura and Kiran and myself -- shifted out of one charming residence and into the next, also supremely attractive, but just a bit further north and up a hillside, in Kensington. The new home is constructed such that guests (we are the first!) get a little cottage all to themselves, complete with kitchenette and a great view. At the time I left, only survival furniture had been moved from one residence to the next. When I got back, civilization was well-entrenched: chairs, bedside lamp, floor rugs, the works ... I was amused to notice what kinds of items, normally unnoticed, were the ones we missed most at the time of the first move: teaspoons, kitchen towels, garbage bins and mugs! The basics for drinking a hot cup of tea, so vital for keeping morale high during times of stress.

And so ... to the play. Well, last night (Friday, 11th November) was the opening night and I finally saw it with all the tech in place. For those of you who attended the unfortunate performance in Delhi and have been interested ever since in the play's history, let me say this: it was better than Delhi. HOWEVER ... but I need to backtrack here in order to be coherent.

I saw two rehearsals before last night's performance (that was about three weeks ago, when I first arrived in Berkeley). Both times, I will frankly confess, I was deeply disturbed. The play was -- alas! Yet again! -- NOT what I'd like it to be. However, one great relief for me was that I was able to express my views to Sudipto; and he took it very well -- because I had also, at the same moment that I told him what I thought, also decided that I would NOT interfere with his interpretation. I told him that too.

He has added at least an hour of performance time to the play, including lines, movements and moods that are in no way part of the original. For instance, he has permitted his actors to use a number of Hindi-isms such as "arre", "beta" etc -- which I find very hard to accept because (a) I am not a Hindi-speaker and specifically resisted falling back on ethnic touches of that sort while writing the play (b) the use of Hindi is a reminder that the family would never normally be speaking English and besides the actual words and terms are cliches, utterly colourless in themselves. I far prefer the play to inhabit a language-neutral space by remaining in ONE language, rather than attempting to balance uneasily between two.

Yet, for all that I disliked -- and it was/is a real dislike -- I recognized that this production, being fuelled by students and their youthful energy, had a kind of vulgar logic. The four principal characters were played by South Asians [-- I've deleted a portion here at the request of a visitor --] and it seemed very important to them to explore the specific ethnic identities of their characters. It's hard for me to express what I want clearly, but it's something like this: since I don't feel the need to underline the fact that I'm Indian/SouthAsian, it is utterly unimportant -- no, more than unimportant, actually UNATTRACTIVE -- for me to make a big deal about that identity. I want to go the other way -- I want to universalize the experience of being whatever -- Asian/Indian/whatever -- and to explore the notion of sameness-in-otherness. Whereas for this production, what seems to have overwhelmed the tone is the heavy spice of Indianness.

I believe it doesn't help the play at all, because the language and ideas don't support it but ... and here's why I didn't interfere ... I wanted to see whether or not I would be alone in my belief, and whether Sudipto's conviction that the play has a context (meaning, an INDIANNESS) that I, its creator, want to deny, would prevail.

OKAY! So back to yesterday's performance. Seeing the play with all its technical effects in place was definitely a plus. There was an interesting take on the GINNI scenes: instead of being shown any views of Her Blondeness, we only heard her voice -- and four different girls read GINNI's part, adding a curious layered effect, so that it was unclear how many people were speaking -- while the Prakash family members looked up at the bright light which represented her presence. Because this permitted them to face the audience, we had a stronger sense of their reaction than is usually the case with the GINNI scenes in other productions of the play AND -- a great bonus -- the audio was delivered live, from backstage, so the annoying tension of pre-taped video was avoided. The final scene, between JAYA and VIRGIL was unusually powerful -- better than most that I've seen -- and VIRGIL's voice was also live, a gravelly male voice, strangely wistful, I thought and quite effective.

It still irks me, of course, that the play is (a) soooo long (b) soooo ethnic. That's not what I wrote and it certainly isn't what I like to see. It becomes an ordeal at this length, like one of those interminable dance-dramas I used to hate so much as a child. Whereas HARVEST's ideal run-time is about one and a half hours, this is almost THREE! By mid-play, I found myself wanting to drown the whole, whining, screaming, wailing, whimpering family of four grotesques -- that's what they had all become, human gargoyles -- it seemed to me no-one could possibly care about what fate lay in store for such creatures. But ...

At this moment, I don't know if I am alone in my dislike or not. I have realized, from listening to a couple of others talking about the play, that the desire to see a production drenched in ethnic context is apparently very great. Enough to overturn other aesthetic considerations ... maybe? I don't know.

At this moment, the second night's performance is still going on ... and I am sitting in the director's office, tapping out these notes, feeling slightly naughty as I do this, feeling pleased to finally be able to get these views off my conscience and out onto the net. I've been suppressing my opinions until opening night, because of course I didn't want to presume upon the performance until I'd SEEN it, complete. And once the performance is over -- there's another hour and a half to go -- I and Sudipto will engage in a talk-back on-stage with those of the audience members who choose to remain. E is in the audience again, and this time Laura, Maya and Becky are all present too ...

Much to look forward to -- and much left to report upon! In just another few hours.