The mortal remains

He searched the pit and came up with a few pieces of bones, mostly vertebrae. That was all that remained of my uncle. My cousin, who had cremated his dad the day before, looked on indifferently. All the tears and lamentations were over before cremation. We had come to the crematorium today to collect the mortal remains and consign it to the sea. I expected the vettiyan (what do you call him? Undertaker isn't correct, graveyard worker sounds like a nightshift call center operator) to hand over a pot of ash, like in the movies. I was unprepared for this digging for bones with barehands.

He found about 10 pieces and broke them into smaller pieces and separated them into two lots. One was to be consigned to the sea, other sent to Kasi to be consigned in the Ganges. I wondered what happens to the skull - does it burn compeletely into ash or is it taken away for some other purpose? I shivered.

After pouring milk(innikku sethaa, nalaikku paalu) and tender coconut on the ashes, we went to the Marina beach. The beach looked stunningly beautiful. The rains had kept away the joggers and walkers, so we were alone except for a young couple. My cousin threw the pieces of his dad's remains into the sea and walked without looking back, as adviced. A sudden silence engulfed us, both of us not knowing what to talk. As we walked back I took a look at the young couple and said, "I wonder what lies they told their parents to come so early to the beach". It was a inane comment, but helped in breaking the silence between us. He laughed, breaking away from the grief that had shrouded him for the past three days.

The second lot of the remains had to be sent to Kasi to the community hall caretaker. The procedure was to send the remains to him by post along with a DD, and he will consign the remains to the river Ganges and send us back the Vibhuti from the temple. The cynic in me thought that the guy in Kasi probably sent Vibhuti packets on receiving the DD, and the remains will be thrown away. But rituals are to be followed, so I went to the post office with the cover containing the remains.

The speed post clerk wanted to check what was inside the cover. I couldn't possibly tell him that it contained the remains of my uncle. So I said it was a packet of Vibhuti being sent to Kasi. He asked me to open the cover and show it. Now I understood why the Vettiyaan had broken the bones into pieces and packed them into s a small plastic cover in the shape of a square. I showed the cover to the clerk, who pressed it without opening and was satisfied.

A is A - who said so?

Couple of years back, I heard a speaker in one of the community functions. The man was boasting that he was socially very active and was a member of clubs varying from Lions Club to Maatuthavani welfare association kind of clubs. What interested me was his claim that he had spoken in more than 15000 public meetings so far. The audience clapped with wonder at this claim. I started doing the math - he was 45 years old, he wasn't a child prodigy so he must have started his speaking career around the age of 20. So that is a total of 25 years of public speaking or 9125 days. So he must have spoken in about 2 meetings a day daily for the last 25 years. I was astonished at his stamina and started to idolise him.

That was an extreme example, but there are so many 'truths' that go around that aren't exactly true. At any point of time, some myth or the other is being built which will later become true. Most of the myth building happens in religious space because it is considered heresy to question the religion you were born in and unsecular to question other religions.

Take for example the assertion by the Kanchi Mutt that it was established by Adi Sankara 2500 years back. Every few years Kanchi Mutt releases a book authenticating its claims to be 2500 years old. Only problem is most of the records date Adi Sankara to 8th century AD. A detailed de bunking of Kanchi Mutt's claims is here. . Even those who aren't taken up with the current Sankaracharya Jeyandra Saraswati idolise his predecessor Chandrasekarendra Saraswati, the Maha Periyaval. But it was during his reign that the rewriting of mutt's history occurred. If one manipulates history, even if it is for the sake of establishing dharma, doesn't his dharma become weak?

Or take the laughable theory being propagated by evangelists in coastal districts of Tamilnadu, claiming the development of Tamil religion and literature was only after the arrival of St. Thomas to Tamilnadu. According to them even Tiruvalluvar was a Christian. Writer Jeyamohan wrote a detailed post (tamil blog) debunking that theory some time back. However the idea seems to slowly propagating into mainstream. You can be sure that in a few years this will become an established truth like the history of Kanchi Mutt.

A is A as Aristotle said in his law of identity doesn't hold true in the real world, I thought. Then I stumbled on this page, which goes on to show that even the law of identity may not have originated from Aristotle. So what is to be believed?

Disclaimers :
1. I am not a follower of any religious organisation.
2. I am not a Christian or a Muslim or a Zorastrian.
3. I am not a student of philosophy or logic.

Dew Drop

What a beauty
is the ephemeral dew drop,
on the lap of the flower
that'll wither away tonight.


அந்திவரை வாழப்போகும்
பூவின் மடியில்
அந்த காலைப்பொழுதிலேயே
மடிந்துவிடப்போகும்
பனித்துளிதான்
எத்தனை அழகு!

-தேவதேவன்

Books

Warning: A long self indulgent narcissistic post

The firs time I remember asking for a book was when I was 5 years old and waiting in Tuticorin Bus Stand along with my father. It was some comics that I wanted, he refused to buy it for me. For some reason that is one of the earliest memories I have.

Till my 2nd Standard I was content reading the school text books of higher class kids. My real exposure to books came during that summer holiday. My father had gone to Libya and we moved to Pudukkottai. My mother's village was near by and I spend that summer vacation there with no other kid in sight. To while away my time I went to the Library in the next street. The entire summer was spent devouring fairy tales and Ambuli Mama kind of books in Tamil. By now I was hooked and used to read any printed matter I could lay my hand upon. I started reading the serialised stories in Ananda Vikatan and Kumudam and the novels (?) published in Malaimathi. Once when my third standard class teacher missed the last part of Manian's serialised story, I told her the ending. She was shocked, the story was about extra marital affairs :-).

The next phase was the pocket crime novels which hit the Tamil publishing scene in mid 80s. Rajeshkumar, Pattukkottai Prabhakar and Suba were the trinities and I still remember their characters. After a year or so I felt bored and could predict the story line after the first few pages. There were a few novels that I read during this period that stood out from the crowd - Balakumaran's Karaiyora Mudhalaigal & Thayumanavan, Sivasankari's Tharaiyil Irangum Vimanangal, Sujatha's stories.

We moved to Madras when I was 13 years old. It was here that I read my first English fiction. It wasn't any classic novel but Sydney Sheldon's Windmills of Gods. I borrowed it from a neighbour who thought long about whether it was appropriate for me. Before I was 15 I had read almost all of Harold Robbins and Sydney Sheldon that were available in my Bengali Neighbour's book case. But the two books I remember vividly are the Victorian Erotica - Charles Deveraux's Venus in India (There is something about this book and Bongs. The only reference I have found so far in blogs about this book is in Sadoldbongand The Pearl(I found the entire collection online couple of years back, oh the joys of internet). I used to slip these away between two other innocuous books.

Four years of Engineering college in Kilakarai was dry and arid in terms of books. The entire hostel had some 10 guys who read English Fiction and a total of 20 paper backs. It was in college that I read my first war novel, War Cry by Leon Uris and thought of him as a great war novelist. The Architecture branch was opened in our college when I was in my second year of Engineering. The lecturer for Architecture told the class on the first day to read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead if they really wanted to become Architects. When I heard about this I was intrigued and borrowed the book from him, who belonged to the first batch of Architecture students in our college.

It was during a night shift in my first job that I got introduced to contemporary Tamil Literature by a senior engineer. Till then my Tamil Literature limit was Sujatha and Balakumaran. He introduced me to Thi Janakiaraman, Asokamithran, La Sa Ramamrutham and Sundara Ramasamy. To say it was a shock to me is an understatement. After years of reading mediocre stuff in Tamil, this was like a fresh breath to me. Next few years were spent in reading all the works of these authors.

By this time I had moved back to Chennai and started blogging in 2002. Blogging expanded my reading horizon. It was through blogs I learnt about and started reading authors like Borges, Marquez, Amitav Gosh, Vikram Seth and so on. At the same time Tamil blogs led me to Jeyamohan, Imayam, S Ramakrishnan, Adhavan, Pa Singaram, Nakulan and many others.

The above recollection was triggered after reading Umberto Eco's Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna, where an art dealer loses his memory but remembers all the books he has read and tries to recollect his life by re reading the books from his child hood. It is a self indulgent, meandering story, but you will enjoy it if you love books. One of the books he recollects is a comic set in India with a villainous king named Tremal Naik :-)

The Rapids of a Great River

It all started with a message in twitter about this article in Mint about a collection of translated Tamil poems.

The friend wanted to know what the columnist was referring to when she said "The title, taken from A.K. Ramanujan’s Poems of Love and War, is a clear reference to the great river that is Tamil poetry, connecting its source—Sangam literature—with the currents of modern writing."

First I tried to re translate The Rapids of a Great River into Tamil and came up with பெருநதிப் பிரவாகத்தின் சுழல்கள். But this phrase didn't belong to any Sangam poetry and as the friend said, wasn't poetic at all.

A little bit of googling and I found the source. I was embarassed to find that it was from the famous யாதும் ஊரே யாவரும் கேளிர் of கணியன் பூங்குன்றனார். As with most of the famous poems, I knew only the first and last lines.

யாதும் ஊரே ; யாவரும் கேளிர் ;
தீதும் நன்றும் பிறர்தர வாரா ;
நோதலும் தணிதலும் அவற்றோ ரன்ன ;
சாதலும் புதுவது அன்றே ; வாழ்தல்
இனிதுஎன மகிழ்ந்தன்றும் இலமே; முனிவின்,
இன்னா தென்றலும் இலமே; ‘மின்னொடு
வானம் தண்துளி தலைஇ, ஆனாது
கல்பொருது இரங்கும் மல்லற் பேர்யாற்று
நீர்வழிப் படூஉம் புணைபோல, ஆருயிர்
முறைவழிப் படூஉம்’ என்பது திறவோர்
காட்சியின் தெளிந்தனம் ஆகலின், மாட்சியின்
பெரியோரை வியத்தலும் இலமே;
சிறியோரை இகழ்தல் அதனினும் இலமே.

AK Ramanujam's translation

Every town our home town
every man, a kinsman
Good and evil do not come from others
Pain and relief of pain come of themselves
Dying is nothing new
We do not rejoice that life is sweet
nor in anger
call it bitter
Our lives, however dear,
follow their own course,
rafts drifting
in the rapids of a great river
sounding and dashing over rocks
after a down pour
from skies slashed by lightnings -
We know this from the vision
of men who see,
So,
We are not amazed by the great
and we do not scorn the little.

Reading the translation I was struck by the undercurrent of fatalism prevalent in Indian Literature.