My life...

My life has completely transformed since I left college. It's not just that a lot has happened to me, at work and otherwise, but it's so much more about the people that I live with, interact with everyday. My housemates, who are also colleagues at work, and really good friends. They are also designers. Artists. Not the kind you usually think of. Not the stereotypical ones. A bunch that I've never really had the chance to interact with. They awe me, they inspire me. And most importantly, they've opened my mind to a world that I never knew existed. Suddenly, I see colours. I notice shapes and patters. I think in more than just writing. I express in more than just writing. Today for instance. With sound. An analog synthesizer. Producing sound waves that I'm not used to hearing. Not melodious, no. Definitely not. But alluring....captivating. Sounds that my ears are not used to. Sounds that my brain is not used to. Experimental music. Electronic. Sounds from the future. Sounds that makes me travel...through space and through time. Did I like it, enjoy it? I don't know. They aren't feelings that I can describe in the language we have. But not just this music. A lot of the things that I've experienced in the past months. There's no language to express them. There are no words. Because most people live their entire lives without ever experiencing these things. Every day, something new happens. Something else that amazes me. The richness of my the life I'm now leading astounds me.

Law and culture

Most portrayals of law in Hindi films has been showing law as being formal, rigid. It shows how the law bends people's spirits and how "justice" is often not found through the law. Contrast this to some of the movies in Hollywood... A Few Good Men, 12 Angry Men, Erin Brockovich and others where the adversarial system seems to be shown to deliver. Do the difference in these portrayals affect how the people of India and America view the law? How much are these narratives also affected by the new medium of TV debates, also called media trials? Again, it raises the question not only of how much TV debates affect the population, but also how the media affects lawmaking and the judiciary.

Narrative jurisprudence, legal storytelling are apparently becoming important facets of teaching law in the US. In India, not so much. The "false and pernicious" dichotomy that exists between the practice of law and the way movies portray law may not exist in India...but for the opposite reason. Not because of the use of storytelling techniques in courtrooms (which may exist, and need to be analyzed more) but because of the negative portrayals of law in Bollywood.

This is one of the paradoxes that our country faces today - a population that is more and more disillusioned of the law, and yet, increasingly obsessed with using only the law to resolve all conflicts, and finds it difficult to imagine non-conventional, non-legal ways of conflict resolution.

Pour toi information

I half decided zat I veel shift outh of ze blooger und I veel writhe in ze wordpress. zo eef euwyu wantth to zee whatth I writhe eyeuyu cum to ze wordpress...selfsame url buth ath wordpress.com.

at wordpress :) [too subtle for ya?]

                                  

Dance

I've wondered why I love dancing so much. I think I may have received my answer in a book not about dancing at all. Dancing, I think, is perhaps a little like playing the agogo at an umbanda. Dancing is a form of expression....of life, of love, of beauty and freedom....of desire. When you dance, you free your body of inhibitions, letting yourself be moved by the melodies of the universe. But by learning how to dance, by learning the steps of this ancient art, you do more. You control the melodies. When your feet move in rhythm with the tabla, you are moving in rhythm with the harmony of the earth. By controlling your movements while in that spirit of ecstasy, you control the flow of the world. You move the music of nature with your body. When you express desire, desire is created around you and moves with that hasty beat of the tabla, when you sway with passion the flute echoes your love, when you fall in agony, you take the world into the abyss with you. When you dance, you understand...you know that there is something deeper something more powerful than all the humans put together, something more beautiful, and in expressing that beauty you create it. You become a believer. 

I'M SOOOO IN LOVE WITH HER!!!!!

Jill Sobule is fucking beautiful and fuckin awesome!!! 

The modern age ad lingo

I've seen many advertisements in my life, and been warned against quite a few of them. But this one takes the cake.

I watched tearfully as a daughter brings a smile to her mother's face, I smiled at two old friends digging up their little treasure, I was touched by a writer going to thank her old school teacher. That is, until I saw what it was...an advertisement for a hair product. Gosh! You took our revolutionary spirit and marketed it as beer, you took our freedom and gave us sports shoes, you took our villages and sold it to us as coca-cola, you took our forests and made refrigerators of them, you took our mountains and made bottled water, and now you take our feelings, our innermost thoughts and emotions and make beauty products! Will anything be left of me that is my own?

Everything that was

The more I read, the more I feel convinced that in losing the Indian civilization to colonization (not just British, but even before that), we lost something quite wonderful. Everything we know now, almost a 1000 years after the end of many of those great civilizations, we seem to have known then and known much better. It was a civilization that was highly evolved. There was a very well structured language, the teaching of which was spread through many lands to improve communication (much like English, except that the English is complete chaos when compared to the elegant beauty of Sanskrit's grammatical and semantical structure), trade between different countries was of prime importance and in fact, geographical routes were created to help increase trade (thus showing an understanding of 'comparative advantage'), the benefits of division of labour and specialization were realized (hence, the varna system), schooling (both gurukul and other forms of apprenticeship) was mandatory for children and was tailored to ensure the greatest amount of skill-development, literature and arts were cultivated, so was science and technology. Philosophy, medicine, maths, music, astronomy, physics, economics, political science, warcraft, history, among others were separate specialized bodies of systemic study, much like they are today, but I believe, in a much more advanced stage. And then, civilizations that were less evolved, except in military prowess, decided they wanted more land. The rulers, looking at a civilization much more evolved, failed to understand its significance and went about slowly destroying these wonderful innovations and discoveries. Humankind was pushed back by 1000s of years, and had to start over.