Gee, I can’t seem to find my soul!

Last afternoon I came face to face with a question that most people take lifetimes to ponder – is food more important than religion? It may seem like an esoteric question, but once I’m through – provided you’re still with me – you’ll realize that it is one of the most profound questions of the century...

With all of us lugging in holiday spirit and suitcases to work, I decided I had the luxury of a really long luncheon – complete with food, reading and mindless chatter. So, in preparation for it, I got the best meatball sub ever made and plonked it on my hallmark table by the window; normally, I wouldn’t leave such a marvelous piece of creation unguarded, but an irrepressible surge of thirst overcame all sense of security and I’d just disappeared for a few seconds to grab a bottle of water, when....

I return in mouth-watering anticipation only to find a pious co-worker blocking my view of the sandwich and, worse still, performing his salah. Now, this could take anywhere between 5 minutes and 5 hours, depending on his degree of spirituality. For a split second, my instinct was to dash around him and grab my sandwich – lest you think I am some kind of werewolf, imagine marinara and tender meat balls and provolone cheese spilling out from a toasted roll of Italian bread that can hardly contain its own richness. If you still don’t sympathize, I’m forced to conclude that you haven’t had the world’s best meatball sub (if you want to reverse that -- and I strongly urge that you do – I can be contacted for hours and location ;)).

Getting back to my predicament, my spiritual co-worker probably thought it was a pork roll sausage, cos at least from the angle I was in, he seemed to be directing a lot of his prayer to it. So, being the very considerate soul I am, I decided to wait it out just a wee bit longer and grabbed the next best thing – a copy of the Atlantic, deciding to satisfy my hunger for knowledge instead (some compensation).

He did finally leave after an interminable five minutes and left me thinking about our priorities as human beings. Here was a guy that obviously rendered a brown paper bag, depicting one of the three essential survival factors of life, insignificant in the face of religion. As for me, the only reason I waited was cos it was his religion and obviously extremely important to him. My own religion, I gave up the day I figured out I wasn’t getting any kind of nirvana till I ate that inexcusably juicy piece of angus; the biggest irony is that people pray to the cow without realizing jus how sal(i)vating it can be :)

Like I have said in excruciating detail many times before, I rarely make masochistic promises to myself, certainly none that include giving up food or living with rodents or freezing to death. It’s a short life we lead on this earth (though sometimes it does seem incredibly long) and there is enough misery to deal with, what with destiny and nature and god and the universe all competing to dole out their share. So, other than making sure that my right to wave my fist stops at my neighbor’s nose, I don’t really claim to have any I’m-holier-than-thou principles.

There was one thing, however, that I once told myself I’ll never ever do, mainly cos I felt I needed a “cool” principle, since everyone else seemed to be having one. “Paper bags,” my environmentalist friend would say, fixing the salesgirl with an ominous stare, rendering preposterous, even the mere suggestion of an existing alternative. “Let’s jus walk down a few more blocks, we’ll find the restaurant, I just don’t believe in 411” another would suggest, even if we are starving to death on a cold February night. “I don’t drink Starbucks coffee”, someone else would say a tad condescendingly to the warm and refreshing cappuccino in my hand; I consider telling them the “actual” crime is to stand there and shiver in the cold when a perfectly divine cup of caffeine, albeit capitalistic, is at your disposal, but change my mind. After all, my world-view is much too personal to me :)

So, my own little principle was that I’d never eat veal in my life (bad enough that I am politically incorrect in my thoughts and opinions). Moreover, I do think it’s unfair to feed a perfectly normal cow hormones and make it grow stunted all its life jus cos you wanted a certain added flavor in your meat (on a completely different note, I did believe till a week ago that bovine meat was perfectly divine as is). So, the one thing I told myself I’d never do, unfortunately had to do with food, the one thing I rarely deprive myself of. Isn’t that supposed to be the point of a principle, anyway? Deprivation, sacrifice, masochism? However, it makes it easier to break as well. And hence, last week I lost the last vestige of my ‘soul’ by giving up that little promise.

Before you make any judgments, I think you should hear me out. As it happened, we had this absolutely marvelous holiday luncheon planned in this absolutely marvelous Italian restaurant, where everyone swore the veal parmesan was absolutely divine. I must say I was a tad tempted but I decided I’d hear the list of entrees and give my principle some credence over good food. The waiter reeled off the list: veal parmesan --- long pause --- cacophonous rattle including chicken-somethin, mussels in red sauce, mussels in white whine and something indecipherable at the end. Since I sincerely believe that white meat should not be considered when there is some perfectly good red meat available (Indian cuisine exclusive) and that sea-food has no business in a meal beyond the first course (walnut encrusted salmon and mango-salsa-laced-shrimp-sushi excepted) I decided I just had to go for it. I felt a tiny little pang of guilt, but once the guy waltzed in with a dozen plates of aromatic, sizzling slabs of veal, the regret was long forgotten.

Anyway, the good thing (other than the incredibly delicious meat) was that I wasn’t the last remaining ‘soul-less’ person on earth. Everyone at the table not only ate veal for probably the thousandth time in their lives with not an ounce of remorse, but also had interesting anecdotes to share about the many ways of cervically dislocating (euthanasia, for the uninitiated, though it probably doesn’t sound like mercy-killing) the mice in the lab. Trust a bunch of stem-cell-researching, cancer-curing, evolution-touting, meat-eating scientists to always bring up the rear on the list of soulful people.

Just to clarify, I am not totally soul-less. Every time I have to snip the edge of a mouse’s tail, I feel like a monster. But then I put it in perspective --- half a million people die of heart and lung disease each year, and every experiment that involves a little rodent brings us closer to saving a human life. I gotta do what I gotta do. And in another part of the world, someone else burns a research lab to save that very mouse. They gotta do what they gotta do.

There are some things we believe in and some we don’t. Ultimately, in my opinion, the biggest sin is to not believe at all. Food and God apart, passion is but one of the most important survival factors...I might never understand what prompted my co-worker to abandon all in the middle of a work day and make a trip to the lounge and do his bidding to God, what I can understand is his intensity of feeling – that is the plane we share. You could sit in the Himalayas and count rosary beads, roll your tongue over every inch of that perfectly done steak or spend hours injecting disease-curing genes into little rodents – as long as you believe...

On being judicially judicious

The Shawshank Redemption is the kind of movie you sit through in rapt attention the first time, that you continue to quote from years later and one that leaves you with a very disturbing after-taste, every time you watch it -- not because Andy Dufresne gets convicted of a murder he didn’t commit and goes to prison for life, not because he escapes with an ingenious plot, but because the former is so frighteningly possible in real life and the latter that much implausibly surreal.

Since I don’t believe in justice being served on judgment day or in the after-life, and I barely believe in an omnipotent entity called God who watches over us and balances it all out, I very desperately need the reassurance that man gets his due, both good and bad, in this life, on earth, under the watchful eye of a book of laws (and I don’t mean the gold-gilded black one with the fairy tale about the stable boy). I wish the rest of human kind would get real and concur that we only get one shot at serving justice and even if it is by thought-capable, tangible, fellow human beings it must hold a certain level of credibility.

A week ago, I watched the Jessica Sanders’ documentary, After Innocence and I must say, the movie not only offered a lot of food for thought, but also took away my long-held belief that I held unthreatened monopoly over criticism of the many flaws of the justice system. Last year, I followed the Scott Peterson trial with a certain degree of interest and watched a person get convicted of murder and given the death sentence without a shred of evidence. A stone-faced expression, an extra-marital affair and being in the wrong place at the wrong time do not a murderer make.

What is scarier than the ruthlessness of a man that did or did not kill his pregnant wife, is that human beings are so involved in waging an all-out war against “evil” that they don’t seem to stop and wonder if the evil they are fighting is rightly placed. It could be an innocent guilt-free civilian who hasn’t hurt a fly in his entire life (his only fault being that he doesn’t flex his facial muscles often enough), a husband that wants to carry on what remains of his life after tending to a comatose life-partner for a decade or a 12-year old boy on anti-depressants.

The law not only follows a fault-ridden system in its hurry to dole out penalties, it also brands a person with evil, satanic and heinous tendencies, on his way to the prison cell. I sometimes wonder if the prison sentence is much needed solace for a human being that has been stripped of all self-esteem, virtue and credibility by the mirthless eyes of the court, media and society, that shun him before even proving him guilty of his crimes or trying to understand what heart-rending circumstances lead him to them.

It’s funny that while books like A Time to Kill and movies like A Few Good Men, which look beyond the crude physical act of murdering a person and delve deep into the human psyche are given a lot of credence, we so easily disregard a person’s emotional and mental state of mind at the time of crime in real-life situations.

A few weeks ago, a man was released from prison after spending 25 years in jail for a crime he did not commit. It saddened me that I found it on a corner of the yahoo news home page and didn’t see it mentioned anywhere in the mainstream media. With American news channels as person-centric as they tend to be (Natalie Holloway, Michael Jackson, Ashley Smith & the Runaway bride, for crying out loud!), what IS evil is that a man spends a wasteful quarter century in prison, and it goes unnoticed.

After Innocence focuses on exactly these problems with the justice system – through the representation of the lives (or lack thereof) of several such unfortunate exonerees, it brings out the painfully careless way in which a court of law punishes those that merely have the misfortune of being caught under its radar – basing life sentences on mere eye-witness accounts of victims who are obviously disillusioned post-traumatization, refusing to do a DNA test when it could so easily be done and in one case even ignoring the results of a forensic exam and detaining a convict in prison years after the records clearly ruled out his involvement in the crime.

To my libertarian mind, which defies regulation even when carried out in pristine fashion, vigilante justice, although anarchic, seems a more logical and satisfying solution to the problem, as opposed to a regulated court of law that sadly makes inexcusable mistakes...

In an age of microchips and supercomputers, why are we still using flawed testimonies and circumstantial evidences to make cases? Why aren’t we using science where we can, to make our lives easier and fairer?

In an era of protesting anything Science (abortion, stem-cell research, GM foods) are we merely apprehensive about playing God or are we so terrified by the prospect of an Asimov-grade takeover of man by machines that we are willing to forego an obviously fool-proof solution to a problem and look the other way?

Science is the tool in man’s hands, and it is there for us to use. The micropipette on my bench seems to be in no hurry to turn around and slap me in the face. Let’s use it to add an objective dimension to our otherwise human-error prone society...

Fun with matrimonial dot-commers

When you’re a single desi girl in your late twenties (yeah, officially began on the “late” a couple months ago, a fact everyone in my family seems to be bothered by but me), your parents invariably try to get you to agree to tie that proverbial knot and nothing is going to deter them except, well, another girl of nuptial age, or maybe, just maybe, another girl of nuptial age, cos let’s face it, among the ferocious cyclones and the threat of dengue and the relentless power-cuts, marriage of their incorrigible daughters in alien lands seems to be the singular problem bogging down Indian mid-lifers.

So, if you’re unfortunate enough to be in the subcontinent, they keep foisting on you that good-natured (uh-oh), decent, well-educated guy from that family of good upbringing, who, by the way, did clear the background check (I am not sure what that entails but as far as I can tell, it’s not along the lines of hobbies or favorite foods) till you finally cave in and agree – after all it’s just your marriage and you’re only going to spend the rest of your life with the guy, nothing major. If you’re lucky enough to have an ocean or two between you, however, your parents learn to be a little more creative, namely, resort to that thing that makes the world a tinier place, and usually has a dot-com at the end of it.

And in order to humor your folks (not to mention a certain tangible fear that began to surface when you found yourself single at age 25 and 2 days, and has grown progressively since, not totally unaided by parent-instilled paranoia) you register at one of the online sites. There’s a wide range to choose from, thanks to Indian ingenuity and cyber-competence, not to mention the fastidiousness of ‘single-and-looking’ desis, who seem a tad pickier (as evidenced by the universal dropdown tab, including yes, no, maybe & don’t know for everything from vegetarianism to spirituality), contrary to the parents that are ruled by criteria totally unrelated to living in this day and age; for one, they don’t seem to be able to translate “good, clean, habits” to “forget ever going to a sports bar or night club.”

So, more for the ‘heck of it’, your love of writing (and parents) and amusement with anything foreign to your character, than any real belief that you’re going to find a potential life partner this way, you use your writing skills to their articulate best and put up a rambling, descriptive profile, that includes everything from your ’90s awe of Pete Sampras to your current radically libertarian views and believe it or not, find a pastime quite unlike any you’ve ever dreamed of (unlike that all-important man you’re looking for, who surfaces every so often).

Shaadi.com becomes one of your daily internet stops, and you soon find yourself accommodating it between the more routine ones like gmail and blogspots and bbc-world. Because, despite the sitcoms and late night comedies and the incredibly stupid republicans out there, you are still looking for something to add to your repertoire of daily laughter – duly fulfilled by the guy that comes “from a very close knit family with lots of values”, the one that is “garnished with positive aura”, the fella that is looking “for a nice lady that is loving to her parents and family” or the father that wants a daughter-in-law “preferably in the IT field” (you do give him the benefit of doubt and wonder if the guy has trouble differentiating between linux and unix, and feel a pang of pain that you don’t qualify).

If you’re fortunate, you have a small clique of single, strictly-25-or-older, female friends that you either talk into registering (in the rare case that their parents were less militant than average and haven’t been initiated yet) or better still, share your password with, so they can join in the fun as well. After all, other than the occasional federer-fervor or matrix-obsession, they fit your profile to a tee (let’s face it, they’re not single and 25-or-older and desi and female for nothing).

And then it happens. Your pal forwards you a Shaadi.com profile and you read it in its entirety. You’re stumped. You re-read it, lest you missed something the first time. Again, nothing. Now you get a little worried – you either lost your sense of humor or your grammatical authority – both, in your opinion, utterly precious to your qualifications as a human being. On the third reading, still coming up with nothing and slightly short of breath, you shoot her an email: Relatively well-read and well-informed, inclined to both sports and politics, decent sense of humor, near-equal weightage to the couch and the outdoors, likes food and the television, and even the English is almost flawless....What is up with that?

And then you spot it. The guy has a damn cat. You haven’t lost it after all. You burst out laughing. Now, a rotty would be dandy. A lab, glorious. A golden retriever, just about perfect. But a cat?

There’s a reply from her almost immediately (she’s single and desi after all ;)).

I know you will beat me up for this.. but that guy in the profile seemed really your type... (esp since he named his cat SPUNKIE)

Now you’re really outraged. She’s drunk the cool-aid!
You could put the spunkie in bold black letters, alright, but I still hear the cat a whole lot louder....

And now, having irrevocably jeopardized my chances of ever finding anyone on shaadi.com, I’ll go back and see if someone missed an all-important comma.

All said, this is not so much out of the cynicism or arrogance that comes with being single, but rather that all-essential, self-disparaging and healthy laughter you need to have with your female friends when you find yourself unattached beyond a certain age....No offense to shaadi.com and the dozen earnest matchmaking sites out there, which would, no doubt, allow a simpler human being find her soulmate and live happily ever after. And to be totally fair, I find it hard to resist a smile when I chance upon a fellow Maher-worshipper or the guy that proclaims to watch tennis with the same nail-biting fervor that seats me on the precarious edge of a sofa through Wimbledon, or turn off when another doesn’t share my penchant for Crichton or T-bone steak.

I am just a little more romantic than a feeble attempt at trying to fit my characteristics on a pre-designed template...and expecting someone to even begin to imagine a lifetime with me based on it... a few hours at dinner, maybe, a couple hour-long phone calls, sure, a 10,000-odd word email, absolutely...

But a page-long description with my co-ordinates and occupation and dietary habits? I’m a little more complicated than that.....I wouldn’t be doing justice to myself....or a potential suitor....

It’s holiday in New York :)

And roundabouts...

It is subzero and freezing with the distinct premonition of a snow shower, public transportation timelessly delayed in a city where a third of the population relies on it, some piled up snow on the sidewalk, a huge line at Starbucks, I am walking back on my way home, and I am not complaining. There must be something very wrong.

Or very right.

Here at Walnut and 18th, across from the calm serenity of Rittenhouse Square Park complementing the hub of shopping and dining and stock-brokering and selling, where chariots move with no sense of time, pedestrians gawk, mindless of temperature, shoppers shop, unaware of the limits on their wallets, cars idle, oblivious of traffic lights, and people eat and drink and be merry, the many problems of life forgotten, it’s hard to complain.

The lights of City Hall look on from the distance, smug that they have helped spread the cheer, local musicians troll from a few miles away, so the winds could carry some holiday melody and dilute the chill, the smell of fresh baked bread mixes with that of winter before wafting through the air, to convince even the most melancholic that joy is all around..

And here in wintry-wet Philadelphia in December, right by a mound of packed and dirty snow, I raise a gloved hand to a well-insulated head, as the realization hits: overflowing trash cans and ankle-deep water puddles apart, I love the annoying discomfort of the North East. Reason why, far, far, away, amid the magnificent rockies, the wonderfully warm, sunny days, the clean and harmless powdery snow-flakes, the homes with central air and in-house laundry, the cars with protective heating and vast open spaces to park them in, not to mention narrower, cruder ones to hike and schlep up, I often dreamed of complicated Jersy-an jughandles and crowded Manhattan metros.

I love the long pea-coats that do all they can to fight the windchill, the buses that finally appear on the horizon, instigating a collective sigh of relief, the snow-boots that slip and slide over piles of debris and ice alike, trolleys with the latest movie poster stuck and re-stuck over archaic ones of a bygone era, graffiti on the shady side of a skyscraper recording the sort of poignant emotion that happens but once in one’s lifetime, interminable waits at the Post Office, endless lines at the supermarket and curt orders at the SEPTA ticket counter, bordering on un-Americanly rude...

Receiving that rude remark pays off though – pays off an hour and half later, cos when you get off at Madison Square Garden and the cold winds hit you just as hard as that pedestrian, and all you can feel is joy, you know where you are, for such vices are so easily excused only in the big apple...

Amid the sights and sounds and life and lights and people of New York, ironically enough, the most mundane thing happens in Times Square – lights fade, fireworks sparkle and a huge crystal ball drops, declaring that yet another year has begun...

Here is where it all happens, here is where I am going to be... I’m back by the Atlantic and I am not going to miss it for the world.

And while I go to bed thinking of the workload of tomorrow, one little part of my brain delights in the feeling of three weeks hence and spending New Year’s in New York...