Strawberry Fields: A tribute

There is something about Strawberry Fields. Half of my euphoria about getting into law school stemmed from the fact that my college organized Strawberry Fields, India’s largest competition for bands, a three day festival where people would play rock music, live. I had never seen a concert where rock music was played, Allahabad wasn’t that kind of place.

Did it live up to my expectations? Yes, it has, without question. The four SF’s that I have seen have been my favourite times of the year they were held in. The music has ranged from terrible to great, but whatever is being played, when I’m standing on a field listening to the music coming from the amazing system, I feel inner happiness at the beauty of it all. My first year, I ran from the acad, where I was doing work for LeGala, to the field at least twenty times per day. The music at Strawberry Fields has always had a huge quantity of really bad metal. Even that has a bunch of fans who talk about how broootal the previous band was. But one can always find the good bands who entertain you with their awesomeness. Strawberry Fields is where I first learnt to appreciate metal, especially the more extreme forms of it. I listen to a few metal bands but they’re kind of progressive or alternative metal like Opeth or Baroness. Full on loud sonic assault metal is however, I think best appreciated live. The rush of headbanging and the enthusiasm of the crowd can make you appreciate the skill and virtuosity of the band that’s playing, and the music grows on you.

However, Strawberry Fields is not just about the music, it is about the sheer epicness of it all. On the days of the prelims, there is music from morning till night and you can chill right there, with a beer in your hand, while the bands keep coming. It feels almost as good as sitting on the beach with a beer. You can hang out with great people, you listen to fun music, you can get super happy if a great band plays, and later you can head bang as much as you want. You’ll eat a Nizam’s roll or a Hungry Hogs hot dog for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can sit in the field till late at night, talking and drinking. If you’ve been working at organizing all day, you can have the satisfaction of a job well done. My first memory of SF is walking towards the field and upon hearing a band play an Avial cover, ‘Nada, Nada’, running like hell to get there as soon as possible. It was glorious.

The prelude to the final day has always been the same. I go for the NLS open quiz, first thing in the morning, doing progressively better over the years but always just falling short of how well we wanted to do. And then, the field. The first band, almost invariably, not metal, plays at around 5:30-6:00 and the crowd is much better than previous days but it’s still relatively sparse. I always feel a little bad for the first band, they’re the only ones to play in daylight and to a relatively smaller crowd. Then, happiness. Because as soon as they start playing, the next 4-5 hours are pandemonium. Lights, lasers, smoke, loud ear shattering music, it feels a lot more intense than the previous two days. The lawschoolites are all in their enclosure but that is also very crowded. One sings along, screams, applauds, headbangs and by the end you’ve had a terrific time. Inebriation helps, of course but is not compulsory and it is the music which alters your consciousness to make you happy. The headliners which for me were Pentagram, Parikrama, Raghu Dixit and Rudra respectively always play a short but stunning set and when it ends, an emptiness sets in, because you know the next one’s twelve months away. I can ramble on and on, but the last SF just ended two days ago, and I miss it. Next year’s the last one, and whatever else happened in college, I’ll always miss these three days a lot.

A Day in Class

So this is the kind of stuff that passes for poetry in this blog. Anyway, boring class, the creative output of which is set out below.


I sit and stare, at a clock, while people around me,
make no sense when they talk.

The master of proceedings, the professor, leads a discussion superfluous,
time slows down, no one makes a fuss.

Some go on and on, loving the sound of their own voice,
if they only knew, half the class would shoot them if they had a choice.

Paying attention, the blessed note-takers,
sleeping in the back, the usual rule-breakers.

Someone’s doing the crossword, one is catching up on his reading,
others are staring at their watches, and silently pleading.

The bored student, staring at a pretty face,
gets caught in the act, hastily lowers his gaze.

Amidst the drudgery, something mildly amusing is heard,
there is desk banging in unison, though most didn’t even catch a word.

Someone is interrupted, from his daydreams and thoughts,
asked to answer a question, he doesn’t know squat.

People texting each other, and notes being passed,
messages delivered, in the way of the present, and the way of the past.

The process of attendance, was pretty much a farce,
for most of those marked present, are not in the class.

One of the blessed souls, who made the effort of staying behind,
was caught using his phone and very heavily fined.

‘No more’, he swore, ‘Hey Teacher, have some mercy’,
I made the effort of coming to class, please show me some courtesy.

His plea unheard, his voice marked with resonance,
he resolved in future, to deny the class his presence.

Another subplot, the students sitting so close,
giggling to each other while people behind them doze.

A person moves to the next seat, there begins a fight,
for a student sleeping comfortably, is now in the teacher’s line of sight.

Sit in front of me please, a cacophony of voices breaks out,
the teacher, interrupted from his reverie, wonders what this is all about.

The classroom is a place to chill, a place to unwind,
but we grow dull and despondent, if we’re there for too much time.

I yearn to be liberated, I yearn to be free,
I yearn to escape from this room so dreary.

A sigh of relief, someone’s rung the bell,
it’s time to escape, from the classroom from hell.

Pakistan, Dussehra and Ganganagar

I am currently in Ganganagar, a relatively small city in northern Rajasthan. Right now, since my dad is posted here, this is home. There is not much to see but I’m staying in a beautiful, green cantonment full of trees, gardens and other flora. The reason it is so green despite being in Rajasthan is because the Indira Gandhi canal runs through it and the army maintains it very well. Most of the area of the cantonment is in fact covered by a golf course. There aren’t many people. One has a greater chance of seeing wildlife like hares, nilgais( who despite the name are a form of deer) and other animals than people while taking a walk after 6:00 pm in the night. It is also idyllically lit up at night, ideal for night-time excursions where one can think in peace. There is a theatre inside the cantonment where movies can be seen for free and I have access to a reasonably decent library, so along with my laptop, I have things to help me pass the time. The city is like a regular small town in any part of the country and it has amazing street food and very cheap good places to eat. Since it is barely 10 km from the Punjab border, the culture is Rajasthani but with a strong Punjabi influence and has a very significant Sikh population also.

One of the many examples of horrendous spelling in Ganganagar

One fascinating thing in the city is the many billboards and road signs which are paragons of bad spelling. I also saw the burning of the effigies of Ravan, Kumbhkaran and Meghnad on Dussehra for the first time in my life. Out of interest I convinced my parents to take me there and it was a colourful and entertaining spectacle. People dressed up in costume actually shoot a burning arrow at the effigies which being full of firecrackers burn up, explode and fall in spectacular fashion.

Effigies to be burnt during Dussehra

The highlight of my visit though was going to see the Pakistan border at Fazilka. Like at the Wagah border in Amritsar there is a post there and both sides hold a ceremony called Beating the Retreat which concludes with the border guards pulling down their respective flags in synchronized fashion. It took us around an hour and a half to get there in our army gypsy and I was following our route on GPS and gleefully watched us inch closer and closer to Pakistan. Around 500 m before the actual post there is some very dense fencing which my dad told me is in many cases electrified. No regular vehicles are allowed beyond that point. We got off and had tea with the BSF officer in charge there. We got onto a BSF gypsy and arrived at the post. There were around 50 people on our side along with the BSF jawans and there were many more on the Pakistani side which according to the BSF officer was because it was a Friday. There were loud patriotic songs coming from the Pakistani side, so much that it overpowered the loudspeaker on our side, which at one point for some reason was playing, “Kajra Re”! The Pakistani Rangers in their salwars and the people must have been 200 odd metres away so we could see them pretty well.

Jawans from the BSF during the ceremony

The ceremony soon started with guards from both sides screaming louder and louder, marching in perfect synchronization, getting their legs higher and higher and making weird provocative gestures at each other like some oddly choreographed military dance. Things were quiet at first but soon there was clapping from the Pakistani side with shouts of ‘Pakistan Zindabad’, ‘Jiye Jiye Pakistan’ and the occasional ‘Allah-u-Akbar’. The Indians were quiet for a while but then a lady in our crowd started chants of ‘ Hindustan Zindabad’ and ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’. The Indian side was hopelessly outnumbered though enthusiastic.

I and my parents though shouting along with the others were finding it really funny and all the chanting was more in fun than in any hostility towards the other side. Both officers on both sides stood up and saluted the parade of marching men. The whole thing went on for some 20 minutes and soon the bugle was being played and the flags went down synchronized to the inch. I thought the show was over, but there was one last subplot. The people from both sides were then allowed to come up to the thin barbed wire which marked the border with huge men on both sides standing in front of them to make sure nothing untoward occurs. Then it was odd, people were staring at each other like they were looking at aliens from another world, most would never meet anyone from the other country. I think one Pakistani started the waving, and soon there was waving and good natured staring very unlike the patriotic brouhaha that went on a few minutes ago. Though separated by a few miles, the appearance of the locals on both sides showed a marked contrast. Women were in a separate group there, wearing burkhas or covering their heads in lightly coloured chadars. And most of the men there were wearing salwars.

Pakistanis staring at us, and we at them

On the Indian side, most men were in jeans, the women were brightly dressed up and there was no obvious segregation. It was very obvious that this was relatively impoverished rural Punjab from the way ordinary Pakistanis looked to us while Fazilka is a prosperous district in a very prosperous state and it showed.

I had a lot of fun but I felt oddly philosophical after the whole experience. I’m known for my fascination with Pakistan and its culture and one day want to go there. As a child growing up in the Army my views were fairly atypical. We visited a beautiful war memorial from the ’71 war which was on the way. There you see the names of the dead, army men like my dad, who fought and died. The regular person’s anger is then directed at the enemy. For me, however the notion of a country, a stereotype of a people as an enemy is absurd and can only come when it has been drilled into you that a country is an enemy. Wars are huge impersonal things and Pakistan cannot be our enemy forever. One day we’ll be able to walk across the Wagah border with ease like this guy did. Till then, I can at least break stereotypes and blogs like this and this give me hope. The flow of information that has been facilitated by the Internet has given me a solution to a problem which I pondered as a child, how does a Pakistani child, the same age as mine believe the things he does, when it so obvious that we are right about everything. The answer is, no we aren’t right about everything, there is no black or white, there is always another side to what we believe. And once we all understand that, we won’t hate the ‘other’ as much.

Part of the war memorial where soldiers' ashes are kept

Finally, after all I had seen, the enduring image from the whole exercise was a bird, which kept hopping from one side of the border to another, back and forth almost as if to show the meaninglessness of the border for it.

Being Punjabi

A certain blog post gone viral , an open letter to a Delhi Boy, specifically a very Punjabi Delhi Boy had me thinking. I’m not from Delhi, never even lived there, but whenever I’ve stayed there for any length of time, the place feels excessively familiar. It’s the Naarth, and most people speak in a very familiar accent. There is a certain Punjabiness about the place, from the food(which is awesome) to the way people behave in traffic to the way people spend money, and also unfortunately the way people stare at women. This viral post (has a 1000+ comments right now) generalizes to a fault and has attracted vitriol from many defenders of the faith and rational commentators who point out that she well spews hatred and makes too much fun of Punjabis. The open letter is funny in places, and I agree with her about certain things, but gets a little nasty sometimes (the Gurpurab and partition references).

Reminded me however, that I am Punjabi. Specifically a Punjabi Brahmin. Almost seems like a contradiction, ‘cause Punjabis are supposed to be overtly masculine and Brahmins are well...not. Also, reminds me of the time I read in an old sociological study while researching for my project that Punjab is one of the few places that the Brahmin is not dominant, in fact rarely owns land and most are priests or petty shopkeepers. At least my ancestors were in no position to oppress anyone unlike some others( Hint: Tambrahms :) ). There are however, certain Punjabi stereotypes that don’t come off too well on me. As a friend pointed out, “You can’t be Punjabi.” “Why?” “ You well, READ!” I can be loud, I put lots of white butter on my pronthas, I relish rajma-chawal( and BUTTER CHICKEN) , am prone to breaking into bhangra in quad parties when a Punjabi song comes on, I can atleast understand the language, but I have committed the cardinal crime of being “intellactual”( said in a strong Punjabi accent). I was the toast of all my buas and masis and chachis for being the only child to be found reading in a corner when all others were busy playing something or the other. I can’t drink great quantities of alcohol without being affected, can’t play sports to save my life, and try not to lech at girls on the street. When I meet ‘REAL’ Punjabi cousins I don’t like it when they drive their cars having downed pegs of whiskey playing very loud music and driving very fast. (especially when those cousins are fifteen years old). I don’t think it is my right to control my sister’s and every other female cousin’s life because I am their big brother.

On the other hand, I love Punjabi weddings , with their sheer ostentatiousness and spirit of celebration with the whole extended family, and the bloody incredible food( and hopefully for me in the future, alcohol). I am obsessed with Pakistan, actually just Lahore, because my grandparents came across the border. I love it when they talk in Urdu sounding Hindi, or when my relatives from Gurdaspur( who never came from across the border) call a Minister a ‘wazir’ rather than a ‘mantri’. For that is my heritage, to all those who call Punjab’s culture agriculture, I would like to point out the stunning Punjabi poetry ( Bulleh Shah, Shiv Kumar Batalvi) which has come to me via Rabbi, and my mom, who explains them to me. Having learnt Hindustani classical music I appreciate things like the Patiala Gharana and the stunning Sufi Punjabi heritage which also comes to me via Pakistan. No way can I disregard Bhangra, which is awesome to dance to, and which has had awesome things done to it in ‘Caneda’ and ‘UK’ by overseas Punjabis. For after all, culture is not the exclusive preserve of the Bengalis. And only in Punjab do you have things like Gurudwaras which give away free meals as langar. I also remember the time in a train when Hindu pilgrims from Ludhiana going to Haridwar shared food with the entire bogie. And the language in the state is awesome, unlike Delhi where they just speak Hindi with a Punjabi accent.

I am Punjabi, and I’m not Sikh (though I have a few Sikh relatives). Why do I emphasize that? It’s pretty cool to be Sikh but I just am not, and I’m still Punjabi. We don’t wear Pugries and along with gurudwaras(everyone goes to Gurudwaras, the Golden temple is just incredible) go to temples too. We speak Punjabi, comprise 45% of the state’s population and exercise a pretty pervasive cultural influence(check Bollywood) but I still get the ‘how’re you Punjabi but not Sikh routine’.

Punjab to me was always Chandigarh. On moving to law school I saw the rest of it for the first time, and though there are certain things about it that I can’t stand, it is a pretty incredible place. Unlike the rest of the country, most people are not poor, people have a lot of money and love to spend it, and there’s a certain altitude to life which is fun. I may personally don’t feel that way because I’m too ‘intellactual’ for them and thus will always not be exactly like them. But there is a certain part of me that is, and I think that’s pretty great.

River of Smoke: A Review

I just finished ‘River of Smoke’ by Amitav Ghosh. The plot is superb, the writing is vivid and the expanse of his vision is vast. It is a sequel to ‘Sea of Poppies’, his previous book which was just as good. The thing about Ghosh in both of these books is the exuberant use of language. The language of the lascars, who were a kind of sailors from various parts of the Indian subcontinent is an odd patios of broken English, some words of various Indian languages and some surely made-up words. The language of colonial Englishmen in India( words like bobachee-connah, cuzzana, puckrow) the Chinese pidgin( Simple English with Cantonese Grammar, origin of Long Time, No see) and snatches of Cantonese in River of Smoke, they are all a delight to read. The books read like a Dickens novel, a vast catalogue of characters, most of them not very subtle but intensely interesting all the same. At times comical, at times desperately sad, these two books which are part of what will be the Ibis trilogy(Ibis being the name of a ship which brings together many of the characters) run through a variety of themes. Amitav Ghosh is definitely interested in the forces of colonialism and what they did to change the world and most of his books are connected in some way with that subject.

From the migration of girmityas( or Indian indentured labourers) to places like Mauritius and the actions of the British in India in the early part of the 19th century everything was about the opium trade. The British grew opium in India and exported it to China where it was illegal, but smuggled through with lax regulations and bribes paid to mandarins, it became a part of Chinese life with millions of people addicted. On the other hand, the poppy growing in India ruined more than a few farmers, many of which had no choice but to put their a thumbprint on a ‘girmit’( mispronounciation of agreement) and become indentured labourers in various countries where their descendants still live today. The world as described in ‘Sea of Poppies’ is sort of familiar sometimes, from rural Bihar to colonial Calcutta, though the deck of the Ibis feels delightfully foreign. The upper caste almost-Sati who runs away with the untouchable man, the young daughter of a French botanist who speaks fluent Bengali and prefers a sari to a dress, the ruined scholarly Zamindar who is sentenced to labour as an indenture, the mulatto from Maryland who looked white enough to be a sahib and second mate of the ship, the mysterious half Chinese half Parsi prisoner. The book is a cacophony of such characters who are led to these paths because of the irresistible forces changing the world they live in.

‘River of Smoke’ to me though is even more brilliant because it is just the force of his writing that hits you. As Amitav himself pointed out in an interview, Indians for some reason don’t know very much about China, or the people inside it, their vast different regions, their history. So when we reach Canton in the time just before the first Opium war, there is no frame of reference that I have that I had with the first book, since a lot of it is set in India. Some it is on the ocean, some of it is set in Mauritius, but the description of the city of Canton(modern day Guangzhou) with the Fanqui or foreign quarter is absolutely enervating. China, its people and the kind of place it was then is painstakingly drawn out in my imagination due to this man’s enchanting writing. The Parsi merchant , along with the other English, American merchants around him are all smugglers of opium who have millions of dollars worth opium waiting to be sold to China but can’t because the Chinese have realized the havoc that it created and persevere on the right to control its sale in their own country. But this as Ghosh points out, is the time of Adam Smith, and Free Trade as an inalienable right from God are concepts which the merchants and the British use as their excuse to justify their actions. This is historical fiction at its very best, the research is immaculate, the books are entertaining, and he literally creates pictures in your head. There is a secret to this, which he has stated elsewhere, the trick to good descriptive writing is not just what you write, it’s also how much you leave out. He describes just enough for one to successfully imagine. And also the man loves words, and playing with them. And by the end, you will too.