Mercedes Benz

The stretched hands of a peace sign crossed
the shiny red crane of  the new social order.
I shut my eyes not to see
the whirling body of the forth class citizen
striving for shade on a sunny pavement of my country.
Is there a bottom line that your dignity would hit
when you cease to be human,
and become living meat,
an animal roasting on  the cement of the city?

the lost order of things

I lost myself
somewhere in between the sliding doors of the metro train
and the open window of the bus
the heart of the forest girl hit the wall of oblivion
with thoughts galloping like black horses
following the words and photographs of the speedy city at 2 PM on a Summer day.
Was it a plan of fortune
Or unfortunate turn of events that
made me stand with my eyes closed and the hand extended in the middle of the crossroads?
A tree with tired branches and brownish leaves of a thirty and five springs of greyish hair
that lost touch with the landscape and begged for directions lost in the traffic of events.
Dear God... Please come and find me for I lost myself
somewhere in between the sliding doors of my own mind
and the open window of other hands around me,
find me so that the horses could graze again on the plains surrounding the green land of the forest.

Ironic, iconic, but not interesting

After everything had been said between you and me, why do I still feel restless and wait for your unspoken words.
Why do I speak to you with my eyes closed and imagine that maybe somewhere far you are now thinking about me the way I do of you.
I don't even know you. Ironic, isn't it?
Iconic, isn't it?
But not interesting. Interesting would have too many syllables to cover the distance between us. I never thought of myself as interesting, have you?
I miss you... these days I miss you in a blue colour of an open sky. 
Simple as that.
Missing that human that you were.
       

Silence

I have chosen silence, it is a very prominent figure of speech. Sometimes remaining silent can help you in finding the dignity that was lost while the words were flowing out of its own, as if they had their own independent existence that you cannot control.  They floated and floated (would be great if you could sometimes help me to find a synonym for floating, I always admire how good you are with words, while for me they stick to my skin like little drops of sweat that has a salty taste after I finish my rehearsal) but they couldn't reach anywhere. Is there always somewhere where one has to reach? Can't we just float (see - again a synonym would be needed) aimlessly through life enjoying the sweetest bites of it? Eating life like children having chocolates - open a box and pick up anyone you want and you imagine that the box would never become empty. Or you secretly enjoy the sweet taste of things in your mouth... hidden somewhere behind an old tree, your grandmother's dress or simply sitting on a bed in your room? I love licking chocolate when it melts on my fingers. Developed the taste for it when I was a real child, but I had told you this story before. 
I don't even know if you are enjoying my stories. They are becoming shorter and shorter every day. I think I'm tired. Sometimes it feels as if every word was taking away a bit of me, wiping me away from the surface of the earth. As if  I were the chocolate melting in your eyes when you are reading this. A playwright once told me that writing is a very private affair, something that drains him out and makes him feel that he doesn't want a company of people around him anymore. 
Can a soul hold somebody's soul in the arms? Can you hold me now?
 I think I'm melting.
Silence is a very prominent figure of speech. Can you break it? As if you were breaking a glass, a brick or a wall? I hate walls around me.... Can a soul hold anther soul? Silence... Figure of speech... break... wall... silence...

The lost words

I lost some words. I don't remember if it was me who let them go, or was it the words that wanted to run away from me. 
Little "I love you" run away from my blue skirt, but it stood in front of a huge old mirror with a wooden frame and suddenly got scared of its own distorted face which read "I hate you".
So "i love you" run away and hid behind it's mother. Other words tried to run away too, they wanted to be a string of pearls that I write on the keyboard but the dyslectic writer mixed them up a bit: Do you stillll memberre how the green taste apple????
Other words got stuck in my mouth when i was to shout them loud so that a child of the desert could hear them properly, but they refused to leave when the time was needed... They are sitting now somewhere in the company of grapes and green apples. Laughing like mad children, while I search for them sweeping under my new bed.
The words that are lost..... will they ever be found???

Nawfar and the sea of stories

There once was a girl who was found in a small bundle somewhere by the sea. And no, her name was not Sita, She could have had many names but we can call her Nawfar in this story.
She was a daughter of a fisherman and it was only few months after her birth that the tiny vessel of her father reached the island where she and her mother lived. When father saw Nawfar for the first time he could not believe how such an ugly child could have been his....
Only few days ago on a moonlit night did he proclaim to his tribe that Nawfar was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.
Nawfar was always close to the water and all the fishermen treated her as if she was their own daughter. And sometimes it even seemed true to me - as if she was the child of feeling and emotions that all the fishermen carried into the ocean.
The life was simple and she floated through various days, months, hours.... Until one day she noticed that people no longer acknowledge her presence....
She was surprised and could not understand why...
She wasn't beautiful, this she knew from the beginning, but still she had a gift of listening and talking to those who sat close to her. People still sat around her, but they no longer looked into her eyes. They looked somewhere beyond her and she could not understand the change that happened so suddenly. Until one day she looked back to see her own shadow sitting on a bench and laughing while pearls would drop gently from her mouth into the people's extended palms.
Oh, no..... How come nobody want me for who I am? Why is only the beauty and magnificence of the shadow that they appreciate? People still kept coming to Nawfar whenever they needed help, whenever some work had to be done, a task to be completed. But the gaze of people and their smiles were no longer directed at  Nawfar. It was only the shadow that they smiled at.
She din't know what to do to show them that she is still herself and it's just a shadow that they all admire so much. So one day she took huge scissors and cut the shadow away from her long blue skirt.
 She threw the shadow at the people, while she herself jumped into the river... And she floated with the stream....... Remember she was a fisherman's child so she knew how to swim through highest waters. Until one day a child played by the side of the river in a desert and caught the bundle in his hand..... but that's another story, you know....

Dari Joocchu Chunnaree...

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts...

We used to have a garden. Technically the garden is still there next to my mother's house but somehow it does not resemble anymore that space that I used to like so much as a child.
The garden of my childhood was a mixture of wilderness of uncut grass and broken pieces of bricks and pavement that marked the alleys. There were some old trees, that did not give many fruits, but still I loved them. I don't remember climbing them, I guess I was too scared that they might break under my load. But I do remember climbing numerous trees in a park that was there in front of my house. It was so much of fun to be playing with other kids, running around, playing football. Sometimes the games were not that nice and I can feel how my body suddenly shrinks at the very memory of it. I'm always amazed at how the body responds to memories, touch, even words.
There were two trees in my garden where a hammock would be hung in the summer and I loved spending my time there. I think I even insisted on being allowed to sleep outside a couple of nights.
There was everything one needed - sunflowers, gooseberries, blackberries, grapes, cherries, apples, peach, plums, wild strawberries, my favourite lily of the valley...  Oh... I could die for a bunch of my favourite flowers... I haven't seen them for years! They are not there next to the house anymore...  I used to buy small bunches of them in the street. It felt so beautiful to be walking down the street with a small bunch of those flowers.
My mother loved gardening. She would spend hours watering the plants, planning what new flowers to bring, cutting the roses before the arrival of winter. I remember seeing a rainbow in a rain of her garden hose. I think I do admire her for her gardening skills, for the patience she had and thousands of little almost invisible sacrifices that she made for her plants. It was women in my family who knew how to take care of various plants in and around the house.
Men prefered spending long hours in front of TV screens. They don't even realise this but it was this common inclination towards certain sports channels that unites them despite the miles of cold waters in between them. I never liked sports channels and till today can not understand the point of discussing the assets of one sportsperson or the other in public. Sports programmes and driving cars... these two things unite them a lot.

Books are much different. One can read them over and over again and each time your eye catches some hidden meanings that you could not see before. The puzzles of words... The pieces of a puzzle that you slowly put together until they become a whole. It feels like translating Sanskrit verses again... I used to love those late night hours spent with a dictionary. And words and grammar that you had to combine into one meaningful sentence.'The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.' Sometimes you would know all the words and the grammar, but still have problems with deciphering the meaning. And then one would run to the teacher and ask if the translation was correct or not. I had this amazing teacher of Sanskrit who spoke so many languages of this world... Polish, English, Sanskrit, Hindi, French, German, Latin, Greek, Lithuanian, Russian... I miss him a lot. He died few years back. I love visiting his grave with prof S. whenever I am there. Speaking of teachers... I do get angry now for when I was trying to learn another language few months back and thought I'm progressing with my knowledge of vocabulary and grammar then the teacher confused me with his defensive answers and I got lost in the spirals of syntax of thoughts. Had the proper guidance been given at the proper time then the process of learning might have been less tearful and painful. But well... What could one expect from those who were trained at some foreign universities in prehistoric times? Sometimes a revision of  teaching methodology is desperately needed. And anyways... Dravidian languages seem to be more complicated than others... but well... so is Polish grammar...

Hm... I seem to be loosing a track of thoughts rather easily these days...

I can't tell exactly when and how, was it a slow change or a sudden one but the garden did not seem the same anymore... The sunflowers, strawberries and all other wild additions were gone, and a layer of socially acceptable grass of a certain social status was sown. And I can't but wonder if this is a natural order of things of family life, or a result of sudden discovery of capitalist society's value system? But then... how come I still dream of having a disheveled garden around my house? Why?

I woke up in the morning right next to a purring ball of fur and it amazed me how the feline animals have this incredible capacity to fill up the negative spaces our bodies create. My cat always knows how to lie down next to me with his head on my arm or waist, he always seems to find those sublime positions that fit perfectly into the curves of my body and purr into my ear. I keep him close to me and scratch his ears and the place on his neck which makes him close his eyes and purr even more... And then I forget if it is actually he who is trying to fit his body into mine, or is it the other way round? Who is a cat now and who is a human? Two beings drifting lazily somewhere between sleep and being awake. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

I don't enjoy the world of adults. It is too concrete, the shapes are too defined and there is no space for ambiguity of emotions, colours of memories and the touch of sunlight. I am happy being a child and I don't think I want to grow up, even though so many wise and experienced experts around me wish I would finally leave my childhood playground I call life and live according to their wishes, orders and expectations. Funny... They don't even realise that in reality they were just programmed to see life as a straightforward process of climbing up the social ladder. I think I am enjoying my space at the bottom. It often feels lonely here too, but I think that the world might be full of children who look outside windows, float helplessly in high waters, decide to spend endless hours in a jungle or walk across deserts in their hope to find teachers who would be willing to become students and who would have this amazing capacity of filling up the negative spaces of their minds, bodies and souls. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Advertising stint

I was told that my writing is gaining in popularity and some of the fancy advertising companies would like to put their banners on my site... but I guess I am slightly weak at the marketing front and they wanted to advertise some adult sites here... But erotic paintings of women in disheveled saris, half sleeve-blouses and their hair open, and those Greek heroes trembling in their fear of what the Faith would bring them appeal to me much more than some gym exercises advertised by those websites... Anyways... I never planned any career in advertising, but still they asked for a line... but the only one I could come up with was:
Thank you O Lord for hearing devices and cat food for they save the earth from deaf bus drivers and hungry cats.
I don't think they were satisfied with my creative side. Shame.

Rule and divide

A good thing about being partially unemployed is having a lot of time to catch up on videos that I wanted to see for a long time - Jerome Bel, Wim Vandekeybus, Akram Khan. The not so good side of it is having too much time to think and interact with those whom we have not met for a long time.
Somebody showed me an article that spoke about how white women who engage in belly dancing engage themselves in the process of cultural appropriation and how they should not be engaging in those forms of dance that originated in different ethnic set-up.
It felt so bad to have read that... It felt so bad because if one would change this one little word "belly dancing" into "bharatanatyam" or "chhau" then this article could be speaking about me and last, I don't know how many, years of my life...  And do I feel like I did something wrong by having studied/performed/taught these dance forms?????  NO. I don't.
I don't for many reasons.
One of them is the amazing education I received at The Department of Indology at Warsaw University. One of the first books that I was made to read was Orientalism by Edward Said. I have obviously met various types of teachers there but and I was lucky enough have met a few who did not believe in "cultural prejudices that are derived from a long tradition of romanticized images of Asia and of the Middle East, and which, in practice, functioned as implicit justifications for the colonial and the imperial ambitions of the European powers and the U.S."  (Wikipedia, article on Orientalism, Edward Said).
I was lucky to have met prof S. who was one of the greatest teachers of my life. It was with her that I would sit in a classroom and watch videos of Teyyam, Kutiyattam, Kathakali, Yakshagana, Terukuttu. It was with her that I have been through a year of reading Natyashastra (She would have killed me for spelling it like this without proper diacritic signs) and translating parts of Mattavilasaprahasana, Mahabharata, Shoorpanakha anka of Ashcharyachudamani. It is thanks to her that I will always remember that it was in 1912/13 that Ganapati Shastri discovered the manuscripts of Bhasa's works in a house belonging to one of the Chakyars. It was she with whom I could sit in the Kutambalam of Vadakumnathan temple in Thrissur and watch performances of Nangyar Kuttu and Kutiyattam in 2002. It was she he would rent a car to take me to the field where Staal attempted at reconstruction of fire ritual. It is because of her that I am the person I am today.
Do I know about the critique of Peter Brook's project of Mahabharata as taken away from it's cultural context? Critique of Stall for providing multicultural context to the fire ritual? I do. But are the Teyyams organised by IGNCA in Delhi less taken out of their cultural context than Brook's Mahabharata? Is a Mohiniyattam production of a Swan Lake less taken out of it's cultural context than Staal's fire ritual?  Is my professor less culturally connected to the performing arts that she studies and writes about than an urban Indian 40-year-old working in an IT sector?
I was also lucky to have studied Comparative Indian Literature at The Department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies at Delhi University. When I first decided to pursue my studies in that Department the University Authorities told me that the course in Comparative Indian Literature does not exist, and that if I think it does then I am not intelligent enough to pursue studies at the university level. But the course did exist and I did fight my way through to get the admission. And I am happy I did. Thank you for making me read Badal Sircar, Chandrashekhar Kambar, BV Karanth, Jibanada Das, Jaywant Dalvi, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. Thank you for discussions on women position in India, on cast identity, on problematics of religion in various regional literatures! Thank you for  adjusting the timetable in such a way so that being the only student of the course I could pursue both my MA and M.phil and my Bharatanatyam studies at the same time. Thank you for making me "me" and giving me a sense of connection through literature with the place where I live. You did not teach me to read "Five point someone", but you gave me a sense of connection with the land I step on.
Thank you also for teaching me that modern theatre in urban India started from translations and adaptations of Shakespeare. Did the theatre personalities of that time think of the concept of cultural appropriation? (And yes, I do know that I'm writing in a simplistic way now).
Few years back I was working in a village in Rajasthan with a group of theatre artists from Kolkata. I was the only "foreign" person in the group. The moment I arrived I was told how dangerous the place can be for me, and how much time it took the villagers to accept that the director's wife can wear capri trousers and roam around the place. I was told not to wear my black sari because the villagers might think that I am a ghost. (You know - "those stupid village people who still live in XIX century conditions"). So I did wear my black sari and I did roam around the village meeting children and women, visiting the colony of the pottery makers, eating roti at a house of the neighbours. We were working on a play and I invited the women and children to come and watch our final rehearsal at that place. Around 50 people came... and it made me so happy...  People I worked with looked at me as if I was a mad person, and I looked at them in the same way when they busied themselves with complaints about the lack of entertainment, lack of TV, heat, need to have drinks more often.  I don't know who was more "foreign or Orientalist" amongst us - me or the rest of the group.
Being a non-Indian person working with Indian culture is not easy. Few years back somebody close to me said that people want to watch my performances only because I have fair skin; that the quality of my dance does not matter. It hurt a lot. Few months back when I was working for my own project at artist residency another person said that I was given the residency only because it looks cool to have a foreign name printed in a programme brochure. It hurt badly again. It hurts when each time I start teaching in a new institute I have to convince the head that I do know Bharatanatyam as well as my Indian colleagues do. That parents of the students can always come and talk to me if they are scared that their children may not be given proper education in this classical Indian dance form because of me being a non-Indian teacher. (And yes, I do suck at two major points - I don't speak Tamil, Telugu, Kannada or Malayalam, and I don't know how to sing, I'm out of key most of the time).
Being a non-Indian Bharatanatyam dancer also means limited access to resources and performances. Well... it's actually more complicated than that...  There are some festivals that want to present performances by foreign artists and I did perform at some such festivals. They are usually nicely organised, and the performers are a mixture of both Indian and foreign artists but at the same time this question is always there - why the need of showcasing artists as "foreign"? Am I really a white monkey that is to be displayed on stage for the people to watch and the festival organisers to have a higher turnout? It is below my dignity as an artist to be treated like that, at the same time these are the only festivals that are accessible for me, and in most cases the only ones that openly call for applications to apply. I recently rejected 3 such performances, and I guess the politics around the performance is one of the reasons why I feel less and less connected with Bharatanatyam these days... Funny... It used to be the only life I knew...
I recently worked in a project that rejected me as an artist because they wanted to work with "native Indian women" and I was a foreign national for them. They ended up working in a close collaboration with a "native Indian woman" who spend last few years of her life living and studying in Germany. I fought badly, and finally was accepted into the project, but my skin was not brown enough to be treated seriously. It was a bad experience to work with a group of white faces who came to civilise natives of this country in their ways of living. It was a true experience in Orientalism, and I hope never to repeat this experience again.
I am not an Indian national, at the same time I have never studied in a fancy dance institute abroad and do not have a tag of "foreign educated" artist, so i am not exotic enough at the market. 
Too white to be brown, too brown to be white. It's a tough place to be in. Believe me.
Why am I writing all these?
It started from this idea of appropriation of traditional arts. Well, in my naive little mind I always thought that art is something that is supposed to unite people rather than divide. If a white woman is not supposed to learn/perform belly dancing, Bharatanatyam, Mohiniyattam or any other dance form, that why should a Japanese or Indian woman learn classical ballet? Isn't it a form of appropriation? Why shouldn't we say - hey, you Malayalis - don't try to dance Kathak. You Poles - do only your Krakowiak dance. You, Akram Khan - don't try to be contemporary. And if we apply this to arts, then won't we soon apply the same principles to our lives? Poland only for Poles! Maharashtra for Maharashtrians! Haven't we heard it somewhere before? Really... do we artists want to repeat the politics of division rather than unity?????

Silly little dream.

When I was younger I was taught that our dreams and ambitions are to be kept secret from the world, as if speaking about them would make them dissolve among the heavy particles of reality and they would evaporate forever.
But then shouldn't our dreams become reality? Shouldn't we finally learn how to speak about them, scream about them, cry about them so that maybe somewhere far beyond the horizon somebody would listen and understand.
I have this silly little dream of mine that started many years back over a cup of tea shared in one of those tea stall by the side of the road. That tea stall was located under the tree and just like that tree the dream has also grew bigger by now and I wish one day it could become reality...

There is a village with thousands of trees not very far from the city. I wake up in the morning and the brown cat begins to purr right into my ear. He has many new companions to chase - other cats, dogs, squirrels, donkeys, even an elephant that looks bemused whenever he sees this miniature of a tiger roaming around the fields. (The grey cat started meowing- he also wants to be present in this dream).
I can hear a murmur coming from the building next door. It is a school that gives free education to village children. But it is not an ordinary school where children are forced to memorize and reproduce all those meaningless formulas and rules prescribed by the text books. They are taught to explore the world around them, to touch the trees, to write letters to kids in a school thousand kilometers away. They are taught that humans are to be valued for who they are and not for what they look like or how much they have. They know who Irom Sharmila is, and what 'deforestation estation due to mining means'. They know that negro and chinki are offensive words and that they have to be grateful to the cobbler because if it hadn't been for him who else would have repaired their shoes? They learn how to create things and speak about things that touch them. They dance and act, sing and paint.
There is a small rehearsal space in the other building. Nothing fancy. Colourful walls, pictures, photos, cane chairs. People rehearse there. Some people stay in few houses around that space. The houses are painted in various colours. The marks of palms dipped in paint create design on the walls.
One wall is white and once a week people gather to watch films screened from a cheap second hand projector that somebody found at a flea market.
The chirping of birds in the morning and the smell of flowers at night.
I'm standing facing the lake. It has this strange pale blue colour. I can feel somebody's eyes looking at me as I turn...
"Sounds good" he said. I think I'd rather have him say "let's try to make it together".