Annie Zaidi's Blog, page 16

A traffic legend

Can’t say I wasn’t warned. Friends who’d been to Dhaka before told me not to make elaborate plans; the traffic wouldn’t allow me to get around much.I thought, but traffic is pretty bad everywhere. Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru... How much worse could Dhaka’s traffic be? Well, let’s just say that it lived up to its reputation.I was participating in the Dhaka Literature Festival and discovered that the

Hairy stuff

Some of the braids draw inspiration from
nature: crabs, flowers, rain that comes cascading down over the ears. But many
styles also document the way in which human effort in one field, like
engineering, leads to inspiration in another, like fashion. Hair is fashioned
into shapes inspired by suspension bridges and skyscrapers, which became common
only after buildings started to get tall in the

All that art

I stopped to stare at another of Tiepolo's
paintings, “The Finding of Moses”. The story is that Moses was a foundling. He
was rescued and adopted by an Egyptian princess. The Pharoah’s daughter would
have been a brown woman and if Moses was of the Hebrew people, it is likely
that he was brown too. Tiepolo paints them as white. The other women too are generously
bosomed white ladies. There are

The evolution of a man

I attended a girls' college where most
of my batchmates were bouncing between three or four options – MBA
degree, teaching with a B.Ed degree, hotel management, and air
hostessing. Anyone who dreamt of travelling the world and living
independently wanted to be an air hostess. None of us dared dream of
becoming commercial pilots. A couple of girls wanted to be in the
armed forces, but they

Not letting it slide

At a literary conversation (about a
year ago?), the audience expressed fear and helplessness about
violence, rifts in the citizenry, prejudice. I remember saying, there
are ways to counter it. I don't know yet but we've got to think about
ways so we all feel less helpless.




I thought about it and wanted to post
this on Gandhi Jayanti. Belatedly, here are some suggestions for
those who wish

Movies: a lost mania?

India went to the movies though, despite the rats, the torn seats and the hazards. We went because it was a now-or-never situation. If you didn’t watch the film in the hall, you’d likely never watch it. Television networks rarely bought films for broadcast. Besides, most people didn’t have television.In the new millennium, things changed. Thousand seaters were knocked down and small multiplexes

Repairing what's broken

Respect is hard. I don't just mean that
it is hard to win the respect of others, or to hold onto your self
respect. It is also hard to lose respect for people you've held in
high esteem.




To see the names of men you looked
upto, whose face, voice, writing were familiar, and then to hear
stories of sexual harassment. Trousers dropped, unwanted touching,
hints to female colleagues that they

Grave matters

Grave Matters





The paths of glory, a poet has said,
lead but to the grave. What the poet may not have imagined is the
path that leads to the actual graves of famous writers.





Certainly, Thomas Gray would have had
some experience of inglorious pathways. Nineteenth century England
was no stranger to rubbish dumps and the poet would certainly have
corresponded with the occassional

The in-law as threat

Growing up, I never heard anything
about who belonged in the kitchen. My mother didn't stay any longer
in the kitchen as was necessary. She put food on the table though.
And books in the library. When she visited home a couple of times a
year, she remembered to take small gifts of cash for her own mother.




My grandmother was in the kitchen a
lot. She never went to school but even from her,

Umr aur prem pe ek lekh

यूँ तो प्रेम का मामला हमेशा नाज़ुक ही होता है, लेकिन कुछ प्रेम कहानियाँ इतनी नाज़ुक होती हैं कि जैसे ही उनका ख़ुलासा होता है, प्रेमियों की समझो शामत!



हिंदुस्तान में, अगर जाती या धर्म का फ़र्क़ हो तो परिवार और समाज के लोगों को तो तकलीफ़ है ही, प्रेमियों की जान को भी ख़तरा है। अगर केवल आर्थिक स्तर में फ़र्क़ हो तो लोगों की नाक-भौएँ चढ़ जाती हैं। जिसके पास पैसे ज़्यादा हों, उससे और उसके परिवार वालों से