Open House

The rains are early this year, and ferocious. This spring-monsoon adds to my discombobulation, since I have felt stretched too thin these past weeks. I've added mileage to my life and car, neglecting parts of my life that have needed tending, juggling, settling, changing, cleaning, picking up and putting it all down in a different place. One of the most important parts that I've had to ignore is, of course, my writing: I've not written a single word in these past weeks, not a poem, not a story, nothing. I must confess I am feeling snarly, often tempted to spread a few hisses all around. Even as I write this, I know it is an indulgence, a sudden thunder storm that has forced me to settle on the sofa, to calm the cats.

Ever since I've moved back to my house, people have been asking me how I am settling down. Honestly, I don't know! My patient reader knows that I lost a cat in the fire and that the two surviving felines had to be well-nigh homeless for a few weeks. I am still reeling with the fallout from those two circumstances. So I don't know exactly how well I am settling down. I have been trying to reclaim my house from the cats inch by inch, with a great deal of help from the fragrance spitters and body sprays.

The fallout I referred to earlier is about some other stray or abandoned cats that my surviving cat seems to have befriended. Already, two of them have taken residence with us in the house and two more come at night to eat and visit. Sometimes, when I wander in during these visiting hours, I get a few causal hisses by way of greeting and warning. Sometimes, I have found "gifts" left by the visitors, namely dead birds, some even partially plucked. I wish I could tell the visitors to feel free to eat, but feel no obligation to leave behind gifts of any sort.

This has, of course, driven my cat food budget beyond the modest allowance granted to it, but that's not the worst. The worst has been the uneasy truce governing the space the cats share with me. We each have different views about how the space should be configured and inhabited. I have placed the fragrance spritzers at regular intervals around my spaces, which has kept the visitors and inhabitants away from my space, but also caused my older cat to feel ever more unwelcome and nervous. To remain fair, I have brought in some more cat furniture, to encourage the live-in cats to leave my perches alone and choose scratch-able, catnip infused, cat-friendly seats and perches.

I have spent weekends building cat shelters in my postage-stamp sized backyard, to give the old cat a place in my house, the old cat who is the only cat I can really call mine, in the sense that I had chosen her to live with me and who has, since, been driven out of my house by the other cats who have decided to cohabit with me. These shelters were meant to lure the old cat back, if not INSIDE the house then at least AROUND it, a safe place during thunderstorms.

However, both, the outside shelters as well as the cat furniture remain cat less and ignored. The old cat does come every time I call her because she has trained me to feed her, but she won't come in the house, nor will she stay. The live-in cats give my fragrance spritzed spaces a wide berth, but also ignore the perches I want them to use.  Of course, I love the cat snuggling between the back of my knees and the back-rest of the couch; after all, I HAVE been trained and conditioned well.

The first wave of thunderstorms has passed and I see three cats stretched out in their preferred spots around the room. I scarf through e-bay for inexpensive cat furniture and wonder how well I am settling down in the new house. I will have family and friends visiting the house over the Summer and I wonder how the visitors and live-in felines will react to this. Hopefully, I will be trained enough not to wonder at whatever awaits for us all this Summer!




 

Navigating the Tornado: CMS and Other Frustrations

This month has somehow taken wing and I stand here, on its exit threshold, not quite remembering how I got here. The first quarter of the year is past, my child's FAFSA updated, my CMS  (Classroom Management System) updated for next quarter that begins on Monday, and even my laundry is more or less done. So, of course, I worry about my work ethic, hopefully to re-examine the way I work, the hours I spend on it, and if I am doing too much or too little for the job that has defined my decade.

One can always argue that it is not possible to do too much: after all, this is the only job I have and the way I do it will define who I am in ways I cannot control. Do I love it? Yes, most days I honestly do. I don't love it so much on days like today, when I look back at my break week with frustration and defeat.

My patient reader would argue, of course, that all that frustration and defeat stem from within me, and that my job has little to do with it: after all, no one has mandated that I change the text book for the course no one asked me to create in the first place; no one has mandated that I construct individual, detailed rubrics for each assignment in each course; no one has suggested that my courses have insufficient assessment / evaluation tools, or that these tools need to be rephrased, re-constructed, or changed in any way. I also know that no one really likes change, and that these hours and days I have wasted on these updates are going to earn me dissatisfaction and frustration from the very people for whom I've made these changes, the students, who will not be able to use their friends' notes, books, and tests for this quarter.

I also know I am isolated in my struggle to manage and force my CMS into doing what I want it to; it resists! It seems that no one has the power to make it do my bidding, even though everyone wants it to. So I have spent most of this week constructing, breaking down, revising, adding, and subtracting the same elements repeatedly until my head is spinning and I've had to walk away to get a perspective. I have felt what the doomed Athenian youth must have felt as they blundered around the Minotaur's labyrinth, trying to get an idea about its structure and ending up lost, not knowing which way North lies.

Actually, most of this month has felt that way, like trying to navigate logically through a tornado. This week, I talked to a few people at work about our CMS and some other electronic resources available to faculty. I have been embarrassingly, foolishly enthusiastic about adding customized rubrics to my GradeMark, about the new databases our library is going to add later this year, about the new tools I am discovering, like the Prezi. I confess to waxing poetic about the wonderful free Google resources for educators.

I usually look for my compasses in the eyes of the people around me, to get  my bearings, to figure out if I am headed the right way or at least the way I want to go. But I have received mixed signals: half the people give me thumbs up and seem to cheer me on, promising to call me if they get lost; equal number of people have looked away, vowing to have little to do with me or my ways, shaking their heads over how lost I've allowed myself to become. A friend suggested that I should learn to curb my excitement a bit, for if I indulge it, I am likely to spend hours, days, weeks in learning about these resources, helping whoever wants my help and that to realise that I am not going to get paid for all those hours, days, and weeks. A respected, well-meaning colleague, only half in jest, showed me a pencil and asked me if I'd forgotten how to use it. I remain shell shocked and lost.

The form and idea of higher education are changing at Warp Speed. I realise that. I also understand that institutions like the one I am with presently might either not survive this change or might metamorphose into something completely different. So my enthusiasm and excitement do sound pointless and foolish, even to  myself. I stand here at the end of my break week, and I must confess to an undeniable strain of guilt and indulgence that run through my enjoyment in learning little things I didn't know before, things that are little more than clicks and links and a few taps on my keyboard, when everything is said and done.

A very good friend, one of the few people whose opinion I value highly, one of my Axis Mundi, wondered at my excitement at the saw that is cutting away the branch I perch upon. I feel unwarranted in pointing out that there would be no other way for me to fly, unless that comfortable branch were sawed off. Most probably, I will have to leave my body behind in this flight. So this post goes out as a hope and prayer that the skies are worth it, that the wings are strong enough, and that my eyes are keen and wise enough to absorb the views.

 

Lumos: of MOOCs and LMS

I must confess to a largely cursory interest in the future of Higher Education until this week. I know, I know, patient reader; this is the business that keeps me in cat food and samosas: how could I not be more aware, involved, curious? However, there you have it: I have been apologetically, blatantly incurious. I've had plenty of excuses for this, of course, and all of them quite, quite valid, all tinged with only an obligatory tinge of apology.

All that changed this week, when I attended a conference (Cengage & SXSWedu) that shook me awake and forced me to turn my head and look out of the window. The landscape has completely changed, and what is more, is rushing fast, faster than my eye can keep up. It is a veritable stampede!

Before I address the changes, I want to first validate what remains reassuringly unchanged. All reliance on a keyboard is not always the best thing, yet. Everywhere I looked, attendees were plugged in (for lack of a better epithet): they all (with probably less than 1% exceptions) had ipads or tablets which were busily buzzing along, talking to them and their phones, and a variety of other devices. I cannot express the strangeness I felt as I whipped out a pen and notebook to take notes during sessions. But then I realized that no matter how much I type, and how fast I've learned to type, I still write much, much faster, with greater coherence, since my hand doesn't require me to press the shift button, or do anything extra when I want to change languages or use symbols instead of words. A part of me feels reassured to know that I am still the most efficient and fastest note taker for me.

At the same time, however, the material I was taking notes on has widened my eyes, popped my inner ears, and lighted up unexplored corridors in my brain! Ah brave new world! I learned of the very real impact of MOOCs, of Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Multi dimensional interface, and Analytical feedback (like the recommendations one sees when shopping on Amazon, for instance).  It was really like an instructor's dream: we were treated to lunch as publishers and authors of textbooks asked what our perfect texts would look like! I know I am not alone in feeling the isolation behind the desk, and I have often wondered about the value of what I do. I have often dreamed of "if only" and "by now, we should be able to" scenarios; well, those scenarios are already here, it would seem.

One of the sessions used the trope of Peter Pan's shadow to point out the impact that Web 2.0 has on our sense of self. This has resonated to me and at last, at last, I have a clearer understanding of why we all prefer Facebook to PDF's of texts (a pointless thing, if you ask me; if students don't read the hard copy, why would they read the PDF of the same?). However, now, I understand why students (and, I confess, the instructor in me) are so attracted to our LMS (which is neither the best, nor the worst) and I plan to exploit it to its fullest capacity.

I do not, of course, mean to indicate that I shall be completely reliant on my LMS: if it goes away, I will not be lost, since I have found  many compasses. I learned how to use completely free resources if one has no LMS. In fact, one of the fascinating lounges I visited was the Google lounge, which offered a wonderful respite from the crowded sessions, provided time and space to explore how to use free resources to teach and learn, even try out the new technology to be released later on this year.

I have heard a great deal of doom saying when conversations meander towards the future of Higher Education, especially during the last year, with its stampede of MOOCs. The sessions I attended, however, have reassured me: learning is not becoming obsolete and the value of the educator in this maelstrom of changing technologies, is unshakable and central. I have a clearer idea of what I'd like my absolute dream job to be (though this job, of course doesn't exist yet, I don't think).

I have spent the greater part of this weekend trying to catch up on the grading that has loomed large in my absence. But today, I don't resent it like I used to. My attitude towards the endless grading (the lot of every writing instructor) has been similar to the unnamed Maiden's attitude to her endless spinning in Grimms' "Mother Holle." However, like the Maiden, I have glimpsed at the alternate world beneath the well, a world that coexists with mine, where meaningless, repetitive chores have cosmic impact and all work is meaningful, relevant, and rewarded.

Primeval Forest of Stories

Deep in the center of the forest called blinks-of -the-eye, the Boar tells the Earth all about the creation of the world, its destruction, the various dynasties, the families derived for the Sun and the Moon, and the many eras that have been, are, and will be: yes, my patient reader, I am held by the Puranas. The one that I am in right now, is, of course, the Varaha Purana. I amazes me how the stories compiled over a millenia ago, still hold their magic. Even though these are attributed to Ved Vyasa, reading them, their contradictions, their unwillingness to support each other's contentions, the very nature Ved Vyasa, all of it reminds me of nothing as much as the Vulgate Cycles through which the stories of Arthuriana come down to us.

It is true that I first turned to the Puranas as I tried to heal from the absolute loss of my home back in 2011. However, this need to heal goes beyond my individual loss and I find, as I drown in the labyrinthine interpolations, that these stories address the very nature of humanity and seek to articulate questions about the validity of a cosmos that is continually being destroyed and created. From this larger perspective, my individual losses, lacks, complaints, whittle away into nonentities, fade away into normalcy of losses, lacks, and complaints of all humanity, nothing unusual. For some reason, this is reassuring: there is comfort in knowledge that all previous and present generations have more or less the same problems, which makes me part of a teeming whole that has survived.

Beyond that, there is the sheer magic of these stories, and I hear the crusty, gruff voice of the very land telling them. There are the stories of cities submerged into the ocean, destroyed by random pieces of unthinkingly discarded metal. Serpents coil around mountains to churn the ocean, which yields unimaginable poisons, riches, nectars, and muses. Gods and demons emerge from the same family, and there are as many admirable demons as there are petty gods. The many levels of heavens, underworlds, the various islands, the ending and unending worlds, all assure that the cosmos is a very balanced structure, with a proper designation for everything in it: the serpents, for example, argue that their venom is no reflection of malice or fault; they insist on a proper allocation of their own place in the world, and their suit is honored.

Along my trek through the Naimisharanyak (Nimesh = blink of an eye; aranyak = forest), I have often found that my sympathies lie with the demons and the gods seem unreasonable; often, the rightful remain unrewarded, not because they were being tested for patience, but because they wished for improbable things. The stories point out that neither the store of merit, nor the hoard of faults is inexhaustible. Sometimes, nothing is lost, not even a blade of grass, a drop of blood, or a grain of rice; sometimes, the very Earth is lost and she has to be sought after, rescued, and healed, that life may be sustained.

I no longer look to be healed by the Puranas, though I find many catalogs of medicinals, curing rituals, and herb lore in them. Without my asking them, these stories have grounded me, and after all, the only way that finds us when we are lost, is the path through the darkest of forests that lie between the blinks of the eye.

 

To My Father (In All His Forms)

Today is my late father's birthday, a day my family remembers as we all feel his absence most poignantly. Along with my family, I miss him terribly as well. People tell me that he and I have the same smile.

The myth of Orpheus (my students well know where I am going with this; I can feel them roll their eyes and say to themselves, "Here she goes again!") cautions us against looking backwards. Orpheus, the musician, convinced the gods of the Underworld to let his dead wife's soul to follow him out of the Shadows; the gods agreed, with the condition that he not look back until both of them are out of the Underworld. Orpheus agrees and somehow holds his patience until he is out of the Underworld, waits a bit, and turns around, hoping to see his beloved smiling at him. However, she is not out yet and he loses her all over again and spends his days mourning him, unable to do anything else, until he is torn apart. This myth resonates heavily with me. I have tried very hard to avoid looking back, no matter how strong the lure. The myth cautions that every time we look back, we lose that which we love the most, all over again; who can afford any more losses?

There have been many days when all I've wanted to do is submit to debilitating grief, rage against the most basic principles of existence, and I am ashamed to say, I have indulged in this. When I was young, this was my nightmare, a world without my father. Then I grew up, made choices, and it turned out that I never saw my father once I immigrated.

Before my patient reader resigns to a litany of self-pity, let me stop. This post is about celebrating all those we miss, not a list of all things we miss about them. Yes, I miss my father's voice, his laughter, the way he said my name, his fingers circling my wrist in protection and comfort, even his silent rage. Then, I went back to visit my home town after over a decade of having left it, imagining that my father's absence will yawn at me and I was apprehensive.

What happened, however, was the absolute opposite. I saw my family alive and well, his favorite foliage swinging in the breeze in our backyard, his favorite knick-knacks on many, many shelves, even the cadence of his speech and pitch of his laughter every time I talked to anyone in the family.

The time away from my father during the first years of my immigration taught me to seek him in the world around me. I learned to recognize my father's voice when I heard his favorite songs; I learned to enjoy the sunrise and sunset for him; I learned to remember the maxims he repeated and use them as guiding metaphors. I was pleasantly surprised when my daughter picked up the violin in middle school for her music credit; I was happiest when she would practice, since my father used to love his violin and played all the time.

Now, even though I miss my father's presence all the time, I do not feel his absence any more. Every time I see my sibling and cousins, every time I meet my uncles and aunts, every time I get an email or message from my mother, every time I see my child smiling, every time I see my niece concentrating, every time I see my nephews laughing, I feel my father's presence. The nightmare world of my youth does not seem nightmarish at all!

Today is his birthday and we all have greeted each other in his name. I raise my tea cup in his name, on this warm, silvery day, as I look forward to enjoying my Sunday afternoon, stretching out infinitely before me. I know that somehow, somewhere, I will meet my father in many many forms and I only pray that when I do, I recognize him as we share our smile.

To Explore Brave New Worlds: A Boston Weekend

Vacationing is most effective when it doesn't just offer an escape from the debilitating regularity of a routine, but goes beyond to open a window to a completely new reality. I do not mean an alternate reality, like a visit to the land of What If; I mean a world that has gone on inexorably, crossing unimaginable horizons and thresholds, one that redefines our very reality. My trip to Boston did that for me: it showed me a brave new world, so that even the railroad tracks in the middle of the street looked incredibly cool instead of impractical.

I spent a couple of days getting to know all about Paul Revere and Beacon Hill. But then, across one of the bridges, lay the cobblestones to another time, more Star Trek than Revolution. I walked past places that were as exotic and improbable as any that the Starship Enterprise could boast knowing; I walked past 100 Technology Square, with MIT buildings owning all horizons all around; Microsoft proclaimed its newest generations on a live billboard in Kendall Square; next to a crepe place, a large window advertised the map of the human genome; across the street were the MIT center for cancer research and center for brain research. Really, I felt like I was perched on the edge of human civilisation. My worries about the cats' feeding times, my child's dorm bill, and the price of gas seemed embarrassingly trivial, even outdated.

There are some cities that just call to me to own them, invite me to explore their labyrinthine alleys, discover new worlds in their roofs and skylines, and through it all, a river runs, lending a touch of the archetypal, cities that, for lack of a better descriptor, simply sing to me. I can barely resist this song, and the fusion that Boston is, with its stately architectures that dream of London and Florence, with the red vein of Freedom Trail that runs through it, with the little ducks all in a row, it hums with a heady aria. People who know me often mistake me for a history buff, but I can barely aspire to be one. My personal touchstones for European history are based on the most unreliable of all historical sources, Shakespeare, Malory, Gildas! So it would be safer to say that I am passionate about and attracted to the drama of human experience that history promises, rather than to a commitment to keeping a chronological string of events untangled in my head. So it was with Boston, which spoke hauntingly of Paule Revere's lanterns, and in the same breath, claimed Leonard Nimoy as its own.

In Cambridge, we passed by this really beautiful local college. There was snow on the ground and the sky looked like a desert with tree skeletons scratching at its cold, grey expanse. But students skipped and strode purposefully and all but danced the extremely serious nature of their excitement at returning to their Alma Mater after a winter fortnight away. This local institution proclaimed its universal appeal with an insignia that summed up its mission in a word, Veritas. Here, as I witnessed the active pursuit of ancient truths, I inhaled and knew the thin, cold air that stratifies the very pinnacle of the highest achievements of our species, from the mundane concerns of lay visitors, awarded a glimpse of the busyness of the business of being human.

I return humbled and enriched to my blue-gold skies and lands of eternal summer, back to my trivial routine. My hope is that this entry shall remind me of this sweet air that I had once breathed, sauntering around in one of the Coops, buying a fridge magnet in exchange of a promise to these cobblestones of many future tramplings.

 

And A Veil to Tether

One of my colleagues says that veils fascinate her and I confess I have had veils on my mind since the past few weeks, all they reveal and represent, the hues they lend the world. Indeed, the blank canvas of the sky laughs with colors of life when seen through a veil, whether it be a flowing scarf, a dancing kite, or a twinkling paper lantern. To paraphrase a thousand Hindi songs, the unruffled dupatta changes climes and brings on Spring.

Like any South Eastern native, I can tell you what the scarves I wear represent: they supposedly represent female modesty, but if the same scarf were tied on a man's forehead, it would proclaim his pride in the tradition that birthed him. Freedom sings in the flight a girl's scarf sketches as she swings from a grandfather of a tree. The audience of a Hindi film knows the scarf well. With bated breath, we watch as the villain considers the innocent girl's scarf through a veil of cigarette smoke, and gasp as he snatches the dupatta off the terrified girl; the camera focuses on the swinging, broken lamp smashed in the ensuing struggle and we all know that she is lost.

Most salwar suits come with a matching scarf or dupatta. The material for a dupatta must be special: it cannot be as heavy as the fabrics that actually cover and protect. In fact, it must be woven of texture light enough for the air to lift, which would require something heavier, like lace or a twice rolled hem to hold it against the wind and then it acquires a fall of graceful ripples. At the same time, the dupatta must match the heavier cloth it is constructed to compliment, with an edging, with contrasting hues, or most frequently, with the same print as the salwar suit. The function of the dupatta, it seems, is to serve as the dream of the salwar suit.

I have worn through a lot of salwar suits, whose stitching has given out, whose exhausted weave has unravelled, but whose matching dupattas retain their original form. I collect them, lightly worn fabrics of numinous use, whose sole purpose seems to be to recall the varied textures our world is made of. When I tried to quilt them, I could not imagine the finished quilt, and they resisted my needle and the stodgy quilting threads, preferring to ripping to submission. Occasionally, I give them to my daughter and she uses them to make a statement of her jeans-and-t-shirt.

As I get older, I find that I need the wrapping of my scarves to protect me, to keep me warm and alive. I have begun to prefer the sky veiled in clouds, and today, on a cool day immediately following the Winter solstice, I look forward to the kite flying in January, which will welcome the sun back. Nothing says Spring like unfurled colors of insubstantial material.

I am working and my lap is not free for the cat. He paws at the laptop and looks inquiringly at me. Of course, I obey and spread my scarf. He accepts this extension of me and it is enough to envelop him, tie him to me beyond language and species. I look at the content, sleeping cat and wish for my dupatta to extend beyond my organic self and chronological life, to envelop and warm my child so that her universe may unfurl around her in weaves of many colors and textures, enriching her life, tethering her to me as she soars and flies off, like an un-achored kite, across unimaginable skies.