Zen of Photography

I think that for some persons, photography can be a way to come in contact with deeper part of themselves. It can be similar to what other persons try to achieve with deep meditation. At least on me photography has that effect.

Jill Bolte Taylor, the Harvard neuroscientist has this wonderful TED video talk that she made in March 2008, where she told about her stroke experience ten years earlier and how it made her understand the complementary and yet different ways in which the two sides of the human brain work.

Jill had a cerebro-vascular problem - a blood clot on the left side of her brain. It happened slowly over a period of a few hours. While that was occuring, there was some moments when she was conscious and could think coherently, and there were other moments, when she knew that she was not in control and her brain was working in a different way. From that experience she came to think certain ideas about how the left and right parts of our brains work.

Our brains are made of two similar looking halves, that are joined together by an area called corpus collosum where millions of neurons connect between the two sides. These similar looking halves of the brain work in very different ways.

Jills says that the left side of our brain functions with words, voices, thoughts and logic. It makes plans, thinks of the past and the future, it studies and understands the world, rationally and logically. It is also the part of the brain that looks at "I" and the "rest of the world", it is about our egos, our needs, and makes us the individual human beings that we are.

The right side of our brain, according to Jill, thinks in images, emotions and intuitions. It does not care about rational thoughts, plans, past or future. It has emotions and it connects us to every thing else in the world, living and non-living. It does not separate between "I" and the "rest of the world". For the right side of our brain, it is all "one world".

Normally, left side of brain dominates in most of us. It is this part of brain that keeps on "thinking and talking" in our heads all the time. It is very difficult to stop it from "making the thoughts noise". And it covers and hides the input from the right side of our brain, it does not allow us to feel the world from the right side.

Thus, talking about her experience, as the blood clot formed in the left side of Jill's brain, there were moments when the control of the mind from the left brain was interrupted and she could feel the world from the right side of her brain. In those moments she felt her thoughts become silent. There were no more continuous thoughts filling her head. Instead, she felt filled with bliss. The boundaries between her body and the rest of the world, like the walls of her bathroom, disappeared, so that "she could not see where was her arm and where was the wall of the bathroom. It was all one, a continuous one."

When I heard Jill explain it, I thought that this experience sounded very similar to some experiences of meditation that I had heard and read about.

I had tried meditation many times.

I see myself in this description of Jill, as a person very strongly controlled by my left brain. Always planning, thinking about all kinds of things, with a voice going on talking all the time inside my head.

And, I think that with age, this left-brain domination, the desire to plan and be rational, has become stronger. I think that as a child, when I had greater interest in paintings and designing, I was less obsessed with details and plans. Then probably my studies in medical college and my profession pushed me deeper into the rational logical world of the left brain.

A couple of decades ago, I went to a meditation class for the first time. A priest had come to Italy from Varanasi and was conducting meditation classes. He explained to me about meditation techniques by focusing the mind on my breathing or on a central point in my forehead or on the image of a god.

"You have to become silent, stop the incessant thoughts in your head", he had said.

I tried but I never really managed to stop the voices in my head. I could never feel meditation, in the sense of "stopping my thoughts and focusing them on nothingness". Often, when I tried to meditate, I ended up feeling frustrated. Once I decided that I couldn't do meditation sitting up and I had to lie down to meditate. After that every time, I tried to meditate, I drifted off to sleep. Finally I had concluded that I was destined to never really experience the feelings of meditation.

And then 5-6 years ago I discovered photography.

I bought my first digital camera in 2005. The 1 Gigabyte memory card freed me from worrying about number of pictures I could click. I clicked pictures all the time and every where. It was a kodak camera with a preview screen, so I held the camera in front of me and clicked images all the time.

When this kodak camera was stolen in Ecuador in August 2005, it was not the financial loss that mattered to me, but the enormous emptiness of not clicking pictures. I immediately bought another kodak digital camera.

In 2009, I bought my first SLR camera with a 4 Giga memory card, suddenly the whole expereince changed. It was a low end SLR (Nikon D 40) in which there was no preview  of the images on the screen and I had to put my eye in the viewfinder to see what I wanted to photograph.

Listening to Jill made me understand something about the joy I feel when click pictures. I feel that when I am taking pictures, the voices in my brain stop and the right side of my brain takes over. The images speak directly to the right side of my brain, strengthen it, make it more powerful, and make me feel connected to the world.

As I start taking pictures, slowly I can see my brain changing gears. I start focusing on small things.

Textures, colours and details that are normally a blur, that hardly register in my head normally, they all come into focus. I can see the rough bark of the trees, the intricate patterns on its surface and the subtle variations in the colours. The insects buzzing over the flowers, the shades of green in the grass, the different shapes of flowers, the angles of people's smiles, the way light skids off their faces, the wrinkles on the corners of their eyes. As I click pictures, life rushing past, slows down.

And when I stop clicking for some time, the life continues to flow slowly.

***

Does it make any sense to you? Or do you think that I have gone bonkers? Actually I don't think it matters. It makes sense to me and that is all that really matters. I can understand that once again I am trying to make a logical sense of my feelings about photography.

It is my left brain that wants to understand why I feel the way I do about taking pictures. Understanding it is important for me, because it makes me understand its value to me.

BTW, if you have not seen Jill Bolte Taylor's talk on TED, watch it now, it is truely wonderful.

 To celebrate, here are a few images I took yesterday evening at Durga Puja and today morning at a canal near our home.

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Fighting corruption

I am reading and following the debates around the Anna Hazare's initiative for the Lokpal bill. I liked reading the post by Aativas about her visit to Ram Leela grounds where Anna Hazare is fasting.

It reminded me of my visit to those same grounds more than 30 years ago, perhaps it was in 1976, when I had gone there to listen to Jai Prakash Narayan. J.P. was talking of Sampoorna Kranti (total revolution) for changing India through grassroots democracy.

Those were such heady days and for some time, I had dreamed that a different India was possible. India did change but not in the way JP had been saying. Looking back at the history shows that things hardly ever go any where in a straight line according to the plans, but they often go off on a tangent. So I wonder where the Anna Hazare movement will take us.

I have also liked reading the report by Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) that points out a key facts:

(1) After liberalization, the number and scale of corruption has increased but the number of CBI investigations into cases of corruption have decreased. In 1991, CBI had 1,181 cases of corruption investigations, in 2010, there 731 cases.

(2) Central vigilance Commission (CVC) is India's main body for investigating cases of corruption among Government workers.However whenever, it receives information about corruption, it needs a sanction from Government to proceed with investigations. However, Government denies sanction for investigation to more than 98% of all cases reported to CVC. Out of the 77,925 cases of corruption among government persons, the government gave permission to proceed in only 1,348 cases (1.7% of all cases).

I hope that Anna Hazare and his team will read the ACHR report and include appropriate suggestions in the Lokpal Bill.

Yesterday there was a tweet from Shashi Tharoor that corruption is not only 2G or CWG, but every time a woman has to pay bribe to get her pension, India's democracy is diminished. I agree completely. As we fight the big corruption by those in power, we must ask for a change so that the all pervasive daily corruption also goes.

Coincidences

When suddenly you start noticing coincidences, does it mean something?

Let me give you three examples of recent coincidences linked to my photoblog called Chayachitrakar and the TV over the past 3-4 days.

The first example of coincidences is about my blog. A few days ago, while searching for a picture in my image archive, I saw a picture of red tulips, that reminded me of other pictures of tulips of other colours that I had taken during my travels. So I spent some time searching for them and the next morning, chose three of those images of tulips for my photoblog.

For me, chosing images for the photoblog, is closely linked to small but significant thoughts that can be provoked by those images. Sometimes, I am struck by specific things in the images that I had not noticed before. Some times, the images provoke thoughts that are not related directly but touch something deeper inside me.

The images of the tulips made me think about the well known Amitabh Bacchan and Rekha from the Yash Chopra film "Silsila". Thus, after uploading my blogpost about tulips, I spent some time on internet to search for the Silsila song and watch it

The next day, a professor friend from India, who is visiting Bologna university for a few months, came to our home for dinner. While talking to him, suddenly he started talking about "Silsila".

Initially I thought that he had been to my photoblog and had seen my post about tulips where I had also mentioned "Silsila". However, after talking with him I realized that it was only a coincidence and he had not seen my blog.

The second example is again related to my photoblog. Yesterday morning, looking at the pictures I had clicked last month in the northern city of Trieste, I selected three images of James Joyce for my blog.

I hardly knew anything about James Joyce except that he was considered an important figure in the world of English literature. So I checked about James Joyce on Wikipedia and read about his life and how he was forced to live in Trieste.

Yesterday afternoon, while waiting to go out, I had switched on the TV and tried different channels. While channel hopping, I suddenly found a journalist talking about James Joyce in Trieste. For a second I was surprised and said to myself, "Wow, what a coincidence. I read about it today and wrote about it, and now this guy is talking about the same thing." Any way I soon forgot about it.

Now the third example - Yesterday afternoon while channel hopping, I also saw a brief scene from a TV film on "Importance of being earnest" by Oscar Wilde, on a channel, and then I changed the channel.

Today morning, at the website of Caravan, I opened an article with the review of Amitav Ghosh's new book, it started with the three lines that I had seen in the scene yesterday on the TV:

MISS PRISM: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.

CECILY: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily?…

MISS PRISM: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means. (The Importance of Being Earnest)

Reading the dialogue between Miss Prism and Cecily seemed to me so strange, after having seen it by chance only yesterday.

By itself, each of these coincidences is something small and insignificant. However, this third coincidence made me think of this strange feeling over the past 3-4 days. So, I am starting to wonder - is there something more to these coincidences? is somebody trying to give me some message? if yes, what kind of message?

What do you think is happening? Am I making a mountain out of an ant hill?

***

Playing dead in a cemetery

I was a little taken aback when Virginia had asked me if I wanted to be part of her special art installation in the antique Certosa cemetery of Bologna (Italy).

I was only needed to play dead in a special picture and then to share my ideas about "what do you think happens when we die?".

I love Certosa (the initial "C" is pronounced like the "ch" in church) cemetery. It has been a burying place for the dead for more than two thousand years. First it was an Etruscan cemetery, and then a Roman cemetery, and then over the past fifteen hundred years, as Bologna changed from a settlement and assumed the form of a city, Certosa has slowly grown bigger.

In the medieval period (1300-1500 DC), people started making there monumental graves with sculptures. Therefore, many areas of Certosa are like an open air museum, with hundreds of statues. The most common theme in this museum, as you can guess, is bereavement, with statues evoking feelings of loss, sadness and crying. However, there are many statues on the tombs of big and famous persons, that are more about power, wealth and vanity.

Surrounded by verdant hills, some parts of the cemetery have lovely views. Over the last two decades, cremation rather than putting the dead persons in graves, has also become more common. They even have an open grassland, where those who do not wish for a grave or an urn, can scatter the ashes.

In today's culture, where emphasis is on enjoying life, normally people do not want to talk or think about death. It was not always like this. For example think of the huge tombs built by Egyptian kings for their own burial, because they were worried about their afterlife, and wanted to make sure that they could continue to live as kings after their death.

Most of us have difficulties in talking about death and bereavement. Amitav Ghosh in a beautiful article about the death of his friend Agha Shahid had written in 2001:

Although Shahid and I had talked a great deal over the last many
weeks, I had never before heard him touch on the subject of death. I did
not know how to respond: his voice was completely at odds with the content
of what he had just said, light to the point of jocularity. I mumbled
something innocuous: “No Shahid—of course not. You’ll be fine.” He
cut me short. In a tone of voice that was at once quizzical and direct, he
said: “When it happens I hope you’ll write something about me.”
I was shocked into silence and a long moment passed before I could
bring myself to say the things that people say on such occasions: “Shahid
you’ll be fine; you have to be strong …”

Shahid ignored my reassurances. He began to laugh and it was then
that I realized that he was dead serious. I understood that he was
entrusting me with a quite specific charge: he wanted me to remember
him not through the spoken recitatives of memory and friendship, but
through the written word. Shahid knew all too well that for those writers
for whom things become real only in the process of writing, there is an
inbuilt resistance to dealing with loss and bereavement. He knew that my
instincts would have led me to search for reasons to avoid writing about
his death: I would have told myself that I was not a poet; that our friendship
was of recent date; that there were many others who knew him much
better and would be writing from greater understanding and knowledge.
All this Shahid had guessed and he had decided to shut off those routes
while there was still time.

“You must write about me.”

We have an old dog and often I am worried that one day he will be gone. Also, when you cross fifty, I think that consciously or unconsciously, you begin to ask yourself, how many years you still have to live. So I think about death off and on for some time now.

I had visited Certosa many times and had already expressed my thoughts to my wife that when I die, I would like to be cremated and I would like my ashes to be scattered in the Certosa open grassland area. Therefore when Virginia asked me to be part of her art installation on death, I didn't think twice and immediately agreed. However, some of my friends were not so sure if it was a good idea.

"Won't it be inauspicious to have your picture there while living? It is only dead persons' pictures that are put there?", they worried.

I looked at it differently. "How many of us get a chance to see our pictures as dead? How many of us get to see our pictures displayed in a cemetery? No one. So if I have this opportunity, I don't want to miss it."

Virginia had a special technique for taking pictures, so that it looked as if the person was coming out of darkness. She took pictures both with persons' eyes open and with eyes closed. "I won't take off my glasses", was my only condition. I know that dead don't need eye glasses, but what fun is to play dead, when no one recognises your picture because you are without your glasses?

I also spoke to Virginia about my views about death, influenced mainly by Hinduism, though not in the sense of paradise or hell:

I like the way death is described in Kenopanishad and Kathopanishad. I think that everything in the universe is pervaded by the same consciousness, and when we die, our individual consciousness goes back to all pervading consciousness, like a river goes in to the ocean. That all mountains, plants, animals and humans are inter-connected through this consciousness.

I think that everything in this physical universe is made of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles and these particles are exactly the same in every thing. Thus, all persons, animals, birds, plants, rocks are made of same building blocks, but our level of consciousness energy is different.

I like the understanding coming from quantum physics that at sub-atomic level, a particle can be in many places at the same time and that between the particles there are huge spaces, so much that relatively, the distances between the constantly dancing sub-atomic particles inside each atom that compose us, are like the distances between the planets. Therefore, each particle of our bodies, is like a solar system. I think that this describes the concept of Maya that Upanishads talk about.

Virginia recorded my views in Hindi also.

The art installation was set up an underground hall from 14th century. Along the 700 hundred year old tombs, there were our images on the walls. We were 12 persons representing 12 different religions and cultures. We all spoke our views about death in our languages. People could also read our views.

It was a wonderful sensorial experience. And, there was enormous diversity in our views about death. Virginia says that this multi-media art work was very inspiring for her. Now she is planning to involve even more persons and one day come out with a book about it.

Are you comfortable talking about death? What do you think happens when we die? Do you believe in reincarnation? Would you accept to be part of an exhibition, where you are shown as dead?

***

Revenge

This post has been published by me as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 22; the twenty-second edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

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Which books or stories or films related to revenge have left a strong impression on me?

It is not that there are no real-life examples of revenge these days. The bomb attacks a few days ago in Mumbai and then yesterday in Oslo, are a gruesome reminder of way revenge is enacted for real or perceived injustices, hurts or insults by the terrorists. This way of revenge targets general populations.

However, I don't want to talk about those kinds of real-life things. I would rather focus on imaginary revenges, that is, revenges dreamed up by their writers as part of their stories in literature and in cinema.

Revenge is a common enough theme in cinema and literature, where it is planned for avenging some wrong-doing or injustices, especially killing or rape of siblings or parents. Think of films like Yadon ki Baarat or Sholay or Don, and you will understand what I mean.

So I decided to think of books, stories and films related to revenge, that have left a strong impression on me.

The dentist and the handsome guy: There was a Hindi story I had read around 40 years ago, that still remains vivid in my mind. It was published in a magazine called Sarika, that was probably shut down in early nineteen nineties.

The story was about a handsome guy who goes to a dentist. He had been chewing paan (betel) and had not rinsed his mouth properly. So the dentist, who is not very good looking and also a haughty-looking woman, tells him curtly that he is ill mannered and to go and rinse the mouth.

The man, used to women falling at him, feels very hurt by the curt manner of the dentist and decides to take his revenge. He follows the dentist and keeps on bumping in to her, first saying sorry, and then slowly praising her and flirting with her. Slowly over a period of time, the dentist falls in love with him. At the end, when dentist wants to kiss him, he tells her that she is ugly and unattractive to him, pushes her away and leaves.

I still remember my shock when I had read this story. I do not remember who had written it or the names of the two characters, but I think that it was an example of really cruel revenge, for something very petty.

Favourite films on the theme of revenge: I can think of an old Hindi film, that had the element of revenge, that I had liked very much. It was called Bandini (Prisoner, 1960) and was directed by Bimal Roy. The film was about a gentle and kind woman named Kalyani (a wonderful performance by Nutan), who comes to the city to look for her would-be husband and discovers that he has married someone else. She starts to work as a servant in that house, where the woman married to her would-be husband is a rich and ill tempered lady. One day Kalyani gets the news that her father is dead. When Kalyani is still numb with shock, the rich lady shouts abuses at her. Suddenly unhinged with anger, Kalyani takes out rat poison and mixes it in the coffee of the rich lady, killing her.

That film showed that sometimes circumstances can be such that even the gentle and kind person can become a killer.

However, there is another more recent film about revenge that I had enjoyed very much. It was called "Khosla ka Ghosla" (The nest of Khosla, 2006, director Dibakar Banerjee). It was the story of the middle class Khosla family living in Delhi that puts all its savings to buy a piece of land where they want to build their dream house. However a cunning builder occupies their land, and wants lots of money to vacate their land. The young son of Khosla, planning to immigrate to USA, asks his friends in a drama company to help him and hatches out a perfect plan to trap the cunning builder.

In our real lives, the corrupt and the crooked, hardly ever get punished. Rather, they seem to get awards and keep on accumulating wealth. Thus, a film like "Khosla ka Ghosla" that has a perfect plan for teaching a good lesson to the corrupt, is mentally satisfying. At least in our imaginations, we can get our revenge, not by fights and might, but just by the intelligence.

And you, do you have a favourite revenge story or film?

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Colours of life and death

I had met Makbul Fida Hussein many times as a child in the nineteen sixties.

Where today there is Palika Bazar in Connaught Place in Delhi, in those days there were the state emporiums. Not the nice buildings they have today on Baba Kharag Singh Marg, but at that time, emporiums were more like shacks, like most of the shops on Janpath in those days. In the centre of that space was Coffee House, the mythical place where writers, painters and other creative persons met for their teas, coffees, cigarettes and endless debates.

It was there, in that coffee house, where a few times I accompanied my father, that I saw Hussein, among other persons, mostly Hindi journalists, poets and writers. Only now, looking back, I can notice something strange about those persons - we never called them uncle, aunty, mama, chacha, etc., as was usual in those days, but all those persons were referred to by their names.

I vaguely knew that he was a well known painter and that he had made a film (Through the eyes of a painter, 1966). I also knew that he had been a painter of signboards and film billboards, before becoming famous as an artist. That was the time when big billboards, handpainted, lined the roads and cinema halls. (On left, Hussein saheb in 1967 during the meeting in Delhi after the death of Dr Ram Manoher Lohia).

My strongest memory of Hussein saheb is from 1966, from an evening in Lalit Kala Academy in Mandi House (Delhi). I think that we had been in Sahahitya Kala Academy, accross the road and then, we had walked with him to Lalit Kala Academy, where there was an exhibition of his paintings. It was during that walk that I had really taken note of his walking barefeet and thinking that it could not have been easy to walk like that on the hot summer roads.

That day, I was acutely aware of wearing my school uniform pants. We were passing though a bad time financially at that time. Our family had recently shifted to a new rented house, leaving the joint family house of my maternal grandfather, and the house rent must have aggravated our family's already stretched finances. I had only two half-pants in those days, and as I had grown taller, they had become woefully smaller and tighter. That was the reason, I had been forced to wear my school uniform pants that evening and I was thinking that everyone must have noticed it and understood that I didn't have another good pair of pants.

In Lalit Kala Academy, I had looked at the paintings of Hussein saheb, that frankly I didn't appreciate so much. I think that most paintings of that exhibition were about jagged black and dark brown lines criss-crossing the canvas, and they had reminded me of barbed wires. Suddenly I was aware of a bit of excitment around us. It was Dr Zakir Hussein, at that time vice-president of India, who had come to see the exhibition. There were just 2-3 persons around him and there were no security issues in those days, so no one had made us go away or stand in a corner.

Dr Zakir Hussein stopped near me and kneeled down to my level with a smile on his face, and asked me if I could make any sense out of those paintings? I don't remember what I had answered him, but I think that I must have been smug and superior, that obviously I could appreciate abstract art.

Decades later, when I had read about Hussein saheb's paintings being sold for hundreds of thousands of rupees, I had remembered some paper in coffee house of Connaught Place, where he had drawn something for me, and regretted that I had thrown away because I had not liked it.

Among his paintings, I remember most the images of horses. I also remember the time after "the emergency" when he had started to draw the Durga images in the praise of Mrs. Indira Gandhi, and the feelings of betrayal it had provoked. Wasn't he supposed to be supporter of Lohia? (Below part of a painting by Hussein in the meeting hall of World Health Organisation building in Delhi)

***
A news item by Dipanker De Sarkar in Hindustan Times about his funeral, defines him as a "devout Muslim". These words disturb me a little bit, though I keep on telling myself that they should not.

Today the words "devout Muslim" bring out the image of a conservative person, someone who follows Holy Kuran to the letter. It seems like a reaction to the Hindutva guys who hounded Hussein saheb in the last decade, saying that he had deliberately wanted to insult the Hindu godess by painting her nude and asking why he never painted the Prophet Mohammed like that.

I didn't agree with the Hindutva Brigade's accusations for many reasons - gods and godesses don't need human beings to safeguard them, they are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves; India and Hinduism has long tradition of people who search for God in their own specific ways - those who stand on one leg, those who go around nude, those who smoke ganja, those who do worship of human skulls in a crematorium, those who look for God through sexual union, and art is also a form of worship; Upanishads also talk of God being there in every thing of this world, there is no place where the God is not there, even in the canvas on which Hussein had painted his vision; and so on.

Seen through the eyes of dominant conservative Muslim discourse as it is understood today, painting Hindu idols, could not have been compatible with being a "devout Muslim". I can't imagine the Hussein I remembered from my childhood, defining himself as "devout Muslim".

On the other hand, each of us should have the freedom to define ourselves as we wish. If in his eyes, he followed the spirit of his Book and for him that was enough to call himself a "devout Muslim", then why should this be a problem for others and for me?

Or perhaps Hussein saheb did change with age? As death came closer, did he feel that he had made mistakes and decided to ask for forgiveness, and become a different person? We can all change with time and as we grow older, many of us, want to go back to security of religious teachings that we had decided to abandon during our growing up years. Was it that?

Or, could it be that the surviving members of his family wanted to give a message to others by saying that Hussein saheb was a "devout Muslim", so these words are about them and not about what Hussein saheb really thought. Mostly deaths and the images that are created for the dead are more about needs of followers and surviving family members and not so much about the wishes and ideas of the person himself or herself.

I think of all these things, feeling a little confused.

Was it like Kamala Das becoming Ayesha and deciding to hide herself behind a Burka or like men and women who decide to close themselves in isolated cloisters or silence of monkhood. They are all bruised and fragile souls, who need some kind of security.

Was it like that for Hussein saheb in his last days?

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How would I like to remember Hussein saheb? I think that I would like to remember him through different images of Meenaxi, the film he had made in 2004.

Like the scene of the song "Nur tera nur..", where sufi dancers whirl around, while others do Kalarippayattu.

Like the never-ending colours of the holi song.

Like the doors and windows standing isolated in the desert.

Like the colourful round matakas (vases) that roll down sandy slopes, looking for a place to rest.

***

I am

A lazy morning after busy days that started early in the morning and finished late at night. Sitting in the hotel room in Goiania. I need to take shower and start getting ready for lunch at my friend Deo's home. Lucas, her grandson will come to pick me up in about an hour.

I am thinking of the small girl in Vila Esperança yesterday, who had asked Renata, "If he was born in India, why does he live in Italy?", clearly puzzled by the idea of leaving the place she has grown up in and loved so much, to go and live some where else.

Yesterday I also had a long talk with Pio, who had left his Armani suits and well paid job in Milan to come and live in Goias Velho, to start Vila Esperança, together with Max. That was 22 years ago. I am sure that lot of persons ask him, why did you leave Italy to come and live in Brazil? I didn't ask him that, but the idea that he could understand my feelings of mixed identities, made it easier to talk to him.

French-Libanese writer Amin Maalouf had written in "On Identity":

..someone comes and pats me on the shoulder and says "Of course, of course - but what do you really feel, deep down inside?"

For a long time I found this oft-repeated question amusing, but it no longer makes me smile. It seems to reflect a view of humanity which, though it is widespread, is also in my opinion dangerous. It presupposes that "deep down inside" everyone there is just one affiliation that really matters, a kind of "fundamental truth" about each individual, an "essence" determined once and for all at birth, never to change thereafter. As if the rest, all the rest - a person's whole journey through time as a free agent; the beliefs he acquires in the course of that journey; his own individual tastes, sensibilities and affinities; in short his life itself - counted for nothing. And when, as happens so often nowadays, our contemporaries are exhorted to "assert their identity", they are meant to seek within themselves that same alleged fundamental allegiance, which is often religious, national, racial or ethnic, and having located it they are supposed to flaunt it proudly in the face of others.

Anyone who claims a more complex identity is marginalised. But a young man born in France of Algerian parents clearly carries within him two different allegiances or "belongings", and he ought to be allowed to use both. For the sake of argument I refer to two "belongings", but in fact such a youth's personality is made up of many more ingredients. Within him, French, European and other western influences mingle with Arab, Berber, African, Muslim and other sources, whether with regard to language, beliefs, family relationships or to tastes in cooking and the arts. This represents an enriching and fertile experience if the young man in question feels free to live it fully - if he is encouraged to accept it in all its diversity. But it can be traumatic if whenever he claims to be French other people look on him as a traitor or renegade, and if every time he emphasises his ties with Algeria and its history, culture and religion he meets with incomprehension, mistrust or even outright hostility.

Amin Maalouf's words resonate with me. I was born in India and Hindi is my mother tongue. It is the language of all those books in papa's book shelf, that I had started reading as a kid. Nanak Singh, Kishen Chander, Rangey Raghav, Mohan Rakesh, Nirmal Varma .. It is the only language in which I can really appreciate poetry. It is the language of my childhood friends.

English is the language of my logic and reasoning. It is the language of discovering writers from different parts of the world. It is the language of my work. It is also the language that I am most comfortable in writing.

And I dream in Italian, the language in which I talk to my wife and son. Italian is the language I read most now. It is the language that I like using for talking to small babies and dogs and birds and trees.

But Brazilian Portuguese is also my language, as are bits and pieces of French and Chinese. They are all parts of me. Languages, people, friends, journeys, memories, experiences, all are part of me. That is what "I am", if I can borrow the title from Onir's film. My complex identity, that is not always so easy to explain.