Experiences

They announced on TV that it was going to be a white Thanksgiving. They showed impressive satellite photographs with an ominous haze over the Midwest. It reportedly snowed in other parts of Illinois and Ohio, and even in Boston, but here in Peoria, it was zilch, nada, ille. It rained all day on Wednesday though—icy, pissing rain with the wind-chill driving the subzero temps even down. I sat up half the night on the eve of Thanksgiving, not wanting to miss the first snow of the season and the first snow of my life. I went to bed a disappointed woman and stayed in it most of Thanksgiving as a protest against the unsporting weather. But little did it care. On Friday, I realized to my chagrin how deceptive the bright sunlight was. The six-minute walk to the bus transit center almost froze me to death. And when I struck out like a dude in the evening to capture the winter sunset, it took mechanical devices to get my numb fingers unstuck from the camera and straighten them. Satu...

I sit down heavily on the tree stump and reach into my satchel for the bottle of water. Almost empty—gosh, how long have I been walking? I look at my watch—12:00 noon. It can’t be! I started the trail at noon! It was one of those mornings—I had gotten up late, missed the bus I was supposed to catch and had reached the Nature Trail center much later than I had planned. I remove my watch from my wrist and examine it—obviously, my brand new Swatch “Sweet Sarong” had stopped around the time I started the trail. Strange! I give it a final futile shake and wear it back. I look around. Where am I? I could see that I had climbed higher up on the hill. The forest is considerably denser than the trail below. It is definitely chillier and gloomier here. I shiver and pull my jacket around myself tightly, as a strong gust of wind rustle the trees and shower fall leaves all around me. What trail am I on? I pull out the map. I open it and grin sardonically. I am extremely directionally cha...

Did you hear about ero-tourism? It isn’t as bad as it sounds. Its etymological root is a combination of the Greek god of love, Eros and tourism – the idea is to discover love while traveling. It’s a new fad in experimental tourism, advocated by Joel Henry. It’s all about two people going to a destination separately and using their love/knowledge of the other as a GPS to find each other. I discovered this concept in an in-flight magazine and was thoroughly excited by it (oops, pun unintended!). And last weekend, I synthesized the concept and pushed it to a new level. My travel plan went something like this: Destination: Chicago Knowledge of city: Almost none Bio-compass: Non-existent Ability to read maps: Laughable Travel companion: A new friend Plan: Explore Budget: Shoestring Well, it was a thrilling experience, to say the least. We randomly got down from the CTA train somewhere in downtown and ran into a Halloween Day parade, complete with several bands, hundre...

Prettiness’ got nothing to do about it, we discovered. It’s about the desperation you show to get on to the said bus and your willingness to dash to the middle of the road and stand intrepidly on its way. But I am getting ahead of chronology here. It all starts with the way Peoria has been showing off to a pretty girl called Monjima. There’s no other way to describe it. I mean, how often do you walk into the neighborhood mall and into approximately 10 live tigers, from the Siberian feline to the pitch-black puma? How often do you run into an Irish festival, complete with Guinness and folk music, when you are just out on a walk? How often do you saunter at 10 pm at night on the main street of Peoria and encounter five people holding up placards decrying the war and lustily asking to get the troops back home? Seriously—10 pm in the night? Don’t even get me started on the weather—it’s been unrelentingly hovering in the 90s the past three months; now that Monjima is here, it’s at mild seve...

I'm in those dreamy moments before wakefulness. It feels like floating on clouds and it feels nice. I don't want to open my eyes. I want to sleep some more. But the clear, sweet voice insists, "Priya, Wake up! You wanna play cards?" There's something about that voice that makes me open my sleep-burdened eyelids. There she is, sitting on the floor, right in front of my face. She looks like a live doll. She is bright and full of energy to take on the world. She's my guru about to impart a big life-affirming lesson to me, but I don't know that yet. She's all of three years old. The next two days are filled with awesome adventures. We spend 10 minutes watching a pair of bumblebees having their breakfast in the flowerbed. We run after a very jumpy squirrel, trying to make friends unsuccessfully. We do make friends with the much-tattooed delivery guy and admire his two-wheel trolley. We start coloring with crayons, but end up with a far more fun game of usin...

Maybe I am exceptionally dumb, but I've never understood the theory of Natural Selection - it says that life adapts to the environment, and those who adapt successfully survive, right? My confusion is this - adaptation requires mutation at the genetic level as well, doesn't it? I mean, the Darwin's Finches can learn a certain traits, but the distinctive differences in their physiology meant some tinkering at the DNA level, didn't it? Growing a new type of beak is not like building biceps, is it? So how did it all happen? Did a series of ground-living Finches clamber up a tree, tried a new diet of insects instead of their staple seed, choked on it and died at first, then gradually liked it over a few generations, and then were helped by random mutations to help them be arboreal and insectivorous? So did this process take like a million years of dying losers on the trees before one generation casually mutating? My discomfort is with the apparent randomness of the mutation...

Have you ever walked and walked around the outer perimeter of a commercial airfield following the fence, on a hot summer day, wearing a suspiciously prison-break-looking orange top? I am the idiot who did it, twice over, and this is my story. The last air show I attended was when I was seven, in Thiruvananthapuram. The show was canceled because the air-force personnel were not able to control the crowd, who insisted on watching the show standing on the run-way. Ever since, aviation display and I have politely avoided each other. ‘Maybe it’s time we got reacquainted,’ I thought as I set out enthusiastically for the Prairie Air Show this morning. It looked like a piece of cake—take the local bus to the airport, watch the show, and come back by the same bus. But when Priya rushes where angels might want to take a rain-check, could disaster be far behind? Of course the air show was at the other end of the air field, in what seems to be a different county altogether. Of course I ...

A few days back, my sister fixed me with a metaphorical stern eye (she was a school teacher in her previous birth) and commanded me to come up with an idea on the theme of national integration, for my 9-year-old niece's drawing competition. It shouldn't have, but it kind of started a long chain of angsty thoughts. I feel that most of the cliched national integration messages are just token sentiments and deep down, we really don't want to integrate as a nation. We're happy in our regional/communal silos. In fact, it looks to me that we love to hate each other. I mean, does any other nation have so many acceptable derogatory slangs to denote each region and each community of the country? Do they make fun of their fellow countrymen like the way we do, be it the "ayyayyoji" stereotype of the South Indian in the movies or the Sardarji jokes? And I don't know whether any other nation resists intra-country assimilation as much as we do. Or whether any other big ...

I confess to an overwhelming curiosity and an adolescent "Heh heh!" in my head that made me linger at the "erotica" section at Borders this weekend and buy my first ever book in this genre. I don't know what I expected from an anthology of short stories on "women's erotic fantasies," but nothing prepared me for the enthusiastic and "in-your-face" form of uber-feminism that I encountered. This was a far cry from sleaze and perversion that I was half-expecting (one wonders where those notions came from)--these were 19 expertly crafted stories by obviously intelligent women authors. Among them are doctors, poets, a medievalist, a comedy writer, and one who thinks it's her "civic duty to write smut!" And as the editor puts it, "These fantasies are fierce, fearless, unapologetic..." The editor is more fascinating--Violet Blue (not to be confused with a porn star of the same name) appears to be a celebrity (I saw he...